Category: Narrative

To AI, or not to AI – that is the question.

~ Gleb K. ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I’ve played Per Aspera and it was a nice take on good old Settlers with a slick futuristic UI and a theme of Mers colonisation. The gameplay does get a bit repetitive after a while, but what kept me engaged was the story: you are an AI tasked with the terraforming of the planet. You have to keep reflecting on practical and philosophical conundrums as the game progresses.

This was a great depiction of an AI personality since currently the term “AI” is being diluted by the introduction of image and text (and code, I think?) generation engines on which companies slap the word “AI”. I won’t argue that companies introduce some complex products, but I personally don’t view those as AI. It turns out that there is actually something called the “AI effect” – the tendency to not consider something an AI once it is well understood. Without going into a philosophical discussion about this I will just say that Per Aspera definitely got me pondering on this topic a lot.

Corelan

~ Gleb K. ~ Leave a comment

…

Corelan was a middle-aged man of a medium build from a bigger Molrava city.
He got stationed to Trell after he accidentally let through a cart filled with goods among which were several barrels of rare delicate spices somewhere from across the Endless Sands. The outbreak of conflicts based on angry cooks and housewives fighting over the piquant spice turned the town into complete chaos for a week. The head judge of the city was so fed up by the cases of destroyed kitchens and sabotaged dishes that the spice was banned. Corelan petitioned to get transferred to somewhere where people didn’t give him the stink eye because he simply let a merchant with some ground herbs through the gates.

…

Interactive Storytelling 2018

Introducing the Bible as an artefact

~ Gleb K. ~ Leave a comment

Welcome to a short overview of one of the biggest magic portals in the world – a book of Bible. The current user base is approximately around 30% of the global population. One may also note that the Bible as a literary work is an iteration of the Judaism stories thus making the Bible partly a recycled magic circle.

