Playing It Forward

The criticism I get the most is "isn't it heartless and cruel to make a worthy cause dependent on income from games of chance? Why not just give them the money directly?"

Despite the economy of abundance we sketch as a backdrop, with the sun giving enough, in principle, to finance our surf, there's still the matter of triage and opportunity cost. The cost of whatever I'm doing now is whatever I'm not doing -- a tautology, and therefore more properly the business of philosophy than economics, but we can discuss that some other time.

Remember: the games tend to be didactic, in the sense of encouraging thought, though not necessarily about the worthy cause at the receiving end (someone in need of dialysis?), your wins redound to your benefit on your karma profile, nor need this funnel / tube be considered, ever, a sole means of garnering support.

Reach beyond CSN, by all means.

And finally: yes, there's a kind of Darwinian process in that some games won't attract loyal players and/or players with skill, and nor will the causes connected to them. This may be for a host of reasons. It's not my job to predict every corner case that might arise.

Remember: some people are philosophically opposed, on principle, to this or that. A chief benefit of playing it forward is getting to designate, even if only in the sense of a ballpark. If you don't want such-and-such a "charity" to be piggy-backing, taking advantage of your talents and skills, then here's a way to dodge those tentacles, to be free of those shackles. Drop charities. Turn your back. Adopt others. You have a lot of choice in the matter.

CSN puts you in the driver's seat. Manage your own karma profile.

Speaking of tautologies, it's easy to map this model to life itself. You're playing world game 24/7 and your playing has ripple effects that may benefit various projects and initiatives to some degree.

Others may study your profile to figure out what you're up to. Some may learn from your role modeling -- another way to have ripple effects.

Others may work to counter your biases, for example by attending to causes you seem to have no patience for, or which seem to rank low on your totem pole.

You might be a member of a team wherein the players have their individual biases yet, overall, the whole is greater than the some of its parts and lots of bases get covered.

Nirel looked like Mary Poppins tonight.

More Market Research

I don't usually review ISEPP talks in this blog, but Gabe Zichermann's talk was too apropos to CSN work to log elsewhere. Tara and I parked quite a view blocks away in a downpour, plus I'd forgotten my raincoat so showed up wet in my dark suit coat and bright orange T (with a collar -- a reunion relic).

Gabe is quite hip in the pre-hipster sense of "tuned in" (also pre-hippie), and carried his audience pretty effortlessly through his presentation. Folks had no trouble following. He included a long excerpt from Storage Wars, a televised game based on the auctioning and purchase of storage units. In this case, I'd say the game serves a legitimizing function in that people empathize with the back end vulture culture that preys on lapsed units. Reminds me of Six Feet Under in some ways, another deftly edited TV series.

During the dinner, I wanted to run by our business model: vendor profits prime the pump, with contributions to player-selected targets commensurate with performance (heroics rewarded), self profiling ("what type of philanthropist am I?"). He encouraged us to use Twitter for this purpose and I will do so later.

Tara asked about military applications and whether gamification could lead to the breeding of an especially cowardly subspecies of drone nazi, a kind of subhuman (paraphrase). Gabe acknowledged that militaries had been using gamification for dark purposes since forever and yes, he shares her concerns. Tara has grown up around Quakers and is interviewing for Earlham College tomorrow, so you can see where our household might not be especially enamored of keeping a devolved idiocracy in a controlling capacity where outward weapons are concerned.

Gabe cracked an Occupy joke or two, knowing Portland was friendly to this global blowback operation. He also knew we're too elitist about coffee to think of Starbucks as inner circle. Having studied this market, I welcome the influx of coffee drinkers Starbucks provides, plus I'm not against Starbucks adopting a few game kiosks, with our without the CSN imprimatur (just remember, you saw it here first). We could use some of that muscle to get past Oregon Lottery zealots who cannot abide the competition. That would take some of the pressure off the reservations to host all the parking (plus some of our best game studios can only be reached by bicycle, or electric ATV -- approach quietly please, serious studying ahead).

Letter to Allen (Wanderers List)

Hi Allen ---

"Religion" might be a misnomer, so we could say "ethnicity" and imagine one like the Jungian Society, which actively taps psychological resources through rituals involving symbols, dreams, incantations of various kinds.

I've been to some of these Society's lectures with Wanderer Nancy. The venue is a church building, but the content is not specifically Xtian in any way.

It's not that you can practice all the rituals within the format of a lecture (any more than in the format of a toast). No, the meeting hall is more for comparing notes and discussing the various dharmas (teachings) one picked up along the way, in whatever vision quest.

At least one speaker had met with Jung personally, had stories to tell.

I would say television successfully spread a world religion of consumerism / shopping that had been hitherto unknown. Many societies tend towards frugality, ship shape, no excess, minimal -- as an aesthetic, not as a sign of "poverty" (the few assets may be of high net worth). This notion [of] filling your garage and basement with cruft as a counter to depression and in reward for "working hard" would impress many a wise ass Cro-Magnon as stupid / psychotic to the bone.

I would not identify this phenomenon exclusively with "capitalism" however as giving individuals more power as routers, when it comes to spreading assets to nooks and crannies, with guidance from shared screens, might be the basis of a systems science with no special allegiance to the capitalist heroes when it comes to demonizing all competing "isms" (a sign of weakness).

