Context

There isn't much of a market for preparing for a virus that doesn't exist... until it's tearing the market apart.

Confusing a current price tag with value is myopic.

Confusing business viability with purpose is dangerous.

Some people want government to do little more than serve business.

What's forgotten is that government outlines markets. Without rules of property and exchange and institutions for policing them, there would be no marketplace. There would be a barter mixed with a brawl.

The Novel City

Ever since I was a kid, five years old, I've pitched my tent on the slopes and in the breezes of the same subculture. And the breeze somehow came down to me from the mountain of elders, even though they don't play games: we see computer games and video games as possibly a little bit different from each other. Whatever name you use for all this stuff, for the larger parasol, interactive media is very ancient indeed, even prehistoric. It isn't unusual to consider all those dicey games of Knucklebones before the invention of writing a prototype of interactive media. And whatever you think/feel about them, digital games are artistically and intellectually new and meaningful (to many, including yours truly), creating a central, though not always recognized or respected, aspect of modern thinking and expression.

As with "comic" versus "graphic novel," or "flick" versus "film," or "pop science" versus "published research," or "porn" versus "erotic art," or "vegging out" versus "watching a historical miniseries," or a hundred other ways we puff ideas up or make them cozy or throw subtle barbs, the words we choose give impressions about status and seriousness that have little bearing on the potentials. It certainly occurs in more fully real, human contexts. For example, we give our judgments with word selections like "lust" versus "love." After all, what is the difference between "infatuation," "obsession," "crush," or "feeling like you're in love"? Not really anything, except the context or judgment you choose to assign. And we do love judging on context. (I recommend checking out the book "Love and Limerence" by Dorothy Tennov for research on the not-quite-universal experience of being in love.)

With games, this is an especially starkly delineated phenomenon, because "game" and "play" are (for most people) more or less dictionary equivalents of "unimportant," "unserious," "unproductive," and "childish." Even worse than that, "video game" today often means "total waste of life." To be fair, I wouldn't deny that games can be intentionally cheap and exploitative. That concerns me a lot. But then so can food or work... Can those not be dangerous? Don't they require good judgment, also? Those also concern me. Just as I don't want my food to kill me, I don't want my games to kill time.

It's difficult to talk about games without full awareness of this social attitude. I don't know if you've ever noticed it, but there are certain words that most people sound awkward and self-conscious saying: "sex" and "money" are at the top of the list. You can hear something in their voice. "Game" is another one. It's loaded with connotations that you don't necessarily want to call up. This affects the way we say the word. With many people, you'll catch a tinge of embarrassment, disapproval, or both‡. Words count, tone counts, but they don't necessarily affect what you use the word for, or even say anything about it.

There is not actually, of course, any real discontinuity between computer game and video game, or for that matter between digital game and board game and sport. But in practice, "computer game" has always said to me that the work may take nature and human experience as questions. Some refer to this category as "serious games," others as "educational games" or "edutainment," or "art games," or "interactive fiction," or even "indie games," but these are all panels on the greater umbrella, which need not, after all, present itself as serious, or have an educational purpose, or look aesthetic, or include characters who develop, or be made by a small team.

Crucially, there is, I still feel, a difference in attitude between most game players and game makers, in one camp, and the few game players and makers who see games not as entertainment or business in particular, but as rebellion, as manifesto, as interstellar ship, as tool, as thought experiment, as high art, as the new speech, as tomorrow. It is easy when adopting this view to become a little aloof, haughty, pretentious. But I think computer games are also very humbling. Even those of us with the basic skills of playing them and making them must admit that the possibilities for complexity and difficulty are staggering, that we ourselves cannot fully handle this, that we are not even close.

Novels are terrific, and the imaginative absorption of a good novel and a good game are, to me, and always have been, extremely similar. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I noticed movies could be as epiphanic as books and games; it took watching some art movies carefully. But a novel is unlike games in one way. A novel, no matter how challenging, is a one-person operation, on both the reading side and the writing side. Of course, the readers will discuss amongst themselves and read reviews, and the writers will get trusted opinions and work with editors, and we can read out loud together if we want. What I'm saying is not perfectly distinct. But a game is almost never the first way, a one-person operation. A game takes a village to make and a village to play.

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‡ Jane Austen wrote about this same social phenomenon around novels in the 19th century, and I'd love to reference that when I find it again. Plays, novels, movies, comics, music, even logic have all been seen, in their time, as dangerous, immoral wastes of potential. This may not be all bad: maybe a few enterprising souls take the challenge to prove otherwise in the best way possible. Maybe Jane Austen's stories benefitted because she didn't want to be seen as immorally wasting lives. Ah, ok, finally! It's in Northanger Abbey and has been dubbed her "Defense of the Novel." Just two lines from it, but there's more:

"And what are you reading, Miss --?"

"Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.

Tug of War

Competitiveness makes you less sympathetic. When you are competitive, you are motivated by winning itself. This means that you want to believe that when you win, it is a good thing, a thing you deserve, even though winning in a competitive scenario means someone else lost or otherwise didn't win, and moreover, succeeding where another fails inherently means they must be at some sort of disadvantage. We don't like to admit these things, but they are perfectly true. We should be careful about how we fall into competitiveness. It's an important force, even a critical one. But it blinds us in a few ways. We ought to see clearly, sometimes, at least, what they are.

Patch

As a system of coordinated action, capitalism has strengths and unstrengths. For example, take the early success of Warren Buffet, glistering icon of dedication and good business. Very young, he decided he was going to be rich. Then he followed through, learning how it's done wherever he could. By 16, he'd saved up $5,000, which in today's terms is more like $60,000. If he could do it, why can't everyone?

In a predominantly capitalist system, much of something could get in the way that isn't fair at all. What if you have an illness that's very expensive to treat? Now your growth (or "growth," if you are a skeptic) as a citizen is impeded not only by the afflictions of the disease, but also by the afflictions of poverty and missed access. If it takes money to make money, and your funds are all absorbed away by something you can't control, then losing money means you lose even more money, and with it, chances for success, and with those, your potential to contribute to society.

Surely that isn't optimal. Most of us in my generation, and perhaps a vast majority around the world, agree this is not optimal. Not optimal, you might say, but it's the fairest system we have that works. And you aren't right if you say that. It's already quite apparent that mixed economies, when set up wisely, work as well as or better than purely capitalist economies.

If imperfect capitalism works better than capitalism, then capitalism isn't the best system. If capitalism isn't the best system, it seems likely that imperfect capitalism isn't the best system, either. Where do we go from here?

Capitalism drives cooperation by competition and competition by cooperation. When the same rules apply to everyone—a tenet of free enterprise—then on one level, the system of rules is fair. Yet anyone who has played a board game knows that applying the same rules to everyone doesn't guarantee playability, balance, or even fairness itself. And everyone who has followed a high-profile court case knows that, at least in the United States of 2019, the rules do not apply equally to everyone.

How can we keep (and improve) the cooperative, competitive, resource-managing, and motivating features of capitalism without succumbing to its many catalogued ills? If the server of the state has a bug, what is that bug, and how do we fix it?

Which if?

We earthlings don't like uncertainty. We usually like imagination. My suggestion: rather than depend on a show of confidence, which ultimately is rather empty or illusory, to get attention and credibility where there's real uncertainty, use imagination.

Rather than say, "We just can't draw a firm conclusion based on these numbers and this proposed mechanism," you can suggest alternative explanations that could hold water for all we know. A vivid alternative can appear positive where a statement of uncertainty would appear negative, even though they are basically the same. As a culture, we ought to embrace uncertainty more as the critical spice it is. Until then, though, use imagination?!

Plicō, plicāre

Is the cat in the box alive or dead? I have the simplest solution to the paradox. The cat makes decisions.

Free will is part of the universe's drive toward entropy. When I was in high school it didn't make sense, as it doesn't, logically, by most any analysis. But now I think it makes a shadow of a sliver of a sense of sense.

Consciousness is not an illusion. If it's an illusion, who is being fooled?

What does it mean to fool an agent without original agency? Why would this entity need to be fooled to prove to it that it isn't what it isn't? By the subjective experience of consciousness and will, which must have evolved as a capacity and must exist in physics as a phenomenon, the universe gives us the means to avoid realizing the truth, which is that this subjective experience is false and we are glorified pinball machines. Why create a subjectivity only to fool it, when there needn't have been a subjectivity at all? And why did consciousness and the experience of active will evolve before any conception of determinism, as would seem extremely likely, given the apparent consciousness of animals?

That doesn't make any sense either, you know.

Let's assume that we are all computer code, and that the code crashes when it looks at itself and realizes that it's deterministic. If it's deterministic, then it doesn't have to do anything; it can just wait for fate to move it. Let's say that logical moment crashes the code, much like dividing by zero. Ok. Ok? The simplest solution here is to evolve ways to keep the code out of that pitfall. You don't need consciousness and an illusive feeling of free will for that. You don't need any feeling of feeling at all. You can just go right on running the code, with the modification that it isn't allowed to divide by zero—or become omphaloskeptic enough to falter.

The illusion of free will is an unnecessary solution.

Across and Opposite of Barrier

The other day I was thinking again about Marshall McLuhan's "The medium is the message" after reading a really good article on the birth of information theory. And I believe I understand the metaphor, but it's easy to misunderstand. At the risk of kneading the obvious, here we go...

Just to pluck up a stray petri dish of an example, the first new Star Wars came out, and (who, me?) I loved it. The Force Awakens! My one big complaint wasn't that it rehashed old plot-liner (very close to a reboot of A New Hope), because I felt that fit. It's a trilogy of trilogies. There will be some recapitulation, otherwise it'll become too amorphous. A poem has stanzas; Star Wars now has a reboot built in.

No, I found the movie thrilling. And this redundancy aspect was a statement, too. New makers, same spirit. If a lot was the same, a lot was different. Anyway, that wasn't my complaint. Nor was the deus ex machina of the Millennium Falcon appearing early on. That said something like, "Ha, gotcha. You didn't realize the Millennium Falcon was part of the Force, did you? It is. Fate will not explain itself to you always." The plot hole improved the experience in meta. No, my biggest complaint was that certain little moments had become de rigueur. When the trilogy of trilogies was first outlined, did Mr. Lucas have any idea how many scenes would involve a Jedi (or Jedi to be) in a fight, arm outstretched, verging on vanquished, light saber pathetically far off, wobbling? It wasn't story parallels or special effects or the unexplainable, but these little tics that were now shopworn. You aren't rehashing old story when things like this happen. You're... a genre.

And that's what resolved the irritation for me. I read another interview with the guy who wrote the script with the director, and he talked very openly about the work of writing genre stories. He'd decided that Star Wars was a genre, and he was thinking about it in exactly those terms. Ah, I thought. Ok. That was intentional.

The next thing he said was what was most interesting. He said that genre doesn't tell you what story to tell. It doesn't tell you what your theme is, your point, your message. You can write a strict genre movie (book, song, etc) about absolutely anything. And that's the beauty of genre. It's like the form of a poem. A sonnet could be about anything you want.

In other words, the medium isn't the message. Right?

It is a metaphor. Your eyes are not two shining suns. Your eyes are biological material with lenses and photoreceptors.

And this unrolls tendrils especially when you think in Claude Shannon terms about what a medium actually is. A medium is something like a sheet of paper. Papyrus is one medium, vellum another, tapestry another, woodcut another, flattened and bound wood pulp another—all closely related. Sure, a sheet of paper could suggest all kinds of ideas to you, and there are ways you cannot repurpose a sheet of paper. But there is so much you can represent on or with a sheet of paper that you are almost unconstrained. The sheet is genre. You can make it about anything you want.

It's worth agreeing that medium, genre, series, form, and format are different ideas. But this actually feeds into the larger claim. If genre allows just about any message, then medium certainly does. McLuhan is right, of course: choice of medium (and genre, series, form, format, etc) is part of the message and imbues it. And the appearance of a new medium changes society, revealing natural hierarchies and possibilities previously unknown. But we also need to agree that all these nouns work as information channels in the brass tacks mathematical sense outlined by Claude Shannon. Genre—say "historical fiction" or "dubstep" or "televised golf"—is like a wire. It's a narrower wire than medium—say "podcast" or "magazine" or "plasticine."** But they're both wire-like, media, tubes of aether. And both work just like wires to carry what wouldn't be there otherwise, which brings options to sender and receiver.

**If you want to call these more expansive names like "recorded sound" and "print" and "sculpture," then so much the better. That strengthens the argument.