Spaces for play emerge in games, sport and often in the business of life too. Play cannot be hidden as easily as playful expression. Play seeps into everything that systems collide with. As an element of the wider epidemic of artfulness, play is a strong deterrent to the fossilification of the urge to create. The plastic of containment of artfulness in rigid modes of behaviour is the failure of the system to restrain from the process of smoothening and calcification as a knowledge terrain.
Playspace can be modelled specifically as a game or generally as a literary space that has ambiguous design parameters and require an experiential description to be conveyed. In the latter case, the description might not even bear the minimum descriptors necessary to make a game but can be accessed as a story with variable content.
Games are sexual. Games are propelled only by the force-field of sexual tension. Sexual tension is reductive in nature. It wants to reduce the number of bodies bound in the tension to one. Sexual energy is very short-sighted. It is desperate to get a closure. Any attempt to shape it leads to perversion. Any cross-linking between the energy and any other important emotional core of the self is an error. It is an error because of its repercussions. Sexual energy is a big deal because if it…
When you lose how do you deal with it? Loss is a result of the actions of self-initiated fallacies. So loss takes a toll personally. Guilt is a free take-away of every loss. How is loss ascertained? When you have something and then you do not have it anymore then it is accounted for as a loss. When the set of elements that we think of together when we contemplate on our self changes in any way, we have to perform an operation of re-calibration. When the set reduces, our re-calibration effort…
Victory is for fools. For the level-headed, victory is only temporary. It is not a point of arrival, it reflects only the coordinates of the passage. It reflects only a brief moment of closure. The brief closure also indicates the frame-rate of your experience of the world. The brief victory becomes exaggerated in scale because your frame-rate is very low. Victory definitely has something to offer though. Every time you pass through one cycle of victory you get a small reward. The reward can…
What is inside the void? Is it empty? What creates an empty experience? Is it even possible? Beyond the push and pull of semantics and the messy business of naming things, lies that which is already there. When a conversation quietens down and there is absolute silence, it is possible to try and access what is the quality of silence. Is it uncomfortable? Is it awkward? A void in a world is engineered as a reminder to what could have been. What could have been is far greater than what is. A…
Why measure? What exactly are we anxious about? When speeds of different planes, when velocities of different entities go out of sync, time is created. A lack of sync creates measurable durations. Once time is created, it is left in a quandary. Time is always present in multiple scales and in multiple dimensions. Do you realise that our life is spent living at the cusp? We live at the cusp of a moment that can consume us. But that only means that moments we are currently living in do not…
Why offer clues? Why make it any easier than it has to be? There is a sense of implied cruelty in being difficult. The implied cruelty implies a implied potential of reducing the difficulty. This implication is not always true. In most cases the levels of difficulty are static because of the world's current state. No model of the world can be simple. All possible models of the world have to be equally difficult to be stable. So the existence of clues is essential for any possible navigation…
Theatre is happening back-stage. While this theatre is playing out, people are distracted and they realise that they have nothing to do. When they have nothing to do, they twiddle their thumbs. But also, they play stupid games on their mobile phones or tablets and they realise that by some weird coincidence the theatre on stage and the on-screen game have something to do with each other. They have something to do with each other in a rather rushed way. Every now and then, for a few seconds,…
Ambience is that which cannot be transmitted. Like biscuits that can only be consumed only locally, transmission is difficult. A large chunk of experience cannot either be transmitted or even accessed or archived. This chunk of experience can only be talked about in reference to the negative space of environmental noise. Talking of the negative space is difficult because first at some level the line has to be drawn. Textures have to be distinguished, variance has to be registered. After…
A fraternity is important to be able to draw the battle lines. If you belong together with someone, you might as well organise yourself. Being organised creates a group identity for you. A group identity is heavier than a personal identity and can move much slower. It can only move as fast as the slowest in the group. But fraternities are kinds of social groups which do not expect total buy-in from its members in terms of commitment to norms of behaviour and ideology. They are clubs for doing…
Consumption is about cyclic uselessness. If you find something useful today, and start a pattern of consumption that has an unceasing chain of consumption of that entity, its transactional power will change. Transactional power has a relationship with the quantum of production as well as the pattern of consumption. Cycles of symbolic value are rotating all the time. The rotation constitutes a game. When the carousel stops, which symbol will be at the counter, that is the question. To model…
Treasure is something that is worth searching for. It takes on a meaning only in specific contexts. Finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow has become difficult now because rainbows and gold both are in scarce supply. Gold has become the most expensive metal in circulation because our economy is fragile and doesn't offer any other bankable treasure. Understanding the treasure of the moment is a very valuable piece of information to have and is somewhat based on the trial and error of…
How do preferences get stated? Do they have to be explicitly selected, can they be guessed or deduced from a set of choices? Contrary to popular belief, preferences are not known even by actors themselves. Self-awareness is expecting too much and offering too little. Self-awareness in the context of the personality that you identify with has no deep significance. It is the flavour of your mouth, the colour of your shirt. Reading more into it is certainly an act of desperation. Two kinds of…
Negotiation is needed in situations when the default mode of behaviour is not going to yield any transaction. Basic histories of political science say that when two bodies are in relation, there will situations of dis-equilibrium which need to be resolved via negotiation. What are the rules by which this negotiation ought to be performed? Negotiations are zones of theatre, combat and courtship. Depending on how low the base-line can be lowered, the zone of a specific round of negotiation can…
Serious games are serious about reality. Either in their modelling or their projection, serious games want to have players believe that they are playing a game when actually they are interacting with real world variables. This becomes a dangerous way to process reality because your game-world interactions do not pass through the same process of deliberation as your outside-game-world actions. Your potential actions in both contexts are sandboxed in different environments. This has bred laziness…
Possession is a craft. You have to mark people in view, crouch up to them and sneakily possess them. They will never find out because they will never be there. Once you possess someone, you displace them from their body for a good amount of time. For all practical purposes, this displacement happens for at least as long as the next displacement. This can be quite chaotic. Very soon the correlation between bodies and people can become an ambiguous fact. The only way that people can still…
When an actor refuses to obey the director, the contract has been violated. With the void of a violation, there is a two options to resolve the impasse. One, the actor can be antagonised and then the entire relationship can be placed in jeopardy, putting the production in risk. Two, the director can choose to work with the actor through the lens of reluctance. Letting the reluctance of the actor become a media through which the direction has to happen. Transparency leads to a loss of…
Possession is a craft. You have to mark people in view, crouch up to them and sneakily possess them. They will never find out because they will never be there. Once you possess someone, you displace them from their body for a good amount of time. For all practical purposes, this displacement happens for at least as long as the next displacement. This can be quite chaotic. Very soon the correlation between bodies and people can become an ambiguous fact. The only way that people can still…
Ghosts are beings without bodies. There is nothing fantastic and irrational in imagining beings without bodies. If there can be water inside a bottle and water outside a bottle, there need not be so much apprehension about the existence of ghosts. Ghosts are actually not interested in the validation of their existence. They never claimed to be real. They can't be. A spook is more often a symptom of a weak heart and a healthy imagination. Ghosts have nothing to gain from revealing themselves.…
Can a simple act of cyclical copying becomes a way of developing a personality? Person to person copying can work as a kind of mimesis. When it happens across many many iterations it loses the smell of its source. After a point entities are as complex, natural and dense as ordinary people. There is a natural selection based preference notification in operation. Only if two entities have a preference for each other, they allow a copy routine to occur. What does copying entail? In common…