So, how is a Bible a magic circle?
Bible is a collection of narratives which makes the book itself into a magic circle, like any other story. But it’s MDA is too separated between different planes of existence that the perception of the real value of the text becomes too diffused or distorted. The problem lies in the fact that one might suggest that a book of Bible actually consists of 2 separate magic circles: one magic circle dealing with the Mechanical part (the Ritual) and another magic circle dealing with the Dynamics and the Aesthetics (the Story).
To understand what is the Church one must understand what a Ritual is. A Ritual is a routinely performed action by a human where they connect some personal meaning to the performed actions thus giving them more purpose from the individual perspective. It is how a user can incorporate the stories of the Bible into their daily life. The Ritual is the more familiar magic circle to our physical plane of existence. It manifests itself in the form of the Church and the weekly visit to the temples (check-in, submission).
The Church is the one who has the most control over influencing its user’s behaviour and can basically be viewed as a giant corporation whose sole interest is to attract more users to their game (acquisition). But like so many other entities that reach the level of a corporation, the Church is losing sight of what allowed it to become what it is. In today’s realias we witness the Church slowly killing their own product by their own actions.
The Church takes upon itself a role of an interpreter of how the Ritual is to be performed and the actions to be understood. The problem is that people are bad at drawing a line between the Ritual and the Story. By spreading their influence over the Ritual, the church basically can interfere with the user’s experience (the Story) of the Bible reader on all possible levels (Protestantism is a reaction to limit the Churches influence into the interpretation of the Story). And while the initial version of the Bible magic circle under the Church’s administration might have been very successful in its initial stages, in today’s rapid society the Bible becomes an artefact of the past exactly because of the archaic structure of its magic circles.
The submission (busy work) approach to the Ritual as a type of Fun scares away new converts from Christianity as an active practice. This, combined with some other questionable practised by the Church back in the days (examples: crusades (murder), catholic indulges (transactions), Spanish Inquisitions, etc.) creates more and more agnostics in the Christianity dominated regions of the planet. One must mention that the church has been facilitating its user base through many different practises, like increasing the quality of life of its user’s for example and it retains a strong presence in the poorer places of the planet (which would be logical as such would have been its function in its original form). But Europe, as the heart of Christianity, is losing its interest fast (retention). And the reason for that could be the punishing levels of submission that seem like an unproportionate investment of time against a possible payout. People simply vote with their time. They choose to perform other things besides participating in the Ritual. And this has a consequence in the real world.
European society has been fostered by the Church for a long period of time. And the Church has contributed in various ways to the well-being of its customers (LTV). The Church remains one of the bigger charity engines in the world. One of the things the Church did try to teach people was the understanding of co-operation. This meant that by losing younger generations the Church essentially caused an emotional ice age in Europe with the last century being filled with a sense of anxiety and depression in the young people.
How can one claim that? Because it is easy to oversee the fact that a good game creates a good community. Now imagine a tradition of millennia being interrupted? One might suggest that today’s agnostics in Europe are simply people who got severed from the major cultural stream. And this might explain a strange sense of homelessness that a lot of youth feel in these last years. It might be the slow crippling realisation of the fact that we appear to be missing a crucial part of our life – the community. The sense of community that used to be fostered by the Church for the last dozen centuries.
Now, to the more interesting speculative part: the OTHER side of the Bible (secret). The side that has brought Christianity its influence, stature and popularity in the Mediterranean and helped the Faith to foster the community (dynamic). If one is to look past the noise of the façade created by the Church, the book contains a much more intricate magic circle on the inside (alternate reality). And this information is obstructed by the language and the interpretation. So, a new user would only be able to perceive the Ritual part of the Bible but not the Story. And it is, in fact, the Story that helps to understand the Ritualistic submissive side of the Bible. But with the Story being too out of focus because of the latest Church trends (and by late we mean, the past several centuries), the submission seems like a waste of time.
Time is the central reason why today most of the Abrahamic religions are starting to slowly lose their ground. These games are designed for a different time. And different time perception. The Bible is a game designed by the ancient writers to allow the exploration of time as well as space. People are generally curious about their surroundings. But, we are talking about a world where information is travelling at the pace of a turtle. We are talking about a world where you might never leave your home village or town and be surrounded by the same people your entire life. We are talking about a world where you do the same tasks (a.k.a the daily grind) for your community every day of your life. But the religion allows for a temporary escape from that (fantasy). And a story about a distant city (open world) for an ancient kid is probably like a story about a different planet for a modern kid. Almost beyond our imagination. And it allows conveying stories from different periods of time (playing with time). This is our oral history. This way information travels at what now seems like an excruciatingly slow pace. And one has to fill up a lot of time between people coming and going (arrivals and departures) who are carrying the information from other places in the world (location-based, spatial expansion).
However, the Bible teaches not only to understand the physical world beyond the borders of the mundane but also teaches to understand other people. This is something that comes together with any creative work (creative work). And since Bible is basically a catalogue of stories, its artistic value is immense. Artistic expression is something that can exist only in the head of the readers without affecting the world around them instantaneously. So, every reader creates their own content that is unique to them (personalised, sensations, fantasy) that can never directly be experienced by other people. And these are the emotions (empathy). Outside of the emotions, the Bible delivers a bulk of information on such concepts as the benefit of teamwork (teamwork), overcoming the challenges alone or with someone together (challenge), and the unending human search for something that is hidden or unknown (treasure hunt). And while the content of the Story text-wise is a magic circle that all can enter and share, the emotional magic circle is much more intricate.
Here comes the tricky part. One can assume that our emotions are uniquely generated content, thus we assume we are all special. But in truth, there are only a limited amount of emotions which we humans can observe and sense. We are limited by our sensory organs. So it’s possible to assume that if one person experiences something, then another person, in fact, can experience the same if the conditions are right. And through experiencing the spectrum of emotions a person can recognize these emotions in other people (social expansion). And this can be called empathy (love, sadness). A language of emotions that is woven into the underlines of the Bible. With the biggest twist of the Bible being the resurrection (surprise) of Christ, a person who is fluent in the language of emotions would probably experience a very enlightening moment.
And today there seems to be a general lack of exactly that – empathy.
So perhaps, it is reasonable to assume that if the Bible was to be revised to today’s understanding of how fast the time and information exchanges are, this magic circle can still be resurrected.

This text was created to fit the terms in (cursive) as a part of a  university course. Any correlations with the real world are not accidental at all, but a lot of this could be complete nonsense. Thanks for reading!

Ubiquitous games 2018

Refrigerator people

~ Gleb K. ~ Leave a comment

They were seated on the blue Egyptian sofas with a round wooden table between them. The rays of the autumn sun pierced through the arcs of the loggia all the way to the opposite wall. The vapour from the cups on the table was slowly swirling towards the ceiling and the outside, creating an elaborate dance with the floating particles.

-So… have any ideas?

-You keep asking that question. No.

Ten minutes pass by in the silence.

-How about now?.. Sorry! I did it again.

-Yep. Why?

-Well, you know, it’s sort of like the fridge.

-Excuse me, but what?

-Hm, sometimes I open the fridge, examine the content and see nothing interesting in there. Yet 10 minutes later I find myself staring at the open fridge again, although nothing new was placed there. I know that for a fact. I am simply bored or trying to distract myself. Sounds familiar?

-Yes, but what does that have to do with ideas?

– Now imagine our heads as a sort of a fridge where things can appear out of nowhere without the door being open. Thus you have to keep checking if anything new has materialised itself inside. 

-I guess that makes some sense. But what I find funny is that this comparison only works if you know what a refrigerator is.

What is the “exception to the rules” or how do puzzles work?

~ Gleb K. ~ Leave a comment

Okay, here is how I SEE this, just a random thought :

On the topic of “exception to the rule” or commonly referred to as “black/bad sheep” – which I assume most people only have a vague idea about, because they never actually ask.

There is a saying “you need to see the BIGGER PICTURE” and a saying “the DEVIL is in the DETAILS”.

so… the first one says that there is the importance in the big picture, and the second one asks to pay attention to the small parts. So it’s a PARADOX! You have to be farsighted and close sighted at the same time?!

SOUNDs, complicated… Well, actually, not at all. The very FIRST expression IS the missing LINK.

Here is an example: A Puzzle

You are in a bookstore or in a toy shop. Somewhere there on the shelves, you have probably seen boxes with puzzles. I personally love gathering puzzles and I have done a 1000 and 3000 pieces (I think? it doesn’t matter). The point is that no one else in my family could last in front of the thing longer than 20 minutes. At the same time, I was able to assemble these for hours. Which means that I must have spent more than 100 hours doing an activity which basically consists of looking for a piece of cut cardboard in the pile of other cardboard pieces. It is deathly boring. Unless you know what you are doing!

Now, one can claim that the main point of a puzzle is patience. But that would be inaccurate because patience is involved in any task that you deem as a task worth your time. Otherwise, you would just think “this isn’t worth my time” and you wouldn’t do it.

Back to the puzzle. The main point of a puzzle is to figure it out. And here is a solution to a puzzle of any type (numbers/shapes/colours/sounds). It’s the same principle in everything, just takes forever to understand it. You have to, figuratively speaking, watch the universe die, and it’s just the slowest thing ever, and no commercials. Like that ballet, you never went to. At least an opera has acts and pauses in it. That’s why we prefer opera, honestly. But puzzling teaches you to approach this as just a problem and that’s the beauty of it. You will either solve it or you won’t. But once you learned something you can never actually unlearn something unless someone hits you on the head. That’s called “amnesia”. But don’t we forget things? Well, yes, because of the “exception to the rule”. And after a while, you just realise that this can be applied to anything. So here are all the elements of “How to solve any puzzle for Dummies” (sorry if this insults you, dear reader, but you wouldn’t be here otherwise)

Where are you making the puzzle?

– a flat surface that needs to be big enough to fit the finished picture and also to have a “frame outside of the work”. The frame is a space where you tend to put pieces that are “suspicious” because you are “zooming in” on their position and you don’t want to lose them the bigger piles.

What do you know about the puzzles?

– you know that you are gathering a bunch of random-ish shapes (the pieces have actually different cuts if you pay attention) into a bigger particular shape (usually square or rectangle).

 

– can you see the picture at all? It might be on the box, which is usually the case. If not, you just got to a new level of hard because:

a. There might be a black and white picture (2 colours)

b.  This might be a coloured picture (pray to your gods, HAHA, that it’s relatively un-mixed, otherwise you are in deep trouble)

c. No picture (I hope you are ready to die, basically)

And you are missing the context completely.

