Author: Kars Alfrink

The problem of “the two cultures” is not, in fact, a problem at all. There’s a reason that art and science are distinct. They don’t just work in different ways; they work on different things. Science addresses external reality, which lies outside our minds and makes itself available for objective observation. The arts address our experience of the world; they tell us what reality feels like. That is why the chain of consilience ruptures as we make the leap from material phenomena to the phenomena of art.

we might have found ourselves in an ironic situation where in order to fulfil architecture’s core ambitions it might have to become less architectural. It might have to model itself on more youthful and vigorous forms of creative practice

Moreso than simply playing games, making and hacking games is a great way to investigate the world around us. It forces us to compare the digital models of our games with the mental models in our heads.

On March 28, 2011, a man who calls himself Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of Minecraft. As the landscape filled in around his character, Mac surveyed the blocky, pixellated trees, the cloud-draped mountains, and the waddling sheep. Then he started walking. His goal for the day was simple: to reach the end of the universe. Nearly three years later, Mac, who is now thirty-one, is still walking. He has trekked more than seven hundred virtual kilometres in a hundred and eighty hours. At his current pace, Mac will not reach the edge of the world, which is now nearly twelve thousand kilometres away, for another twenty-two years.

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.