...Stories and games, stories in games, and games in stories are converging into a hybrid art form that blends cinematic narrative with dynamic interaction. The formation of Wingnut Interactive in September of 2006 is a sign of the times, heralding a concept known as the ‘filmic game’[1]. This art form resembles life more so, perhaps, than any previous discipline because it is dramatic, story-driven, moves backward or forward according to the participant’s decisions and is disturbingly real. Thus, it is existential. The Glass Bead Game is an ideal narrative for this new storytelling discipline because it is an existential story about a game by one of the foremost authors of the twentieth century. And, it is a story, which, up until now, has hardly been touched by the newer media.
In trying to understand some of the underlying reasons for our culture’s obsessive fascination with gaming, it might be useful to go back and investigate Hesse’s work. Throughout the text, the word Game is capitalized. Hesse thus transforms the meaning from just a game into the Game. The Game is sacred. All games contain within their kernel, elements from the Game. In Hesse’s consideration, gaming represents a metaphysical activity. But why is this so?
In the General Introduction that he provides, the 'present age' (approx 23rd century) is an era in which there is little creativity. Human culture has matured and accumulated an enormous amount of intellectual history. After the troublesome Age of Feuilleton (20th century) has passed, the primary endeavor becomes a playful examination of thoughts and ideas that have been collected through history. These concepts have an underlying symbiosis and a game is formed based on the ability to relate disparate topics together; to see hidden connections between musical motifs, scientific theorems, floral patterns, etc. ad infinitum. The Glass Bead Game is an engagement of elaborate idea association. It is a play of synchronicity; of meaningful intersections. It demonstrates that knowledge of the occult relationships and the secret connections between all things. It is a metaphor of the mind's synthetic power; it's ability to recognize subtle associations and analogies amongst diverse and apparently unrelated subjects. The Glass Bead Game is closely identified with music, rhythmic processes, and variations on a theme. The Glass Bead Game is the Mind's playful and lightning quick ability to examine, measure, analyze, compare, contrast, and recombine data. The Glass Bead Game is the Imagination of Knowledge. Most importantly, the Game represents the authoritative achievement of Mind’s triumph over Church and State as the emerging vessel or symbol of divinity in a new age.
*** From Technecromancy (“Technological Necromancy”), a proposal for a video game cinematic based on the 1911 Savannah automobile races.
My approach to the video game discipline comes from an appreciation of cinema and a love of history. Cinema has opened up the past in such an immediate way, literally making real the concept of a dimensional portal between different periods. With video games this process became interactive. I am interested in the overarching concept of the game itself, the driving storyline, epic, or mission. What is the essence of the idea, the summary? How well is it presented? A good game should take us into the movie. It is this brief sketch or preview that I have begun to make the cornerstone of my career as a game designer. I collect kernels and their immediate associations and arrange them in a way to present a comprehensive imaginative vision. This aspect enables more freedom with detail, camera movements etc. than in the actual play of the game.
The industry focuses on two general concepts: the environment and the avatar. There is a world and there is something or someone moving through the world. Immersion refers to both. We enter the virtual world. We become accustomed to it. It insulates us. We also become the hero or whoever's identity it is that is at the center of action. Understanding this basic dichotomy leads to the next point.
The subject matter of the video game world is wild and wacky ranging from cartoonish figments of the puerile imagination to real moments cut out of wars or other portions of recorded history. For the purpose of this project, the focus is on the historical imagination. My intention is take two moments that have been recorded in some visual way, through photograph or painting etc. and make them come to life. In order to isolate the different categories of environment and avatar the subjects are distinct and unrelated.
The subject matter of the video game world is wild and wacky ranging from cartoonish figments of the puerile imagination to real moments cut out of wars or other portions of recorded history. For the purpose of this project, the focus is on the historical imagination. My intention is take two moments that have been recorded in some visual way, through photograph or painting etc. and make them come to life. In order to isolate the different categories of environment and avatar the subjects are distinct and unrelated.
