Role Playing the Future of You
How to face the dicey situations of culture captcha campaigns
🔊 “Facts are never what they seem to be…”
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things
(— Crosseyed & Painless, Talking Heads)
All the world’s enraged…
Hello! Thank you for remaining curious about this endeavour, and a warm welcome to the new subscribers. I’ve been on a few field trips, and decided to rest from the usual online frays in order to observe how people are on the ground, but also to genuinely enjoy the summer days.
The eye rolling (if not tiresome boring) doom scrolling remains a common social status quo (oh woe) these days. There’s deeper texture to life than the trigger buttons designed to bait us, yet the blitzkrieg beat goes on, and reductionist dichotomies of THIS individual/group winner versus THAT other/side loser perpetuate with the escalating memes industrial complex. Internet platform profiles continue exchanging furiously fingered fisticuffs about which opinions are worthiest in terms of both facts and feelings.
Nothing new here or there. There’s so much lamentation, and it bears heavy. I recall Hamlet’s angst-ridden monologue in Act II, Scene II, when he despairs that the earth is but a ‘foul pestilent congregation of vapours’, and baffled by life’s purpose ponders ‘what is this quintessence of dust?’.
“Oh FFS.”
Well, quite…
First, something my dad introduced to me many years ago - is a quote attributed to Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Emil Frankl:
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
Even during apocalyptical situations, sitting in discomfort means making time to contemplate other people’s thoughts, for it yet yields plot changes and revelations. I found inspiration from the words of notable authors, and friends on the frontier of cultural insights. When frustrated by Facts & Feelings, a useful schema to shift the focus from being forlorn, is to actively review other F factors, e.g. Findings, and Futures.
I hereby offer below, some choose-your-own-formula prescriptions, to develop potential antidotes to malaise and gloom. Part I signposts to other people, and Part II is my take on how a gaming analogy could be a practical framework
Part I - How Infinite in Faculties!
Below is an outline of some works I’ve read, that has given me more courage to foster a new batch of traumatised and triggered students this September.
✎ Clive Staples Lewis
I discovered the autograph manuscript of an address given by CS Lewis in 1939, just after the outbreak of WWI. Published as Learning in Wartime, his sermon grasped at the seeming futility of pursuing intellectual activities or academic studies, when the world was/is burning. Here is the chunk that nourished me:
Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life’. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the Nineteenth Century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes.
This sentiment is an echo of older biblical text, that of Ecclesiastes - “All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
I imagined CS Lewis reassuring young students riddled with guilt as to how they might be selfish or frivolous to not worry about anything else but [the latest breaking news] - “Do not let your nerves and emotions lead you into thinking your predicament more abnormal than it really is.”
It’s quite a balm to be reminded into sobriety, that whatever we fret about now, we are not the first, and won’t be the last. Moreover, what a relief to reflect on this notion that favourable conditions never come, we simply do the best we can. I recommend reading the essay in full, for it tackles what we obsess about today - of favourable futures, the hopes for some frustrating finish to circumstances, and how we toggle between fear or faith.
✎ Jessica Riskin
In the 1940 movie ‘The Great Dictator’, Charlie Chaplin delivers a mighty speech, and he warns us not to give ourselves to “machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.” Today, it remains true that machinery has left us in want. While unabated explications about the Artificial Intelligence of machines continues to stream, a buoyant query tugs at the old philosophical game: what makes people uniquely human, and how does a person meaningfully stand out from the plethora of smart cybernetic appliances? A worthy purchase for research is The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick - for it seems the existential wrestlings with our changing identities has been going on for some centuries now.
✎ Martin Shaw
There is a meme that makes me laugh, about a reasonable benefit to being an immortal - the ability to read all the books in all the entire history of humanity. This is a regular enough character in many series, with some eternal librarian or watcher. In any case, there are many of us who have ever-expanding reading lists, and sometimes, acts of serendipity facilitate for certain books to be salient. Shaw’s Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass has been both medicinal and instructional for me.
