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