For the environment, I will be taking a painting done by Peter Helck in 1911, concerning the international car races held in Savannah. For the avatar, I am focussing on a daguerrotype of John C. Calhoun done in the 1830s. My intention is simply to bring these moments into real time. The race cars come alive and zoom by. John Calhoun perks up and begins delivering his "Disquistion on Government."
Technology offers humanity powerful new tools to amplify its reflective historic experience. Photographs, old paintings, sketches, and the dusty tomes accounting previous experience are not obsolete items. My thesis is that the energy of a culture depends on its ability to access its history imaginatively. By utilizing contemporary software developments, the past is no longer a dead yesterday but a living portal to another dimension.
When confronting the overwhelming and complex sprawl of computer languages, the massive and multiple data systems that support or are supported by them, and the speed at which it is all taking place, it is sometimes difficult to discern whether civilization is approaching a 'confusion of tongues' scenario like the one depicted in the 'Tower of Babel' story from the Bible or a hitherto unprecedented evolution of the logoidal impulse towards a universal meta-language similar to that described by Herman Hesse in his novel The Glass Bead Game. It is not this paper's intention to satisfy that philosophic question. This is due, in part, to the immensity of such a task as well as the writer's own ambivalent moods and multiple confusions on the subject, though he does have a few notions one way and/or the other. The main focus, rather, will be on analyzing the ‘glue-like’ phenomenon of server-side scripting languages; addressing their current position within the world of Information technology. These languages in many ways do symbolize the aforementioned gargantuan and thus beg for an analysis that moves beyond technical specifications toward existential reflection. Thus, it may be useful, periodically, to frame them in such a way that a more comprehensive picture of their function emerges.
Server-side scripting languages are made up of variables, functions, tags, and objects put together as programs, that relay messages between a client making certain requests and a server who receives that request and acts based on certain instructions. Whereas, originally, web pages were read-only HTML documents, now they involve complex interactive applications that require dynamic updates. This is why these languages are important and popular. Whether a user is buying a book from a shopping cart application like Amazon, searching for a piece of music on the Database of Recorded American Music, or generating multiple emails to remind students not to be tardy with their assignments, server-side scripting is increasingly in demand. To be effective, these languages must have the capacity to 'talk' to several different systems and users and either 'fetch' information from a database/file stored somewhere on the server’s system or generate a new file, and then bring it all back to the client’s browser. They are integrative or hermetic in the sense that they make possible links between different interfaces, facilitating live communication. In order to operate them, a programmer must become adept at moving from one interface, system, platform, environment, or language to another.
This paper will compare and contrast four different languages: Perl, PHP, ASP, and ColdFusion. The format will move in a nonlinear fashion from a general run through of each language's history, development, and defining characteristics; to comparisons and contrasts between them; and, finally, to some general statements regarding the cultural impact of the underlying trends that each represent.
***From The Devil Went Down To Georgia, Revisited, an original short story
A strange red-bearded man holding a fiddle appeared in Johnson square a few minutes before our pub tour was supposed to go out at 9:30 PM. It was March 17, St. Patrick’s Day - a bit muggy for a spring night. There was fog in the air and thunder in the distance. Nobody saw from which direction the man had come. He was just there, all of a sudden, in the midst of tuning his fiddle. We walked over towards him and he turned to rosin up his bow. I’m not sure why we were so attracted. It just seemed that he was there for us. He reeked of whiskey and it looked like he was missing a tooth. Could this be our tour guide? The sponsoring company was a reputable one, well spoken for by all the concierges in the city. Yet this fellow was a rogue by even the most conservative and generous consideration. Who would dare hire this vagabond? Or was it an illusion? Was it just a costume? An act? Maybe. We couldn’t be for sure in a city where so many outlandish characters were incorporated into a professional touring industry of enormous proportions. It was probably best to give him the benefit of the doubt.
He was standing upon the base of the Nathanael Greene monument. He raised the fiddle bow up in the air. Then, suddenly, a string of fire ignited along the bow's length. He arched his back and slid the bow of fire down his throat and out again. Then he cocked his head at a forty-five degree angle and spewed out a dragon's breath so big that it must've singed the leaves on the live oak trees leaning over the square. A clump of Spanish moss ignited.
