If placing a turret at spot B regularly gets more kills than spot Y, then the meme for placing turrets at B will, all things being equal, successfully express more often and tend to be imitated (reproduced) more often increasing B’s frequency in the meme-pool relative to Y’s. For example, on a given level there may be spots A-Z where automatic turrets can be placed. The memes regularly producing kills tend to get copied more often than memes that do not, and so ‘good’ memes increase their frequencies in a player population.Īll the ways to get kills in MW2 can be considered the MW2 ‘meme-pool’. Every individual has their own memes for getting kills and, when those memes compete, their differential payoffs are analogous to an organism’s fitness. When someone gets a kill, their strategy may be remembered and reproduced, with variations, by those who copied it to memory. The memes evolving in a MW2 Deathmatch are, again, ideas that get kills. You can finesse your ignorance of the gory mechanical details of how the information got from A to B, at least temporarily, and just concentrate on the implications of the fact that some information did get there – and some other information didn’t. If you feel uneasy about accepting the idea of memes without some discrete information carrier like DNA, remember: Modern Warfare 2 then is a meme comprised of, among many others, the memes for Gun, Building, Clothes, Score, War and Team. It’s important to remember that both ‘genes’ and ‘memes’ are a shorthand for whatever information complex is necessary to develop an effect. Since phenotypic effects are the basis of selection in a given environment, any variation introduced and re-transmitted by an individual may increase the meme’s likelyhood of being copied, or likelyhood of reproducing, among other memories: it may evolve. Memes replicate when communicated to other minds and their phenotypic expressions are thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propogate itself, spreading from brain to brain. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. Where genes are genetic information transmitted from organism to organism and “read” during physical embryology, memes are sense information transmitted from mind to mind and read during phenomenal embryology. Examples of memes are wheels, the Haiku format, fountain pens, LOLcats, Algebra, candy apples, wearing clothes, French, this article, slow-motion gun fights and “cooking” grenades. Briefly: memes are ideas that evolve through communication. Though Daniel Dennet and Susan Blackmore have done much to popularize memetics (see Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, by Dennett, and Blackmore’s TED talk, memes are still controversial and have yet to develop as a science. One of MW2’s features, however, fundamentally changes the multi-player dynamic by isolating and replicating successful ‘kill-memes’: the KillCam. In a Modern Warfare 2 multi-player Deathmatch, memes for getting kills evolve against environments of maps, weapon selections, time limits, score limits and other peoples’ memes for getting kills.
The developmental timescales and environments differ between genes and memes, but both generate complex functions by replicating information and storing variations between the copies making the information more likely to replicate again. Memes explain cultural complexity using evolutionary principles: replication, variation and differential fitness. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins introduces the concept of memes as an analogue to genes.
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