SciShow Tangents - Games

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

Kicking the ball, passing another type of ball, running around the big arena and making a point! SciShow Tangents knows one thing and that one thing is SPORTS! Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links![Truth or Fail]Crowd Noisehttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/45821302_Crowd_Noise_as_a_Cue_in_Referee_Decisions_Contributes_to_the_Home_Advantagehttps://www.earq.com/hearing-health/articles/going-to-a-football-gamehttps://www.hear-the-world.com/en/media/media-releases/world-cup-fans-warned-about-risk-of-hearing-damage-from-vuvuzelaRoboCuphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=350&v=H8xc6LpiNVs&feature=emb_titlehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/annatobin/2019/06/25/what-to-expect-from-robocup-2019-the-robotics-soccer-world-cup-kicks-off-july-2/#484935147485https://www.robocup.org/leagues/3HudGlasseshttps://newatlas.com/form-ar-swim-goggles/60985/https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2018/04/everysight-cycling-display.html[Fact Off]Rats playing hide-and-seekhttps://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/why-scientists-taught-rats-play-hide-and-seek/597799/https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/lab-rats-play-hide-and-seek-fun-it-new-study-showshttps://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/so-you-think-you-know-why-animals-play/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/animals-play-games.htmlhttps://science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aax4705 Empathy video gamehttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-08/uow-avg080918.phphttps://news.wisc.edu/a-video-game-can-change-the-brain-may-improve-empathy-in-middle-schoolers/[Ask the Science Couch]Getting competitive about gameswww.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-board-games-bring-out-worst-us-ncna828726www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-06/uoc--yga061314.phpwww.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-06/ucl-ddm053116.phpwww.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-06/s-tsh062818.phpParasocial relationships & sports fanshttps://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1963&context=thesesdissertationshttps://surface.syr.edu/thesis/358/https://www.units.miamioh.edu/psybersite/fans/sit.shtmlhttps://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2368&context=thesesdissertations[Butt One More Thing]Butt controllerhttps://phys.org/news/2013-12-valve-mouth-mouse-butt-gadgets-video.html

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I'm joined by Stefan Chen. Hey there. What's your tagline? 2D6 plus four. That's a pretty powerful hit. Sam Schultz is also here with us.

Hello. Sam, what's your tagline? Half man, half Pop-Tart. Ooh, well, that's what happens. I've been eating a lot of them. I walked by the Pop-Tarts in the grocery store just a couple of days ago and I looked at them solidly for a long time. They looked back, but I blinked them away. I hadn't even thought about them in like 20 years. Yeah. But all of a sudden. I think about Pop-Tarts all the time. Sari Riley is also here with us. Sari, what's your tagline? That's

a good rock. And I'm Hank Green, and my tagline is mystery scent. Every week here on Size Your Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic,

but judging by previous conversations, we won't be great at that. So if the rest of the team deems the tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care. And now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me, everyone.

Wait for it. Oh, what's on my floor? What's on the floor? Oh. Hank has taken out a guitar. Somebody once told me the world was gonna roll me I'm round and being carefully aimed I've been pumped up with some air And some people really care

When I go in the goal during the game Well, they keep coming and they don't stop coming. Everywhere I go, there's more guys running. Always on the move, never get any rest. I'm starting to think that they might be obsessed. Oh, just once I'd like to sit around, maybe find a nice hill to roll down. But the whistle blew, so now I'm back and suddenly I'm being attacked. Oh, hey now, Now I'm back and suddenly I'm being attacked. Oh, hey, now I'm the game ball and I never get bored. Oh, hey, now Hall of Fame ball and I see now I've scored. And someday I'll develop a hole.

But until then, I'll go for the goal. Wow. That's beautiful. That was really good. It also made it sound like you don't know the names of any specific sports. Yeah, I was picturing

a soccer ball, but this wasn't a great way to fit that into the meter of the song. I'd say two points are in order for that one. Yeah, I concur. You think?

Yeah! Ooh! Ooh! That's why I need it so bad. I worked hard on it. I just can't get the all-star out of my brain. You and Smash Mouth both worked really hard on that poem. Yeah, that's true. You can't just count their contribution to this.

