From the standpoint of the psychology of authorship, it is noteworthy that keeping notebooks is in itself a kind of tradition among litterateurs. A commonplace book of literary memoranda may serve as a symbol to the keeper, therefore, of the person’s literary identity (or something psychologically not far-removed), quite apart from its obvious value as a written record. That commonplace books (and other personal note-books) can enjoy this special status is supported by the fact that authors frequently treat their notebooks as quasi-works, giving them elaborate titles, compiling them neatly from rough notes, recompiling still neater revisions of them later, and preserving them with a special devotion and care that seems out of proportion to their apparent function as working materials.

The writing being performed via collecting is thus somewhat unconscious; the sum greater than its parts.

In our age, visual communication is as commonplace as literacy. Thus, for at least the last century, scrapbooks have consisted of both clever phrases and the equally smart typography in which they are set, of notions of selfhood as well as the fashion with which these identities are performed.

Tumblr circa 1912

Recent tools like Ffffound, Tumblr, Polyvore and Pinterest not only facilitate the practice of collecting but, also, transform this once personal process into both a performance and/or a collaborative process.

before

The frontier – the unsettled terrain – is thus not just an economic and political prize but also, importantly, a stage for intellectual and spiritual advancement. To travel to distant lands is to make the world known.

after

The system which emerges, beginning with the colonization of the Americas and ending with the Cold War, is the largest cosmos to date; so ubiquitous, it is capable of viewing itself from orbit.

hello, world

A new self-image, a more unified self is the destination of every figurative voyage. Thus, the lore of the traveler is that of self-discovery. In such representations, any vessel is a means to a psychological end.

a cryptic note to self

The more perfect vessels offer us shortcuts by becoming mirrors. Such reflective ships move the traveler, inwardly. To a world always in creation, one that can never be fully known.

2) Pintxos tacos: Northern Spain. e.g., tacos de pulpo con papa or tacos de bacalao. Anchoas.

Few movies so deftly tackle this whodunnit as well as Blue Valentine. Using the techniques of a mystery – the withholding of information, presenting events out of sequence, framing characters as suspects – it offers an honest account of romance; the falling in and out of love.

Perhaps, all love stories are mysteries, filled with ambivalences, contradictory accounts and motives unknown. For what is love but a suspense; the suspension of doubt and self and even reason as the distinct perspectives of two people merge together, drift apart and, sometimes, reunite.

As in Julio Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch:

You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other…

The questions come later because they were always already there.

Related: Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together.

Catholics who do not accept the phony argument over contraception are said to be “going against the teachings of their church.” That is nonsense. They are their church. The Second Vatican Council defines the church as “the people of God.” Thinking that the pope is the church is a relic of the days when a monarch was said to be his realm. The king was “Denmark.” Catholics have long realized that their own grasp of certain things, especially sex, has a validity that is lost on the celibate male hierarchy. This is particularly true where celibacy is concerned.

Thus, by far the most important political role of sham elections during the past dozen years has been the way they have allowed Putin to display his capacity for manipulating them in an orderly and predictable way and thereby, paradoxically, to demonstrate his authoritarian credentials. Rigged elections, known to be rigged, are the cheapest and easiest way for the regime to mimic the authoritarian power it does not actually possess and thereby to bolster its faltering grip on the country, or at least give itself more breathing room. It takes only modest administrative capacity to rig an election; but a rigged election produces a disproportionate increase in the government’s reputation for power and control. Organizing a pseudo-election is like wearing sheep’s clothing to prove that you are a wolf. Non-competitive, Soviet-style elections simulate a centralized power that Putin’s Kremlin spectacularly lacks. In a sense, fixed elections serve the same function as Red Square parades after the collapse of Russia’s military strength: they allow the regime to thump its chest, even if many of the missiles turn out, on closer inspection, to be duds.

via The Browser

The plot is achingly simple: Kelli is a reservist who returns from war, loses her way, then her job, her car, her husband, her children and finally her freedom.

