Artists work in semiotics now, trading in signs for things, rather than representing nature. Or they create hyper-realities that are simulations of things that never actually existed to begin with. This leads some pessimism, “marked by the loss of an organic relationship between experience and the representation of that experience.”

But there’s another person from which we can question why the natural world, or an authentic and pre-existing original, carries so much value.

We do not necessarily revere the painter who can most realistically represent an image; instead, we often value the deliberate or stylistic deviations from realism. That is where the artistry resides. Even with photography or image re-presentation, we look for the compositional or content choices made by the artist, rather than the perfect reproduction of reality. With re-presented images or readymade objects, artists find a way to offer personal expressions or cultural critiques through mediation, or recontextualizing a commonplace object. In video games, visual representation and sounds are secondary; these are elements from traditional media that are less relevant to video games than interactive systems, the differentiating aspect of the medium. It’s through the interactive systems–as related to the player’s agency–that we see the artistry in video games.

If we take this same line of thinking and we factor out the less valued, less characteristic aspects of human existence, treating it as a medium, we can distill it down to what is most germane, most sublimely unique…our emotional and intellectual responses, and our connections to one another.

The unorthodox question that follows is this: Might we be able to better experience, better appreciate these things in a fully simulated space? Again, if we ask why the real world should carry so much value, and we determine that the aspects of human existence that matter most are not related to the constraints of the real world, but to our intellectual and emotional responses, then we might agree that simulated reality is actually a better environment in which to be human.

Further, the nature of the real world is arbitrary; it’s the condition into which we’re born. Much of our experience with the real or natural world is about physical constraints, environmental vulnerability or resource scarcity. We share those things with animals and plants. Our emotional, intellectual and social capacity make us human; those are elements unique to humanity.

We might, paradoxically, have a truer experience swimming together through simulacra; an experience almost exclusively focused on the things that make us human, on the things that separate us from bacteria, shrubs or insects.

I don’t subscribe to this view, but it is not necessarily true that Baudrillard’s theories lead a pessimistic conclusion.

Today is Blog Action Day, dedicated this year to helping ease the effects of poverty.

I just donated to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and set up a little fundraising page in case any friends want to kick in whatever they can afford.

You can read more about the Global Fund here.

I went with my standard Drafthouse meal…no experimentation this time: White wine, hotwings, hummus with pita chips. I’d just shaved and–in the dark–ended up with hotwing sauce all over my face. Note to self: Avoid hotwings on days that you shave. Face. On. Fire.

In gaming news, I finally got the card game Zombie Flux, and I’m excited about trying it out soon.

I’m still playing Spore and Civilization Revolution…I hope to write up some comments on both soon. I tried to play Just Cause and couldn’t get into it at all.

The books:

1) A collection of short plays by Samuel Beckett: I never read Krapp’s Last Tape and recently–during a conversation about the Graveyard–someone mentioned that it was moving.

2) Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton, comes highly recommend. I’m working on two projects with Arkane: One with a very short development cycle, and one that’ll be much longer term. For the short-term project, I just hit a milestone that will make the Fullerton book very useful in terms of iterating. (Being at an independent, passion-driven company again is fantastic…Arkane is very agile, social and fun.)

3) Universal Principles of Design, also highly recommended, is a great book that the title describes perfectly.

A couple of years back, as part of my minimalist trend, I got rid of (I’d say) 4/5ths of my books. I like having some on the shelf, but I’d be happier if I could get them all in digi format, on a multi-use device that wasn’t just for reading (like the iTouch).

Huge praise goes out to the creators of this interactive work that touches on the ways in which death moves us. This interests me in part because I’ve talked off and on about “a game about death.” Talking to MTV on a panel with Will Wright, Cliffy Blezinski and David Jaffe, I mentioned that I’d be fascinated for personal reasons with a game depicting a human character at successive stages of life, dealing at each stage with a death and with the ongoing ravages of physical deterioration (altering the player-character’s movement model). But while I was wanking about, the creators of the Graveyard created something interesting.

Today I played around with the trial version of the Graveyard, then bought the full version for $5. Hopefully, others will check it out.

The Graveyard has great presentation, in terms of graphics and audio (including the music). I did walk off screen once and couldn’t recover. And while I appreciate the approach of not over-informing the player, I’d have liked more info on the controls. (It took me a while to figure out how to exit even.) The biggest critique of this (brilliant) indie work is the lack of interactivity; it’s not quite “a series of interesting decisions.” But I find it completely heartening that the game industry is rapidly broadening to allow for creative works like this, along with Facade, the Marriage, Passage, Braid and the like.

In my dreamworld, there’d be an expanded version of the game, wherein the player’s goal was to die with contentment. Imagine a faintly saturate bubble around the main character, with a little color…the last shreds of her vitality. Full exploration of the graveyard would reveal similarly hued areas in an otherwise black and white world; each colored spot would mark the grave of someone lost to the old woman, with whom she had an unresolved conflict. Each of these graves would represent a pocket world, a window into her past that would allow her to try, in her mind, to resolve the conflict she had with someone now gone. Imagine a room in the 1920′s, where she argued with a lover for the final time. Imagine her sitting on a boardwalk bench, fighting with her best friend over someone they both wanted to date. In another spot, she remembers a bitter fight with her youngest child who was never happy. The core game loop would, of course, be a challenge, but I would love to see her success in her last hour on the planet be driven by how successfully she came to terms with these past conflicts. With the passage of time and the emotional exertion of dealing with each memory, she’d get closer to death; with the successful resolution of each past conflict, she’d get closer to contentment. The game could then end with a discontent or content death.

In any case, I love the Graveyard and wanted to pass this along. Kudos to the team.

http://tale-of-tales.com/TheGraveyard/index.html

Gygax (and Arneson and many others) had such a huge effect on me as a gamer and as a person. It’s hard to execute great (or even good) video games. As someone who loves games and wants to see our medium spread to every person on the planet, I see this death as a significant event simply because it marks the end of a life that was full of significant influence over games (of many flavor), storytelling, film, books and even the way people socialize.

Gygax is gone. (As my friend Steve Powers lovingly put it: “Gygax is at -10 hit points.”) His influence, of course, is not gone. Same with Zelazny, the voice of my youth. Odd timing, but now my friend (and influential game designer) Erick Wujcik is sick.

All this makes me sad, but it also reminds me to tell people every chance I get when they’ve impacted my life in a positive way.

http://www.witchboy.net/articles/the-dungeon-master-an-interview-with-gary-gygax/

He was polite, and only wrote me up for 80. “I’m cutting you a break, downgrading this by a couple’a categories.” Thanks for the break, officer.

Time for comedy club defensive driving, at the advice of my g/f.