So the topic for the day is not balls, unfortunately. Maybe that's coming up in the future, but it is games. So, Sari, what's a game? I looked around for this a lot, and it seems like there are lots of different definitions for game. But what they all had in common was they're a form of play, especially when they're competitive or structured in some way, and usually for entertainment or fun or sometimes education. So it's not work and it's not art. And then in between that is game.

There are only three things. Yeah. The three genders, work, art, or game. Is sport a kind of game? I think so. I would consider a sport a type of play all sports are games but not all games are sports yeah but there's like within sports and a lot of different kinds of gambling there are professionals who are working by playing the game too yeah oh yeah

now they're working and they're also like sometimes the the way they move their bodies is a kind of art it's that place where it all intersects in the middle. But yeah, we're not going to get to the bottom of what a game is, I think. There are plenty of people who are studying play and games to various degrees, whether it's like how to write a video game script or how to design board games or like how do children play? And those are all like different fields of neuroscience and sociology and psychology and different things so it's broad did you discover discover the etymology

of the word game yeah i did so it is from the proto-germanic ga which is ga which is just a like collective prefix so it means like a collective plus man which is person so ga man basically which is people together so games are inherently a social thing they didn't have solitaire in old english apparently which are also coincidentally the same roots as gambling so gamble and game come from the same sort of place in linguistic history. And so then it went from being people together

to being like amusement or pleasure or joy related. And now it is time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists, it's Sam, has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment,

but only one of those facts is real. The rest of us have to figure it out either by deduction or a wild guess, which is the true fact. If we do, we get a Sam Buck. If we're tricked, then Sam gets the Sam Buck. Sam, what are your three facts? Association football, a.k.a. soccer, is the most popular sport in the world. Even Americans who are notorious soccer haters are starting to admit that maybe it's not so, like, dumb. I guess they like it now. Soccer's pretty cool.

And all that popularity means there's a lot of science and innovation happening around soccer, some of it more useful than others. Here are some weird soccer science inventions, but only one of them is real. Number one. One of the most soccer-y parts of soccer is the rowdy fans in the stadium. Crowds can be whipped up by defeat or victory and can get dangerous really fast and noise levels in arenas are often high enough to damage hearing.

So researchers are developing a sort of noise-canceling sound system to be installed in arenas that analyzes crowd noise with machine learning. And when the crowd starts to get too loud or angry, the sound system would play a countersound that would have the goal of deadening the sound and hopefully calming everyone down.

Oh, so not only is it there to protect their ears, but it's also there to protect them from each other. Uh-huh, from getting too mad about sports. Number two, soccer played by humans? That's very boring. So a group of roboticists from around the world got together to start RoboCup, a soccer tournament featuring leagues of robots of all shapes and sizes, and even hypothetical simulated ones,

with the goal of creating a flawless team of super soccer robots that can defeat a professional soccer team in regulation play. Number three, soccer rules can get really confusing, even for professional soccer players, and no rule is more vexing than the dreaded offsides rule, which I read and still don't really know what it is, but

I think it says that a player can't be any closer to a goal than the ball or the closest opposing player. And it's really easy to screw up and be in the wrong place and get the other team a free kick. So work is being done to develop sporty sunglasses

that calculate where offside is in real time and display a line that you can't cross on a hood inside the sunglasses. And that's for the soccer player? And that's for a soccer player. Oh my god. Okay. So our three facts are a noise-canceling arena system so that the crowd doesn't get too loud or too riled up,

two RoboCup, a soccer tournament featuring leagues of robots and even hypothetical simulated ones to create a flawless soccer team able to defeat a professional soccer team in regulation play, professional soccer team and regulation play, or a pair of glasses that give you a heads-up display that shows you where off sides is at any given moment in time. So you'd have to wear sunglasses while you're playing. Or like, yeah, like goggles of some sort, yeah. I feel like at that point you're cheating. I mean, it's just helping you not break the rules.

