I totally agree about balance, nothing is absolute, although I’m sure there’s an exception to that somewhere.

Conflict is everywhere these days. There is so much social programming that teaches us about us and them, and how conflict and resistance can ensure that our values prevail over theirs. I don’t think there is a place for that thinking in the world any more if we are going to survive as a species.

While a video game is an appropriately harmless place for some exciting conflict to remain in the world, I just wanted to suggest that you also include some more enlightened programming if possible. Although I confess that I’ve been trying to think of an ‘enlightened’ game for years to no avail.

A game almost requires conflict to be able to be played.
Even Simon, the repeat the patterns game, is an example of inflation and a bubble bursting. Once you remove all ‘evil’ elements from a game it becomes more like creating an art work together than playing a game. Can you have a game where everyone cooperates together to ensure the well being of themselves and their world? Maybe Second Life does that in some ways.

I’m was just suggesting that you include some kind of creation, community and sustainability in your game, as we could use as much of that programming as possible in the world at the moment.

Gave me a strange giggle.
I see your ongoing theme of “scale” at work in your second paragraph Doug. Once we let go of a production, either by signing it or marketing it or simply appearing to “conclude” it, we hope the thing itself reflects the work done in spanning various spheres, experience, spaces and ideas. And in so far as it does and produces similar spanning in the reader/player we can say it really does become currency.

To come late is to be in debt, it acknowledges a performance of work, the value of work. It takes a culture a long time to appreciate what it has received. If i may provide a (perhaps unintended) reading of “Station to Station,” i would suggest that America is indebted to Europe for it’s best achievements and principles. As a new culture, we have gone a great distance in performing some notable service to that debt, largely by commercial and military means. The “European Canon” is not the author’s phallus or work, it is a kind of obstruction, a kind of return. Since first hearing this song i thought i heard not “making sure white stays” but “making short white staves.” Regardless of this hearing or the blues motif of “Staving Chain,” an arg – argument exists that in passing on we can not fail to fall short, as if something in ourselves or our interpretation is in our way.

Hence, Europe has long since been attempting to recompense American Tradition with canonical adjustments in theory and practice; these, no doubt, have some interesting roots, etc, but what concerns us (if i may suggest) is the question of receiving, containing and transmitting. I do hope American Culture can begin receiving again. It is not enough to merely hold. Merely holding is not actual containment. Une société réceptrice is a society or corporation that is in the world and not in the box.

I accept your use of the metaphor “in the box” was a “Return” to the world. What i am saying is this implies an embrace of the world not a colonisation. Only in the marriage of “true minds” or “true work” do we find both significant and practical lack of impediment. This is not A, nor The “Gold standard,” but the golden one, the all purposeful one.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare
(1564 – 1616)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Doug’s public thoughts and questions about narrative and myth, do we need a new one, which comes first the narrative or the cultural shift and etc.

I’ve generally thought narrative ought to teach narrative, construction and deconstruction and inspire people either to go out there and learn more, whether in books or from others.

What we want is a growing sense of technical ability and agency. When we are hacking about in a box, we have to be completely aware of that fact, just as when we go out and work in the other “reality” we have to be completely sensitive and aware to that.

I have always liked the question posed by Morpheus in the Matrix, “Do you think that is air you are breathing?” There is also the notion that rules in the box can be bent. This is valuable in the air outside because it causes us to press against the air and water and light and earth and the rules in which they operate. Practice, intent and technology can improve efficiency in systems as well as give individuals very high degrees of participation and personal agency.

The great mystery is why we fear this.

And we should. It’s very tricky, running from box to box and station to station.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY77zDzNmYw

‘Cause for most of us it’s always too late.

I think there are many great ways to help rebalance our lives and economy toward some local and real activities. I don’t think we have to eliminate long distance trade of all sorts, however. I think chard is better sourced locally. Videogames, on the other hand, are a great medium to source in a more distributed fashion. I think sex is a terrific thing to do in person. I think massively multiplayer fantasies are terrific for avatars.

But even this game attempts to work on more than one level – where people form local posses that then contribute to larger, less local networks. So we’re doing a lot of what you’re describing in the iPhone game.

There will certainly be some real world elements to the game, when it all rolls out. But that roll out itself depends on a publisher from traditoinal games media. So far, there’s a graphic novel and an arg….