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Worlds within worlds

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Great piece by Greg Costikyan on the philosophical question of whether MMGs (massively multiplayer games) are games at all — or something new in the way of imaginary-world creations:

 

There and Second Life both claim that they aren’t games. The reason they claim not to be games, of course, is that their creators are under the delusion that they will increase their potential audience by making this claim, since games are for geeks, and they want to create MMGs for “the rest of us.” The idea being that only geeks play games, a small percentage of the population are geeks, ergo, to create a 3D world that achieves a mass audience, you must create one that isn’t a game.

Let’s start with the assumption that only geeks play games. This is patently false.

Greg’s an experienced game designer, and he takes the long view, with a historical perspective that goes all the way back to Habitat — arguing that, if you’re designing an MMG, you’d better make it a good game, or people won’t want to spend time in it.

For a somewhat different perspective, Salon contributor Wagner James Au has been serving as a kind of in-world reporter/blogger over at Second life. His Notes from within that MMG make for a fascinating glimpse inside one virtual play-space.

Eno time: The long and the short of it

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I found myself waiting on a long line at Fort Mason Friday night, one that stretched from the doors of the Herbst Pavilion all the way out the Fort Mason parking lot gate. You don’t often see a crowd that size at the warren of funky non-profits and arts groups. A man wandered up to the line at one point and asked, a little incredulously, “Are all you people waiting for the Annie Leibovitz exhibit?”

No way. We were waiting to hear Brian Eno, who was giving a free talk to kick off a lecture series by the Long Now Foundation. But the makesift lecture hall proved all too small for the huge crowd, so a lot of people had to listen to the talk piped in over a PA to the bigger room next door. You could mill around and look at Leibovitz’s homages to ephemeral celebrity while listening to Eno talk about the value of taking a 10,000 year view.

In the mid-1970s, when Eno’s still-amazing solo albums “Here Come the Warm Jets,” “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy” and “Another Green World” shaped my teenage musical imagination, an Eno lecture might not have filled a small broom closet. So as I waited Friday night — while distinguished ushers Danny Hillis and Kevin Kelly handed out programs and warned us we might not get in — a part of me was thinking, who cares if I get in? I’m just glad to live in a time where Brian Eno has found a following, and a place where he is a bigger draw than Annie Leibovitz.

But I’ve grown a little old for that sort of in-group pride, and besides, the topic of Eno’s talk was one that deserves mass distribution beyond the narrow circles of the Bay Area art-and-science-crossover world. If you haven’t already encountered the Long Now perspective, this essay by Eno does a pretty good job of recapitulating his Friday talk.

Lit from below just a little demonically, Eno explained the Long Now Foundation’s aim of expanding our frame of reference in thinking about the future: What if we were thinking not just about tomorrow or next year or even “the rest of my life,” but about the next 10,000 years? (One thing the foundation does in all of its literature is add a zero in front of the year — for instance, it’s 02003 right now — to “avoid the Y10K bug” and keep that longer time span in the front of our minds.)

As a longtime devourer of science fiction, I’m probably a bit of a pushover for this vision. I remember reading Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” as a 14-year-old and savoring the sense of temporal vertigo its ever-expanding timelines induced.

But there are perfectly pragmatic and down-to-earth rationales for the Long Now idea — not just in the obvious ways, like fostering a (literally) more conservative treatment of natural resources and the environment, but in personal, psychological terms. While the kind of long-term thinking Long Now promotes certainly encourages activism today, Eno argued that it also “takes the pressure off” individuals — “it makes you slightly less precious and tight about your own time on earth.” Long Now projects, like the clock for which it is most famous, are inevitably collaborations across time between people today and future generations.

Eno outlined four misapprehensions of the Long Now ideal: “The Realist” sneers, “Do you really think you can predict the future?” (They’re not trying to predict anything.) “The Pessimist” snaps, “”What bloody future?” (“If he’s wrong,” Eno argued, “it would have been a good idea id we had done something about it.”) “The Optimist” takes a Panglossian, passive approach: “Everything is working out fine,” so why do anything? Finally, “The Designer” believes that “we’re smart enough to design the future for you — we can create a perfect world.”

Each of these responses misses the basic point here, Eno said — one of “encouraging a habit of thought”: “We are building the future, whether we like it or not. We can do it with our back to it, or we can turn around and look.”

For many people, religion provides a moral framework for this long view — but if, like me, you are simply not a believer in any organized religion’s tenets, the Long Now argument makes a great deal of sense. I’ll look forward to the rest of this series.

Dark matters

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Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is one of the very few works of fantasy I’ve read as an adult that moved and excited me the way I was moved and excited by the fantasies (Tolkien et al.) I read as a kid. I’m not sure whether I’d have loved it the same way had I first read it as a kid. I’ll never know, of course.

In any case, Pullman’s New York Times op-ed essay today is a marvelous meditation on the way the rational mind and the imagination coexist. How can a man spend much of his career creating fantasy tales when he doesn’t believe in ghosts and disembodied spirits? Here’s a taste of Pullman’s answer:

  The rational, daylight, functional, get-about-and-do-things part of my mind welcomes the broom of reason as it sweeps away the cobwebs of spookery. But I don’t write with that part of my mind, and the part that does the writing doesn’t like the place cleaned up and freshly painted and brightly lit.

Farewell to Emusic

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I’ve written rapturously in the past about the Emusic service, for which I’ve willingly paid for many many months, based on its high quality of unusual music and its smart policy on downloads.

Well, all good things must pass, and now it seems that Emusic has been acquired by new owners who’ve decided that it should become just like all the other online music services, limiting the amount of music users get for their money. It’s not all bad news; it sounds like Emusic will continue to offer real MP3s rather than DRM-crippled files, for instance. But the real value of the service as a place where you could get turned on to musical obscurities in abundance looks like it will vanish.

It’s tough to run any sort of business online these days and I assume Emusic is doing what it has to do to stay afloat. But I’ll probably be canceling my subscription, and something tells me a whole lot of other people are going to do the same.

Back to the future

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In a previous life I spent my time writing about plays and movies. At the S.F. Examiner — may it rest in peace — I had the privilege of being movie critic from 1992 to 1994. One of the challenges of the job was finding ways to respond creatively, and uniquely, to products that were rolling off Hollywood’s assembly line with depressing uniformity. Another of the challenges was to do so between the hours of 10:30 p.m., when a movie screening often ended, and my 2 a.m. deadline.

Sometimes I found ways to have fun. Today’s sad news from the recall election reminded me of one of those occasions, when, bored beyond reason by Schwarzenegger’s 1993 dud “The Last Action Hero,” I discarded the usual review format and instead wrote up an imaginary dialogue between video archivists of the future. It was clear to me then that Arnold’s career as an action star was tanking. I was not sufficiently prescient to predict his second career (third, really, if you count bodybuilder and movie star as one and two) as a demagogue.

I’m posting the piece here for those looking for some Schwarzenegger-y diversion.

Music to our ears

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My recent post comparing the RIAA to Richard Scarry’s “Pie Rats” occasioned some vigorous debate in the comments, along with a couple of interesting emails: Jeremy Schlosberg, who did some writing for me years ago when I edited Salon’s technology coverage, wrote in to point me to his Fingertips site, which catalogues freely and legally available MP3s: “Something that tends to get overlooked whenever the MP3 situation is debated is the fact that there are actually an amazing number of free and legal MP3s available online for discriminating music fans, and it’s not all amateur crap either. Discussion tends to focus on the illegal stuff people trade or the legal stuff people are tentatively starting to buy, but there is a rich middle ground of free and legal music that’s worth knowing about as well.”

And Shuman Ghosemajumder emailed to tell me about his Open Music Model proposal. Many readers may already be familiar with Terry Fisher’s proposal for a royalty system for file sharing. These ideas and others like them floating around are evidence that the RIAA’s critics are not simply saying “to hell with the artists” or “to hell with business models.” We’re saying, online distribution — and redistribution — of music makes sense and is here to stay. So what can we do now?

There’s more good stuff on this over in Salon Technology: a point/counterpoint on the RIAA lawsuits, and some letters, and some more letters.

Kudos for 0wnz0red

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Cory Doctorow reports on Boing Boing that his short story “0wnz0red,” which we published here at Salon last year, has qualified for the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Awards. Since he has a better grasp of the functioning of the awards process than I do, I’ll let him explain what this means: “That means that in a couple of months, all the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America will have the opportunity to cast their preliminary vote for the piece, and if it gets enough votes, it will appear on the final ballot.” Congrats. We’re proud here.

More grist for Mill

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Every now and then I get to pull back from my managerial duties and write a full-length piece. Today in Salon you can find my essay on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” It’s part of the series we’ve been running called “Documents of Freedom” — a look back at some of the pieces of writing and speech that form the foundation of the liberties Americans often take for granted. (Here’s the full list so far.)

David Weinberger has posted an interesting response. David raises questions about what he sees as Mill’s too-rational vision: “Nevertheless, Mill has always struck me, in his views on liberty as well as his utilitarianism’s calm calculus of interests, as being overly rationalistic in his proposed methodologies, even while repudiating authority and legislated principle.”

I think it’s probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us — steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives’ optimism. And yet it’s also clear to me that “On Liberty” intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways — to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals and that enrich the world without necessarily being useful in a way that Bentham would have recognized.

Stephenson speaks

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Found on Lambda the Ultimate: Some fascinating notes on a Neal Stephenson lecture about his approach to writing, with parallels to programming:

“A good writer (and a good programmer) does not work by distilling good ideas from a large pool of bad and good ones, but by producing few if any bad ideas in the first place. It is important to give ideas time to mature [in the subconsciousness] so only good ideas percolate to the conscious level.”

Unbrand me, you cad!

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As a consumer who hates the commercialization of public space, the creeping of logos onto our clothing, the placement of products in our entertainment and the corporatization of our imaginations, I assume I am just the sort of person whom “Unbrand America” is aimed at. This campaign — which emanates from Adbusters — seems to involve the placing of a big black blotch on ads and logos everywhere (there’s a gallery of examples here).

The Web site offers this explanatory text:

  In the coming months a black spot will pop up everywhere . . . on store windows and newspaper boxes, on gas pumps and supermarket shelves. Open a magazine or newspaper – it’s there. It’s on TV. It stains the logos and smears the nerve centers of the world’s biggest, dirtiest corporations. This is the mark of the people who don’t approve of Bush’s plan to control the world, who don’t want countries “liberated” without UN backing, who can’t stand anymore neo-con bravado shoved down their throats.

But there’s a problem here. The idea is to oppose mindless Pavlovian responses to ultrasimplified graphical logo representations of objects of consumerist desire, right? So why is the campaign based around … an ultrasimplified graphical logo representation of opposition to consumerism? Does Adbusters really think the answer to the logo-fication of the world is to introduce a logo for the anti-logo-ites? Why would one want to protest the omnipresence of advertising campaigns by, in essence, creating a new advertising campaign? Why should we “unbrand America” by creating a new anti-brand brand?

If you oppose mindless Pavlovian responses, you manifest that opposition by thinking, and perhaps acting on that thinking — not by trying to counter mindlessness of a corporate species with mindlessness of a leftist species.