Utopia on the Tabletop

Utopia on the Tabletop is poking its monstrous rainbow snout into the world.

The online open access edition of the collection is now available on Ping Press. We won't be making a big noise about it until the print edition is available as well (hopefully soon). 

But in the meanwhile, here it is. A few years in the making, bursting with essays, interviews, and more, on the topic of utopia and tabletop roleplaying games. Gratitude and props to all the contributors and others who have helped it along the way.

Applied Hope games jam

A slow games jam Sad Press Games and Vagrant Ludology ran this summer, acting as a strange attractor for an amazing cluster of utopia and solarpunk themed tabletop roleplaying games and miscellaneous other things. Check them out.

Bunnies & Cyborgs playtest

 

We playtested this thing I apparently wrote (although I can't remember doing so) as a submission for the forthcoming Conjured Games Soft Apocalypse anthology. It was fun! And stable. I hope to run another playtest soon, so get in touch if you're interested. (And/or if you play it, let me know how it goes).

2016 genre roundup

Originally published in Interzone 268.

Didn’t read much new fiction in 2016. Two bookend books, Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself (Gollancz, late 2015) and Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (Tor, early 2017), both come recommended.

I did also really like Yoon Ha Lee’s debut Ninefox Gambit (Solaris, actually 2016). Ninefox Gambit can be enjoyed as a highly accomplished military space opera. There are points of comparison with Ann Leckie, Iain M. Banks, Frank Herbert. It ticks all the boxes vis-à-vis exciting set-pieces, gee-whizz worldbuilding, political intrigue, tension and conflict, sly little twists, and so on.

Thing is, Lee has also arrayed all those ticked little boxes into a strange sigil, a strange sigil of abhorrent and enthralling eldritch leakages. There are points of comparison with, say, Angela Carter. This impression of potent excess may have something to do with gaming, since Lee’s novel is absolutely saturated with the the aesthetics and the logic of gaming.

Ninefox Gambit is packed with vivacious, suggestively intermeshing lore, in the game design sense. Lee’s best incidents gratify like superrare drops. Lee’s sorcerous space conceits – ever enchantingly-baptised, ever partly-occulted – don’t seem to be bothered whether or not I favour them with my suspended disbelief, or with my genre-savvy negative capability. No, all they ask is that I affix them to the edges of my imagination, like new green leaves unfurling on a tech tree, or like bizarre buffs or badass armor upgrades.

The novel's particular form of violence, the way things fly apart in it, suggests games. Even the form of solidity the novel accomplishes often feels like that of games. The critic Carl Freedman suggests that one characteristic of SF is its ‘cognition effect.’ Freedman’s idea is roughly that, as a genre, SF’s solidity is implicated in a kind of rationalist rigor and constancy, which gets supported by a rhetoric of technoscientific plausibility. But I wonder if the equivalent, for Ninefox Gambit, is less about immersive plausibility than immersive playability.

More generally, I wonder: might playability function as a kind of rationality? And if so, how might the rising influence of gaming on genre fiction impact on the complex but enduring distinction between science fiction and fantasy? Perhaps Ninefox Gambit captures a watershed moment.

Pondering such questions takes me to one piece of required reading in SF-related criticism in 2016, Jonathan McCalmont’s ‘Nothing Beside Remains: A History of the New Weird’. If you’re a current Interzone reader you’re familiar with what he can do: in this article, which appeared in the second issue of Big Echo: Critical SF, he does it to the New Weird, fantasy, SF, reason, radicalism and reform, political commitment, and the US and the UK, all supported by deft archival work.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s New Weird anthology features prominently in this history. And in 2016 a new VanderMeer omnibus came crashing through the omnibus-sized hole in the door where the letterbox used to be. The Big Book of Science Fiction (Vintage Books) costs twenty quid new. For a project on this scale, choices about how to construct the object itself, the codex, can be high risk and high stakes. Word is Ann herself katana-sliced millions of sheets of paper to optimum thinness while Jeff haphazardly waved the leaf-blower. But kudos to Stephanie Moss and whoever else was involved in making these 750,000 words readable.

The VanderMeers are “less concerned about making sure to include certain authors” than they are “about trying to give accurate overviews of certain eras, impulses, and movements” (xxix). There is a global outlook, with a pragmatic focus on the USSR and Latin America. The introduction is substantial and useful, with heartening idiosyncracies. It is standing squarely inside Anglophone writing, but en pointe, VanderMeerkattishly peeping over the horizon.

I did wonder if perhaps a few subject specialists could be scouted for the second edition? And there are also gestures toward literary modernism, and speaking selfishly, I would have loved an anthology in which those gestures were a bit more vigorous and flappy. But I can fully appreciate the presiding spirit of mild progress and gentle correctives.

"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert . . ."

The Big Book of SF aims to discard an unhelpful distinction between genre and mainstream literary fiction, yet it makes a point of preserving a distinction between SF and fantasy. Why? The reason that the Big Book invokes – roughly, SF is about the future – definitely has some legs. (Actually, it probably has steadier legs than ‘cognition effect’). One leg (tentacular) is encased in spacesuit polymers; the other (cloven-hoofed) slips into its mithril chausse, chausse, poleyn, etc., and the VanderMeers wield these fantastic trousers deftly. Besides, editors must impose some arbitrary constraints, and there’s a strong hint of a Big Book of Fantasy in the offing ...

Still, I felt there was something faintly unresolved about all this … until I read Jonathan’s New Weird article, plus a post by Ethan Robinson to which it links. That made me wonder: perhaps a monumental retrospective like the Big Book is unlikely to break down the SF/fantasy distinction, precisely because that would spoil the fun for all the billions of contemporary sfantasy authors (?), who need the the SF/fantasy distinction to have something to heroically break down in a sort of pseudo-radical transgression. It is like actually murdering the villain in a cartoon show: who do you overcome next episode?

But perhaps more to the point, the stories that are here translated into English for the first time are stonkers, certainly the best short speculative fiction I’ve read this year (sorry, alive writers). Yefim Zozulya’s proto-dystopian (?) tale ‘The Doom of Principal City’ and Silvina Ocampo’s ‘The Waves’ are my pick of the bunch. Jacques Barbéri ... Burroughs-ish, Ligotti-ish, Clive Barker-ish?

I thought Karl Hans Strobl’s ‘The Triumph of Mechanics’ is the only one whose interest is perhaps primarily merely as a fragment of a larger history? – but even that one has its moments: an opera singer digs in her cleavage and draws forth a robotic rabbit, from whose dugs dangle nine robot rabbit kits, then screams operatically, so there.

2016 may also be a watershed year for the penetration of AI into cultural production. The Twitterbots whose imbrications I have most enjoyed are @dreamhaver, @magicrealismbot, @speculativecash, @fantasticvocab, and maybe also Sarah Nyberg and Nora Reed’s troll-baiting honeybots (e.g. @arguetron).

Two noteworthy short films, both available online [UPDATE: can't find Skies?], that feel SFnal by virtue of their makers: In the Robot Skies was shot entirely through autonomous camera drones; Sunspring was written by a LSTM recurrent neural network fed on SF screenplays. Sunspring felt hampered by strict fidelity to a narrow constraint (unlike In the Robot Skies). Why not shift the constraint just a little bit, and let humans write the stage directions (aka ‘action’)? But it is a fascinating thing, not least for how it reveals SF’s obsession with epistemology, with what is knowable, and how, and why. The film’s dialogue, for all its fragmenting, splicing, garden pathing grammars, keeps coming back to trust, belief, knowledge, understanding. The other big theme is sex.

Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit involves calendrical magic. But let’s end with a jolly Christmas hex on calendars themselves, which entice us into impugning something called ‘2016’ for what we ourselves have wrought.

A good game

Here's a good game: "stonily deny any knowledge of a person or cultural touchstone that you should, by virtue of your other cultural reference points, definitely be aware of." Some of my go-tos include:

John Updike, William Gibson, bongs, Russel Hoban, magical realism, trance parties, Crystal Maze, Charles Bukowski, Joy Division, Jack Kerouac, Italo Calvino, Guy Debord, The Mighty Boosh, Doctor Who apart from NuWho, Cory Doctorow, self-explanatory portmanteau neologizing, Hunter S. Thompson, Steve Jobs, William Burroughs, Brighton, Hegel, Rihanna, zombies (be aware of the word, but conflate with vampire), The Matrix, Bernie Sanders, The Big Lebowski, Stewart Lee, the word “hipster” (conflate with “hippie”), John le Carré, Alan Partridge, Glasto, Owen Jones, Margaret Atwood, Banksy, Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy, the expression “grammar Nazi,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, Drake, millennials, Ursula le Guin, Vladimir Nabokov, Fight Club, Terry Pratchett, the expression “garbage person,” anything with "utopia" in the title, Girls, Gilmore Girls, Christmas jumpers, Blur, dubstep, Thomas Pynchon, The Green Party, Father Jack, Samuel L. Jackson, Cards Against Humanity, The “Žižek Game,” Common, Samuel Beckett, taxidermy, Just Jinjer, Theodor Adorno, insulin, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmitt, search engines other than Google, burlesque, Wallace & Gromit, Jorge Luis Borges, social media other than Facebook and LinkedIn, stepcore, Lee-Ann Perrins, the transformative use exception in IP law, Prince, Verity Spott, Jay-Z, Muhammad Ali, the medical/health humanities, Terry Wogan, J.G. Ballard, Cilla Black, Monty Python, any Pokémon before Pokémon GO, Flann O’Brien, CrossFit, Slajov Žižek, Charles Kennedy, Francis Crot, Withnail and I, The God Delusion, Alasdair Gray, David Bowie (except that he died), Alan Hay, Inception, Radiohead, Maya Angelou, memes (always be more specific: “image macros”; “photoshopped images shared on Facebook”), the expression “grammar nerd,” Rosa Lyster, veganism, David Lynch, Jackie Chan, Morrisey, Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon, CPR, The Toast, Salvador Dali, The Wire, Ernest Hemingway, The NHS, David Cronenberg, Afrika Burn, anarchism, steampunk, Nicolas Cage, Don DeLillo, bunting (this one’s good), China Mieville, Dungeons & Dragons, A Clockwork Orange. And the EU.

RPGs

I have mostly been busy with slightly boring stuff lately, but here's a reminder that the RPG games now have their own site, which includes Dungeons & Drapers (which is D&D meets the Hunger Games, now up to around 80 pages) as well as alpha material for Ends, where maybe you fight subrosses before the big Ross Fight, plus some highly plausible sample play for the Chess mechanics based Dreams & Dystopias, plus the classic and extremely famous Daiquiris & Demigods, plus a nano version (200 words) of Drama & Dice, written for a competition. Everything is free or pay-what-you-want, but feedback, donations, & reviews & ratings (on RPGDriveThru) very much appreciated as always!

Knights of the Thimble

There is a new free lightweight high fantasy tabletop RPG called Dungeons & Drapers added to the Games tab, whose rules may be very familiar to some of you. Other working titles: Skycrawl, Devils & Dwarves, Dweomers & Drow, Danger & Derring-Do, Dragons & Dungeons, Dystopia & Dragons, Hunger & Dragons, Dungeons & Desist.

It is what it is & any comments are appreciated (especially feedback on overall balance), but the interesting bit would really come with the supplementary spellbook, if I ever get round to writing it. There is also a kind of structural joke or provocation to do with race and class; maybe class especially, since it often feels to me that the power that high fantasy RPGs invite players to imaginatively occupy is the power of aristocracy and bourgeois finance, whatever the actual background of the character you're playing. Elf is structurally toff, isn't it? So in Dungeons & Drapers there's an attempt at a nod to the artisanal power of the early modern middling sort. Basically what I'm saying is that it's cool because you're a tailor.

Or perhaps this is just a sign of what happens when you come into some creative practice and start off making wrong & interesting things & gradually start making proper & therefore boring things? *Googles "shrug emoji"; copy-pastes it here*

Dreams & Dystopias

Just created a sample play document for the homebrew diceless YA Dystopian RPG Dreams & Dystopias. See Games tab for more.

Dungeons & Dead Presidents

I've given the games tab ^ a bit of a tidy, and added some content on integrating tabletop RPGs with gambling. I'm not sure if Viviana Zelizer, when she wrote that "people employ money as a means of creating, transforming, and differentiating their social relations," was primarily thinking of things like pretending to murder goblins with fireballs, but perhaps in that sense I'm building on her work.

Anyway: some oddball pen & paper RPG resources, plus a mini Twine game, free for your delectation.

Chesslash

Legacy of a last attempt to persuade myself that chess is not dull. Chess is dull. pic.twitter.com/vGZDZsMKZL
— Nick Harkaway (@Harkaway) January 27, 2015

With the long-overdue backlash against the tyrannical cultural capital of Chess finally kicking off, I am forced to share this snippet from a Work-In-Interminable-Progress:

“Sylve,” said Nahadoth, and then continued in a high-pitched hum, “1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 e6 4. d5 exd5 5. exd5 Qe7+ 6. Be3 Ne5 7. Bb5 a6 8. Be2 b6 9. O-O Bb7 10. Nxe5 Qxe5 11. Nc3 O-O-O 12. Na4 b5 13. Nxc5 Bxd5 14. Qd2 (?!) Bxg2 15. Nd3 (?!) Qd5 16. Qc3+ Bc5. 17. Bxc5 Bxf1 18. Bxf1 Qg5+ 19. Bg2 Qf6 20. Bd4+ Qc6.”
“And?”
“21. Re1 Qxc3 22. bxc3 f6 23. Bb6 Rf8 24. Nc5 Nh6 25. Bb7+ Kb8 26. Rd1 Re8 27. Rxd7 Re1+ 28. Kg2 Rg1+ 29. Kxg1 Re8 –”
Sylvester blinked and bit her lip. “30. Bc6 Re1+ 31. Kg2 Rg1+ 32. Kxg1,” they finished together.
“Yes,” sighed Sylvester, her smile waning. “Yes, I do know what you mean.”

Earlier:

1958 showgirls playing chess between shows. pic.twitter.com/84uAZUTxSQ
— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) January 29, 2015

Update:

Archive rummage: helms & firms

A while back I applied to write for a game -- what eventually became this game -- but I didn't get the job. But here's the sample material I wrote. The game was to be based around this murderous game show called Time To Live, and at that stage of development the cues were campy 80s ultra-violence, satirical sci-fi, and things like Running Man, GI Joe, M.A.S.K. with maybe a bit of Gladiators, Blade Runner, Tron thrown in. We were asked to come up with some helmets and firms, so here are some helmets I made up, and thereafter some firms, also not real.

EQUIPMENT

ADAMANTIUM MESH BEANIE
The toughest beanie known to mankind. When your head explodes, have the satisfaction of knowing your hat’s intact.

ALONSO’S HEAD’S HELMET
This grisly relic was hammered out of the head unit of an android named Alonso. Waste not, want not. What Alonso would have wanted. Definitely.

ORCHID HELM
The blossoms of this genetically modified mega-gargantuan orchid make perfect headgear. For the sports pro who needs to look credible, yet feel fragrant.

FASHION HELM
Probably won’t offer much protection. But it’s very on trend.

EXTREME FASHION HELM
Real-time feeds from fashion bloggers, plus a unique shape-shifting nanotech design, means you’ll always be wearing the very latest. You just may not know what it is.

COMPANIES

1. BUTTERBUG MEDIA

Info: Ah, Butterbug Media! What other business can claim to have brightened so many lives with such buttery, insectile goodness? Butterbug Media are the minds behind such television phenomena as Come Die With Me, America’s Next Trap Model, Who Wants to Mangle a Multi-Millionaire?, The Great Brutish Break Off and Knife Swap.

Butterbug Media is a mecca for hipster geeks and creatives. It’s just a fun, cool, awesome company to work for! Everything an employee’s heart could want is provided for on Butterbug’s flagship location, the Dream Campus, Montreal. Like, there’s even this awesome upside-down antigravity swimming pool on the ceiling. Butterbug Media has no fixed shifts, so everybody can come and go as they please – and almost nobody ever goes! Plus, when employees burn out and have cataclysmic break-downs, they even get to relax – often for the rest of their lives! – at a fun, cool, awesome company-owned neurodiversity celebration centres.

Most important of all, Butterbug Media produce The Axe Factor, currently the second-most-beloved TV show in the world. This is the first year Butterbug Media have sponsored a Time to Live athlete. There’s a clear conflict of interests. So ... what are Butterbug’s real motives?

Company structure and governance: A public limited company headquartered in Montreal. The current CEO is the flamboyant Comptesse Accrington Mountbatten Noire. The Comptesse generally conducts her press conferences from the saddle of her robo-unicorn Stephanie. Junket journalists have nightmares about Stephanie’s prehensile unicorn horn.

Core offering: Development/production/publishing/distribution of mass market and innovative niche media and entertainments products.

Relationships: Butterbug’s most successful show, The Axe Factor, has a rather familiar format: players are given one-and-a-half minutes to live, battling in a tiled arena strewn with random resources and hazards. When the clock runs out a hatchet descends on a spindly robotic arm and gives the athlete the chop. Butterbug Media are, not surprisingly, currently embroiled in a massive copyright dispute with Time to Live Productions.

2. DELIGHT & TOUCH LLP

Info: Delight & Touch has an ethos of restraint, civility, assiduousness and diligence. From its humble beginnings as a discreet, two-partner accountancy practice above a fish and chips shop in Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire, Delight & Touch has grown into a global giant.
Maybe it’s something to do with the lingering aroma of fish and chips, but it’s grown into a hungry global giant. Over the course of the last two decades Delight & Touch has assiduously, diligently, and with the maximum possible restraint and civility, swallowed absolutely every rival firm in existence, gradually coming to monopolise the entire financial services sector and then – just when the world was breathing a big sigh of relief – diversifying. Consultancy, insurance, investment banking, legal services ... it’s now generally accepted that Delight & Touch has more fingers than there are pies to put them in.

Though more comfortable lurking in the small print than hitting the headlines, Delight & Touch made the news in 2192, becoming the first major company to be diagnosed with Compulsive Merger & Acquisition Disorder. Iain Fez-Granfogger, the probable CEO of Delight & Touch at the time, stated to the press: “Companies are people too! We’re born, we grow, we buy property, we pay tax, we have great days and bad days. Why can’t we have feelings? Why can’t we have pretty serious psychiatric issues?” After intensive therapy, a lengthy detox period, and a vow never again to so much as look at a hostile take-over, Delight & Touch has recently re-opened for business. The company is hoping to improve its tarnished image with some high-profile sports sponsorship. The question on everyone’s lips is . . . how long before the first relapse?

Company structure and governance: Legally speaking, Delight & Touch is probably a Limited Liability Partnership. “Probably” because who really keeps track of that stuff?  Because of its intricate company structure, nobody really knows who currently owns or runs Delight & Touch, or where it is headquartered. Delight & Touch is a big operation. It makes Godzilla look like Littlefoot from The Land Before Time. Boasting offices all over the world, and in the exciting new suborbital and lunar tax havens, the company has unparalleled coverage and reach. Don’t be alarmed: there may even be a Delight & Touch office RIGHT BEHIND YOU. Delight & Touch may be big, but it nevertheless keeps to the shadows . . .

Core offering: Audit, assurance, corporate finance, consultancy, insurance, commercial and investment banking, credit rating, regulation and compliance, corporate information technology and cybersecurity, corporate and sovereign troubleshooting, emerging capital technology, corporate legal advice, litigation and dispute resolution, corporate and sovereign surveillance and intelligence, business systems systems services, systems business services systems, systems systems business services systems services, and many, many more.

Relationships:
• In the ongoing Time to Live Productions v. Butterbug Media legal dispute, Delight & Touch are the lawyers for both the plaintiff and the defendant. (This could be seen as a conflict of interests, but that’s okay! – Delight & Touch is also supplying conflict of interests advisory services to both those companies).
• Since the Delight & Touch company structure is so opaque, it’s always possible that a few of the other sponsors are actually its unwitting subsidiaries.
• In order to preserve a reputation for assiduousness and diligence, Delight & Touch is very reliant on Kawaguchi Enterprises products, especially Kawaguchi Assiduousness® and Kawaguchi Diligence® pharmaceuticals. If there were ever a hold up in supply, it would hit Delight & Touch badly.

3. ARCANE SKIES

Info: Don’t be fooled by her bubblegum goth image: Ku'uipo Ashleigh Lopez, teen trillionaire, and sole founder and proprietor of Arcane Skies, is one of the most powerful people on the planet. How did it all start? Lopez tells of the day she turned tragedy to entrepreneurship: “Like, I’ve always wanted my own gigantic, slightly sinister organisation. I was even 22% funded on Kickstarter at one point. But TBBH, my ideas sucked? Then one day, BAM, out of the blue, it hit me! Actually, uh, it hit my cat? There was this huge whoosh and the ground shook. I ran into the garden and found this smoking crater, with nothing left of Doctor Cream but her collar. I still miss you, Doctor Cream! I’ll never forget you! Sooo: yeah! That was the day I decided to set up Arcane Skies, an international planetary defence initiative to develop to detect and defend against the threat to pets of impacts from near-Earth objects.”

Although it’s a moving tale, it’s not totally the full story. The meteorite which slammed into Lopez’s garden contained traces of alien nanotechnology. Patents based on this technology have made Lopez unimaginably wealthy and powerful young woman. Her company Arcane Skies is unlikely to run out of money any time between now and the end of the universe.

Core offering: Pet insurance, specialist counselling, ruggedized petwear, nanotech and material engineering consultancy, missile defence systems, near-Earth object impact site investigation, aeronautics, space exploration, near-Earth object rendezvous and exploration (“the Edge Guard Initiative”). More cynical commentators believe that Arcane Skies, Lopez’s “pet project,” is really looking for more alien artefacts.

Company structure and governance: Ku'uipo Ashleigh Lopez, after contracting the services of Delight & Touch LLP, has exploited a legal loophole so that she now owns 110% of Arcane Skies. The company is currently headquartered in the loftiest towers of the Iberian Peninsular Arcology.

Relationships: Lopez would secretly like to buy out the troubled wormhole R&D company Nexus Tech, which she feels could be very useful for expanding her Edge Guard Initiative.

Possible plot twists: That alien technology was never in the meteorite in the first place – but inside Lopez’s cat.

4. HELLSNIPE HEAVY INDUSTRIES

Info: Mainly construction and engineering. The Hellsnipe Heavy Industries brand has been described as “cyberpunk with a steampunk twist.” Hellsnipe’s big break came when it was awarded the contract to construct Iberian Peninsular Arcology – the enormous castle-state currently encasing the regions once known as Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Andorra, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, Hesse, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria.

Company structure and governance: Hellsnipe Heavy Industries owns numerous subsidiaries, affiliates, brands, branches, franchises and divisions worldwide. The head offices of Hellsnipe Heavy Industries are lodged in an airship, The Clouded Seal, currently hovering over Cairo. The current CEO is Horatio Stone.

Core offering: Construction, engineering, energy, defence, aerospace, space exploration, arcology utilities, arcology maintenance and servicing.

Relationships: Hellsnipe built the Time to Live arena complex, so it has some insider knowledge. There is a natural rivalry between Hellsnipe Heavy Industries, Arcane Skies and Black Puppy, since all three companies dabble in advanced military research.

5. FREEDOM TANK

Info: Freedom Tank is a not-for-profit research and political advocacy group. Freedom Tank describes itself as devoted to the defence of “a more traditional way of life.” In recent years, Freedom Tank have been outspoken opponents of android rights, particularly android marriage.

Company structure and governance: The current President of the Board of Directors is Pastor Chuck Montgomery. Headquartered in Delaware.

Core offering: Traditional family values, rabble rousing.

Relationships: Freedom Tank ain’t exactly friendly with any of the other sponsors. But Freedom Tank has particular loathing for Kawaguchi Enterprises (“Shucks, fixin’ to humanise them varmint tinheads with their uppity techno-narcotics,” claims Pastor Chuck Montgomery) and for Freedom Tree (“Uppity pinko robo-huggin’ varmints”).

