Month: February 2014

“A yo, Michelle was gonna beat on Barack for taking dat selfie with dat chick at the Mandela wake! Whateva da fuk a selfie is! What’s a selfie, some type of bailout?” yelled Dontay from the kitchen, dumping Utz chips into a cracked flowery bowl. I was placing cubes into all of our cups and equally distributing the vodka like, “Some for you and some for you …” “What the fuck is a selfie?” said Miss Sheryl. “When a stupid person with a smartphone flicks themselves and looks at it,” I said to the room. She replied with a raised eyebrow, “Oh?” It’s amazing how the news seems so instant to most from my generation with our iPhones, Wi-Fi, tablets and iPads, but actually it isn’t. The idea of information being class-based as well became evident to me when I watched my friends talk about a weeks-old story as if it happened yesterday.

It’s time for us to remember that civic and commercial innovation can thrive on the local level as well – not just globally. The argument against Balkanization, made by US-based technology giants, has always relied on some perverse notion and at times fundamentalist notion of utopian cosmopolitanism: if only we are allow maximum interconnection, intercultural contacts will get established, people in Mali will discover people in Montana, everyone will suddenly care about African warlords like Joseph Kony, and so on. Yet, perhaps, it’s time to question whether the pursuit of this cosmopolitan agenda has served us well. We wanted to build a global village – only to end up with a global panopticon instead. There’s little evidence that people in Montana are any more concerned about Mali than two decades ago. At the same time, the cosmopolitan impulse – strategically played up by Silicon Valley in seemingly noble initiatives like Internet.org (a Facebook-led effort to get the remaining five billion people connected) has stopped us from experimenting with communication models that, while possibly less integrated at the global level, would promote different values locally.

I think the best games do this. Cara mentioned the FPS example, but to be frank, it applies to anything: card games; beat-em-ups; sports; real-time-strategy. The first read has to be clear, broad: grokkable, and also aesthetically enticing. Once enticed, you need that detail to repeat, to be fractal, to be backed up by substance. And then, as you delve deeper, into expertise and experience, there’s still depth to reward you, but it never clashes against that first read you had, the thing that sucked you in.

Yes, we “play” games like we do sports, and yes, games bear “meaning” as do the fine and plastic arts. But something else is at work in games. Games are devices we operate.

we – players, critics, journalists – really struggle to appreciate that these games are created not just by the one or two people we see in a dozen pre-release interviews and profiles, but by dozens if not hundreds of people, each with some small say in what the final creative work will look like […] it’s much easier as an audience to boil the author down to a single person: the director, the lead singer, the conductor. But this obscures the realities of how that work was produced and why it is the way it is.

The kids were motivated, busy and engaged. In my experience, the time children get into trouble is when they are not busy, motivated and engaged. It’s during that time they bully other kids, graffiti or wreck things around the school.

It is my belief that videogames are irreducibly pseudoscientific, being composed of such subject-object dissolves, and that failing to account for their status as such will only serve to cut off those speculative possibilities best prepared to advance the medium. […] The relations between gamefulness and artfulness and playfulness are by no means well understood, and the prophetic power of the notgames idea has not at all been exhausted. Notgames have their formal structures, too, and I am interested in exploring them. […] I’d been calling Infinite Sketchpad a game, and I still do, but it can be considered as such only if irrational games are allowed to exist. […] Attempting to allow a maximally intensified/living Art to coexist (become One with?) a maximally intensified/living Maths is the most promising project of videogames, as far as I’m concerned. A new kind of Hippasusian-Pythagorean approach is wanting, where we DO NOT think that it sucks for games to be all about math, because math is not regarded as over-rational reductionism but is rather, as it has always been, the formalization of the players of metaphysics itself, the One, the Many, the parts and the wholes, the rationals and irrationals, and their relations and inconsistencies— the games that they play.