Dynamical meaning – coin a new term

I want to write a book.

In a 2008? GDC talk, Jonathan Blow coined a term, Dynamical Meaning.  The basic gist of it is that, as game designers, the systems we create mean something.  They express something whether we intend them to or not.  Just as any random set of notes you hit on the keyboard results in music, be it good or bad, discordant or harmonious, sad or happy, it is, definitely one of those things.  It has expressed something.
It seems that a lot of the time, game designers make games without being fully cognizant of this fact.  They do not pay thorough enough attention to the meaning that is gleamed from their systems, and there is a discordance between the game and the story.

Anyone who wants their games to mean something, who wants to make art in games, or who wants there to be a story in their game, this is an important concept, and it’s poorly understood.

Okay, I could wax philosophical about this for several pages, LJ style (and I will) but at this moment, that’s not the reason I started this post.  I started this post to find a word for what I’m talking about, because it’s driving me nuts that I don’t know what to call it.

Aerial Observation

While flying home from Florida at dusk for Christmas break (or was it Thanksgivng?), I was in kind of a poetic mood, and I was very taken with the view out my window.  What follows is a lightly edited and lightly embellished transcription of my hastily scrawled impressions.

Destined Foes

I have a proposition for you.
Paul Bunyan vs. Godzilla.

Seriously, think about it.
Though Godzilla was originally conceived as an allegory for nuclear war, over the years he has been cemented in a new identity as a sort of protector of Earth and nature (with no particular affinity for humanity).
With our modern sensibilities, we now see that Paul Bunyan is kind of a giant symbol of the western world’s cavalier, entitled attitude towards natural resources.

And when they fight they can have a tag-team battle with Anguirus and Babe.

Oddly enough, though, they share a common enemy in industrialization…  Perhaps it would end with them teaming up to defeat the automatic log-eating Mecha Godzilla.

Chronoscoping

Perhaps this is because I’m just not well-read/watched enough, but something I’m quite surprised I haven’t seen or heard of in popular sci-fi is the idea of using astronomical distances to observe the past.

I used to think about this idea a lot, and was reminded of it when one of the characters in an anime I’m watching mentioned something about the light they were observing, looking at Earth, taking 25 years to get there.

Think about it. If you had a highly advanced, extremely powerful, extremely sensitive telescope that was capable of actually observing the surface of a planet in another star system, then due to the distances involved, you would effectively be seeing human-scale events from the past. (I’m not sure how feasible this is, of course, with the movement of said planet and the amount of light that would be reaching the telescope over that kind of distance, but sci-fi need only concern itself so much with feasibility).

If you had such a telescope, and you also had the ability to travel at faster than light speeds, then without any crazy spacetime tricks (aside from those required in going FTL in the first place) you would then have the power to directly observe past events on your own planet. You could go 65 million light years away and see dinosaurs. You could go 4 billion lightyears away and watch the Earth form. You could go 4 lightyears away and make observations of events that could be used as evidence in a trial.

Is this not a plotline goldmine? Why have I not heard of anyone using this?

Necessity is the Mother of Direction

This post was originally written in response to troubles expressed by many of my friends over the past couple years, so there’s a bit of a personal address to it, but it should still be plenty interesting to the general public.

In times of great need, people will rise to meet that need.
But in times of comfort and complacency, what do we do with ourselves?
Necessity (and profitability) is the mother of direction.

You may remember some posts I made last year mulling over my lack of direction and how I felt about my career decisions, etc.  I’ve had several friends on multiple fronts talking about the lack of direction (or dissatisfaction with the direction they’ve got) they feel coming out into the real world, and it’s gotten me to thinking about how paralyzing freedom can be and how we find direction, or how we deem that a job is something we like, or something worth doing.

How is it that We Are?

I’ve brought this subject up before, but it was floating through my head a few days ago, and I want to address it again in the hopes that I can better articulate it.

I guess this idea started when I thought about how we living beings are separate from each other.   How we can’t see into each others’ heads and feel exactly what someone else feels.  And that leads me to thinking how odd it is that I am what I am.  I’m a not the average person in tons of ways, one of the most prominent being that I, like all of you, live in conditions immeasurably better than even the richest humans have throughout most of our history.   And I got to thinking how, as something of an oddball outcast, the predominant culture seems strange and foreign to me sometimes, and I don’t really know what it’s like to be a part of that, and perhaps in many ways, can’t know.
Anyways, the question is.

Why am I me?  Why am I not someone else?  Why is my consciousness this specific one?

Fear Itself

I’ve been working lately on actually figuring out my fears; pinning down and labeling those vague worries that I too often let control me.

Those laser-eyed Sphinx things from The Never Ending Story always creeped me the heck out when I was a kid.  Fitting, I suppose, since they’re supposed to be a metaphor for how “the only thing to fear is fear itself.”  That’s a very familiar trope in fantasy stories.  The idea of something that only works if you’re not scared, or will only hurt you if you are scared.  That sort of thing has always bugged me.  I’ve talked before in other journals about how I dislike the use of a literal rebirth (as a baby) as a symbol for redemption or a second chance.  It’s a metaphor (is the fear thing even really a metaphor?  It’s kinda just a simplification) that’s so simplified that I feel like it loses its meaning.