Power
This is the story of power. In the beginning, there is the community. At first there’s no real differentiation between members, each doing whatever work seems to need to be done as it occurs to them to do it. One…
Tag Philosophy
Meaning
When we search for meaning in an uncaring universe, what is it we search for? Meaning isn’t an object that can be found, isn’t an inherent trait of anything, isn’t even a truth that can be discovered – meaning is…
Fate
A little while ago I was participating in a conversation about the nature of causality and whether the information we have supports the idea of a deterministic universe, and I found myself getting perhaps uncharacteristically defensive. If you aren’t familiar…
Zeroes and Heroes
How is a number like a hero? How is an equation like a tragedy? First: The world as we perceive is not the world as it is. As we perceive the world we live in, through our sense of sight…
A Sense of Place
I don’t know where the bottomless pit began. Maybe it’s always been there. How can something with no end have a beginning? But I think most of us first encountered the bottomless pit playing Super Mario Brothers, falling off the…
Myself
We aren’t ourselves, really. Over our lives, a persona is constructed around us. For some of us, that role fits us well, and for others less so. Sometimes the gender doesn’t match. Sometimes we don’t really want the things we’re…
Team Colors
It’s useful knowing what team you’re on. Red vs Blue, Shirts vs Skins, Us vs Them: In game design, we try to make that difference obvious on first glance, we make the shapes different, tall and thin vs short and…
Tiny Gods
One appealing aspect of religion is that it lets us presume our world is crafted with the same care and intent that we put into our art. The difference here isn’t a matter of intelligent design vs unintelligent design – to…
Self-Aware
What obligation do we have to our creations? In the film Ex Machina, the character Nathan, designer of an apparently fully conscious artificial intelligence, is shown through the story to be abusive to his creations, a tyrant, a monster. He…
Breadcrumbs
Admitting that I don’t really know who I am has made my life so much easier. Admitting that I do not know the extent to which I am fundamentally unknowable has made my world so much simpler. Admitting that my…