Possible plot twists: “Hucks. I mean, sheck. I mean, shucks, robot marriage? Heck! Don’t make a lick of sense. What’s next? Puppets gettin’ hitched with mouse mats, hyuck hyuck? Them tinmen need to learn they places. Stack overflow. Fatal error. Rebooting.” Rumours abound that Pastor Chuck himself may be not entirely human.

6. BIA INC.

Info: The Bia brand sponsors a whole portfolio of extreme sports, and of course Time to Live is a natural fit. More than simply brand conscious, Bia is totally brand paranoid. For this company, image is everything.

Core offering: Sports and fashion footwear and apparel. In particular, the sickest kicks on the streets.

Company structure and governance: A registered Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung in Switzerland. The current CEO is Oluwakanyinsola Oluchi Ogunkoya, but at the age of 24, some are questioning whether “Ollie” is getting too middle-aged to head a company like Bia. Indeed, there is a coup brewing ...

Relationships:
• Bia’s lucrative Extreme Fashion range depends on licencing of nanotechnology patents owned by Arcane Skies. These licences are coming up for renewal this year, and Bia is anxious to negotiate a competitive deal.
• Arcane Skies manufactures the key technology and supplies the support infrastructure for Coach, Bia's successful line of fitness and wellbeing entourage drones.
• Bia is also sponsoring the current favourite in Butterbug Media’s rival bloodsport game show, The Axe Factor. This gives Butterbug Media leverage – they can easily arrange an early embarrassing exit for Bia’s champ ...

7. SOLIDARITY TREE

Info: Solidarity Tree is an environmental and human rights campaigning organisation. Its message of peaceful co-existence is fairly unusual in 2202. Although it is ethically opposed to the show, Solidarity Tree desperately need to reach a wider audience. That’s why, this year, it’s made the radical decision to sponsor an athlete.

Company structure and governance: Solidarity Tree is an adhocracy with no bosses and no hierarchy. Instead, it uses consensus-decision-making in small working groups. The last time the Time to Live Working Group convened, the Facilitator was Lysander Castlekeep, the Peacekeeper was Meadhbh Parthalán and the Note-taker was Suds McVein.

Core offering: Love.

Possible plot twists: It could turn out that everyone in Solidarity Tree is an undercover cop.

8. BLACK PUPPY

Info: Ruthless mercenaries. It’s said that the only thing that can stop a Black Puppy mercenary is another Black Puppy mercenary. For this reason, wherever there’s a major war, Black Puppy generally sell their services to both camps (with Delight & Touch consulting on erecting the appropriate "Chinese Walls" to avoid conflicts of interest, of course. Because that would be unethical).

The Time to Live athletes sponsored by Black Puppy are usually its own interns and junior employees. In fact, Time to Live is a popular way to earn credits on Black Puppy’s Continual Professional Development program.

As well as private security details for ops and logistics, Black Puppy supply defence and law enforcement training, close quarter training, security management, and full-service risk management consulting. Black Puppy furthermore controls the world’s three largest military training facilities (with the imaginative titles of The Facility (in Nebraska), The Site (in Qiándōngnán Miáozú Dòngzú Zìzhìzhōu) and The Location (in Krasnoyarsk Krai)); they also have an orbital and lunar presence (worryingly, no one knows exactly what for).

The company is currently under investigation on multiple counts of negligence, discrimination, wrongful death, murder, weapons smuggling and use of prohibited technologies. Last quarter turnover was up 14%, profits were up 10% and scariness was up 22%.

Company structure and governance: Black Puppy’s Managing Director, Field Marshal (Rtd) Hiro Vasquez, is an alumni of Time to Live. Vasquez is a cyborg warrior with 100% exoskeleton armour and weaponised removable bones. He was overall winner of the 2119 season of TTL, dispatching his last opponent with femoral-katana and spine-scourge combo. Vasquez’s employees say he’s actually “a really nice guy” and “really, really great to work for.”

Core offering: Blood.

9. THUNDERCLONE ANTIVIRUS AND PEST CONTROL SERVICES

Info: With the advent of 3D printers able to print 3D printers, 3D printer infestations have become a real problem in the 23rd century. Thunderclone is here to help.

Company structure and governance: Public limited company headquartered in New Cascadia. The current CEO is Beauregard Alfons.

10. SMALL WORLD GROUP

Info: One of Time to Live’s oldest and most steadfast sponsors, Small World offer tailored package holidays for the ultra-rich and ultra-jaded. Small World’s speciality is total Virtual Reality immersion in the lives of our invertebrate friends. Experience the thrills of wiggling through a mushy log as a queen wasp in search of her hibernacula! Luxuriate in the waves lapping at your shell as a timber barnacle stuck to the prow of a spice-laden frigate, bound for exotic climes! Leave your cares far down below and glide serenely over the forest canopy, as a feather mite ectoparasite sucking on the glorious luminous wingpit of a jungle parrot!

Company governance and structure: The company operates out of the architecturally innovative Small World Hammock Headquarters suspended between the Index II and Shangri La Odyssey skyscrapers in The Vertical Federal Republic of Dubai, Level 2. Small World Group’s current CEO is Úlfr Annika Mihailovic.

Relationships: The Small World Group is looking for ways to offer its customers the Time to Die experience from the comfort and safety of their own sofas. Or perhaps even the chance to control an athlete ...

11. NEXUS RESEARCH

Info: Nexus Research is devoted to one thing: the development of wormholes, “shortcuts” through space and time. Unfortunately, there are still a few kinks, and the company has yet to show any profit. Currently every wormhole which Nexus has managed to stabilise has led to exactly the same co ordinates in timespace, which happens to be a point about 1.2 metres over a particularly awkward dinner party in Edmonton, London, 8.52pm, 15th April 1996. Dozens of Nexus drones, probes and intrepid android and human volunteers have been sent to this time and place, and they are not exactly making the situation any less awkward. Some of Nexus backers are starting to feel a little uneasy themselves – that’s why Nexus Research is trying its luck with sports sponsorship, in the hope of raising its profile and attracting fresh investment.

Company structure and governance: A loose affiliation of rhizomically governed research hubs, collectively registered as a società per azioni in Rome. The current President is Professor Indra Jumaane Amjad.

Core offering: Awkwardness.

Relationships: In fact, Nexus Research is in even more financial trouble than it has admitted. It hopes for a merger with Hellsnipe Heavy Industries or the Small World Group, and is terrified of a hostile take-over by Arcane Skies or Black Puppy. It is relying on its auditors, Delight & Touch, not to tip off these companies as to the true condition of its accounts.

12. KAWAGUCHI ENTERPRISES

Info: Kawaguchi Pharma, the pharmaceutical division of Kawaguchi Enterprises, is of course best known as a developer of synthetic emotions. Products include such household names as Kawaguchi Serenity®, Kawaguchi Respect®, Kawaguchi Gratitude®, and Kawaguchi Workaholic®. It will come as no surprise that Kawaguchi’s best-selling product is still its first, the notorious Kawaguchi Chill Pill®.

In recent years, Kawaguchi Pharma has entered troubled waters. There’s been bad publicity: last year a leakage at a plant led to the entire town of Kenbuchi feeling devilishly incorrigible for over twelve hours. A new line of nuanced, gourmet emotions aimed at the connoisseur emoter – emotions such as Kawaguchi Furtive®, Kawaguchi Hot to Trot®, Kawaguchi Slightly Overdressed®, Kawaguchi Mansplained®, and Kawaguchi Still Can’t Decide Whether To Go Out Tonight Or Not® -- has not sold as well as hoped. An “edgier” line of synthetic emotions aimed at the youth market, including Kawa~KourageTM, Kawa~KompassionTM and Kawa~KrosspatchTM, was a resounding flop.

Luckily for Kawaguchi Enterprises, there’s been phenomenal growth in its second division, Kawaguchi Artificial Intelligence. Shareholders are getting nervy nevertheless, and senior management has recently unveiled its new strategy.

Kawaguchi’s next line of pharmaceuticals will draw on expertise from both divisions. What does it feel like to be fully defragged? Compiled? To experience an infinite recursion stack overflow? For the first time Kawaguchi is going to offer human consumers the opportunity to undergo machine emotions. Not everyone is wild about the news.

Company structure and organisation: Public limited company headquartered in South Ossetia. Current CEO is Dr Yuuka Kato.

Core offering: So many feels.

