Monday, February 20, 2012

Modern Living & Proceduralism


“By procedural literacy I mean the ability to read and write processes, to engage procedural representation and aesthetics, to understand the interplay between the culturally-embedded practice of human meaning-making and technically-mediated processes.”
-Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost

“If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine [his] whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity. To these qualities that Mr. Glendenning ascribed to the code I would respectfully add one more: boredom. Opacity. User-unfriendliness.”
-The Pale King, David Foster Wallace

“Training videogames become educational when they stop enforcing a process as a set of arbitrary rules in the service of the organization and begin presenting a procedural rhetoric for the business model that the employee has been asked to work under. Once the worker has a perspective on this business model, he can interrogate it as a value system rather than an arbitrary condition of employment.”
-Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost

“The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air [...]  find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. [...] It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
- The Pale King, David Foster Wallace

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

digital goods

Originally, I was planning to take a short break from writing about games and talk about some books I've been reading. That attempt was frustrated when my Kindle informed me the notes I have been taking were too numerous, and thus I could not have easy access to my notes. So, feel free to look up these locations yourself and draw your own fucking conclusions.


Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 5067-69 | Added on Friday, November 04, 2011, 04:44 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 5517-18 | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 04:38 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 5537-38 | Added on Monday, November 07, 2011, 04:40 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 6677-79 | Added on Tuesday, November 08, 2011, 05:15 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 7075 | Added on Tuesday, November 08, 2011, 05:46 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 9048 | Added on Thursday, November 17, 2011, 04:51 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 11896-97 | Added on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 05:45 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Note Loc. 11897 | Added on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 05:45 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 13878 | Added on Monday, December 05, 2011, 05:23 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 25170-71 | Added on Friday, December 16, 2011, 04:32 PM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 18030-31 | Added on Monday, December 19, 2011, 09:51 AM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 18093-94 | Added on Monday, December 19, 2011, 09:55 AM


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Infinite Jest: 0 (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 19467-68 | Added on Tuesday, December 20, 2011, 05:06 PM

fakepoastering

Have I ever told you about my senior year of college?

I was bored. I had essentially finished my degree, and I was sick of school. Me and my buddy Jake decided we needed a project. For our last semester, we took turns coming up with fake posters and putting them around campus.

I opened with:


Jake deftly responded with:

I decided I would match his proposal with a threat:




Jake took this populism to the extreme:


I responded to his broad, inclusive club with a very narrow lens:



Our posters didn't stay up for very long, but a few of them lasted the entire semester in some fairly high-profile locations.