Why do these bad things happen to her? Time and again, Kelli is asked if something happened to her while she was at war. Each time she declines an easy answer, noting that nothing special happened to her over there. She has no story that would make sense of her confusion, her misfortunes or her increasingly reckless behavior.

And that’s the brilliant conceit of the movie: Kelli isn’t the only one who lacks a war story, it’s everyone around her – the audience included – who want for an explanation.

Through Kelli’s search for meaning, Johnson reminds us of the gaping holes in our grand narratives, from the missing weapons of mass destruction to the alleged benefits of creative destruction.

That the movie, like its protagonist, declines to provide an explanation for the circumstances that afflict its protagonists is to Johnson’s credit: that responsibility lies with us and the policies we support.

Their imagined community is obsolete to an increasingly multiracial, multicultural and anti-heterosexist majority. Quite simply, the numbers do not support their story of self. (Not that they ever did.)

Meanwhile, this ruling minority are also experiencing a crisis of faith, as their religion, high finance, keeps failing to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Thus, perhaps, a great deal of panic. From Wall Street to Main Street and back.

But viruses are more than a MacGuffin, they’re the intersection between the organic and the inorganic, between that which lives and that which exists. Viruses may be responsible for some of the biggest upheavals in human history and they continue to impact human behavior in ways that undermine our identity.

Consider Kathleen McAuliffe on T. gondii and more:

But T. gondii is just one of an untold number of infectious agents that prey on us. And if the rest of the animal kingdom is anything to go by, says Colorado State University’s Janice Moore, plenty of them may be capable of tinkering with our minds. For example, she and Chris Reiber, a biomedical anthropologist at Binghamton University, in New York, strongly suspected that the flu virus might boost our desire to socialize. Why? Because it spreads through close physical contact, often before symptoms emerge—meaning that it must find a new host quickly. To explore this hunch, Moore and Reiber tracked 36 subjects who received a flu vaccine, reasoning that it contains many of the same chemical components as the live virus and would thus cause the subjects’ immune systems to react as if they’d encountered the real pathogen.

The difference in the subjects’ behavior before and after vaccination was pronounced: the flu shot had the effect of nearly doubling the number of people with whom the participants came in close contact during the brief window when the live virus was maximally contagious. “People who had very limited or simple social lives were suddenly deciding that they needed to go out to bars or parties, or invite a bunch of people over,” says Reiber. “This happened with lots of our subjects. It wasn’t just one or two outliers.”

More, previously.

perhaps, by believing, however remotely, that one is in the company of the very food we are consuming.

What’s crackin!       Wassup, bro!!!!!

Hey pal, can I join you?

Clemente arrived to interrogate the suspect, a handcuffed middle-aged man named Zaid, and underneath a napkin on the table, he found a small device, the size of a brick, with a hand crank and wires with alligator clips at the ends. Clemente shut down the interrogation, took Omar for a walk.

“Is that how you do police work?”

“Of course. We torture them.”

“Don’t you try to figure out what they are doing first, and who they work for?” Clemente asked.

Omar said, “No, why should I? This guy is a terrorist — he was going to blow up people.”

“We can flip him,” Clemente said. “Let me talk to him.”

Back in the room, he uncuffed the man. “Zaid, did Al Qaeda pay you to bury the bomb?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“$150.”

“Do you have a job?”

“No.”

Clemente pulled out a photo of his children. “I have eight children,” he said, “and if my kids were starving, I would do anything to put food on the table.” Clemente put a hand on Zaid’s shoulder.

“What if I could pay you more money to not make bombs?” Clemente had convinced the FBI to give him plenty of cash to pay informants to make his plan work. Zaid took a breath. Omar gazed at him intently.

“I’ll pay you to tell us whenever you see bad men planning or doing bad things.”

Finally, Zaid said, “How much can you pay?”

Clemente looked at Omar. Bingo.

The findings at Göbleki Tepe suggest that we have the story backward—that it was actually the need to build a scared site that first obliged hunter-gatherers to organize themselves as a workforce, to spend long periods in one place, to secure a stable food supply, and eventually to invent agriculture.

Exhibit A: The Firearms Philosophy of Ivan Chesnokov

I didn’t know I had any desire to learn about firearms until I stumbled on this collection of satirical forum posts penned in the style of a Soviet-era Russian who speaks ENTIRELY IN ALL CAPS:

MAN WHO ARGUES ONE SHOT DEATH BY PROUD MILITARY CALIBERS IS FUCKING FOOL. I EXPLAIN WHY.

THIS MAN LOOKS FOR PISTOL TO HIDE ON PERSON TO SHOOT MAN FROM STREET WHO WOULD DO CRIME TO HIM. MAN WHO WOULD DO CRIME IS NOT LIKE BANZAI CHARGE OF JAPANESE INFANTRY. HE IS NOT IN “GROUND OF DEATH” FROM EPISTLE OF WISE SUN TZU. MAN WHO WOULD DO CRIME IS NOT FIGHTING FOR LIFE OR FREEDOM OF PEOPLE. HE FIGHT ONLY FOR THINGS, HE CAN GET SOMEWHERE ELSE FROM SOMEONE ELSE. THIS MAN DOES NOT FIGHT TO DEATH. THIS MAN FIGHT ONLY UNTIL IS CLEAR MAN WITH PISTOL RESISTS AND SO HE RUN AWAY.

PISTOL OF 9 MILLIMETERS OR CALIBER OF .45 IS GREAT SHOCKING HOLE IN BODY. IS GIANT SPOUT OF BLOOD AND PAIN OF MORTAL WOUND. MORE MEN DIE FROM BULLET OF THESE TWO CALIBERS THAN ALL OTHERS IN HISTORY OF WORLD.

I ADVISE AND YOU LISTEN. LAST TIME ARMY CARRY BAD PISTOL INTO COMBAT WAS NAMBU OF JAPANESE EMPIRE. SINCE THAT TIME MILLIONS OF MEN CARRY PISTOL OF 9 MILLIMETERS. IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR THEM WITH STUPID GENEVA TREATY BALL BULLET. IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU WITH TEN ROUBLES PER CARTRIDGE HOLLOW NOSE BULLET AND FANCY BRASS OF NICKEL PLATING. YOU PRACTICE WITH MANY MAGAZINE, YOU CARRY MANY CARTRIDGE. WHEN MAN WAVES GUN AT YOU, FILL HIM WITH BULLETS FAST AND STRAIGHT. MORE HOLES IS BETTER THAN BIG HOLES. CARRY PISTOL WITH LARGE MAGAZINE AND MANY CARTRIDGE.

IN THIS WAY YOU DEFEAT CRIMINAL.

Poetry. Worth a read.

Chadwick relates the story of a wolverine kit that perished during its first winter. Researchers later found the tiny body in a depression scraped from the ground, and covered with pieces of wood chewed from a nearby log. It was, in the words of the researcher, undoubtedly a wolverine burial site.

Take, for example, the war in Iraq. When the war broke out, North Korean newspapers would report: “Iraqi army is bravely battling against America’s imperial army, downing two fighter jets and five missiles.” With this report, North Korean people would think: “Ah, there is a war in Iraq. There would have been a lot of fighter jets, and they only got two. They have no chance — America would win pretty soon.” And in fact, the reports on the exploits of the Iraqi military would decrease over time, and then completely disappear from Rodong Shinmun. Then the people would think: “Iraq is losing the war.” Some time later, upon seeing the reports that say “Iraqi patriots are bombing the American military base in Baghdad,” North Korean people would think: “So Iraq is now under American rule.”

previously: why are there newspapers in north korea?

recently, i went to check out one of the most expensive high tech gadgets you can buy: a new car. 

perhaps, our experience was atypical. but I suspect not given the larger transition underway in the auto industry.

at one dealership, only a single dealer – out of say 10 – knew about the model we were after. and that dealer wasn’t in.  

at another dealership, two sales reps traded rough words almost within earshot of us while discussing which of them was allowed to show us the car we wanted to see.

can you imagine going into an Apple store and finding nine sales associates who know all about iPhones but nothing about a MacBook? Or striking up a conversation with a sales person only to see them get into it with another one about which products they’re allowed to demo?

i understand that commissions are at the heart of the auto sales business. but do they need to be?

could a  bonus for which dealership has the best customer service drive more sales across the board? could a higher baseline salary produce a more democratic and a more collegial work place where everyone knows the products and everyone can sell the products?

consumers are already changing the way they shop by going to web sites to research big ticket purchases. a more informed consumer will expect a more informative salesperson. and a more integrated sales experience, from vehicle maker web site to dealership, could benefit all involved – not just the consumer.

for example, if the car marker’s web site encourages potential buyers to schedule an appointment to see the vehicle in person, rather than dropping by without warning, the dealership could hire fewer warm bodies and focus only on retaining the superstars. such a referral process could even generate helpful leads.

a differently trained sales team could also bubble up important consumer insights to the engineering and marketing teams. after all, who better to capture the “deal breakers” than the deal makers?

update like so.

The Moral Majority was just entering its apex and small town America was a pop cultural phenomenon (months after Footloose was released, Farm Aid hit the air and Small Town reached #6). There was also, generally, lots of dancing in the streets.

Fast forward to 2011 and covens of sexy but celibate vampires play a bigger role in the popular imagining of white adolescence than uptight congregations. So while Footloose (2011) had no problems putting butts in seats, I don’t think anyone – not even its makers – believes it put its fingers on the pulse of young Americans.

And, yet, if the 2011 retelling had been set in a city like a Salinas, CA (pop. 150,000, 75% Latino, 40% under 18) it could have represented a community at the crossroads: teeming with young kids rebelling against their hick parents, caught up in a mess of gangs, a shitty economy, starved government, fire and brimstone preachers, and a dance trend that combines (Mexican) country with techno.

What RSS promised, Facebook delivered: easy to use, personalized news. There’s tremendous canny in shortening “subscribe” to “like”.

revised

Glass Milk Half Pint Creamer

Olive, El Bulli

Soy Darks

The cast of Jersey Shore Italy

korean tacos

War: Cisco Kid (YouTube) 1972

Steely Dan: Do It Again (YouTube) 1972

Malo: Suavecito (YouTube) 1972

Santana: Evil Ways (YouTube) 1969

La Surtidora Abarrotera Mercantil “Julio Gabriel Verne” is the old-timey sounding name of a new restaurant which serves the most traditional and basic Mexican dishes as they are meant to be experienced: in the present.

It is, not surprisingly, located in Mexico.

While its quirky name and spare decor are just as affected as that of a restaurant named after a colonial-era landmark and decorated with hand-wrought ironwork, the social and political implications of its affectations are very different.

We use the word “nostalgia” to refer to a temporal longing – the desire to go back in time – but the root of “nostalgia” means literally a pain for returning home; from whence we came. It is an understandable desire: to undo the passage of time is to escape our certain fate: change, death.

Life is thus a journey away from our origins, away from sameness, towards difference and disruption. As much as we may want to end up where we began (an odyssey) the very journey transforms us – just as entropy and others will have transformed whence we came.

People have many reasons for becoming a steward of tradition – whether by preserving a recipe or a relic – but such traditionalism does a disservice to the very roots it seeks to preserve when it denies them a chance to grow, branch out and bloom anew.

Many religions offer the promise of a supreme and perfectly fair authority. Such an eternal and just arbiter offers relief for people who live daily under unjust, biased and/or inhumane authorities.

Consider who is keeping Christianity and/or Catholicism alive in many parts of the United States. Undocumented migrants live in terror of being seized and punished solely for wanting to work in a productive economy and to raise their children in a safe society. They are like other groups around the world, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Pakistan, who turn to religion to restore their faith in a just order.

Rather than sating their thirst for justice, such a faith must also whet it. Perhaps, they take religion seriously because it takes seriously the matter of justice. Some religious citizens could thus be motivated to participate in a coalition that addresses the glaring injustices in civil society.

For example, those bringing light to the plight of the 99% might consider using posters that remind TV viewers that the Christian God expects more from the 1 percent than largesse. Something about camels being passed through the eye of a needle. Or about being generous when you yourself have received the generosity of others.

That is, has anyone tested the hypothesis that those who have broken with reality are more likely to participate (and possibly even to lead) groups that advocate for a radically different reality.

Like many Mexican restaurants, it is decorated as if it were a 19th century Mexican ranch home. It has dark wood beams, stone and brick walls (they’re painted-on, like trompe l’oeil) and the shelves are lined with knickknacks resembling pre-Columbian icons and statues.

When you order chips and salsa at this modern Mexican deli, the chips come in a plastic basket woven to resemble wicker and the salsa in a plastic cup styled like a black rock molcajete. In sum, the interior is designed to create a feeling of a pre-modern life even if the ingredients are not.

Would a restaurant that bills itself as a “modern American delicatessen” be decorated with a wagon wheel and bales of hay?

modern American deli Cracker Barrel

Would a bright, airy decor, light materials and/or photos of contemporary Mexicans and their homes make the food taste less authentically Mexican?

When is Mexico?

is it then?

or now?

when someone tells you something that makes no sense and you can’t contradict it, you become “sick to your stomach.” nauseous, as if suffering from vertigo – which way is up or down?

can an irish catholic be president? can a working class guy be a blue chip ceo? can a black doctor deliver white babies? can a woman be a fighter jet pilot? can an occidental college grad become a u.s. senator?

among the roles being elaborated today are those of husband, wife, mother and father.

some groups have attempted to use the political process to forbid any changes to these roles by introducing laws that would prohibit, among other innovations, same-sex marriages.

their arguments, while heartfelt, lack standing if not reason:

The question is relevant to the assertion that Proposition 8 is constitutionally valid because it furthers the state’s goal of fostering “naturally procreative relationships,” Walker explained.
“What is the harm to the procreation purpose you outlined of allowing same-sex couples to get married?” Walker asked.
“My answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know,” Cooper answered.

the friar father of modern genetics

in procreation, codes are transcribed, combined and modified. it is hoped that these combinations and modifications will be beneficial so that each subsequent generation is better adapted to a co-evolving environment.

as the environment changes, so do the codes that are most effective for ensuring survival.

among the many codes that a child receives are those that pertain to ethics: how should the child behave. these are passed on, for the most part, via behavioral modeling – “do as I do”.

in 19th and early 20th century America, families were organized in a hierarchy based, in part, on each family member’s sex, with the male parent (father) above the female parent (mother) and, even, male children above mother. This structure was enforced by legal and cultural norms: property law, election law, dress codes, school curricula, and so on.

no doubt, this arrangement according to normal physical strength “made sense” given that work, for most, meant back-breaking and/or life-threatening manual labor. (that this arrangement made less sense among the aristocracy is clear from such artifacts as Sense and Sensibility.) moreover, the infant mortality rate was +3,400% greater, the rule of law was neither uniform nor universal and conception was possible only through sexual intercourse.

of course, today, the environment is quite different.

for instance, in just one generation, the percentage of men with a high school education who are unemployed has jumped by 21 percent to one in four. if it continues apace, in the next generation, 40 percent of all male high school graduates will be unemployed. (in all likelihood, the rate will increase – the shift in the last generation took place before personal computers, before the Internet, before globalization, etc.)

at the same time: “in occupations in which ‘people skills’ are becoming more important, jobs are skewing toward women.” our best business schools promote emotional intelligence.

applying the same logic as our ancestors did, one might argue that mothers should now be placed at the head of a household. they earn a higher income applying skills that appear to be closely tied to a feminine mindset.

alternately, a household of two male parents, both of whom display feminine sensibilities, may be a better guarantee of a positive outcome.

or not. while sex is encoded genetically, gender is encoded culturally. we expect a female to act feminine and a male to act masculine. just what feminine and masculine mean vary greatly across time and space as do the ways in which a person who is male or female may adopt and adapt feminine and/or masculine traits.

today’s father may look more like yesterday’s mother. and tomorrow’s motherhood, well, we don’t know yet. but we’ll figure it out as we always have: one generation at a time.

meth math teeth: before, after

and the nightmare of addiction continues.

the present is where what is happening breaks into the already happened, like water pouring on hard concrete.

we bend this arc outwards by focusing on what happens next. engrossed by a picture, story or game, it is not just our pulse which quickens but our internal clock. we experience time as flowing faster when we are lost in that future moment.

when we approach what is coming we experience the joy of what can be done rather than that which can no longer be changed.

as with steering a motorcycle at high speeds, one looks ahead, to the curve that is emerging. in chess or in soccer, one anticipates the moves possible at a time to come. through intoxication, we impair our ability to retain what just happened, blocking our short term memory in order to regard only what is just emerging; what is still possible.

even nostalgia throws us into a future tense, as we replay a sequence of events in order to experience what came next.

Why does this image make us laugh?

The tattoo. It translates into the simple world of The Simpsons elements of our complex society. The tattoo as totem. The pirate as hero. The clown as pirate. (Krusty, meet Jack Sparrow.)

Using symbols, we take a familiar scenario and transpose it into a new setting so that it can be better observed. To translate or transpose, we must identify and carry over the telling details. This gives the seemingly superficial activity of play acting the potential to reward us with deep insights.

In popular fiction, everyday stories are crafted in novel ways. These vehicles are often deeply moving because they return us home via a new or unexpected path.

i know, i know

In the recent movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an actor in heavy computerized makeup helps play out a familiar father-son drama. The effect is not so much a displacement or avoidance of adult reckoning as it is an opportunity to experience a traditional conflict as if for the first time, seeing it assembled from scratch, piece by piece; one gene or pixel at a time.

couples therapy

The movie The Next Three Days is pleasurable not because most of us have had to or would like to spring a loved from one from jail, but because we have all experienced being separated, becoming estranged from an absent lover, the individual ostracized by the group, etc.

Likewise, the posters for these TV series promise us not so much tales of true crime as different ways to reckon with feminism, be it empowered females and/or feminine power.

The similarities: a badge that draws attention not so much to a cocked gun but to cocked hips. Tag lines that evoke the way we talk about a personality or personal issues. The differences: their rings. Their chests – the second even shown in profile.

Top: Love I, Love II, Love III from Lladro by Committee
Bottom: Campanas + Lacoste

The logical conclusion. Being consumed by the sign.

To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not. Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud.

The pleasure of make belief is that it is a form of play – a game.

Literalism requires the believer to take someone else’s word for it. Literal belief is thus a question of power – of submitting oneself to another. (cf., struggle, surrender, kneel.)

Interpretation invites the audience to play along: it assumes an independent reader who must be seduced – the willing suspension of disbelief. Rather than submission, it requires co-operation.

“There’s nothing intelligent in Alien. It has absolutely no meaning. It works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror and more terror.” – Ridley Scott

To be self-aware about making art is an exceedingly rare stroke of fortune – probably, of the bad kind. But there is no such thing as a terrifying spectacle or story without meaning. If anything, Alien has too much meaning.

When we are astounded, awed, terrified, it is because what we already know is insufficient to explain what we are in the process of learning. The greater the meaning created, the more “viscerally” powerful the art work.

Scott is a genius precisely because he is focused on awing the audience: his goal is to produce the awesome which is necessarily the new, the disruptive, that for which words do not yet exist – ideally, that for which the appropriate words will never exist.