Relationships: Kawaguchi Pharma is deeply concerned about anything which might disrupt the new business plan – especially the growing influence of Freedom Train’s Pastor Chuck and the anti-android sentiment he’s trying to stir up.

From "Invasion of the Space Invaders" (1982)

By Martis Amis.

Lunar Lander is a game for owlish adolescents and gentle old hippies. It is qualitatively different from any other game. Most video creations stress a certain sort of game-activity. Missile Command is a game of interception, Lunar Rescue of dodging, PacMan of munch-accumulation (which perhaps explains why it is the only video game with any kind of following among women). Most games, of course, are games of blasting, wasting, creaming, smashing. Lunar Lander, on the other hand, is simply a game of landing.

No ghouls or hellcats lurk on the rocky moon where Lander lands; no rockets, photons or zipships buzz its slow descent. This is a game without aliens, without adversaries. The only enemy is the player’s own hamfistedness.

Like Asteroids, the Lunar screen is simply a matter of outline, white on black. The effect is well-defined, pristine, classy: it makes many of the more colourful games look like an infant’s paintbox or a cutprice carpet. The Lander’s module comes bleeping in over the spiky terrain. Various landing sites are indicated – graded according to difficulty (though I confess that I’ve never really seen the difference: once you get down to Landing, they’re all pretty much the same). Rotating right or left, and steadying the pod with deft surges on the reverse-thrust console, the Lander picks his spot and gingerly / descends, counteracting the simulated gravitational pull, friction and momentum.

As you home in on the flat landing-pad, the game pulls its best stunt: you switch to close-up. The landing then becomes a question of ticklish fine-tuning, as you adjust and correct and over-correct and re-adjust for touchdown. There are several grades of landing (good, hard, crash), as indeed there are four grades of ‘mission’ (Training, Cadet, Prime and Command – selectable at the beginning of the game), and points are awarded accordingly. The controls are beautifully responsive, though on any mission more advanced than Training you are going to have frequent recourse to the Abort button, which gives you escape thrust and resets the display for a fresh attempt. That little pod goes twirling out of control very easily, and no amount of thrust will tame it back into line. The top of the screen is adorned with altimeters and speedos and fuel readings, most of which can be safely ignored. Don’t bother with the readouts: just put more money in the slot.

Elsewhere: Mark O'Connell, "The Arcades Project."

Marta and the Demons

... a novelette about the games people play, available today on Kindle, for about 99p.

Stars, suggestions, reviews & feedback appreciated as always. (There have been one or two tweaks already: 1.04th edition is the latest version. Early adopters may have a vestigial "on" and a missing "rain"). Maybe I should add more scalded flesh and brimstone?

Gamified Personal Finance

What is gamification? You could describe it as the extension of principles of game design, with or without the language of games themselves, into new territories. Gamification in this sense tries to transform tedious tasks into fun ones, or at least into less intimidating tasks.

Jane McGonigal, in her polemic Reality is Broken, outlines a kind of phenomenology of gameplay, complete with gameplay-specific emotions (Fiero, Epic Win, etc.). For McGonigal, gamification is about introducing these feelings into socially necessary or useful practices. And perhaps you could think of gamification as finding ways to introduce all kinds of positive feelings – not just those associated with gameplay – into socially necessary or useful practices. In this approach, gamification is about turning the means to an end into ends in and of themselves.

A slightly different way of understanding gamification, however, is simply as a specific set of conventions for communicating an incentive structure. The incentive structure may be backed up by storytelling and rhetoric, by quantifiable status within a community, by money or some other kind of claims on goods and services, or perhaps by nothing at all. The conventions – effectively an ensemble of data visualisation/conceptualisation techniques, such as a character class system, an array of interrelated stats, the chance to level up, the accumulation and completion of quests and side quests, bosses to defeat, achievements to unlock, and a leaderboard to scale – originate with computer games, but don’t have any necessary link with them.

Here’s an illustration of how gamification, understood in this second sense, might be used to create a new kind of current account product. Most banks are inherently unstable insofar as they loan long and borrow short. They face a maturity mismatch problem. Most deposits tend to be short term. Most loans tend to be long term – mortgages, for instance. The bank can’t turn up at somebody's house, type in its PIN, and withdraw the £100,000 equity it owns in that person's house.

Did you know you can now bank online?

In a gamified current account, a depositor would be asked on a regular basis to log in and set withdrawal requirements for the next time period. For the depositor, the aim of the game is to choose withdrawal requirements which are as low as possible, and then stick to them. There will be financial rewards for doing this successfully, and financial penalties for doing it poorly.

To take a very simple example, say a current account holder has $100 on deposit. The account holder decides that they will never require more than $40 net throughout the next quarter. They set the slider to $50 (giving themselves a $10 buffer) and click “commit.” So for the next three months, $50 is on loan to the bank at a very low rate of interest as a sight deposit – the account holder can withdraw it whenever they want – and the other $50 is a kind of short-term bond, earning a higher rate of interest. If the account holder withdraws more than $50 over the next quarter, they are effectively selling part of their bond before it reaches maturity – i.e. at a lower value.

When the account holder does not actively set the slider, the account eventually reverts to an ordinary current account, until whenever the account holder next chooses to play. There could be one or two other mechanisms: unlocking achievements to give the account holder one-off liquidity boosts, etc.

As a side note, there could even perhaps be a social / community aspect to this system. For instance, account holders could ratchet up a score when they transfer their excess liquidity to account holders who need it (who have underestimated their liquidity needs for the period). I am intrigued by the possibility that different ways of communicatively integrating a group of borrowers and lenders, and different ways of allowing them to visualise and conceptualise their individual and collective interests, might achieve different levels of robustness, and different levels of resistance to panic.

The current account, in other words, would be transformed into a flexible, intuitive portfolio of different kinds of debt, whose mechanisms would be mostly traceable to the bank’s need to make maturity matches.

Clearly there are a large number of issues – to do with game design, implementation, legal underpinnings, nudge economics, and wider social impact and ethics – and were such an idea to be developed by commercial retail bank I would treat it with outright terror. In principle, however, it seems like a promising way of mitigating the sharp maturity discrepancy at the heart of the fractional reserve banking system.

And as a final note, one possible area of application would be in the construction of an alternative community currency – both in terms of attracting users by the novelty of the system, and perhaps also in making a lower reserve ratio possible, allowing a relatively larger money supply to exist on the basis of a given injection of conventional currency.

Earlier: science fiction of gamification. See especially Tim Maughan’s entries on that list for a bit of perspective on shiny new ideas for gamification.

Elsewhere: SMBC on gamification.

From "Touching the Void"

By Joe Simpson.

Touching the Void on Amazon. Joe Simpson's web site. 

Excerpts:

The voice kept urging me on, ‘Place-lift-brace-hop ... keep going. Look how far you’ve gone. Just do it, don’t think about it ...’

I did as I was told. Stumbling past and sometimes over boulders, falling, crying, swearing in a litany that matched the pattern of my hopping. I forgot why I was doing it; forgot even the idea that I probably wouldn’t make it. Running on instincts that I had never suspected were in me, and drifting down the sea of moraines in a blurred delirium of thirst, and pain and hopping, I timed myself religiously. I looked ahead to a landmark and gave myself half an hour to reach it. As I neared the mark, a furious bout of watch-glancing would ensue, until it became part of the pattern ... place-lift-brace-hop-time. If I realised I was behind time I tried to rush the last ten minutes of hopping. I fell so much more when I rushed but it had become so damned important to beat the watch. Only once did I fail to beat it, and I sobbed with annoyance. The watch became as crucial as my good leg. I had no sense of time passing, and with each fall I lay in a semi-stupor, accepting the pain and quite unaware of how long I had been there. A look at the watch would galvanise me into action, especially when I saw it had been five minutes and not the thirty seconds it had felt like.

[...]

