It seems clear this trope needs some repair. Really, it needs a second draft - interesting to read the launchpad discussion where several issues were raised and then the trope was launched anyway without addressing them and nobody has taken a second look since.
4. Description is written fairly gaming-specific even though it's not.
3. Description starts with rather long hypothetical that at the same time is too specific (some game mechanic with a lot of details about it and the reaction to it) and too general (no SPECIFIC mechanic given to help understand a proper application of the trope) - should get more to the point, THEN discuss a REAL example after
2. A number of variations among the examples; some probably just wrong, others probably right but not technically matching the description
1. Text kind of conflicts with the audience-reaction concept that the trope was built around and the nature of technology innovation that leads to this kind of reaction
The core problem: The text describes...
Type A. Primarily tech straight-up built in reverse order - there is something that is WORSE and GENUINELY HARDER TO CONCEIVE OF than what is built later on, such that there is no real technological reason the first version should've had to be built at all. The problem is that this is almost never how technology works. As has been pointed out on this discussion page, there is almost always a good reason why
- things that LOOK convoluted were built the way they were, or
- the "simpler" versions are more complex than they appear and are built around concepts that really did need more time and innovation to develop.
If these examples do exist for longer than a brief experimental period, we might call them "ultra examples". But I suspect this trope would be so empty as to justify deletion if we applied that standard. We certainly shouldn't name it after the bicycle anymore in that case, which doesn't meet that standard.
Type B. The next level is what most of the better current examples follow, including the Pennyfarthing bicycle and free mouselook controls of computer games (see the other discussions on this page).
- There IS a good reason the complex-looking thing was built first and the simple-looking thing took longer to develop...
- but something about the impression or usage of the old thing makes a layman user/viewer's intuition focus on the complex part so that it SEEMS backward.
The description briefly mentions this - it SEEMS like the simple thing would've naturally/intuitively come first rather than the complex thing, but that doesn't mean there's NO technical or historical/contextual reason why. We should emphasize THAT element much more in the description. The laconic also doesn't contradict that point but doesn't remind about it either. It seems to me that since the trope is mainly conceived around the viewer reaction to comparing to how the two things SEEM to be designed and operate, general impression is a deciding factor much more than some kind of in-depth analysis. It makes it more subjective but there are many, many subjective tropes.
The apple-carrot vs apple pie is a good metaphor and seems like type A, but in real life would likely be type B. For example,
- Perhaps carrot-apple pie was typically baked because there was an excess of carrots which were easier to farm than most fruit, and people realized mixing apples with them would make them a tastier treat. To the food industry before the Great Orchard Innovation Boom, it was "simpler" to bake the carrots into pies with the apples than to bake purely apple pies as a luxury item AND figure out another good way to to sell the more efficiently-grown carrots - one product is simpler than two, in the context of this agricultural sales problem.
- Or, perhaps pies tended to burn way too easily unless you had carrots in it, so it's actually "simpler" to produce carrot-apple pies that aren't burned than pure apple pies that aren't burned, until baking techniques improved enough that it was technically possible to consistently bake the latter.
In both cases, a layman ignorant of the history and technical principles might look back and say "two ingredients instead of one? one is so much better AND so much simpler!" despite the one-ingredient version NOT being so simple for people at the time.
By the way, if anybody knows why strawberry-rhubarb pie is a thing and strawberry is not, please share haha. (I assume strawberry pies might just be too sweet on their own, making that an example of "it's not as good, people like things that are better", which is People Sit On Chairs.)
Type C. Basically just Technology Marches On. An example is justified simply by the fact that something is easier to use in the modern version, and ease of use implies simplicity from a certain point of view. However, if a layman can look at it and see that the device clearly DID get more complex to make it easier to use, it's not this trope. One example discussed already in another thread is the printing press - a single wooden block for a document is clearly simpler in concept than a whole bunch of individual movable letter pieces that must be typeset before printing, even if the modern system is much easier for the printer to operate over the course of multiple documents. Another is minivans with two car doors - sure it's simpler for the customer to be able to access the van from either side rather than following the "complex" process of walking around the van and THEN opening the door, but it's obvious to the layman that putting 2 doors in a box is a bit more work than just putting 1 in.