The gentleman standing near me remarked in disbelief,
"That man just ate fire."
Knowing a little bit about the history of the city, having taken a day tour earlier in the afternoon, I ventured a speculation.
"Well, you know this is where the biggest secession rally in the whole South was held, six days after South Carolina seceded in December of 1860, right before the Civil War."
"You don't say?" the man was still in disbelief.
"Yeah, apparently there were about 10,000 people jammed in this square and all the fire-eaters made their speeches right there on the Greene monument under a flag with a rattlesnake coiled that read, "Don't tread on me". That was what they called a passionate Southern orator at the time. A fire-eater.
He apparently didn't hear me for he had wandered up with the others to get a closer glimpse. I followed.
As we gathered around him, the fire-eating fiddler straightened his lanky body, took a long glance at everyone, and then grinned. He introduced himself as Darby Hicks and said that he was here to lead us on a pub tour in old Savannah that we would never forget. His voice had the lilt of a prankster, varying in pitch, creaking from high to low in a single sentence. It sounded almost like his fiddle as he plucked it to check the pitch.
He then went on at some length about the mysteriously haunted nature of the city and warned us to stick close, emphasizing that we would be creeping along an energy vortex where the spirits of the past peered into the present. Savannah was the most haunted city in the United States and he was going to tell us why. And if we weren’t careful with our ‘mead’ intake we might get caught up in the romance of it all. And what a tragedy that would be! Then he gave a knowing wink. Everyone looked at each other under the spell of an intrigued wonder as he waved his arm forward and turned to the south. He was moving fast and before we knew it we were on our way down Bull Street, the “Avenue of Heroes,” drawn along by a strangely magnetic force and an old Irish lay.
***From This World, That World, a research paper on technology and spirituality
The promise of another world is an ancient concept informing religions, mythologies, mystery schools that advocate spiritual initiation, and the imaginative literature surrounding individual descriptions of transcendent visionary experience through the ages. It is the place of the idea. Whether this place is a destination, an origin, or a realm that one can periodically interact with while in the process of becoming, the legend is that there is another place outside of mundane reality where a different order prevails and strange and extraordinary things are said to happen. The general belief that cuts across cultural lines is that this is a spiritual realm or plane where the operant entities are to a degree disembodied and where traditional physical laws break down and give way to concepts of immortality and strangely enough, chaotic magical theories underlying the cosmos. Fundamentally important, is the dualistic nature of human consciousness and the recognition of the significance of multiple dimensions and their relationship to the real world. Even in the blander more behavioral forms of modern psychology, there is the admission of the mytho-poetic spiritual dream world of the subjective individual psyche haunted simultaneously by phantoms, archetypal motifs, and memories, as well as the material world of objective relationships where logic dictates clearly visible causes and effects. Distinguishing between these two visual realms and learning to properly synthesize them, according to those who recognize the existence of both, is the hallmark not only of sanity but also of transcendence and the evolution of consciousness.
***From The Electromagnetic Frontier, a proposal for a video game
Panic seizes the United States of America after a devastating earthquake saddling the San Andreas Fault has destroyed much of the lower half of California. Lamentations are heard everywhere as lava flows through the streets of Hollywood. A chain reaction of explosions deep within the earth has ruptured the planet’s electromagnetic field and caused a warp in the space-time continuum. An enormous volcanic mountain, radiating a strange gamma ray light never seen before, has arisen where coastal California once stood proud. The geothermal radioactivity has ripped a dimensional veil and destroyed the barrier between the past and present. Different peoples and creatures from the past are suddenly walking forth in the present. The world is overcrowded with its history.
Everyone is being drawn in a westward direction toward the volcanic mountain which is attracting the world like an enormous magnetic black hole vortex. An ancient sea creature circles the volcanic mountain, viciously guarding it. The world is about to implode upon itself as civilization approaches a critical mass. Both theologians and scientists argue that this is the end...