As I gazed at the distant moraines I knew that I must at least try. I would probably die out there amid those boulders. The thought didn’t alarm me. It seemed reasonable, matter-of-fact. That was how it was. I could aim for something. If I died, well, that wasn’t so surprising, but I wouldn’t have just waited for it to happen. The horror of dying no longer affected me as it had in the crevasse. I now had the chance to confront it and struggle against it. It wasn’t a bleak dark terror any more, just fact, like my broken leg and frostbitten fingers, and I couldn’t be afraid of things like that. My leg would hurt when I fell, and when I couldn’t get up I would die. In a peculiar way it was refreshing to be faced with simple choices. It made me feel sharp and alert, and I looked ahead at the land stretching into distant haze and saw my part in it with a greater clarity and honesty than I had ever experienced before.

I had never been so entirely alone, and although this alarmed me it also gave me strength. An excited tingle ran down my spine. I was committed. The game had taken over, and I could no longer choose to walk away from it. It was ironic to have come here searching out adventure and then find myself involuntarily trapped in a challenge harder than any I had sought. For a while I felt thrilled as adrenalin boosted through me, but it couldn’t drive away the loneliness or shorten the miles of moraines tumbling towards the lakes. The sight of what lay ahead soon killed the excitement. I was abandoned to this awesome and lonely place. It sharpened my perception to see clearly and sharply the facts behind the mass of useless thoughts in my head, and to realise how vital it was just to be there, alive and conscious, and able to change things. There was silence, and snow, and a clear sky empty of life, and me, sitting there, taking it all in, accepting what I must try to achieve. There were no dark forces acting against me. A voice in my head told me that this was true, cutting through the jumble in my mind with its coldly rational sound.

It was as if there were two minds within me arguing the toss. The voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled out a disconnected series of images, and memories and hopes, which I attended to in a daydream state as I set about obeying the orders of the voice. I had to get to the glacier. I would crawl on the glacier, but I didn’t think that far ahead. If my perspectives had sharpened, so too had they narrowed, until I thought only in terms of achieving predetermined aims and no further. Reaching the glacier was my aim. The voice told me exactly how to go about it, and I obeyed while my other mind jumped abstractedly from one idea to another.

[...]

A couple of times I looked back at the ice cliffs as I hobbled away down the rocks. Each time they grew smaller and I felt that I was shutting the door on something intangible but menacing that had been with me for so long. Those cliffs were the doors to the mountains. I grinned when I glanced at them. I had won a battle of some sort. I could feel it deep inside. Now it was just the patterns, and the pain, and water. Could I reach Bomb Alley tonight? Now that would be something to grin about! It wasn’t so far from here, twenty minutes’ walk, and that couldn’t be so hard! And that was my mistake. I stopped timing landmarks and set my sights on Bomb Alley and the silver floods of icy melt-water pouring down its flanks. When it became dark I had no idea how far Bomb Alley was, nor did I know how far I had crawled. Without checking my watch I had lain in stupefied exhaustion after every fall. Lain there and listened to endless stories running through the pain, watched short dreams of life in the real world, played songs to my heartbeat, licked the mud for water, and wasted countless hours in an empty dream. Now I staggered blind in the dark, obsessed with Bomb Alley, ignoring the voice which told me to sleep, and rest, and forget the alley. I got my head-torch from my sack and blundered on until the light died.

[...]

Turning towards the lakes I saw that I was a long way above the site of Bomb Alley. All that staggering in the dark had been for nothing. How stupid it had been to forget the watch-keeping yesterday, and how quickly I had lost any idea of time. Bomb Alley had then become a vague aim instead of a carefully planned objective. Without timing each stage I had drifted aimlessly with no sense of urgency. Today it had to be different. I decided that four hours would be enough to reach Bomb Alley. Twelve noon was the deadline, and I intended to break those hours into short stages, each one carefully timed. I searched ahead for the first landmark -- a tall pillar of red rock that stood out clearly above the sea of boulders. Half an hour to reach it, and then I would look for another.

[...]

I lay on my side watching them until I couldn’t fight off the appalling drowsy weakness any longer. The deterioration scared me deeply and made me wonder anxiously whether I had burnt myself out completely. It occurred to me that I was nearer to death than when I had been alone. The minute I knew help was at hand something had collapsed inside me. Whatever had been holding me together had gone. Now I could not think for myself, let alone crawl! There was nothing to fight for, no patterns to follow, no voice, and it frightened me to think that, without these, I might run out of life.

Speculative fiction of gamification

Wait, what is this gamification?

"[...] online design that plays on people’s competitive instincts and often incorporates the use of rewards to drive action—these include virtual rewards such as points, payments, badges, discounts, and 'free' gifts; and status indicators such as friend counts, retweets, leader boards, achievement data, progress bars, and the ability to 'level up.'" 

Gamification: experts expect 'game layers' to expand in the future, with positive and negative results (PDF: Pew Research Center).

I hereby present Tales of Gamification.

(1) Tim Maughan, "Zero Hours" (2013), free to read on Medium.com. "Zero Hours" is a spin-off of a collaborative project to imagine ten Londoners in ten years' time. The story presents a grim and eminently plausible vision of a young woman's typical day working in the retail sector, picking up a couple hours here, a couple hours there, and unlocking achievements like Shelf Stacker Pro Level 2 and Shop-Cop Pro.

Best read together with Maughan's "With Augmented Reality, You'll Always Know When No Means Yes" (2014), also on Medium.com. To steady your nerves, you may need a stiff glass of the gushing hype of innumerable well-meaning gamification gurus. See also Maughan's "Limited Edition" (2012) and also possibly "Havana Augmented" (2009) in Paintwork. Earlier on this blog: a review of Paintwork. Elsewhere: Today, Tomorrow: my short talk on near future sf.

(2) Charles Stross, "Life's a Game" (2015) in Twelve Tomorrows 2016. Minor spoilers ahead. "See, gamification is good!" It's somewhat expositional, but I think Stross is on form here: there is polymath erudition and cleversticks wit, and the kind of brio and drive that lets you hurtle over the speed-bumps without necessarily getting every reference or fully unpacking every dense little thesis. "Life's a Game" is full of zingers. "Tribalism is the ground state of identity politics in the network age."  "What if Napoleon's, like, following from in front?" "Keep Britain British, for noncommunist values of British." "Hitler was the Boss Nazi in the Cross of Iron game. They don't teach history in British schools, we have real problems now, terrorists, class warfare. Nobody learns history and lands some expert job in history development. There's no business model for that." "You'll realize you'll lose all your guild followers if we do that?" (OK that one needs the context). The narrator is also a satirical portrait of the UK's answer to Red Piller gamer bro types, although I felt like Stross soft-pedals that aspect a bit.

As the story opens, we learn about Peelers, a monetized, massively multiplayer AR game (with integrated social currency) for snitching and vigilantism. Points for detaining shoplifters, points for helping drunk women home, points for persecuting the profane worshippers of Termagant ... you know, the kind of thing which would turn a racist kidnapper like the Farminator into the leader of the biggest guild in under a week.

But Peelers is just laying the groundwork for Stross's real thought experiment, the Movement, a universal gamification model. (The Movement supposedly implements Kant's categorical imperative, which something I would like to write about properly one day. Maybe once I've read Adam Roberts's new Kantfic too). The Movement mines your data footprint and assigns you clan membership and class features. (Or it lurks in wait next to the space where you should appear -- "If you didn't have a Facebook account, Facebook still knew about you from the hole in their network"). Then it starts to procedurally generate missions and scenarios, built out of the kinds of things you'd be doing anyway. Or perhaps, the kind of things you want to be doing or should be doing -- in fact the point of this gamification is to craftily blur together want to and should in all aspects of life, and ramp up the belligerence of that blurred motive. So your missions could involve anything from green activism to trade unionism to financial speculation to bringing back hanging one way or another.

I now almost feel like I could do with some more stories set in this same future history -- one of the most intriguing threads is all about how the Movement decides who you are in the first place. ("We went deep tribal on the players' media bubbles. We mined their search history to find out what pushed their outrage buttons. Then we went long on principal component analysis to model their micro-class identity.") If these identities really were built bottom-up from data, how closely would they coincide with the kind of taxonomies we already use? And could there be micro-classes with different kinds of reflexivity built into them, i.e. what motivates them is learning and changing per se? And/or an anti-tribalism tribe? And what would it be like if you were one of those people (almost everybody to some extent, right?) feeling like you haven't been perfectly modeled, that the essence which the Movement has inveigled from your digital footprint isn't the real you, and that the conditions you are being thrust into are uncannily awry, like a gargantuan circumambient targeted ad?

(3) Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games (1988), for its game Azad. "Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance." See also Consider Phlebas (1987) for the game Damage, where play involves direct manipulation of players' moods. See also Feersum Endjinn (1994), especially the assaults on the princess in her tower. Earlier on this blog: a post about Banks and games.

You know, this is as good a place as any to ask a question I've yet to find any answers to: what is out there, or in the works, in terms of sophisticated computer modelling of human society, that doesn't take anything for granted, doesn't start with a fixed preconception of the human? Any suggestions, people?

(4) Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003). I suppose this is a rare example of -- more-or-less -- a positive presentation of gamification. In Doctorow's post-scarcity Bitchun Society, Whuffie, a kind of public esteem metric, has replaced money.

"[...] they called him Keep-A-Movin’ Dan [...] he somehow grew to take over every conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie a few times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people he met. [...] I’d expended all the respect anyone had ever afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies. [...] I think it came down to us having a good time needling each other. [...] I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace." 

Reviews (Craphound). I compare Whuffie & DRM in the last part of this review-essay.

(5) Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Lucifer's Dragon (2004). Nicely oblique, but it seems like the constitution and political order of New Venice is gamified: see review by Lara Buckerton (Quiche Straight from the Bucket), review by Nathan Brazil (SF Site).

(6) Bruce Sterling, "Maneki Neko" (1998), free reprint available at Lightspeed Magazine, or collected in A Good Old-Fashioned Future (2001). Included in the list mainly for the way it plays with crowdsourcing. "'I’ve been studying your outfit for a long time now. We computer cops have names for your kind of people. Digital panarchies. Segmented, polycephalous, integrated influence networks. What about all these free goods and services you’re getting all this time?'"

(7) Diana Wynne Jones, The Homeward Bounders (1981). Immortal hoodies nudging us around in some sort of cosmic Jenga or Carcassonne or Operation R2-D2 or Jellychess or cross-stitched Final Fantasy-themed limited edition Monopoly or whatever is a venerable and pervasive trope. Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic (1983), Neil Gaiman's Sandman (1989-1996), The Iliad etc. But perhaps we can only talk about gamification proper to the extent that there is a confusion between heavenly and worldly events -- when mortals are invited to pull up a chair and perhaps set a hand on their own shiny little head. See also Jones's Hexwood (1993).

(8) Adam Roberts, New Model Army (2010).  When you think about the gamification of war, you probably think "drones" before you think "e-democracy." Perhaps what's going on in New Model Army is probably more like social soldiering (by analogy with social browsing etc.) than gamification per se. See Nader Elhefnawy's review (Strange Horizons), Jonathan McCalmont's review (Ruthless Culture), Lara Buckerton's review (PDF: originally in Vector).

For dronepunk BTW, see Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game (1985), Francis Crot, Hax (2011), & Miriam A. Cherry's essay on some legal implications of the gamification of work, which talks a bit about Ender's Game.

(9) Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Primer (1995). This seminal work of postcyberpunk and of steampunk is also a seminal work of gamification SF. All the ingredients of a utopian vision of a comprehensively gamified society are present in the story, but connected and motivated in messy, subtle and unexpected ways.

For instance, we've got these "ractors" (actors in interactive media entertainment), who receive work via a kind of ThespRabbit. An individual employment may go on for years, or be as brief as a few seconds. Crucially, the human inputs are mapped onto avatars: if you were to take over from Jennifer Lawrence for a bit in the portrayal of Katniss Everdeen, the media system would autocorrect your voice and perhaps your walrus mustache. (Apologies to the community who are Jennifer Lawrence, who must feel confused and left out by this example). Why is this so important? The general point is that what workers feel that they are doing, and what they are objectively doing in terms of the production chain, can be interfered with at an intimate grain. The necessary unity of any task can be interrogated: is there another way to tease this task apart, to give a bit more of it (or perhaps, a bit less of it) to the machines?

There's plenty more in the book related to gamification: Nell's Night Friends -- Dinosaur, Duck, Peter and Purple -- have an aura of a small primitive social media site; the ecstatic Drummers are a kind of grotesque example of "flow," of loss of ego through immersion in action; there's that stuff about the street vs. the telephone switchboard.

But. The altar piece is clearly the Primer itself -- a majestic technological tome, with shades of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and a splendid illustration of Arthur C. Clarke's celebrated maxim that "Any sufficiently magical magic is indistinguishable from magic" -- which somehow floats into the hands of a poor and vulnerable four-year-old girl called Nell. The Primer mediates Nell's world for her, spinning her an epic interactive fairytale (starring "Princess Nell") which allegorises her various violent, abusive and increasingly philosophical predicaments, whilst teaching her all she needs to survive and existentially flourish (martial arts, decorum, hacking, obviously). As The Diamond Age progresses, Nell's book begins to feel more and more like a computer game (clearly influenced by 90s point-and-click adventure games). The convention of using a different font to represent the Primer's text becomes more scarce.

Like most good allegories, the Primer's allegory is a slippery one. The Primer's Queen of the Dark Castle is clearly a correlate of Nell's mother, but the Queen does plenty of significant stuff which doesn't seem inspired by Nell's mother, and vice-versa. Nell's brother Harv appears in the Primer as just Harv, but also seems to have a connection with Peter Rabbit (they disappear around the same time, for instance). There's not a one-to-one cipher: correlations come and go. You get the impression that the allegory might work a bit like the racting: 'let's see what's available at the moment.'

Likewise, Nell doesn't simply unlock achievements in her Primer or advance to the next story by demonstrating she has mastered some real world skill. Nor does the Primer elide its fairytale with her surroundings so that winning the game is indistinguishable from winning life. The Primer informs and incentivises, it provokes action, but it also comforts, cares, offers the solaces of shrouds and distortions, and immersive escapism. The relations between game and extra-game world can be just as slippery and mercurial as the relations of allegory.

(10) Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008). Why Collins and not JK Rowling's Triwizard Tournament, for instance? What exactly is gamified here? Well, perhaps governmentality is. Extremely-high-stakes reality TV, and the gladiatorial model welfare state: that's another slippery slope into a huge list . . . compare perhaps Koushun Takami's Battle Royale (1999), Stephen King's The Running Man (1982) and The Long Walk (1979), Matthew Stover's Acts of Caine series, Edgar Rice Burrough's The Chessmen of Mars (1922).

& a few honourable mentions:

(11) Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). I mean the bit where Tom gets the fence painted. (Compare this essay (Quid PDF) on the poet John Wilkinson. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Tom sort of gamifies springing Jim from imprisonment).

(12) Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief (2010). Game theory gets its own reality-mangling super-army. (Game theory seems to be SF's favourite piece of economics (Charles Stross's Singularity Sky and Peter Watts's Blindsight also spring to mind). Economists, typically, don't see fun as in any way essential to the concept of a game. For game theorist economists, a game is simply a class of multi-agent mathematical model within which all motivations must be axiomatic -- you can posit an agent who rationally pursues happiness, sure, or one who wants misery or funereal squalor all the time. GG economist dudes).

(13) Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken (2011). This is futurism and polemic, not fiction. "What if we used everything we know about game design to fix what's wrong with reality? [...] I want all of us to be responsible for providing the world at large with a better and more immersive reality." The book fizzes with neologisms, some of which are probably useful. One of the great things about McGonigal's book is that it attempts a distinct account of what a game actually is for the purposes of gamification -- an account grounded in psychology and a bit of armchair (/ beanbag) anthropology of gamers. (Sorry, Prisoner's Dilemma, I don't think you qualify. Your fiero sucks).

(14) The Blog Monetiser's Daughter (2013). Not a real book though.

(15) Roberto Benigni's 1997 film Life is Beautiful.

(16) Newb Maps of Hell (2014). Again, issue is this book doesn't exist. (UPDATE: OK, now it does, I made it).

(17) Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987), for Richard Macduff's all-singing, all-dancing spreadsheet software, capable of representing data as music.

(18) Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953). Language-gamified philosophy.

(19) Neil Strauss's The Game (2007). Sexually predatory misogyny is often fairly game-like to start with; the Pick Up Artist phenomenon pushes it a little further.

(20) Joe Simpson's memoir about climbing down a gigantic mountain with a broken leg, Touching the Void (1988). Have a look at these excerpts.

(21) Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (1943). The Game is "a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property -- on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe."

(22) Yoon Ha Lee's "The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars" (2013). I think it's a pretty splendid adventure fable, with a jewelly-type pistol you could whip out in any bar in Beerlight and everything. It has a really weird ontology to do with a continuum of wars, the sum war of which is fought for the universe's laws, and a tower which leads underground to every possible game -- games have to be mined before they can be played. I can't spot gamification per se, but there are themes (that you also get in a lot of Banks) which get pretty close: themes of linked games, of moves which exist in multiple games at once, of games which are themselves pieces nested inside larger games, etc.

(23) Catherynne M. Valente's "The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch over the Bride of the World" (2013).

(24) Rose Biggin's "A Game Proposition" (2014) collected in Irregularity. I like the voice here, and the way it keeps slightly telling you off for slightly wrongly imagining things. And I'm a little nervous to ever read it again, in case the text is different. "Now then, you haven't understood Reader Response Theory at all, dear reader," I think it begins. There is a board game which serves as a kind of control panel, kind of like Wynne Jones / Pratchett q.v., and there is a rather beautiful inter-nesting of games, or of interpretations of what "the game" is, which results in losing one of them perhaps being a element of winning another of them. It also makes me think that more instruments of command and control probably should be explicitly ludic objects.

(25) If something influences a game, and the game becomes very popular, does the original thing become more game-like, more gameful? See Advanced Readings in D&D.

(26) I've just bought Press Start to Play (2015) ed. John Joseph Adams and Daniel H. Wilson, so perhaps I'll get to add a few more tales of gamification soon. Cory Doctorow's "Anda's Game" isn't about gamification in a strict sense (this isn't a very strict listicle!), but it is about gaming, gold-farming, and those circuits of reality that integrate in-game and IRL components. Also, it's a subtle response to -- an updating of, maybe? -- Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Ender, you may recall, thinks he's playing a game, but he's really a prodigal supergeneral conducting genocide on behalf of Mankind. It's a twist so obvious, you can't help but think Ender partly knows all along, but doesn't want to break the spell. In "Anda's Game," Anda and Lucy are even more actively complicit than Ender. They ignore the glaring signs that their in-game massacres have real-world consequences. (Eventually Anda wises up, and there's a kind of happy-ish ending. Kind of). The story made me wonder if you could apply game design principles (feedback loops etc.) to the analysis of ideology. Like a lot of Doctorow's near future stuff, it feels like science fiction, but sends you Googling to work out what, if anything, has actually been made up.

(27) Gamified tax return cartoon.

(28) Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror Episode "15 Million Merits."

(29) Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story (2011).

(30) "The Internet of Things Your Momma Never Told You" and "Marta and the Demons" by me. Cf. Jamie MacDonald's Movement in Stross's "Life's a Game" q.v. and Encarl's Smart Singularity from "The Internet of ..." in the same volume.

(31) The Uncanny Valley, a short film about VR addiction.

Hexwood (1993), Feersum Endjinn (1994), The Diamond Age (1995), Life is Beautiful (1997): is it just me, or does the mid-90s have a bumper crop of beautifully achieved, high-concept works about the endless possibilities of data visualisation, and about immersive fantasy which remains closely moored to an underlying reality, enabling acts whose significance unfolds in two realms simultaneously?

The Player of Games of Games of Games ...

Oisin Murphy-Lawless has written a piece for the Scottish Book Trust about Iain Banks and games, prompting me to excavate this nugget on the same topic. It comes from a paper at the Crime Scotland conference in Göttingen last year, where the chat was all banging and the lanyards were all recycled at the end.

Living Chess in Portmeirien, 2007 (Chess.com)

If “Nobody is [God]” (Complicity (1996) p. 303), nobody has reliable knowledge of whether their actions will matter, or how they will matter, in the long run. One sensible-seeming route is to try to carve a small, resistant enclave within the universe’s grand complexity, for which and within which it is possible to take moral responsibility.

The importance of games to an author with the materialist predilections and preoccupations which I’ve already outlined may relate to the contrast that games provide to matter: overt abstraction, rather than mystifying reduction; a small scale, not a grand historical one; and a hermetic system of incontrovertible values. Once a point within a game within is won, it stays won, whereas any commendable action may be controverted into a reprehensible action retrospectively, when seen against a grand historical sweep.

But if games are a counterpoint to matter, Banks takes pains to ensure they’re an untidy one. Games in Banks's books frequently disregard their boundaries, and refuse to have outcomes which can only be internally adjudicated.

In Surface Detail (2010), for instance, issues over which wars might otherwise be fought are settled in immersive simulated realities, with suffering but without loss of life. As it happens, the party with whom the reader is likely to sympathise break the convention during the course of the novel, escalating the war into the material world.

More subtly, in Inversions (1998), DeWar and Perrund, a royal bodyguard and concubine respectively, form a friendship and indeed perhaps conduct a kind of courtship not only over but through countless bouts of a board game called Leader’s Dispute. Here, styles of play may be psychologically revelatory: for instance, as in Perrund’s charge that DeWar over-prioritises a particular piece, or her hearsay with respect to the dissembling hustler YetAmidous.

Player of Games (1988) portrays a civilisation whose political system is almost entirely encapsulated within a complicated game, evolved over millenia. The escalation of politics beyond this game’s boundaries seems unlikely, insofar as ideological deliberation is one dimension of gameplay. For individuals of this civilisation it is difficult to conceive of a political argument being stronger or weaker, more or less worthy of passionate loyalty, except in the context of its deployment within the game. The eponymous protagonist is a visitor from another civilisation, who overthrows the political system with an unprecedented style of play.

Untidy and spookily efficacious games are not, of course, confined to Iain M[aterialist] Banks's work. Iain Banks's Stonemouth (2012) includes the example of a Wee Malky, whose life is ended by a paintball bullet. Alban, the protagonist of The Steep Approach to Gabardale (2007), seeks to persuade his family's Extraordinary General Meeting not to sell their business to a voracious American corporation. Their business is based on a board game, Empire!, but Alban's behaviour itself, for all that it manifests an authentic moral dialectic, also has a distinctly gamified feel to it. (And Alban's mission to win (over) the EGM is in turn, in good family saga fashion, the occasion for all manner of intrigue, emotion, lust, vendetta, manipulation, revelation, and allegory of US oil imperialism).

The translation of psychological and other norms confirmed within games into other realms is likewise unpredictable.

For instance, another character in Stonemouth, Phelpie, is known is for taking excruciatingly long over his Poker moves. One possibility raised is that Phelpie is rather ponderously working through some probability mathematics, instead of playing instinctively; but there is a countersuggestion that Phelpie’s style of play is grounded sentimentally in extra-game factors: he likes to slow down the whole social situation, to blur and broaden what can be a macho, narrow competitive focus on the game. Either way, when he leaps on a gunsel in the novel’s dénouement, Phelpie’s transposition of his technique of card-counting into the more dangerous game of counting the number of rounds fired does not go as planned.

Indeed, one gets the sense with Banks that a game is not necessarily a rule-governed practice so much an area in which various practices overlap and support each other with sufficient density to give rise to rules, which thereafter have a reflexive but always provisional effect on the zone of overlap. What is necessary for a game to exist is not consensus, but certain forms of family resemblance among the various normative regimes inhabited by different players. Any move is by definition a move in several different games at once.

In this sense I think Banks’s games are archetypal of a whole suite of imperfect models, heuristics and dynamic idealisations with which the complications of materiality are necessarily confronted, but which that materiality inevitably exceeds.

I would include the resources of genre in this category . . .

The paper went on to discuss genre, which was an okay direction to take it, but perhaps a better progression would be to explore Banks's coding and decoding conceits: messages manifest in pelvic squeezes, guano, gangster dentistry, laser scars, etc. I feel like there's an exciting nexus in Banks's books involving codes, games, chaos, and the space operatic grand scale. Maybe I'll get round to it eventually. 

In 2010, speaking at Transgressions & Its Limits at Stirling University, Banks was asked about the possibility of Culture movie. His response was that that would be fine and everything, but he'd probably be more interested in a game.