Interesting to note that as technology gets good enough it becomes less clear to the layman what had to happen, so Type C shifts to type B. For instance, "talking to Siri in plain English is so much simpler than having to learn the interface of a whole program" is a justification for this trope if you don't understand that English language and sound itself has a huge amount of ways of expressing a single idea, and that clicking a clearly defined area on the screen is way simpler. This is like an inversion of Clarke's Third Law where instead of the tech appearing as MAGIC, the fundamental tech appears as REALLY OBVIOUS tech such that you don't know why the ancient innovators had to spend any time on it at all.
In the next week I plan to categorize current tropes to test my theories, then plan for a description rewrite if it seems justified. I certainly plan to move the Technology Marches On examples to that page for cases where the old thing IS obviously simpler in technology or complexity.
Edited by jerodast
Why is this trope called "the Penny Farthing effect"?
The Penny Farthing is a much simpler design than the modern bicycle. The pedals are directly attached to the front wheel (so if you pedal once, the wheel goes round once).
A limitation of that is, if you want the bike to be more efficient, your only option is to make the front wheel bigger and bigger - so that each of those revolutions takes you further. It was the later invention of bicycle gears that made it possible to have a passably fast bicycle that didn't require a dangerously large front wheel (there's a reason why the ancestors of our modern bikes were called "safety bicycles"!).
It certainly wasn't the case that someone came along and said, "Hey, guys... you know how we've always designed our bikes with dangerously big front wheels? How about we try *not* doing that?"
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Yeah... how much of this trope is legitimately odd circuitous historical developments, and how much is Outside Jokes? That said, it's a fascinating discussion to have!
That is a TECHNICAL description of why the design is simple, which is not what this trope is about. To a layman/end user, having to hop up onto a high seat, as well as the aesthetically lopsided wheel size, SEEMS less simple than two similar looking wheels with a seat at butt-height. Most people don't see a bike for the first time and immediately kneel down to the chain drive and say "ahh, how sophisticated".
And the "Hey guys" argument is missing the whole point of this trope - of course nobody says that. We're not talking about the technical experts on bikes being dumb for 20 years, because technology pretty much works that way. We're talking about technology that LOOKS like it's weird or roundabout until you understand the technicalities and context of it better.
People don't seem to understand this trope. Almost none of the examples given are actually appropriate. Both FPS mouselook controls and the moveable type printing press, for example, are in fact more complex systems than their precursors and are what one would reasonably expect to have evolved from the old.
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Simple and Complex are subjective concepts. From the user perspective, using a freely moving device - mouse - to freely direct your view, is akin to how human heads and eyes are relatively free to move smoothly from one line of sight to another. Having to break down the desired motion into separate perpendicular dimensions and then use binary activation of constant-speed rotation controls is simply not how we look at things. If you plop a never-used-a-computer newbie in front of a computer, and said "you can wave this thing around, or you can press these buttons. Try them both out, then turn the camera toward the blinking red light that will appear in a random location in 1 minute", most will say using the mouse to do it is simpler.
From a historical perspective, it is certainly simpler to go from keyboards as the main input device (which themselves originated from typewriters) to more keyboard controls, than to go to a totally different device. And that's related to the technical perspective, in which getting the correct operation of a mouse is harder and newer than a keyboard.
If you allow the historical+technical perspective to invalidate the examples, this trope becomes redundant - anything CAN be explained. The question is, to a layman, is it already obvious that a computer is more complex than a typewriter (not this trope), or does it require that historical/technical explanation to understand why it happened that way?
Oh right, the printing press. TL;DR I agree with you - a printing press is Technology Marches On.
That said, you CAN make the same argument, it's just more "from a certain point of view" since the user of the machine is themselves a technically trained person. The basic technology of making a single big block, pressing it on ink and paper, and bam you have a printing, is simpler. It's harder to make modular tiny little characters that stay where you put them in a complex rig, which THEN is pressed to ink and paper without messing up all the little typesettings. But, to the printer who actually needs to USE the device over a long period on multiple projects, "rearrange things" is simpler than "carve new physical objects every time".
Taking it to the layman's level though, the process by which block printing works IS both technology AND intuitively simple. That's what makes that example the more common trope to me, whereas the mouselook example is still this one.
I'm confused. In history of edits, there are things that have been added, then never removed... but somehow they don't display in the article proper nor are hidden in the text formatting. What's going on?