Justin Pickard

We dwell in possibility

“My focus is on habits, practices and opportunities, not a limited set of concerns or visceral reactions to our changing world. ‘I dwell in possibility’, not a mere assessment of digital spaces’ less perfect or less savoury aspects. I will leave that to others more concerned than I. Change is not disconcerting to me. People do some messed up things when cloaked in anonymity. We will live.”

- Lisa Galarneau, ‘I dwell in possibility’

A spirited defense of techno-optimism, from digital anthropologist (?) Lisa Galarneau.

[key texts] Transhuman Space

For me, Transhuman Space is a key text – a book that’s had a wholly disproportionate impact on the shape of my life. An RPG setting published to critical acclaim in 2002, it stood as a plausible vision of where humanity might be at the turn of the twenty-second century:

“It’s the year 2100. Humans have colonized the solar system. China and America struggle for control of Mars. The Royal Navy patrols the asteroid belt. Nanotechnology has transformed life on Earth forever, and gene-enhanced humans share the world with artificial intelligences and robotic cybershells. Our solar system has become a setting as exciting and alien as any interstellar empire. Pirate spaceships hijacking black holes . . . sentient computers and artificial “bioroids” demanding human rights . . . nanotechnology and mind control . . . Transhuman Space is cutting-edge science fiction adventure that begins where cyberpunk ends.”

Stumbling across a copy in my local bookshop as a wide-eyed 16-year old, Transhuman Space was my first encounter with the ideas of transhumanism, morphological freedom and ubiquitous computing.

It blew my tiny teenage mind.

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Capture the Flag & Public Space

These videos (from Ivo Gormley & Matan Rochlitz) make me pretty ruddy cheerful.  There’s a certain vagus nerve-tickling, ludotopian current to this whole thing.  And I like that.  A lot.

Stateside Superstructing, Some Notes

I return from the mirror world with a surnburnt nose/forehead combo; a bag bulging with books, papers and wallcharts; and a brain almost literally humming with new inputs.  Along with @mathpunk, @rtgarden, @stevepuma and @genebecker, I was representing the Superstruct game community at the Institute For The Future’s 2009 Ten-Year Forecast in Sausalito, California.

Through communicating & mediating my experiences of the game to the other conference attendees (representatives of some of the big organizations in the economy and public sphere), in an environment heavy and humid with ambient information, I was able to link up some ideas that have been floating in the recesses of my consciousness, assembling and superstructing them in interesting ways.

Before the event in question, I was in San Francisco for a good 6-7 days – immersing myself in the city, and scoping out the lay of the land.  At once strange and familiar (embodied above and beyond my experience of the city through film and the media), the real San Francisco threw my mediated experiences into focus – the American sitcoms syndicated endlessly on British TV are now five, ten years out of date. This, then, is an emerging social imaginary; a land of corporate bail-outs, green-collar jobs and (as @mathpunk was later to tell me) hybrid hypermiling – in which we can see the overwhelming drive of the competitive, of the concrete challenge … even when it risks endangering the self.

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Debordgame

Strange alignment.  I’ve been reading & recommending the pirate issue of Culture Machine, I’ve watched the excessively saccharine trailer for Richard Curtis‘ take on the history of pirate radio, and I’ve been trying to hammer out some more thoughts and issues relating to the whole Free Territory thing.

Then I start reading an article in the “pirate issue” by Alexander Galloway – ‘Debord’s Nostalgic Algorithm’.  A impenetrable fog of a title for this curious piece 0n Guy Debord – vaguely known to me as a situationist and the father of psychogeography.  Oh, and the guy who said:

‘Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.’

Galloway’s article begins to talk about Debord’s dabblings in boardgames.  I stop.  Intriuging, I think, as a experimental google conjures forth an old post on UvA’s Masters of New Media blog.   And then I see Anne Helmond.  Then, further down the results list, rumours about AG being served a cease-and-desist by GD’s estate.  And an attack on the article by detail-minded anarchists.

And, after writing this post, I’ll probably have to return to the article (opens pdf).  But my attention span is short, and easily distracted by pictures like this one:

WANT.

(Image by Anne Helmond)

[BoRT] Free Territory

Following Thursday’s post, this should be able to kill three birds with one stone a grenade.

Firstly, it’s my response to February’s BoRT challenge:

February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

Secondly, it’s part of that whole alter-urbanism thing – my (slow, progressive) attempt to catalogue all kinds of feral, rogue, and wild cities.

And it should appeal to the literary sci-fi set.  I’m taking Mile Zero’s plans for Iron Council: The Game … a design based on the novel by everyone’s favorite socialist – China Miéville.

I’ve read Iron Council, but it’s been long enough now for the specifics to have faded into fog, leaving me with the taste and shape of the book’s mood.  Perfect.

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[BoRT] Books & Game Design

In the last week or so, I’ve applied for a couple of jobs and internships that are – one way or another – to do with the creative side of the games industry. Not (necessarily) limited to computer games, but types of games and game structures that mesh with my academic/research interests in narrative, technology, and place.

As such, I need to get my shit together.  Start laying down some of my thoughts down on paper the internet.  Through a tangential link-grab from Juliette Culver, I stumbled on the nifty Man Bytes Blog and his Blogs of the Round Table project.  Which is awesome.  Wasted a significant chunk of the last week reading some brilliant responses to the question – “What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first?”

Responses were varied and stimulating, envisaging:

• Wodehouse’s Drones Club stories as a fast-paced card game
• Solaris as an enigmatic MMOG
• Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as … Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov? or Murder in a Russian Province – a creative and rather wonderful mix of Cluedo and Broken Sword
  
• The Crying of Lot 49 as a collectible card game
• House of Leaves as a classic text adventure
• Jane Austin for the Nintendo Wii (Pride and Prejudice: Adventures Among Polite Society in the Village of Longbourn!)

And, perhaps most excitingly for me, China Mieville’s Iron Council as a German-style boardgame – more on which tomorrow.

Superstructing

Last month, the California-based Institute for the Future annouced Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. Here’s the (in game) press release;

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the “survival horizon” for Homo sapiens – the human race – from “indefinite” to 23 years.

“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”

According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. “Each super-threat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world’s adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”Garcia said, “Previous GEAS simulations with significantly less data and cross-validation correctly forecasted the most surprising species collapses of the past decade: Sciurus carolinenis and Sciurus vulgaris, for example, and Anatidae chen. So we have very good reason to believe that these simulation results, while shocking, do accurately represent the rapidly growing threats to the viability of the human species.”

GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”

GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.

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Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.

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Mystery on Fifth Avenue

From the New York Times;

Indeed, as Ms. Sherry and Mr. Clough told their tale, this reporter had to ask Ms. Sherry if she ever questioned her architect’s sanity. “Yes,” she replied cheerfully.

Architecture + Pervasive Gaming = Genius.