Dear Friammers,
I am late to this conversation but it has just impinged on something I have been thinking about a LOT. I used to be sure that there was a firm distinction between productive labor and … to use the technical term … bullshit. Growing food and making automobile engines were examples of productive labor; designing this year’s fashions in automobiles and clothing, that was an example of bull shit. It truly disgusts me that the automobile industry designs a pretty good car every decade or so, and then, stops making them because, because, after all, there always must be something new. (Oh what has Subaru done the Forrester and Volvo to the Volvo Wagon? Once they comfortable boxes in which to carry people around. Now they both look like outsized running shoes with gun slits for windows. That’s the essence of bullshit. LL Beans had a pretty good winter coat a decade back; can’t get it any more. More bullshit. Now gambling and gaming in any form (e.g., investment banking) seem to me to lean pretty heavily on the side of bullshit. But I have begun to worry that, one of these days, I am going to wake up having realized in a dream that EVERYTHING is bullshit. Certainly that’s the direction that complexity thinking leads us. Or, at least, to the realization that because there is nowhere near enough productive labor to go around, most of us have to paid to do bullshit to keep us from doing real harm. Anyway, Penny and I published something about that 35 years back. Perhaps some of you like to look at <http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/Texts/1980-1984/A_utopian_perspective_on_ecology_and_development.pdf> it. It’s called, “A Utopian Perspective on Ecology and Development.” For all I know, you might its first readers! The authors would love to hear from you. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2015 6:21 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] DOH! Arlo writes: “It is not some secret mystical human experience, nor does it have to be some weird pop-culture cult, but just another way to spend some free time.” I suppose the distinction I’m making is between open vs. closed or leading vs. following. With so much unknown in the world, why use hours of wakefulness to enumerate the states of a finite state machine? In what way is there anything to discover from a game? I appreciate there is a craft to making a storyline and a craft to in designing the graphics and physics engines, and of course the graphic arts in designing the visual appearance of characters. But I appreciate the story like I’d appreciate literature or art – I am not an expert in those things, and so I am not a participant – I am merely a consumer. On the technology side, I can acknowledge that gaming software is sometimes impressive. But why _bother_ writing it _except_ to sell it? Another way to ask the question is how is it more significant to be a gamer than, say, a reader of fiction or even a moviegoer? How is being a gamer a Thing? Marcus
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