Plot Spoilers

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing plot spoilers. Now before we start off I just want to issue a warning which is I want to talk about Game of Thrones for a second. Well I don't want to talk about Game of Thrones so we've just completed series seven of Game of Thrones which I have not seen anything and I don't want any of you or either of you to spoil anything for me. Yeah we probably ought to issue a general

Speaker B: 00:00:49

on all channels a general spoiler alert for this podcast I may make reference to but we'll try my best not to spoil too heavily. Westworld, The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, Ghost, Terminator 3, Alien 3 and the Star Wars prequels but the only film I will explicitly refer to in terms of what the actual spoiler is is The Empire Strikes Back so if you haven't seen it and you want to switch the podcast off but I'm expecting almost everyone to know what I mean by the central twist

Speaker A: 00:01:23

of Empire Strikes Back. So all that being said spoiler alerts or plot spoilers Chris go for it.

Speaker C: 00:01:30

Yeah so this really sort of was spurred by a lot of online debate about the latest series of Game of Thrones and whether particular elements of the plot have subsequently undone previous elements of the storytelling in the series and whether they undermine them etc and this really stems from I think a a fairly modern phenomenon which is of the requirement of the the script writers because now obviously they have extended beyond the set of books which George RR Martin has written and those books obviously have come to fruition the the first sort of five full books or seven sort of with the split books were written over you know 20 years plus and conceptualized over 20 years plus and they're now having to sort of tie together all the the loose ends and conclude the plot without that framework of long established fiction so that's one peculiarity about this the second is that you know there is there is a huge online audience now discussing where the plot might go at any one period and this this means the script writers have to think much more carefully be much more spontaneous use something which has been referred to previously as Schrodinger's gun in in plot development which is is used in sort of usually used in interactive storytelling like Dungeons and Dragons role-playing or computer games where at any moment you might have to change the plot because of something a character actually acts to do and might try and predict the plot the same is now having to be applied really to the writing of Game of Thrones because there are so many people second-guessing what's going going on that the writers have to be agile and respond to things which people are saying about about the show and so I think they're in a very difficult position and let's not forget that you know they're probably amongst the most successful and best tv script writers in in history so you know we we shouldn't we shouldn't criticize them too much so what's the central question what's our question the central question is the extent to which when you write something um and it un and it unpicks something which you felt very strongly about originally um why is that why is that so emotionally powerful and why does that have such an effect and to move it away from Game of Thrones so we don't risk any any um you know uh spoilers further um if you the huge reaction there was to the um second trilogy in terms of when they were produced but the first trilogy of when they're sequenced the star wars you don't even have to say when you talk about trilogies yes yeah okay so the terrible three uh as uh as they shall now be be known you know that had a huge emotional impact on on many people including including myself you know for somebody brought up in a secular household like myself you know lord of the rings and uh star wars were effectively my theological like the old testament and the new testament like the old testament of the new testament exactly and it's it's it's like somebody had suddenly said having read the new testament you know i've got the old testament um god is is actually uh you know a children's party entertainer or something um you know that's that's the kind of uh and and it feels like you were robbed of your your childhood you put down these memories about the plot cheated

Speaker B: 00:05:31

exactly yeah i mean the the so uh just sorry just i think we should say that probably uh we're gonna need to discuss the prequels and and the uh original trilogy here but um the the perhaps most egregious example for me is that you know i remember when um the the when um obi-wan kenobi first gives the lightsaber to luke and opens his eyes to the world of the jedi and he says you your father was this great sort of space pilot and i think we all we all imagined someone very sort of kindly and heroic you know who's an excellent pilot who then you know the tragedy of course that he gets turned to the dark side and becomes uh what we later discover is is darth vader um and you watch the prequels and he's not he's a whiny bitch he's a totally obnoxious teenager um he's totally unlikable in in all three and you just think well you know this isn't a tragedy him turning into darth vader because i never liked him in the first place and in many ways darth vader is an infinitely more charming and interesting person uh you know than than um than the hayden christiansen version of anakin skywalker um and i think that's you know uh

Speaker C: 00:06:32

that for me is the worst sin that they committed and and i think the um you know it says a lot about uh so i think the emotional reaction we have when a a subsequent piece of plot affects something which we which we held held dear i think this is akin to um you know things we find out like for example you know if um if you're the um child of parents who divorce when you're older or something and you you you realize your childhood was a sham or if you're or people who discover that they're adopted and it causes them to yes that kind of that kind of thing or you know um people whose partner has an affair and they thought they were happily married and so on and so forth yeah that that that emotional wrench of having uh not only is the trauma of of the you know the event itself but there's also this you're having to rewrite a set of memories there's this there's this sudden cognitive dissonance of um wait a minute i thought i was this kind of person this is my identity and now i'm having to to shift it accordingly

Speaker B: 00:07:36

i think that's what's going on yeah because we were we were trying to we were sort of talking about um uh whether or not though what's the difference between a spoiler and a synopsis you know if i tell you in empire strikes back that you know they get they they fight a battle on hearth and then luke goes to see yoda and you know that they um they go to cloud city and and that you know luke uh discovers that darth vader is his father um well i mean if i if i'd admitted the if i admitted the last bit i've still told you quite a lot about the story why don't we find it bothersome i mean you know why why does it not bother us to get a synopsis if you like what what what things are you not allowed to include in a synopsis because they're officially spoilers and i think chris has sort of nailed it there really it's about about the extent to which it affects the interpretation of of everything else in the film um such that it were you to watch it again having known the spoiler you would have interpreted events

Speaker A: 00:08:29

differently okay but look let's clarify i think we're talking about two different things here because we're talking about on the one hand where a plot which will be extending over however many episodes of a film suddenly pulls the rug from under you and what you had previously invested emotions in turns out not to be true um that's one thing but i think that's different from a plot spoiler um where as you say in a synopsis if it gives too much away then it spoils it for you so for example had you had a synopsis of the empire strikes back and part of it says and in this we find out that luke's father is actually darth vader um and luke's luke and and princess leia are actually brother and sister then that is giving too much away but i think these are two

Speaker C: 00:09:20

different things are they not uh yes i suppose in in a sense um the uh yes they are i mean the subsequent um the the subsequent plot points uh it's almost in reverse a spoiler is where you tell someone something that's coming that's coming up um these are where you sort of say you know that and this is why it's so much more disorientating uh this is where you say you know that thing that you thought happened it didn't it didn't actually pan out quite in that way or some elements of it now are cheapened in in in some way and it yeah i don't see a big difference

Speaker B: 00:09:58

i think what we're talking about is the same thing the plot development which substantially affects the interpretation of foregoing events is the same as a twist that would be a spoiler way to tell someone about it i think that's what a spoiler is telling someone um one of these

Speaker A: 00:10:15

plot developments no because the difference is in one you've already invested your emotions and and and they and those get to be um disturbed yeah disturbed or anyway um but the other is actually you're not getting the chance to invest no i know but that's

Speaker B: 00:10:33

no no i agree but what i'm saying is that the same analysis tells you what would be a spoiler this is how to know whether something's a spoiler is whether it has that effect on you were you to watch it that's what i'm saying it's the same thing i don't think obviously a spoiler is ruining that by giving someone the answer before they get a chance to be emotionally invested in it um i want to i just actually i mean on this topic i think i can sort of push this forward a little bit um by saying okay people think they don't like spoilers right it turns out that they do right in fact people's reported enjoyment of watching a film um is increased when they are told uh what the spoilers are so when people are given information about what's going to happen in the film they actually enjoy it more but people think they won't right and this this kind of just to i think this touches on the for me the the relevant psychological um uh sort of the the relevant um psychological uh field here which is this issue the distinction between experiencing and um and remembering and um i think herodotus uh has this quote that he he says solon in a conversation with king chrysos who of course was famously fabulously rich he said count no man happy until the end is known and and that's interesting you could live your entire life being perfectly happy but if you had a sort of sad end uh we would judge that to be a sad life and and this this is uh actually corresponds to findings in from empirical psychology where uh you know if people are let's say two people are well one of the studies is to do with sort of pain during surgery that if people um experience uh some nasty pain but then some slightly nicer pain until eventually the pain goes away um in total they've experienced more pain than someone who just gets the nasty pain at the beginning but the person with the nasty pain remembers that as being much worse uh because there's sort of the story is there was this very painful surgery that i had and and it turns out that actually our experiencing self so that the the kind of the happiness or whatever you want to call it we experienced during an event during something which we're directly involved in is uh very different very different in terms of the things that it considers important to the remembering self which is our evaluation of it afterwards and and you know actually the these um you know the is the thing is it's the remembering self who is to all intents and purposes us and the decisions that we make are made by the remembering self but but they're often hugely in conflict to our experiencing self so so i think that you know that's this issue about spoilers you you learn a spoiler uh you it hasn't actually affected the experience you had during watching the first bit of the film all the way up to you know luke finding out that darth vader's his dad you still expect watch the same film but your remembering self

Speaker C: 00:13:29

has now had a very different experience and i think this this fits with the idea of a sort of narrative uh narrative paradigm and um you know the theory proposed by um walter fisher uh and that you know humans experience their lives as a narrative as a as a story and um that uh the the you know the reason why we find um events that don't fit into that story difficult difficult to deal with is because they're not they're not consistent with our our narrative um and so if you look at if you look at plot plot twists or plot developments that are unsuccessful we you know we require narrative um consistency in our storytelling we require narrative consistency in in our life and i think the two things are sort of parallel but if you look at stories that aren't successful i think it tells us about experiences that aren't pleasurable um and um you know there are three kinds of types of um uh consistency within a story there's there's external consistency which is that uh you know the story must fit with the rest of the world unless we've been told specifically otherwise so you know people must act in a certain way they can't suddenly fly in a story unless you explain why that is is the case so there's external consistency we can we you know we we can break that provided we tell people the reason for for doing that uh there's then genre consistency and this is where the the George RR Martin has been extremely um successful is in in in breaking the expectations of genre by um you know in particular plot twists by by getting rid of key characters or key elements that has that is not traditionally done uh that's been really really successful but where we can't bear it is in internal consistency which is consistency within the story itself if something happens that's totally out of a character's uh um uh sort of um you know their personality or or their behavior so far or uh something erodes a really substantial thing that's been built up that's very difficult to to to deal with and that is true in in life when things you know suddenly go off kilter if something's been going in a particular direction and it it goes somewhere else like events like you know brexit or um uh for some people you know president trump's election those things when people have got a narrative that they're projecting in their mind when that narrative is disrupted uh it becomes psychologically very discombobulated you had to

Speaker B: 00:16:06

ve a bit of a spoiler for the: 1990

Speaker A: 00:18:15

dealing with other humans we're gonna need to wrap up there um i can't remember quite how we got onto this but bringing it back around to to something um which was you were talking about um remind me you were saying about experience and the the experiencing self versus the remembering right okay so i don't know how this fits in but i was once presented with an interesting dilemma which i was in hospital lying on a trolley just about an hour before having quite having had quite a serious accident and i was lying there with uh all sorts of broken bones quite badly broken um and one of the things they needed to do was my right arm um had been dislocated the elbow had been dislocated and the whole joint shattered and they needed to give me like almost a sort of a pre-operation immediately so i was already in a huge amount of pain and doing that would put me even in even more pain and they said right you've got a choice here what we can do we can either knock you out with a general anesthetic but you've just um in the last few hours you've been eating and drinking and so the effect of the anesthetic is that you'll want to vomit in fact you will vomit um and they said so as we put you under what you'll just feel this very slight pressure on your throat which is us pushing down on your throat to stop you choking on yourself okay on your own vomit um and actually i remember the words they said and it's completely illegal in germany but it's fine we do it here all the time okay so that was option a and obviously there would be no pain in that okay it's an option b is we'll give you loads of morphine um and some sedatives um and we will um and we'll and we'll set your uh elbow and you'll be perfectly conscious um but you will feel a lot of pain as we do it but don't worry you won't um even though you're in a huge amount of pain at the time you won't remember that you've had that pain um so what do you want to do and what would you do in that position well i think that's that's almost

Speaker B: 00:20:09

just a real life example of some of these psychological thought experiments i i actually just don't like the idea of feeling like i'm going to vomit and i would probably go for the go for the small amount of pain that was going to forget well a large amount of pain okay large amount of pain yeah i think i'd probably prefer that somehow to the possible indignity of vomiting while while uh while i'm general anesthetic um i yeah what would you go for chris i'd

Speaker C: 00:20:34

i'd have definitely tried my hardest to avoid the accident in the first place i think

Speaker A: 00:20:38

go back in time and make more sensible decisions um yeah so i think so i i went for option b because you know i understood that option a was a bit dangerous um and did you did you indeed forget the pain yeah well i'm not sure if i forgot it but i think they described it incorrectly because i actually remember it all quite reasonably well and it was one of those things i don't know if anyone here has ever had morphine um but i was very conscious that i was on the one hand in a huge amount of pain uh but on the other hand that it didn't matter yeah and it was fine so i don't think i did forget it i just think the morphine just sort of just overwhelms your body with good stuff so um and you've been taking it ever since yeah yeah not look back so um yeah i don't know if that's sort of if that's a sort of a i i think that ties into what

Speaker B: 00:21:31

we're talking about i guess very much so yeah it's and i think you know this this um so daniel kahneman uh you know has done has done quite a lot of work on on this uh on this topic and you know the problem is that uh you then ask well are we do we want to be um happy uh in our life or do we want to be happy about our life and they're very different things you know you can be go through life being you know experiencing a lot of pleasure um but you are still ultimately in some way dissatisfied with the way everything's going and those two those two are quite distinct in terms of the the results that you get when you try and survey people um yeah and i think i think you know when when the when the two selves are sufficiently dissociated you end up with problems such as chronic procrastination where you know someone is always choosing a uh and the easy life the sort of pleasurable life but but it's having devastating effects because they are unable to actually achieve the things they want to achieve because those things are kind of mildly displeasurable all right so um we'll wrap up

Speaker A: 00:22:29

there um thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast i'm Fraser McGruer we've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights thank you as always until next time bye