Edited by Pat Kane (email)

:: Sim Politics and Mirror Worlds ::

A play company so perfect one couldn't invent it.Ludicorp is a privately held company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, whose mission is "to create new possibilities for creative expression through play". To that end, they've been testing a new kind of simulated online community called The Game Neverending, which has been getting rave reviews. Steven Johnson (a fellow player) described what they're about with great lucidity in one of his recent Discovercolumns:

Game Neverending is a delightfully open-ended virtual space that encourages new sociopolitical structures: Where SimCity lets you build a neighborhood, Game Neverending promises to let you create a new form of grassroots alliance, or even a cult. The designers are hoping to get away from the traditional game interface, which involves sitting focused exclusively on the computer screen. The idea is to create new ways for information to flow from real space into virtual space.

"I could have lieutenants in my cult who are allowed to draft new members," says cocreator Stewart Butterfield. "And one level up, there are cult members who can kick people out. Now, managing that group can take a lot of time, but the social interactions that are involved in that management can take place outside the game." You could exile an underling without actually launching the game just by sending a short text message from your cell phone. "We really want people to be able to have a 30-second or a two-minute participation that's satisfying, rather than launch a monolithic application and play with it for five hours."

Somewhere in this mix of tools and interactivity, a true mirror world is brewing. Combine the visual interfaces of SimCity, the up-to-the-minute data of My Neighborhood Statistics, the multiple inroads of Game Neverending, and you'd be able to create a true alternate universe, one that was mapped to real events. Ten years from now, a massive public planning operation like the one under way for the Ground Zero site might well be unimaginable without a mirror world. Photoshop pictures of the new skyline are nice but can't answer the important question: How will this new space actually be used once it's built? Will it be dreary, teeming, commercial, or diverse? Just create a virtual model of each proposal, download the latest economic data, populate it with users willing to participate as residents and workers, and press play.

So much to investigate here, alongside the rise of console games like Republic, in relation to what we might call a play-ethic politics. Might the computer game be a spur to new political forms, in the same way that electrification and the petrol motor shaped industrial democracy? (Or will we just find new terms for old tendencies - saying that we're more "Circle" people than "Org" people?, instead of egalitarian and hierarchical?) Perhaps testing out our social options through "Sim Politics" will allow us to truly shape the future, rather than blunder into it with our usual mix of creation and destruction?

:: If Open Source Were A Child...::

Extraordinary new ad from IBM, invoking the open-source software Linux as a child prodigy, absorbing the best wisdom that the world can bring him, from Muhammed Ali to Henry Louis Gates (as you can see, he's a cross between Haley Osment and Eminem). Although I bet everyone at Adbusters is really suspicious of this stuff, I must admit to being very excited.

The strapline - "Linux: The Future is Open" - is right in line with a players' perspective: indeed, it's the core position (even the ontology) of the Play Ethic that our social reality is much more open to intervention and action than it might usual seem.

Open Source is a living demonstration of that - an information-environment born from the imagination of a public community of hackers, rather than brewed up behind copyright in a corporate lab. Indeed, the transcript captures the playful idealism of Open Source's Hacker Ethic perfectly:

Cut to Professor Gates speaking to boy.

Mr. Gates: Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom. But sharing data is the first step toward community.

Cut to side shot of poet speaking to boy.

Poet: Poetry. There’s not much glory in poetry, only achievement.

Cut to overhead shot of boy.

Voice: Knowledge amplification. What he learns, we all learn. What he knows, we all benefit from.

Yes, of course we need to keep an eye on their business acumen. But might IBM be onto a new business ethic here?

:: Play Times ::

The Game Theory of Nature. Words of wisdom from John Maynard Smith. "If you look at the animal signalling literature now, it's entirely based on game theory. I've just finished a book on the evolution of animal signals where we talk about religion quite a bit. You mustn't think it is confined to human beings: religion, meaning ritual behaviour functioning to create emotional commitments - there is plenty of it. You find it in a group of hunting dogs about to go out for the day, in a group of birds about to migrate, and in some very odd circumstances in chimpanzees..."

Howard Gardner on the best schools in the world Reggio Emilia - the Italian schools that validate play in all its forms as a learning tool - praised by one of the great educational thinkers. An education for players here. Gardner's speaking at an extraordinary event about 'education, music and the mind', in my home town next week.

Selling Your Soul. Literally. It's a joke. I think it's a joke. Though the rates are excellent.

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