Month: January 2014

Sim­u­la­tion titles that fol­low Bogost’s line of under­stand­ing of what con­sti­tutes a videogame tend to have this prob­lem: they believe in a utopia where sys­tems and rules and mechan­ics can be full of mean­ing, for­get­ting that as humans, we are not Carte­sian machines, for we also think with our sens­es and emo­tions and under­stand the world by touch­ing, see­ing and hear­ing it.

But if wear­able is going to get any­where it’ll need to embrace the point­less. It’s the domain of the point­less, the ter­rain of the triv­ial. If we were all being prac­ti­cal, we’d wear iden­ti­cal nylon boil­er suits and £4 watch­es — but that’s not the species we’re in. We’re the species that evolved a fash­ion indus­try and Glob­al Hyper­col­or T‑shirts. Effi­cien­cy is not a pri­or­i­ty for wear­ables. What are the cheap fash­ion appli­ca­tions? What acces­sories can Claire’s sell? What can you buy at the gar­den cen­tre and down the market?

Although this scene hap­pens in silence, I did actu­al­ly write dia­logue for it. The actors are actu­al­ly speak­ing it and it might stand as an expla­na­tion for some. In any case, that dia­logue will nev­er be writ­ten in the pub­lished screen­play for the film and I told the actors nev­er to reveal it to any­one. They are bound to silence for­ev­er and I hope they will have for­got­ten it by now, because they didn’t know when they were shoot­ing it what the sig­nif­i­cance of the scene might be.

Forums and instant mes­sages were the key medi­ums for speed run­ning the­o­ry to spread through the mid-2000s, but it remained a niche hob­by. Live video stream­ing, which took off at the begin­ning of this decade, has since made it a medi­um for mass consumption.

What would a game look like if it were designed to encour­age a process of read­er engage­ment that con­sists of com­ing up with a nar­ra­tive hypoth­e­sis and then test­ing it? If the dis­cov­ery of lay­ers of mean­ing and per­son­hood were achieved through play?

The guide­lines would have strict­ly lim­it­ed which foods could be mar­ket­ed towards youth — exclud­ing even peanut but­ter — but would also have been, yet again, entire­ly vol­un­tary. Lob­by­ists for the food indus­try pushed back, argu­ing that the rules would “vir­tu­al­ly end all adver­tis­ing” towards those younger than 18. The reg­u­la­tions stalled in Con­gress, and were just last week “killed for good,” Har­ris says, with a sin­gle sen­tence in the 2014 omnibus spend­ing bill.

The essen­tial point is that a par­tic­u­lar con­fig­u­ra­tion of build­ings is nei­ther “good” nor “bad” in absence of a seri­ous exam­i­na­tion of the social rela­tions respon­si­ble for the con­struc­tion of those build­ings and the greater social process­es that con­tin­ue to shape the greater com­mu­ni­ty in which those build­ings exist. In oth­er words, urban­ism is not about an object, but about a set of over­lap­ping, con­sti­tu­tive process­es that pro­duce a wide range of phys­i­cal forms. The phys­i­cal form is large­ly a reflec­tion of these greater process­es and forces.

Man’s first attempts at mak­ing his own deci­sions are called div­ina­tion. Exam­ples are the study­ing of omens, watch­ing the stars, throw­ing and study­ing sticks and bones (sor­ti­lege), ‘read­ing’ ani­mals’ intestines, etcetera. These are all meth­ods that project the will of the gods, who were still thought to exist, into the exter­nal world. So deci­sion mak­ing was in this phase a process that took place in the world, not in the mind.

In a cul­ture where the myth of objec­tivism is very much alive and truth is always absolute truth, the peo­ple who get to impose their metaphors on the cul­ture get to define what we con­sid­er to be true—absolutely and objec­tive­ly true.

whether in nation­al pol­i­tics or in every­day inter­ac­tion, peo­ple in pow­er get to impose their metaphors