Well, but in football, like, well, American football, excuse me. When you're watching on TV, you have all these overlays now where you can see the line of scrimmage and all that. But if the players could see that, I feel like that would be... I mean, I guess everyone can see it, but I don't know. Then you're going to not get as many offsides penalties, and that's no fun. It's more exciting with the penalties. Do you watch soccer, Stefan? No. Okay. So you don't know if it's more i actually don't know it does to me feel like something that you give to the referees not the players though like they're the cops of sports

who stand on the sidelines and are like you've gone over the line and they don't have those yellow lines they just have human eyes, but giving them lines seems helpful. That was my first thought, too, is that it'd be useful for refs before players because players aren't going to want to wear something on their face. But nobody's saying that this is a thing

that they're going to use. They're saying it's a thing that someone is trying to develop. Yeah, a bunch of dorks in some lab somewhere. For their rec soccer leagues so they can become the best and win their little trophy. So RoboCup, I guess the near-term goal is to have two teams of robots playing against each other, and the long-term goal is for them to defeat the soccer players because it feels like we're a long way away from being able to defeat a soccer player. I've seen soccer players. I've seen those latest Boston Dynamics robots videos

where they parkour and stuff. I would not fight that in soccer. No, I would definitely not fight it. I wouldn't want to hand to hand it. Stefan, what do you think soccer is? Wait, they have swords, right? It's a lot of punching.

It's a lot of punching. I mean, I could see robots playing against each other. I could not see them playing against people. I don't care how fancy your Boston Dynamics is. I could see that as a great way to incentivize robotics teams to develop better, more maneuverable robots or whatever, is to compete in this RoboCup league. Yeah, and if you have something

like battle bots with robots destroying each other you can have a like a ball bot that kicks the ball around that that seems achievable to me knowing very little about robotics and then finally we have our noise canceling sound system which if this is like technically possible there's got to be somebody working on it it may be that it's like just not a thing that's possible but if it's possible i feel like yes somebody's got to be thinking about this like i know that it's of course possible inside of headphones yeah but that's like one person with one set of headphones which is very different from like giant 60 000 person stadiums i don't know a lot about like stadium or like concert audio.

The acoustics seem complicated. It seems much more complicated than doing headphones to me. Regardless, I'm going for that one. It does feel like something a lot of people could use. My dad is a big football fan, which you wouldn't expect coming from my family, but they love the sports. And he brings earplugs

to every football game to put them in his ears like he's going to a loud concert so that he can yell as loud as he wants and also protect his hearing. So I'm sure there are plenty of also hearing conscious people who would like a sound dampening system. But I'm going for robo

soccer because I would like to see the robots. Oh, boy. I mean, there's got to be robots playing each other in soccer. There's not, like, that's a thing. That's definitely a thing. I'm sticking with my answer, but that's got to be a thing. So since Hank is locked in, I'm just going to say that I really don't think that the noise-canceling stadium is a thing.

Because you can't control, like, with the headphones, you know how far it is to the ear, so you can control the phase. Because that's what it is. You need like exactly out of phase audio to cancel it out, and you can control that. But in a stadium, you can't control the phase to everyone's ears. They're all in different places. But wouldn't you know where they all were to a certain degree? Maybe. Maybe Hank knows something.

My thing is that you have like a distributed system of many speakers. So it's not like one noise canceling for the whole stadium. It's like every little area gets its own. Okay, well I'm going with RoboCup also. I'm screwed. The second RoboCup. Okay, so you're ready

for the right answer? The right answer is RoboCup. But my noise canceling idea is pretty good, right? It's so good. Except that Stefan's a freaking audio engineer. That's even better. He can help me. He can help you know how impossible it is.

Well, okay. That's what every inventor hears before they invent the automobile or whatever. It's impossible. Okay, so RoboCup. I'll start with that one. It's real. Like I so the RoboCup. I'll start with that one. It's real, like I said. It started in 1997, and 2019 was the 23rd RoboCup.

What? What? Oh, wow. 1997? What the hell? It started with a goal very similar to Deep Blue, which defeated Gary Kasparov in 1997 as well, except at soccer.

It wants to defeat humanity at soccer. And it started out with just a simulated league, but it's grown to have tons of leagues and sub-leagues, like the humanoid league, which has kid, teen, and adult-sized sub-leagues. And the simulation league now has 2D leagues and 3D leagues. And then it has all kinds of non-humanoid-sized categories for more battle bot type soccer playing robots. And the stated goal of beating a World Cup team

by the middle of the century is secondary, like Stefan said, to having fun and to being a good challenge for roboticists. They do want to, by the middle of the century, make a team that can beat humanity. There's one league called the Standard League where everybody gets the same robot body, but they all have their own programming for it. Right.