But it is incorrect to say there is no intelligence in art for intelligence, as we are reminded, consists of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Whereas scientists are focused on the first category, the religious on the second, artists elaborate the third.

Using free software, consumers took apart the pop album ushering in an era of digital singles. Using samplers, producers took apart songs and then entire genres, converting rap and funk into hip hop and then hip hop into pop. And, after a series of missteps, record companies are beginning to take apart their business models, using sites like YouTube as A&R and dabbling with such technical and pricing innovations as allowing consumers to rent songs (i.e., new forms of bundling.)

Digitization is also having a transformative effect on video production and consumption.

The primacy of the network or channel is being usurped by that of the series, thanks, in part, to the digital video recorder. The new business of distributing short video clips is having a very healthy run on YouTube. Cameras and editing software are cheap enough to come standard on portable media devices like the iPhone and iPad. And television companies are beginning to shift their weight by taking cautious first steps into digital distribution.

One outcome of this transformation is already clear: consumers have signaled that they’re open to great variety in video entertainment. Properly developed, new formats could provide video producers with new revenue regardless of what happens to existing formats.

whether via an internal monologue (that whistling noise is coming from the tea kettle because it is on a lit stove) or in conversation with others (religion, science, politics, literature, movies, etc.) stories help us understand not only what has happening but also why.

though not often discussed as such, games are a form of storytelling. in games, multiple players participate in the construction of a shared meaning.

the more fun the game, the more it makes sense. the converse is also true. the more the game makes sense, the more fun it is to play.

the Socratic method, which pits two participants against one another, is a kind of game, the product of which is a meaningful story.

likewise, a game of soccer is an occasion to ask and answer questions such as: which side will win? which team is better? which player is better?

if it is unclear who has won a game, it ceases to be a game. thus, the outcome, the “moment of truth,” is integral to the experience of a game.

games must always be challenging if they are to be meaningful. thus, they consist of rules that, by design, impede the player so as to reorient him in a new direction. a game is necessarily humbling for the player. we enter into games not to win, per se, but to learn by losing. in fact, they allow us to experience loss (say, death) via simulation.

games are thus a mode of inquiry and there are games within much of what we call the arts.

in the case of a novel, the reader must play along with the author’s ruses, following her every move – and feint – until meaning is produced. if the reader does not wish to play along, no meaning will be produced. if the author is not very good at playing, the process of reading will not be very pleasurable, etc.

in theater, a playwright calls for actors to play out a series of moves (lines, gestures, moods). if these are played out properly, the audience will experience the pleasure of recognizing not only what is happening but, more importantly, why.

computer games offer new and interesting “sense making” opportunities. built out of rules and in a constant state of simulation, computers are always at play – a notion popularized by late 20th century movies such as Tron and War Games but also in the quick trajectory of computers from state-owned tools for war-making to personal entertainment devices.

not only can computers effectively re-stage most of the games we have inherited from our ancestors, they also allow us to explore new approaches to that most rewarding and most difficult game of all: crafting the story of ourselves.

we are beholden to others for seeing ourselves as we really are. a worthy adversary is said to bring out the best in any player. only through dialogue, whether with a real or internalized interlocutor, can we escape the well-worn paths of habit.

assuming that our own identity is complex and, at the very least, a conjoining of our conscious and unconscious selves (our waking and dreaming selves), any game which allows us to knowingly challenge and possibly even lose to ourselves is a potentially reflexive process.

what better opponent could we devise than our own shadow?

today, video games are primarily an offshoot of theater wherein the game’s makers act as playwrights, devising challenges that the player (protagonist) can overcome only by intuiting the action or response appropriate to each scene.

yet, we are creatures of habit. we repeat ourselves and in doing so we betray ourselves. a computer need not be smarter than its human opponent to win, it need only keep sufficient track of the player’s (likely unconscious) habits.

by building sufficiently sensitive and deliberative software, the game designer as playwright could eventually cede her authority not just to other players (as in MMORPGs) but, indirectly, to the player’s own unconscious.