For example, I regard the standing military as essentially a socialist institution (shared public property, institutional wealth over individual wealth) and the above description matches various soldiering philosophies regarding increased unit autonomy and self-direction within the ranks.

On the other hand, the shared focus on "capitals" in the sense of cities, state capitals, might merit the use of this word for some other ideology as well, supranational in focus, urbane and metropolitan.

So for the sake of debate let's call the new religion "capitalism" while reminding ourselves it's a rather different "invisible hand" this time, as the investors think more like Jung & Swedenborg than like Smith & Maynard or Marx & Engels.

Adorno and the Frankfurt School remain influential I would suppose, but I gamble more heavily on Vienna Circle influences, know those horses better (gambling is not verboten in this namespace, or call it "church bingo"). Yes, I'll offer myself as an example capitalist in this namespace (aka "designer religion"). In my case, it's another fork within Quakerism (we're dime a dozen on those). In other tellings, the Unitarians played a pretty big role. Depends on the historian, as always.

Kirby
CSN / Cult of Athena

Cubbies

[ inserted later ]

I'll have to check with the CFO if there's a financial claim on the English language word "cubby", which works in Scrabble. Will the King of English sue if I revector it slightly? Or maybe he'll join us in this use of the short form of "cubbyhole" (we suppress the "hole" aspect, but don't deny it completely -- "accentuate the positive" as they say).

So what's "cubby"?

A cubby is an alternative to Pod (not iPod, just Pod), which is another place to park your body while working, quite possibly in cyberspace. Mostly it's an alternative to "cubicle", which most cube farmers know well, as their home-away-from-home. You get tricked: buy this expensive home with a mortgage, but then you're gypped out of getting to live there most the time, as you squeeze into (a) a commuter vehicle, perhaps single occupancy and (b) a cubicle, often without window or privacy, where you get "supervised" for much of your adult life, not unlike elementary school, but they pay you.

The "cubby" is more of a complete dwelling unit solution and might be added to a camp situation without default demands. It works will with grid hookups, like an RV, but if these are not available, it works with various more semi-autonomous solutions involving composting, rain water harvesting and solar / wind energy collecting. We're talking about a large catalog of Office Depot supplies (you'd think Home Depot but the plywood industry is dead set against us at this point, plywood domes notwithstanding).

You get an operators manual and getting the thing going feels a lot more like booting a computer than doing upkeep on some ranch style suburban Frank Lloyd Wright wannabe. You've got a lot to learn, and might even need a special school (special ed) before putting "cubby friendly" on your resume. Like if the first day on the job for Verizon they send you to a call center in the Andes, and you've faked knowing the basics, you might not figure out about heat, or how to run the comm center. Best to not fake it. Find a retreat center that offers real experience, perhaps through your local church (try Amigos, maybe Steve Martin will take your call).

"dwelling machine rendering"
(by Andrew Owens)

The Fly's Eye Dome has become somewhat the signature / logo for the Cubby movement. There's a sidebar where we alternately heap scorn on, and collect donations for, the cube farmers, who now seem like they're living on squalor. There's "building sickness" and the shame of being gypped. There's knowing some of your peers are enjoying life in the Cubby club, whereas you're still expected to run around in a cube farm, like some rat in a maze, like Algernon before he took the red pill and got smart.

How does all this relate to CSN, other than we're thinking of staff housing? Well, because of the draconian laws against off shore gambling, we'd had to bring this in house more in terms of a subscriber service, like cable or satellite. Then we don't think of it as gambling, but fundraising, with the games serving a didactic purpose. Rest assured, we don't plan on keeping it this way, so completely out of the public eye. But for now, we have to use the "private party" motif, lest we come across as some unregulated casino trying to escape the Federal jurisdiction. That might work on Native American properties, but this is Portland, Oregon we're talking about.

There is a dome at OPDX by the way, looking something like a Cubby, but that's mostly a secret. There's a skin over it, making it look like a regular tent. Nothing illicit, just under the radar.

Note: you can wear a Cuffka in your Cubby, why not?

proto-cubby, OPDX campus

QOTD

"My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein (Culture and Values)

Some slides from my talk

:: from Pythonic Andragogy ::

Faraday Rooms

These were suggested to me at a recent conference as a synonym for what I was calling a Dead Zone, with some kind of public icon on the entrance.

You will avail yourself of such spaces when you want to frustrate cell phone and computer use, radio reception. People may still have personal listening devices. The point is to have conversations, meetings, without the interruptions or distractions of telecommunications.

People entering such a room are signalling their mutual willingness to suspend contact with the outside world and just focus on the matter at hand. One might pull out a cell phone to remember a name, but by social convention this might seem gauche.

You might even have a locker system like in a gym, although that adds a layer of inconvenience.

Some people simply do not wish to part with their telecommunications devices, especially if not that familiar with an establishment.

The "check your phone at the door" policy need not not involve physically parting with your device, although you may wish to park it elsewhere, as a convenience, when heading into a Faraday Room for a long day of intimate discussions.

Whether the Faraday Room is actually engineered to block all wifi and TV-radio would depend on the establishment. Given CSN serves a schooling function (without being too much of a testing center) having feats of real engineering exhibited is more encouraged than not.

Having stories to take home, about some of the Hogwarts-like qualities of the place (inexplicable magic, it might seem to some) is what any good casino aims to provide, whether or not it permits gambling.