He sagely asks readers to review that “we all like to fetishise our individual struggle sometimes”, and that “we make things holy by the kind of attention we give them.” In previous newsletters I noticed how extension technology has perhaps made us ‘out of touch’, with worst case scenarios of a global village of billions that we protest ‘has got out of hand’. Whereas once upon a time, people consulted with Palm Readers, our hand-held devices have become worshipped sources of information. Many still believe that our fates are mapped out in the creases of our skin. Revisiting The Handless Maiden, I traced through my hand lines and wondered how I’ve lived with curses and blessings. I wrote in my journal:
What if this is the best timeline ever… because I’m in it, and there are enough people here for me to love? What if many of us thought this - Now is our best timeline, because we’re actually in it and we know…
🔮 Media Masters & Message Mongers
We’re all caught in the webs of audience CAPTCHA; we think we’re being our ‘original selves’ when we type out replies, but what if we’re actually just copy-cut clones of common cult denominators? We appear to be tragically held hostage by our mobile mirrors, curating our identities by designing them on how it would be received by an abstracted audience of peers. In The Saturated Self: Dilemmas Of Identity In Contemporary Life (1991), the psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen proposed the notion: I’m Linked, therefore I am — the “I” is conceivably a conglomerate of our attachment to elements from various types of “We Are”. An identity is in-formed by other identities.
I continue to converse with fellow students who poke around and probe about The Technological Self:
Tracey Follows and I were speakers at this memorable conference in 2015, Silicon Beach Bournemouth. Our presentations had unicorns in them, and since meeting each other, we have thankfully continued swapping notes. Tracey has a podcast series, a published book, and recently shared a deck on Identity Century - advising us to “prepare for full-scale profilicity.”
Andrew McLuhan is delivering another round of Understanding Media this September. I’m a graduate of this intensive course, and strongly recommend it. I am also eyeing up The Medium boardgame!
Jamie Stantonian is a friend from The Long Now London meetup, and we recently went on an analogue mission of Chalking the White Horse.
Part II - Perception Check… before you Wreck Yourself
Comic drawn by Scarlet Forrester: scarletforrester.weebly.coDungeons & Dragons (commonly abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG or TTRPG) originally designed by Americans, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. It was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules Inc.
The premise of the game, is likely inspired by Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, and derived from wargaming with its ‘campaigns’, where each player creates their own character to play, usually in a team, led by the Dungeon Master (DM). Components of the game include various dice, character sheets, and maps or token pieces. Mostly it is an oral/verbal storytelling activity, and players are invited to make decisions or consequential actions through collaborative narration.
What we know about Artificial Intelligence (AI) + Machine Learning (ML), is that computer programs have been created to play and master games that is considered to require human skills, such as chess, the Japanese game of strategy called shogi and the Chinese game of strategy called Go. Computers have thus been able to beat the top masters in these human games, which is what also worries some people that the digital electrical machine, will be more intelligent than the biological human.
In a Wired article from Feb 2020, it was suggested that spontaneous yet coherent storytelling is something that computers aren’t very good at yet. In this game of creative storytelling, it seems that humans still possess the advantage, for it is humans who are capable of reading and inventing ‘context’, whereas machines are only able to process from the data it has access to, and is therefore faster only at generating content rather than any substantial critical or imaginative thinking.
To return to the mechanics of playing DnD – one of its actions is called rolling for a ‘perception check’ using a D20. Part of a character’s ability is having a ‘Wisdom’ score (for Perception) – and this allows the player options for spotting, hearing, or otherwise detecting the presence of something within the narrative of the gameplay. The result of rolling the D20 dice, determines a character’s general awareness of the surroundings, and which the DM curates accordingly for any other detail to assist in the sequential storytelling.
