Outside Lands and vexilology (Or: the importance of having a flag)

Last summer I went to Outside Lands, the great big music festival held in Golden Gate Park. I had not really been to a major music festival before. Stepping into the sea of humanity friday evening, I rapidly came to the following observations:

1. My subjective geography of the park had been massively altered by filling it with people. A plain that once took a minute to cross could now take half an hour to scoot and elbow through.
2. Everyone was making a futile effort to call their friends, taxing the cell system and making it impossible to get a call through. SMS was an option, but it might take 20 minutes for the text to get through, assuming your friend even has their phone charged.
3. My friends seemed to be in various altered states, and not necessarily good at finding needles in haystacks.
4. Standard methods of finding your friends are therefore woefully inadequate.

Airs, Waters, Places...Smells?

I think a lot about smell, as you might have guessed from my having written a magazine article about it for an offbeat quarterly. Today I find myself musing about odors, ritual, and sacred spaces.

It's no surprise that incense and its ilk are associated with religio-magical practices beyond written history. its ability to mark and recall deep memories is well-attested, and the entire practice of aromatherapy is based on its power to subtly alter moods at an almost pre-conscious level. Beyond sacred circles, geometrically-bewitching architecture, or striking acoustics, making a place sacred starts with making it smell different.

I realized this, as it happens, while waving a burning smudge of white sage around my campsite at dusk, muttering "repel ghosts," a meme-worm picked up from Basquiat via my art-friend Superchief Jeronimo. The phrase felt like the right thing to say at the time, but I had no intentions of a supernatural nature: I just wanted the damn mosquitoes to back off.

Cocktails, murder, and treason: a stay at the McKittrick Hotel

[Cross-posted from the Duncan/Channon Tumblr, because attribution is forever.]

I am somewhere in midtown Manhattan, in the 20s near the High Line. I am watching MacBeth murder Banquo with a brick, put on his suit jacket, and sprint out. I follow. My nose is sweating under my mask, it’s dark and hard to see, and I end up losing him around a corner. But I notice an interesting (and more sparsely attended) interaction going on across the hall between one of the witches and the god-fearing tailor, and veer over to watch that. Why does she have a key around her neck? What does it unlock? And who is that lost-looking young woman with the suitcase?

Welcome to the McKittrick Hotel, home to Sleep No More, an immersive theater experience that just might be New York’s best show and worst-kept secret. With zero advertising, they’ve been able to consistently sell out shows at rates of $75 to $95 per ticket, with high repeat visits, some up to seven or eight times.

It had been something I’d been meaning to see since it opened, but hadn’t quite found the right time/friends/money over the last two years. But, on hearing rumors that the British-based group that put it on will finish up their run in June and head back across the pond, I knew it was something I had to jump on.

I went last Sunday with a friend, though we were quickly separated in the opening rush of action. This was actually a preferable outcome, as we were able to compare notes afterward (“You didn’t see the strobe-light witch rave?” “You didn’t see Lady MacBeth and the out-damn-spot?”)

The design was amazing, building out a world of shops, bars, cemeteries, forests, and darkly-haunted nurseries into five stories of warehouse. The light and sound had a sculptural quality typically limited to installation art. Being as site-specific as it was, the result was a mind-blowing union of set design and choreography: dancers would haul each other up to run on the walls and vault over pool tables, or slither through exposed stone windows. The performances were wordless, physically-demanding, and just this side of otherworldly.

If you’re in New York in the next month, go. Take friends. Get there early. Wear shoes you can sprint in. Consider taking a lock-picking class. Read the Sparknotes for MacBeth and watch Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Practice running up flights of stairs at full speed. And remind yourself that even then, you’re not going to see everything, but you’re going to see great things. And perhaps, if you are lucky and daring, you’ll get to be the one that gets taken aside, ushered into the locked room, and trusted with a dark secret. If not, well, now you understand why people are coming back half a dozen times.

Score: FIVE OUT OF FIVE BLOODY DAGGERS

Sleep No More runs at The McKittrick Hotel, 530 West 27th Street, New York, NY. Running time varies depending on entrance time, but is between 2 and 3 hours. Performances begin nightly between 7 and 8pm, with additional late night performances Friday and Saturday starting between 11pm and midnight. Tickets must be purchased in advance at http://www.sleepnomorenyc.com/


[Pictures via Mordicai]

Gothama: a game of non-attachment

The last weekend of January is quickly becoming a sort of annual holiday for me. It certainly involves sitting around and eating a lot, but that's not the focus. No, dear friends, the last weekend in January is the time of the Global Game Jam.

Sanctioned by the International Game Developers Association, the Game Jam is a mad dash to make a working game (usually, but not always, a video game) in 48 hours. Teams assemble on the spot based on appropriate balances of skills and abilities. Last year, I was sort of the utility infielder (writing, audio, and miscellaneous inspiration) of a team that already had an experienced game designer, but this year I ended up taking on the role. For someone who has read a ton about games, but not actually made many, this was tremendously exciting.

The theme for the year was an image of ourobouros, the snake that eats its tail. To me, it brought up associations of eternal recurrence, death, and rebirth. That brought me to the buddhist notion of Saṃsāra, and the suffering associated with endless fruitless repetitions of the cycles.

Which, in the context of video-gaming, instantly took me to thinking about stupidly-hard games of the NES era.


 These were games that forced the player to memorize complex geometric patterns and punished them for a single infraction. These were games that decided that the best way to increase replayability was to tell players after the final battle that their entire first run of the game was "a trap devised by Satan" and force them to play it over again at an even more difficult level. These were games where your entire motivation for risking virtual life and limb was proving that you were a bad enough dude to rescue the president. They may have had different surface trappings, but ultimately they were games about suffering.