And they all go against each other. And they look like little babies playing soccer. They do. And they just fall over all the time. I'm watching them. It's really good. They are not close to being able to defeat a human, I will say, from watching this.

They're not particularly good at soccer, but they're as good as a toddler that knows the rules of soccer, which is pretty good for being only from 1997 until now. Sam, I'm just going to be watching robots play soccer. Oh, that one fell down again!

This is like my entire rest of my night. The crowd noise thing is fake, but crowd noise in arenas of sports of all types is a huge problem. Sports crowds tend to be about 90 decibels and hearing damage starts at 85 decibels. But Vuvuzelas, which are pretty much banned all over the place now, but they were huge in the early 2010s. They can be 127 decibels, which is mostly why they were banned, because they were just shredding people's hearing. The best I could find in terms of actual ideas for sound mitigation

was just earplugs, like Sari's dad does. So he's ahead of the curve. It's a low-tech solution, I'd say. Not nearly as high-tech as this terrifying spider robot that I'm watching play soccer right now. I've got to stop watching robots play soccer, but we'll link to some good soccer robot videos on SciShowTangents.org.

I'll track down as many as I can find. Because it's great. And then researchers are using machine learning on crowds at some sporting events, I guess to figure out what makes people most excited. So they can stop that from happening so that it's really boring and quiet. There's a thought that they could anticipate

where fights are going to break out with it. But that was very early from what I could find. And then the HUD glasses are not a thing for soccer as far as I know. But there's HUDs being integrated into lots of like swimming goggles and goggles that people who ride bikes wear. So they can see like elevation, temperature, and vital signs and how fast they're going. And now there are football helmets like prototype football helmets that can display plays and they can respond to like verbal commands so they can hear the person shouting the play and then show it on the hood of your football helmet

but those are just used in like experimental practice scenarios right now probably because they break into a million pieces if you hit them is my guess. And also they have cameras in them so that you can like pull up their view to show to like people at home I think is the idea. I want to be inside of a quarterback's actual head. The thing is though I feel like I've heard like streams

of like football players helmets while they're on the field and it's not that exciting because they're just like a lot of jiggling around. Next up, we're going to take a short break and then it'll be time for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Sandbuck totals. Everybody would be tied with one,

but I got an extra point for doing a parody version of Smash Mouth's All-Star, so I'm in the lead with two. Now get ready for the fact off. Two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow our minds. We each have a sandbuck to award the fact we like the most. But if we hate both of them, we can just throw our fact away. And we're going to decide who goes first with this trivia question.

Since we are recording this episode on Hank's birthday, happy birthday, Hank. So in celebration of birthdays and Hank's love of Tetris, when is the developer of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov's birthday? September 30th, 1946. All right. I don't know. It just came out, Stefan. The spirit of Alexey moved me. I feel like, I don't know when It just came out, Stefan. The spirit of Alexi moved me.

I feel like, I don't know when Tetris was developed, maybe like late 80s, early 90s or something. And it feels like something an early 30s person would develop. Oh, wow. Being strategic. May 5th, 1959. Oh. Wow.

So the answer is April 16th, 1955. Oh, good job, Stephan. That's actually pretty close. Okay, well, I'd like Sari to go first. Okay. So play in animals is kind of a biological mystery. It seems like it's something that should be straightforward. Like they play fight or chase a ball or goofy and we love them and that those all have purposes.

So play fighting might train them to defend themselves or being goofy with us could increase their social behavior or decrease aggression. But not all behaviors fit neatly into a box of a theory for play and for games. And so we don't really have anything really conclusive besides it's fun and maybe lowers stress or improves coordination. But researchers are particularly interested in studying play because it's tricky

and interesting to understand. And one group of scientists at the Humboldt University of Berlin gave it a go in 2019 by teaching rats how to play hide and seek. They didn't want to use carefully regulated classical conditioning methods like food rewards or like negative electric shocks. So they met the rats on sort

of their own level. They knew that rats would play with each other. So this researcher, Annika Reinhold, started getting them used to her by petting and tickling them, which I learned that rats giggle when they're tickled at really high frequencies that we can't hear, but they love it. They love to be tickled. Can they hear each other giggling? I think so. Oh, good. After some training, all six rats learned how to seek. So their starting enclosure was closed, and then it would open up remotely, and there would be a human hidden in the room. Then they would scurry around and like vocalize and check past hiding spots and like seek out the human and then get really excited when they found them.

Executing what are known as joy jumps or Freudensprung. Oh my goodness. So they were having a lot of fun. And five out of six of them also learned to hide if their starting box was open and the human was nowhere to be found so they would like sneak around pick a hiding spot stay still and silently wait to be found and sometimes when the human found them they would like run away before getting their tickle reward and hide again because they were having so much fun and they were just like i want to keep playing and so then they would hide again.

So it was really, really interesting. One, because hide and seek seems like a sort of more complicated game than play fighting because there are separate roles. There are more rules involved, but humans were still able to train them. And they noticed that when rats are conditioned with food, they're usually silent and can tirelessly perform hundreds and hundreds of trials.

But these rodents were really eager to play and really tired when the block of games were over. So they were like giving their all to this task and then being tired afterward. So it's like really heartening to see how happy these rats were, but also like sad to see how other trial rats are not necessarily living their best lives. There's a lot of competition to get into the giggle fight rat study. Yeah. At work today, I got tickled. I've got to play hide and seek. What did you do?

Well, the bottom of my cage is electrocuted. Mostly, I just found this really endearing and play is cute and good. And we don't know exactly what its evolutionary purpose is, but we know that it's really important. Do rats have games when they're not in captivity? Do they know? Yeah, I think they're pretty playful. A lot of mammals are really playful and demonstrate a lot of play behaviors.

So rats, I think, do a lot of this. They like tussle and hide and pounce on each other. So sort of similar to things that you'd see a cat or a dog or other pets do. You said some of the rats are also seeking, but do they seek other rats and then tickle them? Or are they like seeking the humans? It's a human-rat game.

So the rat is either the seeker or the hider, and then a human is the other person. That's a good question. If rats can tickle each other, do we know the answer to that? Probably. I don't know. I hope so. I feel like the way we've measured their high pitch tickly giggles, it's because humans were tickling them. But I imagine that they giggle because they tickled each other at some point and they were like, hee hee hee. They giggled before the first human induced giggle. One has to assume.

Yeah. Okay. All right, Stefan, what do you got? So one of the very important skills in life is empathy. So just understanding and experiencing the emotions of other people. A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was wondering if they could use games to help teach people empathy. And so they developed this game called Crystals of Kedor that was designed to teach empathy to middle schoolers specifically. They had 150 kids in the study, 75 played this

game, and 75 played a control game. The sort of premise of the game is that I think you're a robot and you've crash landed on this alien planet and you don't speak the same language as these aliens. landed on this alien planet and you don't speak the same language as these aliens. And so you have to build emotional rapport with them in order to like gather the parts of your spaceship and then presumably like put it back together and get back home or whatever. It just so happens, luckily enough, these aliens have extremely human and expressive faces. And so all the key mechanics of the game are about identifying what emotion they're feeling and how intensely they're feeling it. They had the kids play the game for about an hour a day for two weeks. And in fMRI scans after those two weeks, I think all of the kids who had played the game showed improved neural connectivity in the brain regions associated with empathy and perspective taking. But some of the kids also had more connectivity in emotional

regulation brain regions. Those kids improved their scores on empathic accuracy tests. And so they had taken those tests before and then after playing the game, they did better. So kind of showing that like the game worked for them, but it doesn't necessarily work for everyone. But the idea behind this and like why they're targeting middle schoolers specifically is like, you know, it's a time of life when your brain's still developing, you're learning these social skills, and it could be really helpful for children who are on the autism spectrum or just generally have trouble with empathy and social skills. But the idea is to show that it can be impactful and then maybe inspire the game industry

to include more empathy-based things in games. Because that was the thing that I was thinking about while reading this is like, there's no game that I have played that uses empathy as a mechanic. It's like, can you click on this thing faster than the other person clicked on this thing? Or in RPGs, you're like, I'm going to use my charisma skill to get a good deal on these basilisk toenails. But you just roll a die.

Stefan, you've played Rust, right? Uh-huh. That caused a big ruckus because its character generator is automatic. And so you can't choose the race or gender of your character.

And you're locked into it for the whole game. And like game scholars and sociologists were interested in that because it's like some people pick an avatar that resembles them

and some people pick an avatar like men will pick a sexy woman or something because that's what they want to look at while they're playing a game. But this took all control out of the players hands and like forced you to be a person and hopefully in some way teach you empathy or just like see how it plays out in this survivalist game. People were really mad about it too. I remember. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. People were like very pissed. They couldn't change their character.

No empathy was developed. Yeah. So we've got in 2019, neuroscientists teaching rats how to play hide and seek by rewarding them only with tickles. Or we've got Stefan with a game developed for middle schoolers where you have to understand the facial expressions of aliens to develop empathy. Sam, are you ready to vote with me?

Yeah, I am. Three, two, one. Stefan. Mixing it up again. I like this useful tool. It seems like a game I'd like to play. Also, I'm worried about my own child, also his entire generation,

and I want them to be able to understand people in the world. Are you saying you wouldn't want to play hide and seek with a mouse? Because I sure would. Or a rat. Oh, yeah. No, I want to giggle the heck out of some rats. And I want some kind of headphones that let me hear them giggle that i don't know why that hasn't been developed yet but i definitely i think that that our sort of like species level appreciation for rats would go way up if that

was possible oh yeah i picked series because it delighted me yeah it was really delightful your reasons were extremely compelling once i heard them and probably Stefan's is more important for the world. Now it's time to ask the science couch. We've got some listener questions for our couch

in quotation marks of finally honed scientific minds. This is from at sciences and art. Why do we get so riled up about games?

This is like a psychologically complicated question and I tried to do reading and I recruited Deboki to try to do reading. And the answer is maybe just dopamine because, of course, anything. As with so many things. It is the answer to everything. 42 and dopamine. Our brains apparently have a tough time separating games from reality. And that's partially because of game design. Like it wants you to become invested in winning or losing, but also just we feel very big.

And so chemically in your brain, when you lose money in a board game, dopamine neurons will start firing. And when you win, you get the release of like those same hormones that bring you joy and pleasure and feeling good. So like we were saying in the definition phase, game playing is like learning different sets of rules and learning behaviors and accomplishing those behaviors and learning from the consequences of your actions. And those are all important parts of development in other regions of your life. So like you learn from the consequences of your actions in real life. If you touch a hot burner and you burn your hand and you learn from the consequences of your actions in soccer, if you kick the ball, not to a player, but like far off field, I assume that that's a bad

thing. That's like my most general bad thing I can think of with soccer. And those drive the same general learning behavior, like, oh, that thing is bad. I should not do it again. And dopamine is a key hormone involved in those kind of reinforcement learning pathways. From like a fan's perspective, what are they getting so worked up about when they're watching a game though? That's the identity part. Yeah, I feel like that is the identity part as part of a fan. This I did less research into, so I'm pulling from very old knowledge. But when you become a fan of something, you forge community around it in the same way that you see in like internet fandoms, for example. And so when good or bad things happen to the object of your fanishness, then you like have emotional responses to that. You have this parasocial

relationship with that person or that team, which is just like a fancy psychological way to say that you feel like you know them really, really well because they've shared parts of their lives with you, but they don't know anything about you. And so you feel like you like know your football player stats, you know who's been traded onto the team, you know how to cheer for them. And that way their performance really affects you emotionally, even though what you do doesn't affect them at all. Well, if you want to ask your Science Couch question, follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at PK Lake Mama, at Little Gray Fish, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode. Final Sandbuck scores.

Everybody's got two points except Sam, who's got one. Oh, no. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. It's super helpful, and it helps us know what you like about the show. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from this episode, and

you can tag us, please, and let us know. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Riley.

I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by

Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Trocovardi, our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. In 2013, an engineer at the video game company Valve

was playing around with creating two different kinds of controllers. One like a retainer that you stick in your mouth and use your tongue to manipulate and click. And one that you stick under your butt and lean or twirl to move around or pan the camera or things like that. Sometimes you just need two extra buttons. One for each cheek.