The energy crisis has made it virtually impossible to rectify the situation. Civilization has taught mankind to depend on energy that flows from a cosmopolitan grid. Due to the present chaos, however, people are no longer able to derive their power from artificial sources. Older survival tactics from the period of frontier settlement must be studied so that power can once again be retrieved from natural organic sources. Oil reserves have been disrupted and most roads destroyed because of the earthquakes. Mechanical transportation is currently defunct. The only way to travel other than foot or horseback is by light waves on...The Electromagnetic Frontier.
Electromagnetic Frontier (“EMF”) Blueprint Flow Chart
***From The Challenge of Charisma: Vanity, Deceit, or Inspiration, a research paper on postmodern directions in American Theater…
The concept of theater as an arena where human interaction is played upon through time in various ways suggests that the medium may provide general representations of the values of a particular milieu and thus might serve as a useful laboratory in which to analyze this tumultuous period. The eclectic shifts in thought and action in American theater since the 1960s are too enormous to encapsulate within a brief study. Another complication makes itself apparent when one is trying to ascertain whether or not it is possible to establish, equivocally, any unity in American theater at all, its pluralism refuting simplistic summary or interpretation. However, there are certain contemporary microcosmic productions in the past thirty years that offer a useful glimpse at some of the more important ideas that are still effecting change throughout the country.
This analysis will focus on the work of the Wooster Group, from New York’s Soho, during the early 1980s, arguing that it represents a culmination of the revolutionary theatrical practices initiated earlier in the century and coming to the fore during the 1960s and 70s, with special regard for its production L.S.D.(...Just the High Points...). This work represents a certain maturity in the troupe’s development. It is an excellent isolate example of American postmodern theatre. And because of the controversy it caused with its appropriation of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, it brought up several important contemporary questions concerning postmodern methodology and its irreverent premises, the relationship between playwright, text, and interpretation, the antagonism between being and becoming, and the function of morality and responsibility in the public theater…
The Wooster Group is headed by director Elizabeth LeCompte and has been producing plays in New York under that heading since 1980. It is descended from Richard Schechner’s Performance Group which had been in operation since the late 1960s. In October of 1984 the Wooster Group opened a production to the press (after almost a year of showing portions of it to special audiences) entitled L.S.D.(...Just the High Points...). In this piece, LeCompte juxtaposed excerpts from writings of key Beat generation activists with scenes from Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Timothy Leary was the representative icon in the group’s production and provides a contrasting identity of sorts with the hero of The Crucible, John Proctor (Savran 180).
The issue of textual analysis is a somewhat difficult one, for L.S.D. follows no concrete verbal script. In a review of L.S.D in the Summer 1985 issue of The Drama Review, Arnold Aronson describes their subject matter as often evolving “from instinctual or subconscious sources”(65). And for that reason, this analysis will not dwell long on a review of the play as much as it will on the particular methodology that the Wooster Group used when fielding this production and the subsequent controversy that it engendered. Aronson summarizes their approach effectively in his review:
...the Group has taken modern classics (The Cocktail Party, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Our Town, and The Crucible) as raw material upon which to construct theatre pieces. Out of these sources come fragments of scenes, characters, dialog, and thematic material, which are explored, reworked, echoed, quoted, blended, and juxtaposed with fragments from popular, cultural, and social history as well as events, ideas and situations that emerge from the personal and collective experiences of members of the Group. (66-7).
Their techniques have been influenced by “the expressionistic style of many ensemble groups of the late 60s” especially in regard to the emphasis on immediacy (65). It is impossible to have an accurate appreciation of the Group’s work, therefore, unless one has actually been there to see the performance. However, “the structure-- the most dominant aspect of the performances,” according to Aronson, “is highly formal and abstract,” and is thus available for effective analysis (65).
***A review of the film, Being Light (2002)
Being Light (2002), an independent film written, directed, and performed by Ramain Duras and Jean-Marc Barr, is a satire of “heavy” Western modes of expression. The story involves the journey of Maxim and Jack from Paris to India, in search of the beautiful Justine. Through the conversations engendered from their various adventures and relationships, Duras and Barr demonstrate the wisdom of Being Light.
As the backgrounds shift, the perceptions about the characters transform in the contrast between Western and Eastern worlds and the value systems that each represent. In part, the character Jack personifies the West. His ruling idea is that “Greed is the engine of progress!” Maxim personifies the East in the worship of his guru, a small plastic pig that he often pulls out of his pocket and speaks to: “O beloved Pigmaster, give me the courage to know all worlds around me!” Next to the title, the exhortation to explore multiple worlds is also a driving theme as the plot develops around a quest that bridges those worlds.
The symbols of these worlds also extend past the attributes of the characters. The West, as Paris, is shown as fast moving, unethical, materialist, and coarse to elevated sensibilities, a place where Maxim must be locked up. The East, as India, is depicted as a realm where spirituality and madness are actually cultivated rather than restricted, a place where Jack must die.
One method that Duras and Barr use to establish the contrast between the worlds is through suggesting an identity between advertising slogans and ancient enigmatic oracles. Maxim, a lunatic that has recently escaped the Flowery Field asylum, is entranced by the statements that he reads on signs: “Follow your instinct!”, “Even when we are closed we are open!”, “Wake up your tongue!”, “Please empty the trash!”, “Beauty is our city. Preserve it by keeping it clean!” He reads them with great enthusiasm, not as a consumer fooled by his own appetites or as a citizen mindful of his obligations to the hygiene of a community, but as a seeker after truth, following encoded suggestions from worldly signposts. His humorous exaggeration that achieves the imperative commands with astute earnestness, ridicules the ways that signs direct the actions of individuals.
By the end of the story, Maxim, the escaped mental patient, is recognized as a lucid spiritual guide (Though he has much to learn from Justine). Jack, who is successful in the business world, is exposed as a shallow idiot who has been hiding behind a wig (literally and figuratively) and who is incapable of appreciating experience without considerations of profit potential. This is the most important reversal in the film. The taxi driver in India begins referring to Maxim as “Sir Maxim” after he receives unabashed advice from him concerning marriage and the treatment of his wife, advice that Jack would be embarrassed to give. This is enforced by the reference to a mad child in India as one who is “protected by the gods” and also by the epileptic fits intentionally induced in Indian shamans, to achieve higher levels of consciousness.
There is an identity here between the asylums of the West and the sacred temples of the East when Maxim begins slapping a man during a fit and warning him that he will have to go to the third floor if he does not calm down. This again suggests the close connection between madness and wisdom.
The friendship between Maxim and Jack, however, is mutually reinforcing and rises above a direct criticism of capitalist aggrandizement. Jack, by listening to Maxim, and observing his interactions with the world and also to Justine, is able to restore part of his compassion and sense of humor. Maxim, through Jack’s worldliness, is able to fully express himself with security. Duras and Barr carefully express the more serious themes indirectly, though, in accordance with the title, which directly undercuts any attempt to assign meaning. It is a paradox. The meaning of the film, even when we attempt to assign one, is that there is significant value not trying to assign grave meaning. With this interpretation, the taxi driver’s rebuke of Jack’s pretentious humility, embodied in the exhortation to “Forget Ghandi!,” becomes clear.
The strength of this film is in its simplicity. Ramain and Barr concentrate on conversation, human interaction, and an intriguing plot development to hold the attention of the audience. The natural environment of India and cosmopolitan Paris make for colorful contrasting backdrops. There are no special effects. The vivid personality of the characters against these backgrounds is the real enhancing element. Maxim is the central figure and “hero” of the film. More than anything else, Being Light is an exuberant reflection of his life spirit which is light, free from the gravity of the Western world. The best scenes in the movie are those in which he dances with Justine on a mat. There is no music. It is a nonsensical expression of joy that interrupts the serious undertakings that surround the two of them in an asylum, restaurant, landscape, or in any world that they may meet.
[1] 'The Future of Storytelling' - panel speculating on potential of the filmic game narrative
at the XO6 conference, September 2007.
[2] Joseph Knecht, the Magister Ludi (Master of the Game), is the hero of Herman Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game(1943). ‘Knecht’ is a German word for ‘servant’. Servant and server are often used interchangeably in the English language.
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