Mimicry
The act of mimicking something is interesting. It’s one part empathy, another part motivation.
Empathy is of course feeling what someone else feels, often because we have similar personal experiences. Part of our brain is dedicated to this function, and it helps make us the social creatures we are. One side-effect of this is how we anthropomorphize non-human things, such as animals – essentially we bring the feelings we have of empathy and apply them to other objects or creatures that often have certain features we identify with (big sad eyes, non-scary shapes). We then craft our own little story around them – they’re humans, just stuck in a cat’s body, with all the trappings therein (see my lolcats post below).
Mimicry, on the other hand, is about motivation and action. We see an action that looks fun, something that we want to feel in physical form. Where empathy generates automatic feeling (barring any built-up tolerance) in one part of our mind, mimicry generates the automatic compulsion for a different type of feeling in another.
The motivation that induces mimicry is something about an action we’re perceiving that is alluring to us. Some possibilities:
- We question whether we can do that action ourselves (desire to learn)
- We like the external outcome of that action (sights, sounds, etc)
- We like the internal outcome of that action (desire to feel something)
- The action reminds us of our capability and we have an audience (desire to perform)
What’s most fascinating is that mimicry is not interactive, yet it feels like it is. Much like certain online communities where participation isn’t really (I will explore this in another post).
The impetus for this post is a cute little thing called the Yellow Drum Machine… a robot that exudes a ton of toddler-like personality. When I saw it, I said to myself ‘this thing really nails the essence of fun’, yet it was totally non-interactive. Since I had just read the Theory of Fun again, I had ludemes on my mind… so why not ludemes of mimicry? The attitude could be broken down into just two key systems:
1. move the eyes left and right, and
2. bang on things.
What a simple, elegant system.
Note: Of course it needs locomotion, but it’s not strutting around, so there’s no attitude / mimicry there yet.
Checkkit:
