kurt

Dreams

Michael Naimark's provocation or summary of my interests:
"games that are on all the time."

I want to design interactive experiences that engage me so that I want to "play" them myself. Describing the form I believe these experiences will take starts out with a collection of vague design goals/interests, from that cloud of abstraction I will distill the projects and applications that are the most interesting to me.

Reflecting on my own habits of play, I notice a pattern in my attention span for video games over the last 5 years: I play intensely for a short period of time and then abandon the game, often within a relatively short distance from the end. The cause of this habit may have many sources, but the significance is profound in the way that it informs my conceptions of design. I rarely lament the "failure" to finish the game, instead I evaluate the success of the game and my experience with it based on my feelings of whether I extensively mastered the game mechanics/controls/agency and the game space/world. So, settting aside narrative/story issues, my desires within a game are: 1. expressive 2. exploratory.

Pursuing satisfaction in an abstract creative space for collaborative expression and communication.

I never get tired of Block Jam. Expressive gaming. Abstract yet concrete and tangible.

Many gamers are environmental hackers. They test the limits of each system that they interact with, meticulously manipulating objects and space, searching for new and surprising configurations, especially those ones unintended by the developer. What exactly are they looking for? Emergence.

http://www.clui.org/
http://www.rodencrater.org/
http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

On the back of the syllabus I drew a triangle. At each angle I wrote two words:
1. mobile/portable
2. social/network
3. location/narrative

Then I wrote all possible combinations by choosing one of the two words and preserving the (arbitrary?) numerical ordering. There are 8 combinations that all sound somewhat similar but evoke something different. My current favorite is "mobile social narrative". I already have a vision for it in my mind.

We are defined in an interesting way by our mobility. (Remember the pseudo-statistic that goes something like: 99% of people live within 5 miles of the place they were born? probably not true but an attractive mythology to those seeking a way to inflate the importance of their own limited travel) As we move into the present we leave a trail behind us of the space that we used to occupy.

"They stood in a time-corridor whose perspective showed the world around them in an event-pacing of greater frequency, hence the man-shaped tubes winding up and down the streets marking the passage of pedestrians."
-from page 209 of John Shirley's "City Come A Walkin'" (1980)

We are defined in an interesting way by our social interactions. Invisible and visible paths of signals link individuals together as they communicate intentionally and unintentionally. What percentage of this do we sense? What percentage of sense do we consciously perceive? What percentage of perception do we remember?

We are defined in an interesting way by our experiences. Events are often thought to string together to form the narrative of a life. I cannot catalogue all the classifications of events here but if you can think of it then it counts.

So what is a "mobile social narrative" then?

Auto-cartographic socio-spatial network imaging system.

I'm not kidding.

The earth has been explored and mapped in exhaustive detail... I don't desire to do that to people in any literal fashion. I would rather allow people to become instruments improvising a performance in a creative space.

I dream of unlimited geographies defined by the individuals that trace them in sensorially unbounded environments. Populations explicitly organize or allow emergence to control their connections. Players explore the creative limits and collaborate to witness the aggregate effect of their movements.