The Proficiologist

Coherency and the Game Combos

In sta­tis­tics, one learns very early on that inde­pen­dent ran­dom vari­a­tions tend to can­cel out when grouped together. By the law of large num­bers, the col­lec­tive behav­ior of many inde­pen­dent ran­dom enti­ties tends to closely reflect the aver­age behav­ior of these enti­ties. This is very con­ve­nient if we see the ran­dom vari­a­tions as being mean­ing­less noise and were only inter­ested in the aver­age. But if the vari­a­tions con­tained all the inter­est­ing com­plex­ity, then the com­plex­ity is washed away in the aggre­gate. In a generic soci­ety, the gener­ics may be highly var­ied and indi­vid­u­ally very com­plex. Naively put them in a group and the col­lec­tive behav­ior is sim­pler – quite plau­si­bly, the vari­a­tions can­cel toward zero and the group achieves noth­ing as a whole.

This all changes if the ran­dom vari­a­tions were not inde­pen­dent and tended to align along cer­tain dimen­sions. The vari­a­tions will be ampli­fied wher­ever they align, and the col­lec­tive behav­ior of the group cleanly empha­sizes the align­ment of its con­stituents. If we want a group of gener­ics to retain a mean­ing­ful iden­tity dis­tinct from the aver­age of its mem­bers, we need to give the gener­ics a desire to align with each other in behav­ior or moti­va­tion. The topic of today’s post is the coherency domain, which con­tains ideas that lend well to being mixed with other con­structs to describe non­triv­ial social behav­iors. As an exam­ple, I will use con­cepts from the coherency domain to describe the gam­ing com­bos, which are a set of meth­ods for cre­at­ing align­ment even between unre­lated or mutu­ally exclu­sive activ­i­ties through the com­mon par­tic­i­pa­tion of a big­ger event.