So, let’s not even think about there not being an instruction manual (the picture) cause that’s the thing about puzzles. You see the instruction literally on the box. It’s not a piece of paper inside… actually there are no instructions inside. So if there is no instruction, then you might as well just turn off the light and start learning to locate shapes with a sonar, like bats. It will probably take the same amount of time to learn how to piece together a 10000 puzzle by just the shape. Which is funny, because you can technically do that if you instead make 10000 identical pieces but with a picture. So, basically without a glimpse of the picture, you don’t know anything. Now, back to the puzzle instruction:

-Flip all the pieces. Have fun!

– Now try and fail with the following steps. Repeat infinitely until this can’t be repeated.

A. take a piece and try to fit it with another random piece without any point of reference. Repeat infinitely until this is impossible.

OR

B. Sort by observable shapes (pssst, the frame is the easiest cause it’s missing one side, and after that, you don’t have to think about shapes until you actually notice them) and colours (big juicy spots are easiest to spot. Curse all the picture with a giant BLUE SKY that takes up half of the thing. They are absolutely the worst to piece together).

 

There is no mystery to this. It’s just time perception on a different level. We spend 1-5 seconds assessing data about a piece we looking at to establish if we know anything about its colour or shape that would correlate with any other piece we already remember. Which is why we need to watch the bigger picture to remember a bigger list of already existing data. Get it? The bigger picture, haha.

So, what does all of this mean? I’m getting there.  First, you need to be aware of both the data of the individual piece and the intended bigger picture. However, you have to keep switching between those to keep assigning the data until you remember, in which case you will simply feel like stopping to check. The point of the puzzle is only detectable when 999 of those damned pieces are in place. You reach for the last one and … it not there. And your head explodes. Because you have spent days on this stupid thing, and now you are denied the satisfaction. THAT is the “exception to the rules”. It is the painfully obvious knowledge of the fact that this puzzle is not complete. It’s like knowing that you are holding a cold fork or a warm cup in your hands. I mean… have you actually realised how “knowing” feels like? If the answer in your head is “no” you should really reconsider some things. I mean, seriously, just stop for a second and think about what you are doing, because chances are that there is something naaaaasty happening. As yet another school shooting in a country whose name we shall not mention, but you know which liberty-loving, oil craving, gun defending enthusiasts I am talking about.

If the answer was “yes” you can stop reading now. Congratulation, you figured it out!

But if you hesitated for even a second…

And so, there is the understanding of the fact that you can’t actually finish this work. Your life was spent in vain because you can’t make that perfect picture. Oh, yes, people might not notice, but YOU will know that there is a piece missing. And it might be missing somewhere at the edge which is not that noticeable. Or in the middle, which is super noticeable for obvious reasons. And you can start to double-check the box, around the table, in the entire room. You assess that the puzzle piece is missing and you realise that you are obsessing about that and you need a solution. You spend the entire next day thinking about where it could have possibly gone and where to buy high-quality paint so you can cut out an exactly fitting piece and colour it in a perfect way. No one will notice, for sure. As long as you say nothing, it will be fine. You talk to your colleagues, you talk to your friends, you talk to the guy that works in the shop that sells those tiny weird figurines called Warhammer something? The topic of the subject is that damned piece. Does it even matter to them? Not to your colleagues – they don’t get it. Not to your friends – they tell you are just overthinking it. That guy at the weird shop gives you a weird look. Like he understands? Please, what does he know about you? But at least he helped you pick out the correct colours.

And so you are home, with that tiny bottle of coloured poison, your tools of murder ready to perform the crime of a century (as long as there are no witnesses!) and you feel your head spin in front of that table, where you have been slaving away for moments that felt like centuries that you could see unravel, and sometimes other moments were just passing by unnoticed. They wouldn’t understand anyway. Who knows? Does it even matter? It’s not like it’s the first time this happens…

And you think to yourself “Okay, let’s just calm down and give this place one last look before we do this”. You realise that you did this with your eyes closed. Suddenly you hear a voice say:

– Do what?

You have your eyes closed. You are annoyed at the comment.

– The missing piece, obviously!

