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.