Our ability to project our emotions onto computer code makes video games possible. From “Creating the Illusion of Emotion, or Why You Care About Ones and Zeroes,” by Brian Crecente in the Vancouver Sun:

“David Mark, president of AI design consultant Intrinsic Algorithm, spent about half an hour last week walking game developers through what he called the psychology of artificial intelligence. He used to time to give the game-makers tips on how to make gamers feel like they’re in a world populated by real people instead of digital automatons.

The key, he said, is to find a way to get gamers to project their own emotions and psychology onto the game’s characters.

‘In the absence of defining information people project what they believe should be there,’ he said.

To prove his point, Mark showed the Heider-Simmel demonstration, an animated video created by psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel in the 1940s to explore the ‘attribution of causality.’

The short video shows two animated triangles, an animated circle and a box. There was no audio, just the crude line drawings moving around. After showing the video he said that most viewers saw the video as a couple and a bully; or a mother, a child and a bad guy; or a father and a couple. Each viewer created their own, sometimes elaborate back story for the simple drawings.

‘It’s really just two triangles, a circle and some lines,’ Mark pointed out.

In the absence of information, viewers created their own fiction, their own emotional attachments. But movement and positioning, he added, does help shape context.”

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Heider-Simmel Demonstration, an experimental study of apparent behavior: