The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [58]
Communities Shape the Perception of Simplicity
Simplicity is not an absolute, objectively quantifiable value. Rather, simplicity is relative to the properties of the system in which it is being measured. What is considered simple depends in part on what is considered complex. Given our shared mathematical culture as humans, we all agree that it would be strange to count by twos differently at 1,000. However, computer chip manufacturers routinely produce chips that can easily do math within some large but finite range but are incapable of doing math normally outside of that range, because these sorts of chips are easier to produce. (That is to say, they are simpler to make.) For those computer chips, what is natural is to say that 32,767 plus one is - 32,768, that is negative 32,768. The fact that humans find it simpler for arithmetic to work the same way no matter what its scale stems from the fact that in our human existence, we experience objects as adding continuously. Adding one more bead to a pile never causes the pile as a whole to disappear. However if we were to somehow live in a world like Tetris where putting enough things in a row causes the row to disappear, our species would find it simpler to think that nine plus one equals zero, rather than ten. Simplicity depends in part on the particular qualities of the world in which we find ourselves.
Even for humans living in this world, what seems simple depends on how you approach a problem. Using decimals, one third is 0.333 … repeating, an inconvenient number to work with. Using fractions, it is inconvenient to work with a number like 0.12345 which reduces to 2,469 over 20,000. In either case, the approach you use dictates whether a number is “simple” or “complex” to work with. Some numbers are easier to calculate with when written as decimals; other numbers are easier to calculate with when written as fractions.
Our assumptions about how the world operates shape how we think of certain situations. These assumptions in turn are based on our repeated experiences. If we run into certain situations again and again, our brains will regard that as an ordinary situation and come up with simple ways of explaining it. The cultural context of the interpreter will have an impact on what that interpreter considers simple. If you have played many Zelda games already, you need only see that a room has a group of torches in it to recognize that they need to be lit, but to someone who has never played Zelda, solving a puzzle by lighting torches may feel as arbitrary as if a room could be beaten by, say, walking around in a circle seven times or knocking on the wall with your sword in a particular rhythm. Thus, to a Zelda fan, a “light the torches” puzzle may seem very simple, but to a non-gamer this puzzle may seem quite arbitrary and complex. Part of the fun of mastering a Zelda game is to make the transition from being an outsider for whom Zelda puzzles are difficult to being an insider who solves them with ease.
If simplicity emerges from the needs of a community, then it should be clear that the reason simplicity is an important interpretive principle is that simplicity means nothing other than what a community already finds useful for achieving its aims. If the definition of simplicity is the recurring abstraction through which the community understands its world, then tautologically, simplicity must be the means by which a community makes decisions about