Kota asked not to be mourned.
Sorry man, I cried all day. I can't really see how you'd expect me not to, but I think it was compassionate that you asked.
You decided to check out and that's your right. I can't imagine what it is like living with chronic pain and without even the tacit the support of your family. They did not deserve you. We disagreed often; you felt that I let myself get too worked up about the state of the world. But you listened when Juniper died, and you spent the time to check in.

I appreciated you. We disagreed civilly. We always oriented toward compassion toward one another. I loved sharing passions with you. You were often the only person to reach out to me when I was in depressive slumps with a meme or occasionally something horny. I appreciated both, even if I sometimes had to be careful about the context I'd check them in.

It's so hard to enumerate six years of friendship. There was a fair share of drama. We played a lot of games. You practically carried me in my ill-conceived attempt at FF 14. We watched Neos die. We both escaped Florida.

You were a constant. You were my friend. I hope you are at peace, you fucking gremlin.

I'm going to miss you, but you already knew that.

It seems that we once again must wave a friend on as they journey into the unknown.  Lynxalicious has stepped out, it was a comrade, it was family. We drank coffee together on the day it decided to leave, I had invited it to lunch, but they burned out on the loud environment of the coffee shop and had to step out. We briefly discussed strategies for the next meeting to make it more sensory friendly, then I took a nap. When I woke up, I saw a disturbing post on their social media and asked my partner to reach out to its father to make sure it was okay.

It unfortunately was not. It was a union bot. It knew the whole IWW songbook. It shared my corny humor and my interests. We built things together, ESP-32 based transmitters, community outreach, found family.

We had discussed some of its struggles prior. It told us how she felt that even the happiness it was capable of feeling paled to the mountain of sadness. We had discussed possible interventions. It had talked to us frankly about its suicidal thoughts. But not yesterday. We had just discussed frustrations and planned to address them.

It is surreal. Within a matter of hours, the world transfigured itself into one where the thousand contingency plans I end up making for the people I care about no longer matter. My friend is dead, and my weekend cleared up. We had been having it over every week, as we knew it was struggling with alienation in its job. We did dinner, we hung out, we watched corny movies, and we planned resistance.

We were queer, and so much more. It was family, and so much more.

It had been a stone for me as I navigated nearly a year of unemployment. It provided me the lead that ended up crystalizing in the job I start later this month. It constantly looked out for us, and we did our best to look out for it.

But it only took a moment. She's stepped out now. We are left to celebrate her memory and to navigate her loss.

There is one fewer of us, so we are now each that much more precious. We will make sure JNP-3R is celebrated for its kindness, and we ask that you join us in renewing efforts to keep friends feeling safe and valued.

I can only hope that your here-after is quiet. I can only hope that you never feel this profound exhaustion ever again.

We love you.
Goodbye, comrade.

The thing about sudden death is it’s suddenly permanent. We think that we’ll get our last word in, but it’s always death who gets the final say. Our friends are all rendered temporary by the machinations of time and health. If we are lucky, we get to tell them we appreciate them. If we’re lucky, we get to remember them laughing. From all accounts, Forest spent his last day with friends doing just that. He went to bed expecting nothing less than the love of those closest to him, and by all accounts he would not be disappointed in what he found. Grief is the natural response to the loss of a loved one and pain is the natural result, but these things will never diminish the facts of a life lived well. Still we are here, and here in the present we must navigate the pain of loss, the pain of plans left unfulfilled.

Still, to quote Kahlil Gibran:

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.”

We are the ones left behind to do the work. Forest has already confronted the unknown and is beyond this pain. It is we who must adjust and heal. This endeavor is one that will oscillate between community and solitary work. I encourage those who are feeling touched by loss to reach out to their friends and find solace in the shared experiences. I encourage you to seek out stories you never knew before and learn more fully the life we should celebrate. Death is an intimate experience, but it is no less of life, and we can no less learn of our friends through the stories of those who they chose to surround themselves with.

Forest was always a one-step removed figure for me. Close friend of my close friends, but I met him far after his life became extremely busy. On occasion we would talk, and each time I found myself wanting to get to know him more. At first it was because my friend Fausk wanted me to, but each interaction was frictionless and Forest’s commitment to empathy was obvious. Each of my friends who knew him held him in high regard. It’s funny, really, how many of his friends were my friends. If the timing was different, I’d be grieving more than playing an impromptu pastor.

And yet I knew him. Through his work, through the occasional conversation and through my friends. I am surrounded by people, important to me, who feel this loss keenly. I can think of no stronger evidence of a life well lived.


And so, I join them in bidding farewell. To a cornerstone of my community. To a friend of a friend. To a friendship I had hoped to kindle.

“For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
[...]
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”

So. I'm hosting a kind of class on modern Magick. It's going to be formatted around discussions, and it's going to lay foundations within the discourse of post-modernity as an attempt to address the principle criticisms of that project and still operate as a meaning-making paradigm. The goals of the class is to foster an understanding of the esoteric that allows for deconstruction and a theoretical basis outside the Neo-Platonic. We will go over some high quality sources in a lesson plan that is modeled after the classical hermetic three fold division of Alchemy, Theurgey and Astrology. It's going to be a long process but hopefully we will conclude with a somewhat naturalized theory of magick and queered mythologies from which to work off of.

If you would be interested in this project, please send me a note and I'll drop you an invite.

My heart goes out to those still living through it.

I'm insanely well prepped though, so huzzah.
Also 'in Irma's path' at this point is just looking like all of Florida, geez, In any case, I will be attempting to stay online as long as I can and I will post another journal when the storm passes, which should hopefully be on Tuesday.
Stay safe out there!

No.

I'm going to look at art. It's going to signal to me in some way that clarifies some innumerably tiny new facet of the human condition. I'm going to steal that, i'm going to incorporate it into my gestalt of cultural context, and i'm going to create. There is nothing anyone can do about it. There is nothing anyone should do about it. This is the creative process and these pig headed notions that anyone can reasonably grind any aspect of culture development to a halt for their petty ego serves only as detritus in the face of our collective desire to express in our shared mythologies, regardless of how small those culture bases may be.

It will be blown away and if necessary I will be a hurricane.

I will let go of the narrative so that my players can tell the stories.
I will distribute the book keeping as a token of sharing the responsibility to have fun.
I will write down every stray thought I have, but will only develop them once the players have engaged with it.
I will avoid getting attached to a monster or encounter to the point it would upset me that it was not included.
I will shamelessly steal from everything I see.
I will spend no more than one hour of session prep so that most of the story can be told at the table.
I will reward the players based on the actual difficulty of the session rather than a pre calculated assumption.
I will commit to come to the table in a ludic mindset and encourage others to do so as well.
I will use all the tools available to me to ensure the party is unified.
I will address concerns immediately and frankly.
I will provide an anonymous form from which to ask for feedback.
I will read over each character sheet and review common monster entries within 30 minutes of game start.
I will not over-develop my tools.
I will not over-develop my tools.
I WILL NOT OVER-DEVELOP MY TOOLS.

This is something that I feel bears repetition. Debate is not an argument. You can not debate without divorcing yourself from your position.

The fundamental mindset that must be taken when entering into debate is that both positions are equally fallacious or valid until a rigorous examination proves otherwise. In an age where public discourse is so prevalent, I truly think it is a shame that rhetoric, logic, and grammar are not held in esteem. We've become so ready to throw ourselves at the altar of STEM that we've forgotten other methods of discourse. While I'd be happy to discuss whether or not science can give us an authoritative position on morality I really doubt that we'd be discussing the merits constructively outside of the process of presenting a Resolution, Case, Impact, Value, and Clash.

I'd argue in a culture that is increasingly hyper textualized that we need to understand the structures of information more than ever. So understanding the structure of debate is as important as understanding the structure of this journal (Title/Body/Sig) which is as important as understanding the structure of your web browser's GUI. These conventions are at some level require to even start to use these tools, but this is not necessary of debate. You don't need debate to use language, and so a lot of people use language to 'debate' without any real understanding of that process.

I'm not saying that every discussion needs to be formalized down to timeframes and what not, but the understanding of the structure of an argument, the understanding of the logical process of cognition and the understanding of where that process tends to go awry I'd argue is fundamental to participating in informed commentary. I do not believe it is in our best interests to devalue these skills.

That being said. STEM is fucking cool; You should learn STEM too. Learn everything, damn it!

XOXO, some guy on the internet.

"I am not a bad man."

When one reads shakespearean tragedy, it can be drastically illuminating to look for "I am" phrases. The moment of not-so aristotelian recognition of the self. Shakespeare practically invented the deep exploration of identity.

"I am a good person."

We often like to see the world in dichotomies, a neat moment of sharp contrast with righteous causes opposed by ones of evil. This tends to create circles of society, where one not steeped in the social graces is quickly caught and labeled other. It is a fevered paranoia, and a great sickness that prevents the triumph of human kindness.

"I am white."

Here I must clarify. I do not have anywhere to retreat to, I am a mutt. I have no pedigree of great breeding, I have no great national traditions or family crest. I am just a white male, that is my heritage. I am a white male intellectual who has dabbled and tried to escape every label I can, but in studying these issues I have become stooped in the lore of letters.

So this is my heritage now. Somewhere between Milton, Butler and Douglass. I read, I write, I watch the world weep and I weep with it. But I do all of this from a position of privilege. I do all of this through the filter of abstract reckoning. I do all of this without the visceral fear of oppression. I am queer, but I am a virgin. My orientation also to me an intellectual mator. It is nothing that someone looks to me and says "You are queer, Irick. This is your role in life."

But they do expect me to be white. They do expect me to be male. They do expect me to be an intellectual. So I take on this mantle, and I think. In my thoughts I come to know of virtue. In my thoughts I come to know or morality. In my thoughts I come to know of justice and injustice alike and in my heart I feel anger rising, a deep empathy. It is a natural reaction when we see injustice to be quick to anger... but on what authority can I rest my claim?

On what authority can I speak? Surely, as one who thinks I should speak out on this subject. I should use the mind I have cultivated for justice. I should stoke and moderate, I should draw on my cultural context to try and right the wrongs around me... but all I have are words. Yet in my crisis of identity, in the rampant cries of outsider deep within myself, they are rendered dry and lifeless.

How can I speak with legitimacy? How can I be frank and meaningful when I know nothing of the deep and systemic persecution that I, even if I protest, will be called to account for? I feel /deeply/, but I am terrified to paralysis to participate because I do not tow lines. I analyze. I contradict. I probe. I infuriate. I test each claim and debate to strengthen the argument...

"I am not that."

Race and Gender are such personal things. I hesitate to engage in their activism. I hesitate to voice opinions. I hesitate, because I am told I am not allowed to be a soldier. I may only be an Ally. Allies are those who sit down at the negotiation table to help you draft a treaty. They are for negotiation. Allies do not engage in Direct Action.

Direct Action is for comrades.

I can not sit by as my brothers and sisters die. I must do something, but I am trapped by my own labels in a sort of schizophrenia of identity.

I hope, maybe, this is the first step to resolve my doubts.

I don't know why but strep infections are always particularly afflictive with me. I've got that full body kind of weariness where limbs don't quite respond. The fever seems to have finally broken, i'm on day two of antibiotics. My throat is still killing me though, but at least I can think again.

Today is my birthday!
https://youtu.be/TdIRrmNN_CQ

I consider them extremely exploitative.

In the fandom the relationship between commissions and commission is one that is accepted by custom, but there is very little legal force. Unless you have explicitly licenced your ref sheet or otherwise worked out terms with the artist you commission you effectively have no licence or ownership of any given commission. In the context of a regular commission this isn't so much a problem because we don't really intend to use our characters commercially or do anything more with a commission than show it to friends. In this case the money is more or less being paid into the community to support the cycle of commissioner/artist culture.

Adoptables represent to me straight up double dipping and exploiting commissioners. Someone who adopts a character has no more ownership of that character than anyone else and nothing of their own is even in it. And the ridiculous expense that i've seen some adoptables go reminds me that the internet is still very much a wild west when it comes to artistic services.

I know that adoptables are popular, but to me they are no more or less honest than running a shell con in lieu of donations. If you offer them, that is your prerogative, but I can not support the practice and I would encourage anyone doing so to at least offer an explicit license if you are going to do them.

If you offer adoptables, I will factor that in to how I choose to spend my commission budget.

I do not support the practice and consider them actively exploitative of the community.

You can disagree if you like but that is where my position lies. I consider it a fair and well thought out opinion.

Oddly contentious issue that. Its not a huge surprise where I stand.
I've never been a fan of the rhetoric of fear and the slow erosion of civil liberties that fear inevitably leads to. I find it interesting how even of a split the polling data has been showing. I choose to take that as a sign that people are at the very least starting to seriously think about the implications of sacrificing everything at the alter of security.

I'm not a huge fan of our reliance on black box technology, so please don't take my endorcement of apple's position as an endorcement of their platform nessisarily. Its a perfectly fine platform and I'm glad that they are making some token resistance to governmental pressures. I have to, however, point to their behavior in China and other developing markets. I don't want to endorse a notion that apple is doing anything other than securing safe positions in order to secure long term market share, but I will say that I support their right to refuse to develop a crackkng utility for their phones.

We need to be careful as to what powers we give. The power to compell anyone to develop the means by which to render their work null and void is very broad one. Much more so when that work also puts the security of the entire platform at risk.

Identity politics in America is one of the sort of most surreal things I think most people get exposed to. I tend to look on it with an odd sort of fascination even as I find myself ever more embroiled in it. However, I'm seeing that more and more subcultural identity is sneaking in under the radar as fan culture becomes more and more collaborative.

It seems like being able to contextualise your identity in relation to a popular medium makes it much more acceptable within the past couple of generations. The artful use of trope reference can justify just about any sort of predilection. This sort of pop culture savvy is easily seen in internet memes. Is it that we are finally figuring out how to exploit the cultural capital of our increasingly connected society?

Considering how complex our current culture is I can't help but wonder if there is some sort of seven steps to kevin bacon formula that can be exploited to effectively hack social acceptance of an idea or theory if one knows the cultural context of the audience. I think that this could be an interesting rhetorical challenge, but it also just makes me wonder just what the scale of difference between any given collection of cultural institutions is.

I'm sure there is a framework out there that restates this theory in some sort of elegant axiom, but I'm unaware of it.

For tabletop, RPGs mostly :3 I'm trying a case study of various popular systems of interaction, poking around at their elements and seeing how they click together.

I am uncertain how to go about finding help. I do not know what will help anymore. I need to find out a mroe reliable way to deal with this. I'm crashing hard. I am trying very much to keep my thoughts positive. I'm losing control of my stream fo conciousness. Why are small things so important to me. I don't understand why I can't do things. I don't understand why I can't make people happy. I don't understand why I have to feel so useless. I don't understand why the things I do are wrong.

I want a rock. Why can't I find a rock? Why can't I be stable. Why can't I just feel good about anything I do. Why do I need people to gratify it. WHy can't I just be my own rock. Why is this not easy? Why is it obviously so nessisary and seemingly impossible. What would make something like me?

Why can't I find help? Why is my breaking response to shut myself away from anything that could possibly remedy my needs? Why can I be conscious of this yet still do it? Why am I trapped in this stupid chemical machine watching it do everything it can to perpetuate this horrible mindset? Why is this the only thing I can think of ot help? Why is asking for help stigmatized?

Why can't I be useful to other people? Why do I need them to feel useful? Why do I need to ask these questions? Why can't I just be stupid and happy?

https://youtu.be/N7yAe2MBIpE
I'm debating statting The Count up for a halloween special. Maybe something built around Pathfinder's Sacred Geometry feat.

I building a religion, I'm building a brand: but it has no name.
I've been exploring the idea of gender as brand, which is an interesting little thought experiment but I'm running into some problems when considering how to increase the number of expressive points along the gender spectrum. Mainly that no one seems to be working to define descrete segments of the gender spectrum. This raises two problems to me:
1) Discussion of gender is predicated upon the understanding of the feminist theory of gender.
2) We can only express our identity in relation to the gender binary.

With an understanding of feminist theory, I can say I am gender fluid and someone else can reason out that it means that I express high gender variance as well as gender typical qualities situationally but, I would argue, this is of limited utility within the prevalent language.

In fact, I would argue this is of limited utility for me. If I seek self understanding and all I can find in language is expressions of a relationship with the gender binary, then I am essentially left with the non-choice of conform or become a socio-linguistic other. We need a more expressive way to handle this, one that uses the prevalent culture to express new ideas of gender. To this end I am now looking for:
A) expressions of descrete segments of the gender spectrum
B) classical Greek examples of characters expressing these segments
C) popular culture examples of characters expressing these segments.

As much as possible, I want to avoid inventing new words for these concepts. I have a feeling that once classical examples can be found that words that can be repourosed for these kind of discourses can be found. I invite anyone else who is interested in improving our tools of expression to join me in this endeavor or to share knowledge I may not be privy to.

I take this moment to reflect on the year, which is interesting to me. We put so much importance on the year. The very idea of the year has changed from century to century, reigon to region, year to year. A few leap seconds here and there to bring everything into spec. We rotate along the sun at a more or less constant rate. We spiral through this mostly empty universe scared to death of hitting something. So, i'm going to take today to not be scared about the past or the future. Today, i'm just going to enjoy the sun going up and setting, maybe spend a few hours with my friends.

I hope you all will do the same.

It's not because it's not a good deal, it's not because the selection of goods is subpar and it's not because of any reason that can be justified as a consumer.
I've heard of LootCrate and other services billed as "Comicon in a Box", which I believe embodies my complaints about it. LootCrate takes the idea of 'geekdom' and packages it into a monthly, thought free box of kitsch. The only moment in your life each item represents is the moment that you open that box. It is such a pure expression of consumerism, of materialism and of shallowness that it frankly seems an insult to the community it targets itself to. I like the idea of bulk purchasing, i've seen services similar to this for things like Magic The Gathering where each month you get some new boosters, or sites like MassDrop which bring goods down in price for their members by having everyone pledge for a bulk sale. These are good ways to hack the system of purchasing power and I approve.
The difference is that LootCrate doesn't sell items, they sell a themed service, and that theme is geek. I have had this problem before, especially with the commercialization of punk. Taking something like a subculture and making it a purely aesthetic phenomenon is insulting to it. The idea that something like Comion can be reduced to the swag, put in a box and shopped away while retaining the meaning is insulting and it seems to be preying on basic human psychology.
The idea that cultural identity is nothing more than a fungible commodity is anathema to me.

You can find me over at https://www.weasyl.com/~irick
In fact, I'd much appreciate seeing my friends over there as well :)

From the comfort of my room, I have come to learn that I know nothing. The history of philosophy to me is a curated resource, the greatest thoughts of the greatest men mere seconds from rasterization upon the thin film of transistor driven crystals that make up the screen before me. The screen in my pocket. The screen on my coffee table.

In my day to day life the fruits of an entire history worth of theoretic physics made practical is exercised with the same precision of a master craftsmen to augment and refine my own mind. I tangentially invoke quantum fluctuations, very simple logical circuits working in indefinably complex ways to do something as simple as fill an allocated gray rectangle with the text, icons, menus and boarders of my word processor. My understanding of the process only seems to make it more wondrous to me.

The religion of the theologian is not so mysterious or unapproachable. The enlightenment of zen is a concept I can grok. Through the ever expanding worldwide network, my consciousness is transmitted. My consciousness is received. It mingles with the alien. It argues to find some sort of greater truth. Every day it is remade anew. The breadth and quality of experience is no longer dependent on locale in the traditional since and the platitudes of the 80s conceptualization of cyberspace ring as quaint anachronisms to my understanding of the virtual world. There is no space here. It is a singularity of knowledge.

The physical separation of servers and networking equipment is tangential. The addresses in URLs are a hanger on. The entire domain hierarchy exists for the convenience of a system that is rarely used. Information has become truly contextual and we treat it as such. Ours is an age of functional ambiguity.

One only needs to go as far as TV tropes to understand the essence of the era. We scrutinize with a zeal unrivaled by any in our history the exponential products of culture with a kind of back-handed earnestness that drives us to dismiss that which we can categorize. Knowledge is a tool that has historically tended twords misuse. Perhaps it is therefore the fate of our generation to know so much and think so little.

It is fascinating that we are practically inundated in this culture with the factoid that the STEM fields, being Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics, are the only ones worth pursuing. I find it hard to believe that we are raising a generation of scientists when curiosity is so demonized. It is one of those little niggles. Another bit of functional ambiguity that seems to be the zeitgeist of our generation. Our culture values information, but not critical thinking. We'd rather leave progress to the machine.

At the same time, there has never been a period of time where so many people had access to so much. The online culture is rich, our conversations can draw on the collective works of every major civilization with as much if not more fluidity than the layman can his Bible. The operative word here being can. In the increased exposure to humanity, I find both my since of brotherhood and cynicism engaged with equal intensity.

At times I feel we are truly beyond our pregenital development as a culture, but for every moment of serenity within my ivory tower of blinking lights there is a sobering reverberation of that vicious id. Is it more visible to me because of this mass of copper and glass? To excuse myself an irreverent turn of phrase: the greatest injustice of racial guilt is that those who feel it do not need it and those who do not feel it need it all the more.
It truly pains my heart to hear my parents speak on race. I wonder if it is because of their palpable obliviousness to their own biases that I sought out my own, for our outlooks could not be more different. It is a vicious thing that they have done in their self-delusion. They deny the problem while making light of it. I feel some small sense of hypocritical progress at the very least when I quite truthfully say that I now make light of the problem in full awareness of its breadth.

Ours is a generation of jokers. The enlightened buffoon is perhaps the most engaging. I can not tell if this is because of our apathy or because of the truly terrifying state of our situation. How is it that we are being duped into inheriting the lowest common ideal of our ancestors? Of their compromises and failures both? Sometimes I wonder if the only thing that kept the science fiction writers from being true prophets was their underestimation of the influence of the past.

I yearn for yearning. In my ennui I sometimes look with some degree of ignorance at the social revolutions taking place at the edges of my consciousness. A degree of jealousy hits me, a want for similarly meaningful change in my own culture. It is with the scant few that I share and engage on the points of discontentment with the establishment. It is a scattered counterculture. A virtual upheaval. Our revolution is not televised, but it does make the news site comment section.

I don't know if people understand that phrase anymore. We had Occupy, I even attended a few rally against the automated collection of telephone 'metadata' myself. We wrested control of media from the media corporations and occasionally it did something, but for the most part we have become content with out ability to watch. To interact safely from afar.

I hate that word. Safe. The great curse of this information age is the safety it allows. I can explore the most breathtaking views in the world with this tiny glowing screen. I need not ever touch a single stone or huff a single pained breath. The greatest risk is my life is that I will be too curious. That for some fucked up reason my meandering intellectualisms will bring me into the consciousness of the institutions I dare to criticize. I'm too small for that to be anything real, but I'm not small enough not to be touched by it.

People go dark. Bits of this expanded existence are wrested from me because of the machinations of systematic oppression. The people on the other end die. Friends become overcome with pointlessness and make theirs one less point in the sea of desperation. These are my martyrs. They make up the memory of the lost cause I champion, even if that cause has no name.

I study Dao. Another one of those functional ambiguities. The concept of just being resonates with me, but the realization that the very fact that I /study/ Dao makes me unable to find the Way of things hits me with the same sort of tragicomedy that I so enjoy in film.

So, it is equally surprising to me that I can occasionally just be. To smile despite it all. To forget the desperation of my mind for meaning, the suffering in the word and just enjoy a moment with friends. That I can find fascination in art, despite the culture glorifying STEM. That I can find awe in scientific discovery, despite the entire history of the enterprise being at the tips of my fingers.

Perhaps functional ambiguity isn't so bad.

I'm going to try out writing based on suggestions.
So, go at it. I'll work on a story based on the suggestion that resonates with me the most.

So recently I discovered that MIT has one of their massively open courses on game design. Now, this isn't one of the 'how to use tool a to get result a' sort of courses, it's a look into the fundamentals of game theory and works its way through the arts and practical structures that make up modern game design, both as traditional games and as computer games. In reading through the book I was reminded of the importance of language when it comes to artistic critique.

Now, this isn't to say that we need more jargon in games journalism, but it is to say that I feel games journalists should be well versed in the language of games design. The importance of the dolly zoom in film should be understood by anyone who wants to be a film critic, so i postulate that the importance of open and closes systems, the cultural impact of emergent gameplay and the history of interactive entertainment should be the expected grounding for those who want to criticize games. This is especially true as we move into an era where we expect games to be treated as an artistic medium.

As we are a young medium we borrow a lot from the established fields of criticism. This leaves us will a lot to say about story, visual presentation and other components that map well when regarded from another medium, but not a lot to say about what makes games stand out from the other methods of expression. There are a few general categories that a seasoned gamer can draw on to describe the general feel of a game, but rarely do we find commentary on how the feel of a game contributes to the direction or expression as a cohesive whole. perhaps this is indicative of the informal genre divides, or a side effect of game designers being forced to template from popular successes regardless of the vision. Regardless of the explanation, as we move forward this kind of discussion will become critical to establishing the legitimacy of the medium.

Let us take for example The Last of Us. It is a critically acclaimed game, widely reviewed as the best that the last generation of consoles had to offer. A lot of the reviews focus on the story, the characters and the visual presentation. It looks amazing, has a moving story with interesting characters and forces us to accept morality as a grey zone. It also has gameplay, but... it's nothing special. It plays like you would expect a third person action game to play. The gameplay doesn't really add to the end statements, the player doesn't really have any meaningful choices that impact the narrative. It's the kind of game that lends itself well to a critique with the same language as a movie with a bit of gamy bits thrown in. This isn't to say that it's a bad game, but it does raise the question of what is important in a game. We don't have the language formalized to describe the mechanical impact of games. The discussion of the system interacting with the narrative elements of play is not very prevalent, so it seems like most of the time we get this big budget games that instead really just push out the gameplay that will sale with packets of content that will review well with the established language of criticism (usually cinematic).

Now, on the opposite side of the spectrum from the Last of Us is Conway's game of Life. Conway's game of Life is a zero player game with no real art assets to speak of and no giant story. It means that, if viewing it as an artistic piece, all of the message is in the rules and mechanics of the game. The rules to Conway's Game of life are as follows:

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Any narrative or story must be a result of these rules. The player sets up the board, populated with as many live or dead cells as desired, and then the game plays itself. The assumptions codified in the ruleset gives us a kind of message, and while this is supposed to be an abstraction of cellular evolution we can derive many messages from it. The game itself says that the rules of life are simple, but through the simple rules amazingly complex machinations and interactions can occur. As a game designer I can look at this game and see that a well written, simple mechanic can produce amazingly nuanced gameplay. As a historian I can see that the game is a product of the times, with the prevalence of computer systems reaching a point to make the testing and implementation of such a model feasible. The game has such a wide spread impact that it has recently been implemented on drum machines because the computational pattern is simple and fits well to grid-based sequencing with interesting results.

I think it would be interesting to see how mainstream game journalism would review conway's game of life. To me there is obvious merit. We can communicate the ideas behind it, we can discuss the history around it, it has an amount of historical impact that can not be overlooked. It is elegant in its simplicity and stunning in its complexity. These are things we can say about great art...

But do we want art?

For me, it's a resounding yes, but as I look at the mainstream sensibilities I am not sure. The god of the mainstream game is fun. It's this subjective metric that changes for everyone, but it rarely includes the desire to go to an art museum. It is obvious to me that games _can_ be an expressive art form, but look at how the gaming community reacts to games being evaluated _as_ an expressive art form. Even mention a feminist critique on a gaming forum and you'll likely get flamed within the hour. Games have the capability to be powerful vehicles of thought and expression. games have the capability to provide meaningful insight into society. Games have the capability to be interpreted as products of history and culture, but is that something that the gaming community is ready to embrace?

Let us consider the most popular novels in the world. Last time I checked, the most popular kinds of novels are harlequin romance novels. They are usually cheep, contrite pieces of throw away writing that use lazy plots in order to indulge in a fantasy. They are insanely popular. I don't know of many people that would point to any of these books as an example of great fiction, but I don't know of anyone who would argue that novels can not be great art.

Now, this analogy might be slightly disingenuous. The direct parallel to the harlequin romance novel would be cheap cell phone games that are plentiful and widely varied, but they work well as an illustration of my point. Big games, like the Last of Us or Gears of War would be better compared to hits like the Harry Potter series or Twilight. People will always be more divided about how to look at these bits of popular medium but we still do not generally put them on the same level as Catch 22 or Great Expectations.

I don't think anyone who is familiar with gaming will argue that games don't have their Catch 22s. I don't think that anyone who is familiar with gaming will argue that games don't have their harlequin romance novels... and I think the mainstream is becoming familiar with gaming.

As we develop and disseminate more and more language that allows for deep discussions about games, I feel that the culture will change. I think it already is. We are taking the way that games are portrayed more and more seriously. There is more and more lititure that tries to seriously contemplate the impact of games. People are more and more aware of what makes a game enjoyable...

Art isn't always enjoyable, so art isn't always popular. I don't think this is ever going to change in any medium, including gaming. However, as more of a medium is enjoyed by the mainstream it becomes easier for them to accept it as art. I feel we are reaching that point.