/lit/ - Literature

>>11829045
some more random fuckface thoughts in the meantime.

about digitization, perhaps about how we transition from the Age of Unreason to the Age of Performance: you can already imagine the society of the future asking, on your CV, what are your routines and subroutines? how much software are you familiar with? how much upgrading do you need to do? how much downtime to you require? are you compatible with X? it's not hard to envision a world which is Optimizing and Upgrading in these sorts of ways. whatever you choose to do with your miraculous Capital is irrelevant: you can have it all, you can have everything. you're a citizen of cosmopolis, those are the perks. you can sexually identify as a cyber-unicorn, we don't care. but cosmopolis is powered by autotelic computer processes and will prefer, perhaps, a new kind of citizen who does not Interrupt The Flow.

it’s at once a highly individualistic world and yet a postindividualistic world. urban life as routines and subroutines, processes and subprocesses, repetition and automation, grind. even just a phenomenology of grind would be interesting. why do we enjoy grinding in vidya? it’s like work, the slow accumulation of numbers and perks, the repetition for the sake of repetition.

speaking of games, deleuze will identify molar and molecular processes, smooth and striated spaces, but what is it that we are doing in vidya? a game is something subtly different from a piece of cinema: a game is an editable cybernetic text with an auto process, a documentary that unfolds in front of us wherever we look. the whole process of the hollywood classical system was ultimately to take an enormous amount of technology and *make it all invisible,* so that you had this amazing sense of seeing what was there. and yet this is a sort of surgical incision into reality, all of these cameras and machines, cast and crew, to make a thing feel automatic and seamless. and so successful was this project that we now take our cues about how reality ought to be from its representation on film.

games borrow something from us, with a few twists: the player is now also the director and lead, and the computer handles the rest. the show begins as soon as we press start, and runs for as long as we would like it to run. this is a synthetic reality, but we don’t participate in games the same way we participate in cinema. but games also borrow from literature, not only for the themes, but because the original models for many of the games we play were initially run on engines powered by pencils, miniatures, and dice…

and it’s not theatre, either, because the stage is absent and the DM is not the director or the author. it’s all relatively procedural, although players prefer what they prefer and so on. and of course, character death is a possibility! and this too, today, can happen in WoW or in whatever other game...

the great age of simulation and performance, powered by Capital.