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Bruce Sterling / transmediale 2014 afterglow Opening Ceremony (by transmediale)

Perhaps not Sterling’s greatest performance ever but he makes some interesting points towards the end about the need to argue with the status quo by building alternatives. And that the value of these alternatives can be in their rickety nature. A few choice quotes:

“It’s time to build alternative computational systems which reflect our own ethics and values. We can do that.”

“In the tech art world we have to break with our long habit of living off other people’s crumbs. We gotta stop sleeping in the rich guy’s used car.”

“Now that commercial computation has become so slick and seductive. People forget that technology and technology art are hard labour. It’s a tough scrabble when you’re really on the electronic fronteer. And if it’s nothing but decadent pointing and clicking. How do you know if you’re any damn good? You’re good if you’re building something that people can use with some sense of decency.”

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
“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.

Too poor for pop culture – Salon.com

No profound statements about inequality here, just a sobering sketch of life amongst Baltimore’s poor.

Playing with Rules workshop at Lift 14

There are some interesting comments from a participant of our Playing with Rules workshop at Lift 14 in this video made by the organisation. In the video the participant (David Canat) describes the “Mensch ärgere dich nicht”-adaptation his group made about workplace inequality. They managed to get players to become conflicted about wether to collaborate or compete. He does not mention it explicitly but I know they also found personal ethics started to influence player choices also. It’s interesting how a seemingly simple boardgame can already have such strong effects. It also gets me thinking about irrationality as an important quality for social issue game design.

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.
The World Is Not Enough – How To Reinvent The Internet « Der Feuilletonist
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.

Infovore » First Read / Second Read

Interesting thoughts from Tom on designing for different degrees of appreciation.

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.

The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird – Ian Bogost – The Atlantic

Just one highlight from a Bogost piece I could quote almost entirely it’s so great. The best thing I’ve read on games in ages. Don’t be fooled, this discusses Flappy Bird, but it’s not a Flappy Bird article. Read it.

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.
Games by humans