Is it possible that within the DnD Game, there is a more visible structure with rules and identifiable options for behaving and acting, whereas with Social Media Platforms, which is heavily based on ‘identity profiles’ and gamified interactions through button votes and comments, the users are not as self-aware of the ‘rules of engagement’ or etiquette necessary to develop the plotlines of each character?
However, it has also been observed that an element of DnD, the Non-Playing Character (NPC) has been co-opted by the meme machine, and is now popularly used for social media content, as it is appropriated within the identity politics of users, e.g. being ‘woke’ or ‘right wing’. Moreover, it is recognised that users of video-based social media platforms, specifically TikTok – are also asserting #MainCharacterEnergy. It’s curious though that the social media curation is reminiscent more of the TV, with is ‘reality show’ template. Perhaps the obsolescence of film cameras with mobile phone apps, has somehow revived/returned the demand for the moving image, and in social media, the user is the star of their own show or ‘live feed’.
In the Global Village, contrary to the scenario presented by the Coca Cola advert in 1971 that included the jingle “I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)”, the cacophony of discordant ‘voices’ is that of comment wars, disagreements, and various culture-wars spurred by identity politics. People are not singing from the same page, but each is adamant in being heard, seen and represented. The stories are more emotionally reactive, since the pathways to being noticed is through accumulation of likes and followers in quantity.
If Marshall McLuhan were alive, I wonder whether he would agree to the application of a DnD directive concerning ‘Perception Checks’:
Perception Checking is a communication skill used to confirm one's understanding of a message or situation. In the context of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD), perception checking is often used by players to understand the motivations and intentions of non-player characters (NPCs) or to confirm their understanding of the events taking place in the game.
Before a character takes an initiative, they have the option of scoping out the narrative, by asking the DM for a perception check. The improvisation of the scenario allows for the following steps:
a. Description - provide additional description of the behaviour noticed.
b. Interpretation - provide possible interpretations of the behaviour.
c. Clarification - request clarification about the behaviour & interpretations.
In DnD, players proceed with these basic guidelines to gain insight into the game world and the characters they encounter. As in real life, and the different identity roles that are played out, it’s possible to increase one’s ability to perceive and understand the messages others are trying to communicate, in order to avoid making hasty decisions that could lead to misunderstandings or negative consequences.
Here are some creative and playful ideas for training one’s perception skills:
Sharpen Senses: Roll a D20 to determine how sharp your senses are feeling. Did you roll a critical success? You're feeling extra perceptive and ready to take on any challenge!
Listen Actively: Pay close attention to what the other person is saying and try to understand their perspective or meaning that could be different to your comprehension. Don't be distracted by that shiny object in the corner or the smell of freshly baked cookies wafting from the kitchen.
Clarify: Summarise what you think the other person said to confirm your understanding. If they correct you, you'll know you need to pay closer attention!
Ask Questions: If you're still unsure, ask open-ended questions to gather more information. Roll a D6 to see how many questions you can ask the other person to get more information. But beware! If you roll a 1, you might accidentally insult them or ask a completely irrelevant question.
Consider NonVerbal Cues: Pay attention to the other person's tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language to gain additional insight into their message. Take a break from rolling dice to do some interpretive dance to mirror the other person's body language. You might discover hidden meanings and messages that you would have missed otherwise.
Take Your Time: Don't rush to judgment or action before you have all the information you need. Take the time to carefully consider the situation and your options. Roll a D12 to see how many minutes you can take to consider the situation before making a decision. If you roll a 12, you have all the time in the world to contemplate the mysteries of the universe (or the best course of action for your character).
If you’re in the mood for listening, I additionally compiled a playlist of some songs that I embedded in each edition of this substack:
Hi, I’m Rina. I teach at Kingston School of Art, and as a cultural ecologist, I unravel complex wicked problems by synthesising the strategic with the scholarly and sacrilegiously spiritual. I play D&D as a warlock class water Genasi, and available for hire as a games sommelier for private members clubs. Am also accepting submissions for artwork variations of sacred pomegranate orbs! / reginaradicata@gmail.com