Gothama was thus a loving tribute and a philosophical critique of classic 2D platform gaming. It is at its highest level a stoic/buddhist/vedic-inspired critique of the ‘little pleasures’ of videogaming: the jingle of coins, a satisfying stomp, a well-timed dash and jump. We relish the shot of dopamine we get, the ability to feel greater than ourselves, but to what extent do they lead us to towards the short-term and ephemeral rather than our greatest good? Gothama makes uses of the tropes of the genre to make a point about non-attachment.

What point, you ask? Well, I suppose you'll have to play it to find out.

Click here to download the special edition of Gothama.

Tower defense sweatshop: the wonderful world of newsgames

[Cross-posted from the Duncan/Channon Posterous...]



"Sweatshop is a new browser game, developed by Littleloud for Channel 4 Education, in which players fill the role of a factory floor manager in a developing nation. Taking design cues from the tower defense genre, the game tasks you with placing skilled workers and child laborers along a conveyor belt."

I'm a big fan of games that teach, not by lecturing or quizzing, but by letting you take on the role of a newsmaker. You're in a much better position to understand the decision space of the person once you've worked through their decision tree a couple of times. In any case, I'm following the recent wave of newsgames with a fair bit of interest. Their ability to model complex, inhuman systems lets us get past our usual bias towards narratives and personalites, at least that's what we hope for.

Which is how we come to a tower defense game in a sweatshop. Initially, you can make all the jeans or other clothes with fine and safe labor practices, but as the game increases in complexity you're forced to choose which goals you're really working for. Very clever example of procedural rhetoric, and a good use of existing gaming conventions.

The frightening, real-world power of Channel 4's "Sweatshop."

All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality.

[Cross-posted from the Duncan/Channon Posterous...]






So you know Dwarf Fortress, that crazy game I may have told you about over the past six months? The sim game where you basically build the Mines of Moria? Where dwarves go crazy and build a fractal statue with 73 images of itself?

It's been written up at length in the New York Times Magazine.

Third Eyes

Apologies for the thin-ish layer of dust. In December I had to manage an artificial ice rink at a christmas village during the holiday season, an activity that demanded all my Christmas cheer (and gave me a greater  appreciation for the Santaland Diaries, incidentally). Since the new year I've started up with a bit of researchy work for Duncan/Channon, an awesome advertising agency based out of the Bay Area. 

One of their clients is Blurb, which helps people design and print their own books. Given that we're in a major period of transition for media, we're all doing a fair bit of reading and thinking about futures for the book.  One thing I've run across lately is the results and findings from Portigal Consulting's Reading Ahead project, which really sets the mind abuzz. As part of that project, they did a One-Hour Design challenge with Core77, which had all kinds of cool results. I particularly liked the Booklight from Kicker Studios, which projects ebook text into a (real) blank book of your choosing:

That's pretty cool, and feeds into the greater trend looking toward ubiquitous projectors as a means of overlaying data onto the real world, of which MIT's Sixth Sense is my current favorite. But that system also involves cameras, which is where we get to the other possibility this picture raised in my head: What if you could put a small camera/projector on a print book you already owned? With the right software, you'd get some of the the added functionality of an ebook (sharing, tagging, copy/paste, analytics and so forth), though obviously none of the portability that comes from e-readers. 

If you took it a step further, what if it compared the text it was looking at with a database (like CDDB or Musicbrainz) to identify what you were reading?  You could easily comment on it socially, sync it with your other devices, and effect all manner of extensions to your reading life, with all the wonderful and regrettable things that means.

There could also be issues if this doodad had the capability (either built in or suitably-hacked) to rip books and spare consumers from the vinyl-to-cd-like pain of paying again for something you already own. All in all though, I like the idea. One thing that shouldn't be forgotten in our rush to adopt new forms of text is that the ol' print codex has a pretty long shelf-life, particularly when printed on acid-free paper. There's an opportunity to be had in unlocking extra functions out of the stuff people already have.

by hand

If you're surrounded by things you don't understand and can't affect, you're going to feel unhappy, or at least less happy than you would be if otherwise. Most people would agree with this, and yet there's a tremendous amount of disconnection between people and the thousands of objects, systems, and and in/conveniences of everyday life. This isn't a new thing; the 60s counterculture and the subsequent "Back to the Land" movement testify to alienation over the past generation at least. But I think people are beginning to adopt a more pragmatic approach. Rather than chucking all of modern civilization out and starting from scratch, we're trying to make everything around us more transparent and open to modification. This is reflected strongly in how we look at food and cooking, but also in more technical realms.

"No Impact Man" as seen from Cambodia

For the observant, browsing through the bootleg DVD shops here can be quite rewarding. Firstly, the covers were definitely designed by non-native speakers of English, because their hype quotes on the front of the box are sometimes ambivalent or downright negative about the film. My favorite was for "Step Up 2: The Streets," which proudly displayed the faint praise, "It's no Stomp the Yard, but it's alright!"

There are also curiosities of selection. While you're guaranteed to have the current blockbusters and popular tv show box sets, there are always certain unusual offerings, like 8-in-1 selections of Oscar winners from the 20s and 30s or 9/11 conspiracy documentaries. But more to the point, there are a ton of quality documentaries available, I reckon as the joint result of backpacker/NGO-worker demand and ease of supply (I'm guessing the maker of a movie about philosophers talking is maybe not as zealous about copyright infringement as the big studios. After all, for small players in the creative arts, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy.) As a result of this, I got to watch the wonderfully entertaining documentary, No Impact Man.

I really liked it, and it spurred a couple of thoughts: