I’ve been fighting off a cold all week, but it’s never quite tipped over into full blown concern.
Just low level, bone tired, bunged up, pressure behind the eyes. It’s worse in the mornings when I’ve been laying down over night. BUT, i’m not going to complain any further as it’s nothing that a little Lemsip can’t get me past.
Game Definitions
I read On game definitions by Oliver Laas this week, which can be found in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. It’s a short essay in the relative scheme of things, 13 pages. But has a lot of deep insight.
Rather than focusing on ‘games’ Laas instead focuses on their definitions and how they work in different ways to achieve certain ends – I hope I’ve parsed the essay correctly as I’m about to explain it LOL.
Drawing on Wittgenstein’s idea of games as having family resemblances (as I also did in my mythmaking mechanisms talk) Laas argues that definitions are not fixed and absolute but depend on their purpose. A lawyer defining a game for legal reasons for example will approach the task it differently from a game designer.
Some definitions list examples of games, while others try to find the necessary conditions that make a game possible.
Laas argues that definitions are not just neutral descriptions but arguments that people use to support certain viewpoints. For example, some people define games in a way that excludes video games from being considered sports, often because they want to maintain a traditional view of sports as purely physical activities.
The essay then explores three common ways that people define games. The first is called a “real definition,” which tries to describe the true nature or essence of a game (Huizinga, Morgan etc). The second way to define games is through “explicative definitions,” which aim to clarify the meaning of the word rather than claim to describe its essence (Suits) and lastly “persuasive definitions,” which are used to push a particular viewpoint. A good example is OG atari video game designer Chris Crawford’s work on games, which states that they must meet a set of conditions.
The definition you choose shapes reality. Returning to Esports as an example, whether or not you consider it a “real sport” has financial and social consequences.
There’s also some power analysis mixed in too. Like, asking who gets to decide what counts as a game and whose interests are being served by a particular definition. There is no single answer to the question “What is a game?” because the answer depends on the situation.
On The Blog:
I’m still getting the old episodes of the pod online. Only 8 more to go!
Permanently Moved
Survive Until 2025
2024 is leaning over into 2025 in a way that makes everything feel precarious.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/02/09/2501-survive-until-2025/
Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymoSubscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/
Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Met up with Cullen Miller from SPAWNING and spent the day with him on Monday
- Put another 4k words into the current big writing project
- Did a major restructure of the document and feel a lot better about the flow now
- It’s revealed what i’m missing and where a whole bunch of other ideas need to go
- Big launch for PROJECT ENTRY!
- Call with the team behind a certain virtual influencer art project
- Delivered a thing that has been hanging around since last year.
- no new work in the pipe
- But its fine, because I have a MEETING next week.
Terminal Access
I highly recommend watching Bratton’s 90min lecture A Philosophy of Planetary Computation: From Antikythera to Synthetic Intelligence to the Long Now Foundation last week. Really interesting, a lot to chew on. Brings together and lands over a decade of his thinking.
Dipping the Stacks
Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope.
Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals – by Erik Hoel
My point is not that nerdom itself is bad compared to other choices, but that, like any dominate cultural force, it is totalitarian, and even moreso, that it poses a unique problem of capturing a segment of the population that should be caring about things a bit more. . . artistic. Aesthetic. Abstract. And I’m a big enough nerd to admit it.
The Curious Case of the Channeled New Age Tape | Bandcamp Daily
A few years ago, John Brien was digging through some cassettes at a Goodwill store when one tape caught his eye. Its cover read Agartha: Personal Meditation Music at the top and Spiritual Questing: Music for Alignment at the bottom. In between sat a striking painting of a woman flanked on one side by a pastoral lawn-and-house setting, and on the other by cosmic swirls emanating from her body.
I am a better therapist since I let go of therapeutic theory | Aeon Essays
That finding, from the journal Developmental Psychology, undermined years of learning in psychodynamic theory. It means that the effect of your family environment – whether you are raised by caring or distant parents, whether in a low-income or high-income family – matters very little when it comes to your personality. If you’ve ever had any training in therapy, this goes against everything you have been taught.
People who demand nothing of you (or, notes on charismatic people)
The most likable, charismatic, enjoyable people to be around are people who demand nothing of you
Reading
Still re-reading Autobiography of a Yogi. Still reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. Still chipping away at Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh.
I went back Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead this week too. But mostly I just blasted though both audiobooks in the Urdesh duology in the Gaunt’s Ghost‘s series/Warhammer 40k universe. Bit crazy to listen to both back to back. But it is what it is.
Music
Oklou – Blade Bird | NTS Session
Oklou was a real hilight of Unsound back in 2018, and I loved the 2020 EP Galore. Her new debut album choke enough came out the other day and it’s all I’ve been listening too since it dropped. The track blade bird and it’s video filmed and recorded at Streatham Ice-rink for NTS radio is wonderful. Blade Bird is the album closer and a lovely track.
I really enjoyed this interview with Oklou about the album with cracked magazine:
“I’m actually a bit sad to acknowledge this, because it’s been my inspiration since I was able to go online on my own, but I’ve gotten tired of the internet,” says Marylou Mayniel, as she absent-mindedly sucks from a magenta smoothie through a paper straw. “My YouTube algorithm has become so bad now that I don’t discover anything any more. It’s not just YouTube – the daily energy I get from X is terrible. Instagram is the same. I’m bored.”
Remember Kids:
But the success story was also a matter of timing. The chip was born just when the computer was starting to grow up.
The Chip by T. R. Reid
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