Something I want to make

Dear Friends,

There is something I want to make.

It's a computer game. I have never made a computer game, and I don't really know how to, but there are books for that and it's a relatively new and exciting medium and I have a couple of ideas that have been kicking around for a while.

The one I want to talk about today is an adaptation of the film Groudhog Day.

As a physicalist I find it very interesting to think about Groundhog Day. If he remembers what happened on previous days, then that means the composition of his brain is different every time he wakes up. And if he can be different in some ways, maybe he can be different in other ways too. Bill Murray's character learns tricks like throwing cards, and he learns the piano. This might require his muscles to change a bit, so he can move his fingers across the keyboard faster. If he had been learning guitar instead, would he get hard callouses on the tips of his fingers?

Will he get more physically muscular the next morning (or that same morning repeated again the next time) if he does a lot of exercise? Will he get older? What if someone he knows notices that something has changed about him, one of his crew for instance? Would he just have to explain the magic? I am not sure anymore whether he does explain the magic spell that dastardly groundhog placed on him to anyone, and if it made a difference. I guess there is no reason why not. Anyway I was having fun thinking about what the rules of Groundhog Day would allow to be changed and what thez would not.

The reason I am interested in this is that I was thinking that a Groundhog Day type set-up could be a nice pretext for deconstructing the RPG, in particular MMORPGs.

They are called RPGs for role play games, but in my experience that does not really seem to be the defining feature. You could say that all games are role play games: they are not real life, that is why they are games. (I mean, obviously they are real life, but they are supposed to be representaions of something other than your own real, actual life. You know what I mean). What I find curious about MMORPGs from my limited experience is that the player logs in, or whatever, and when they do they arrive in a world that is essentially unchanged from the last time they did so. Most NPCs that one intereacts with do not change their behaviours to you, or if they do it will usually only be once or twice. No, the only thing that has really changed is you. Like in Groundhog Day.

That is what characterises the RPG for me. A relatively static world where most of the progression that takes place is the development of the character themself. This makes sense, as it seems pretty safe to imagine that RPGs are spiritual descendents of mythology, with their focus on great people (who you get to imagine being) with supernatural ability engaged in almost god-like feats.

And so I thought it would be fun to make a big open sandbox type RPG, where you get to go and explore and do quests and stuff, but every 24 hours in game time you would wake up again in your bed. It could start a bit like Groundhog Day in the setting, or it could just have a few little references to the film and most of it could be more overtly about deconstructing the RPG genre.

This brings me to my next point about this game. Did you ever see the film Adaptation? Oh! Silly me for asking, you can't interrupt me to respond, that's not possible within the medium I am working with! It seems like I am frivolously breaking the flow of my writing to make a silly joke but actually I am trying to make a broader point. Adaptation is a film about its filmmaker, Charlie Kaufman, trying to write a film adaptation of a non-fiction book called The Orchid Thief. It's my favourite film, I'm going to watch it back to back with Being John Malkovic which it references at some point and you are all invited. The film Charlie Kaufman ends up writing is the film that you watch when you see it: so you watch a film of that very film being written. It's interesting. There's lots of self-referentiality but it isn't annoying or overly pretentious, rather it raises some very interesting ideas. Now you should see the theme I was trying to evoke earlier: recognition of the medium one is working with in the content of the created object. In some respect this is inevitable: it is impossible for the paint to make no difference to the painting: the paint is the painting. On the other hand it breaks down the fictions that we surround ourselves in when delving into a good story: it makes us reflective and not fully embedded in whatever world has been created. A world is instead created which is part fictional but part intellectual: where the interplay of ideas provides half of the drama. Obviously it is very easy for this to be done badly, but it seems to me the most authentic way of doing business.

I go into writing because I am interested in saying things. sometimesfor this best to work it is better not to acknowledge openly the fact that one is writing within the writing, but sometimes it is a good idea. I think that making a deconstructed RPG adaptation of Groundhog Day is one of the times that it is a good idea. I could even go Adaptation style and openly speak to the audience within the game about the fact that it is an adaptaion and reflect on what I am trying to do. I could even talk about the influence the film Adaptation had on the game.

We have things like metafiction, metajokes, there's lots of things that can be meta. We can very well ask why looking at a some object through specifications of its own devising should be such a persistent theme, but the answer is not particularly elusive. The objects own specifications can shed unique insights into the object itself. Perhaps completion requires that we see things in terms of themselves as well as in any other light we wish to see them in. If something cannot be meaningful within it's own criteria of what it is to be meaningful, perhaps it cannot be meaningful at all.

I am trying to express an idea now which does not feel like it wants to be expressed, but I will do my best. Just as Charlie Kaufman found it hard to turn a non-fiction book into a film narrative, so I think it would be hard to turn Groundhog Day into this game. I think it can be done better, however, with enhanced disclosure of the project contained within the project. The disconnect between the media can be bridged in part by a certain selfconsciousness and engagement of the audiences higher faculties in making the appropriate connections and creating the complete picture.

I have some tadpole thoughts about the future, or perhaps present, of our ideas which the preceding sentences can be seen as a prelude to. I wish to give the subject greater attention in due course, but I think that there might be an emerging trend occurring towards metamodernism. It has its won wikipedia page, though I am not sure what it says. If we can characterise the first half of the twentieth century as modernist, with the advent of mass mechanisation, the production line and the changes in perspective that brings, we can perhaps see the second half of the twentieth century as postmodern. Themes might include a certain recycling or collage of culture, an anything goes attidute bordering on the nihilistic.

I would tentatively characterise metamodernism as the trend that we might see following postmodernism. To me it seems like a self-conscious but cautiously optimistic way of attempting to derive or construct meaning, carefully acknowledging the influence of what has come before but trying to build on it, not just produce faint echoes and distortions of it. Wrapped up in this are ideas of the difficult situation we find ourselves in, of uncertainty, doubt, isolation, mutual incomprehensibility, meaning as socially constructed but possibly still extant, religion as probably false but possibly good, this jumbled mess of an ephemerally emerging consensus. The metamodernism work is something between art and an academic essay, it seeks to achieve authenticity through disclosure and careful consideration, while knowing full well this might be impossible but trying nonetheless, because there is a fair chance there is nothing else.


Caleb

The trouble with performance pay...

... is that it seems to me it creates perverse incentives. Employees have good reason to attempt to lower expectations on their performance to lower their target thresholds, because it would make achieving those targets more likely, increasing their chance of getting a bonus. Therefore it seems to me that a rewards system based on meeting targets that the employee themself has a say in framing may cause organisations to lower their expectations, and accept less from their employees. This could be seen as a problem particularly in public services where a tepid institutions quickly translate into social misfortune.

I will be interested to see how the narrative develops on high pay in the public and private sectors, but at the moment it looks to me like there is no perfect solution. Every pay policy comes with its own problems.