– You mean the puzzle piece?

You feel annoyed, confused, tired, annoyed again? And then you think to yourself that it kinda already took forever to piece the puzzle together and a whole day to obsess about finding the shop with the paint, so you can bother your royal self to lower your jaw just this one more time…

-yes…

You sigh and for some reason add:

-i mean the puzzle piece that I can’t find.

-Is that the piece that is right there on the table?

You open your eyes and you see that indeed there is the frame, the picture and on the edge, there is this one piece. You hesitate.

-It’s ok, you just didn’t notice it.

You get distracted from the piece and turn your head to see that there is a person sitting in the corner of the room. You are at such a loss.

-how could I have not noticed it? i was obsessing about it the entire day!!!

-Actually, you have been obsessing about it for three days. The first day, the piece was there, but you forgot to put on your glasses, so naturally, you missed it. The second day I took the piece aw—

-WHAT?!

– shhh… Don’t you want to know what happened?

And you feel compelled or too confused to actually just listen instead of doing something… else… that you are used to doing… in similar situations?

-So, I hid the piece on the second day and you came with your glasses on and looked around and thought to yourself that clearly you can’t see the piece, which was not actually there. And today I put the piece in the exact same place. And I do mean the same, I actually made a marker. And you didn’t notice anything again.

-ok… that sounded weird? Why would you do that?

-To prove my theory.

– …and what would that be, oh you, the mysterious shadow in the corner that I don’t even know who you are and what are you doing here!

– I was betting with the world whether you would actually figure this out this time. You see, I and the world made a wager. I am stuck in this corner and the only way for me to leave is to get noticed. However, people seem to be super-efficient at ignoring my presence. So, I can leave my spot for a short moment to hide something small. To maybe draw someone’s attention. It’s boring, so I make the bet against the world. Would you like to know what the details of the bet are?

-…

 

At this point you are frozen and you can’t really force your tongue to move, because there is something about the eyes that, you realise, are staring at you. You know for a fact this eyes looked at you for a very long time. A very, very long time. You are sensing how you are slowly being crushed by minutes. You are getting crashed by hours. Days are crashing you. Crushing months. Years… How could it be that you sense this in just… a second? But that is the time it took you to look into those eyes.

 

-Of course, you would like that. I was always betting that the person would notice because I was stupid enough to believe in humanity. And finally, I couldn’t listen to the world laughing every time I bet on you no more.

 

Your tongue unfreezes. Your… anger? is allowing to squeeze out a small:

-you bet against ME?!

-No, that was two games ago.

– I … don’t…. understand?

– Well, you see *eyes roll*, I decided that it didn’t matter that the world was laughing, but I was just annoyed at it. So for once, I decided to give up my faith in humanity and try to surprise the world. I mean, come on, I have bet against it for 135971539. I thought that this time it will not suspect for sure. But it did. And the world laughed even louder. Which made the whole situation even more unbearable. So I decided that it was a punishment for me losing my faith in humanity. And I went back to betting on you again. And I lost again.

-why??

-Because you have forgotten.

-what have I forgotten?

– You are doing it right now.

-Am I?

-Yes.

-What?!

 

*eyes roll*

All you hear is silence.

You try to focus. You try to remember something. Your tongue moves slowly as if it is unused to the concept of moving:

 

-So, what happened after you lost when you bet on me again?

-Oh, the noise got even louder.

-And what did you do?

-I realised that there is one way to make the world shut up. Which is how I am speaking to you now.

-And how did you do that?

-I gave up betting because it doesn’t matter. I knew that will happen. It’s the same thing happening over and over again with a slight variation.

-What do you mean?

-Well, you see I bet on humanity before. But every time I lost it was so painful, that I would convince myself that it didn’t happen. Now that I have finally, kinda won, but not really, because there was no bet, I also realised how many times I did bet after all.

-Sounds… bad?

-Not really, I’m ok with this, it is entertaining to watch, I just wish you would realise one thing.

-What?

– Not that it matters, because we will forget any way probably, but there is a thing you can always do.

– What thing?

– You can just ask.

– Really?

-наци.

– Что?!

– No, not THOSE nazies. The grammar Nazies.

you wake up