Complicated games do not transition so well as clear games (such as chess) to a virtual reality—although many of the quest-like games often require challenging and tight coupling when introducing a Boss who must be defeated in order to move to the next stage of the game. Thus, single-player, serial, complicated virtual games likely allow for a non-human to complete the game more successfully than a human. However, in real-world complicated games like relay races, computers are faced with the near impossible task of running, which involves highly complicated multi-agent (body parts) that interplay with one another.

Computers struggle mightily with this level of complexity. As a result, we see mixed results in Palmer’s Complicated quadrant depending on the context and nature of the game, activity or task in which humans and computers can sometimes battle. The outcomes are less predictable than we have seen with clear, simple games, activities and tasks. The distal feedback is much harder to discern while the game is underway. The baton can be dropped. A new agent can enter the game and “mess” everything up.

Complex Systems

As we move from complicated to complexity, we shift from a highly static, stable and predictable environment or context into a complex one. This environment is filled with dynamic and inter-dependent movements of multiple agents across an often-fluid environment. Feedback is not only delayed (distal) but often confusing or even contradictory. Interactions become more loosely coupled and there are more degrees of freedom with enabling constraints. What are enabling constraints? This sounds paradoxical. Are they enabling more freedom or are they constraining freedom? As often is the case, both can be true.

Here is a definition of enabling constraints that we have found to be helpful (Juarrero 2017):

“Enabling constraints force alignment of the agents which leads to resonance. This, in turn, creates a higher order system. The higher order system provides feedback to the agents which constrains their behavior and stabilizes the higher order system Rather than direct control of a rule, enabling constraints are dynamic and sometimes fluid, yet lead to alignment of agents and bring the possibility of agent-resonance, creating a higher-order system.”

One begins to think of a river, with the banks of the river providing the enabling constraint that aligns all the water molecules to move in the same direction. The riverbed and gravity provide further enabling constraints that provide direction-of-flow, thus distinguishing the collection of water from a still and static lake. Three of the enabling constrains are visible and tangible—the two banks and the bed. One is invisible, that being gravity, yet as essential to the form and function of the higher-order river as we know it.

The resonance of the water often creates the sound of a rushing river. The water becomes a higher-order system transforming water into a river. That river then begins to erode and alter the banks depending on rain, soil conditions and other feedback factors and may change the direction of the river—such as historically occurred with the Mississippi river until humans began to outsmart mother nature by creating new and constraining cement banks and dikes to avoid flooding and instability in the river.