Wednesday 1 June 2005

Pic of the day: A young Kozue-chan in plantinum mood, from the anime Mahoraba.

Love and platinum mood

I probably came to think of this because of the (admittedly moderate) mention of "love & intimacy" as part of Dr Ornish' lifestyle change program. Evidently he and his collaborators consider this important to physical health, as do writers in such different publications as Psychology Today and Scientific American. As usual, this makes me think, since I am much more of a thinker than a lover. And I think: Where's the control group?

When you test a new drug to lower blood pressure, for instance, you seek a reasonably large number of volunteers. You then randomly divide the large group into two or preferably three groups. One gets no treatment at all (if they are at a stage of the illness where this is ethically acceptable). One gets placebo, pills without any active drug. And one group get the actual new drug. The others are "control groups". That way you can see whether the changes would have happened anyway. Any study without a control group is based on guesswork. You cannot bring a new drug to the market without having gone through such a study with a control group.

So who is in the control group? Who are the people who are randomly chosen to live without love and intimacy until they either die or outlive the loving ones, whichever comes first? The question is the answer: There is no control group. Even if it had been legally and ethically acceptable to ask people not to fall in love, there is no way you could enforce it. And there is certainly no way you could force the other group to actually make love. With particularly cooperative test subjects, you could come some way towards quantifying sexual intercourse; but not love, and not true intimacy.

Beliefs that cannot be proved or disproved, and which have significant impact on people's lives, are usually called "religion". Until I see some pretty convincing arguments to the opposite, I'll file these claims under the same label. Not that religion cannot be true. You just can't prove it or disprove it except for your own heart.

***

Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of an episode I recently saw of the anime Comic Party Revolution, a cartoon about a bunch of young artists who draw manga (comics). Actually they draw doujinshi, which are like fanfics only they are comics. Selling those would be legally dubious in Europe or the USA, but in Japan it is a long established tradition and widely accepted. It is said to be the main way to get established as a comic writer or artist. (Actually people often write and draw their own comic, or at most work in pairs where one is mostly responsible for the story and one for the art.) That's not the point though. The point is love. Or in Japanese "koi", that's the kind of love you fall in, as opposed to "ai" which is the kind of love that make you care about family members, friends etc and make sacrifices for them.

The premise of this episode was that you cannot make really good art without the experience of falling in love. Ideally you should be in love while making a masterpiece of art, but at the very least you have to have the experience in order to suffuse your art with feeling. So one of our heroes sets out on the quest to help another fall in love. Incomplete information abounds and one strange thing follows another, making for one of the funniest episodes I have seen so far. (Not that this is a favorite anime or anything... it is something I watch when I'm out of the interesting ones, or at least it was until this episode.)

***

And then I was sitting peacefully in front of my PC, playing Sims2. My most recent Sim has the desire to sell a great novel. But this is no easy task. Writing a novel takes a lot of time and isn't much fun for Sims (your fun mileage may vary, certainly it seems to do so if you look at NaNoWriMo.org). And writing a great novel is even harder. You have to have maxed out your creative skill before you even start. And then you need to stay in a good mood. You cannot possibly be all green, but you should at least stop before any of your needs go into yellow, and take care of them. There is however one way around this: Platinum mood. If you have recently fulfilled a big wish, or even several smaller, you get platinum mood and can do anything you do with exceptional quality.

You probably see the pattern here. Actually, in Sims2 romance is only one of several possible aspirations. My popularity Sim gets high on partying instead. My standard procedure is to throw a house party and invite a couple who know how to entertain each other spontaneously. Thus he will have a great party without having to work for it. This leaves him in platinum mood for the rest of the day and night, which he used to write furiously until he falls asleep or has to run for the bathroom. Alas, the effect wears off in less than a day, no matter how great the party was. Love (the fall-in type) is supposed to last 6-18 months, I have read.

The principle is still the same. You do something that should have value in itself, in order to excel in something else. Writing a great novel, drawing a great comic, living a long and healthy life. That's a lot like cheating, isn't it? Or at least bending the rules. You can do that in Sims2, but I would be very cautious about trying it in real life.