User:Ada/SI20

✴ week 1 | bare facts

sage tea ritual

special issuing:

➵ ritual: sage tea and sharing game stories.

○ shared about my horse tunnel game where i would pretend to be a horse when driving trough tunnels, not sure why i picked that one.

○ read and annotated with boyana the bare facts of rituals (johnathan z. smith), talked about the interesting parts of the text.

○ rituals as exercises in the strategy of choice, grace and nature, divine and human

○ ancient men making rituals of bear hunts, creating false divine realities so far from the human truth. ritual as a perfect hunt where all variables are controlled. the hunter knows that this is not reality but performing the ritual makes the hunt's full significance to be perceived, a significance which the rules express but are powerless to effectuate.

✴ week 2 | ritual-games

intersections between rituals and games

special issuing:

➵ ritual: aglaia's coffee reading ritual (happy drinking times ahead for me)

○ going over the text defining games (Salen & Zimmerman). did not like, patriarchal survival of the fittest mentality about games. defined them as systems in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules that result in quantifiable outcome. hard pass.

○ conflict identifiyed as non-essential in games, games and rituals as stories (journey, florence & abzu, beyong blue, gris)

○ real emotion in digital play, play as labour, games as rituals?

○ me, cara and stephen made a physical graph(on the right). x = gameness, y = ritualness. then we placed concepts in the graph. gun, unserious, cara, intoxication were more game-like. me, strong scents, belief and purification were more ritual-like. butter and courtship were outside the graph.

prototyping:

○ LAN party (played adventure badly)

○ python basics revisited, text-adventure game python lessons.

methoding:

○ read and annotated the ruling class and ruling ideas(marx&engels). it was very confusingly written. ritual as instrument of freedom is discussed.

○ annotated wedding rituals from the perspective of marx-engels. I annotated the ritual of a municipality wedding in Milan. religious authority was just replaced with urban one.

✴ week 3

play-through of my cult game on my pink terminal

special issuing:

➵ ritual: hard-drive purification from stephen. i was late, my hard-drive is still sinful.

○ talked about the base and superstructure model.

○ read and annotated game modding: cross-over mutation and unwelcome gifts (Schleiner) with aglaia. we discussed about wether modding is community building or exploiting labour, wether video game companies can ever be ethical or wish for anything but profit. i shared my love for the sims modding and how the player is the author in this context.

prototyping:

○ text adventured some more. shared our assignments. i made a text-adventure python game about a cult member going trough the cult and eventually either escaping or staying. the game used all python elements i tried so far, was my first trial with if and elif statements. i struggled a bit with placement and indentation. seems like my coding mistakes are really silly.

○ made an undo function for my game with joseph

○ talked about putting data into .json files (spoiler: this will take me weeks to understand)

methoding:

○ reading ideology in popular games, discusses the reworking of the base/superstructure model into the ideology/media/production/feedback model.

○ counter-media is introduced in the media, the space between media and production is collapsing as self-performance in (social and on-line) media means we are both the producer and consumer of media.

○ i annotated sims, what real values are reproduced in the game I am playing? community being so important in this game then means that the crux of the social reproduction is happening when the choices you have made in the game are broadcasted. counter culture in terms of mods is allowed, if not encouraged. cheating is also encouraging, but if the way to play is to not play like you are told, is that even counter-culture?

✴ week 4

special issuing:

➵ ritual: aglaia's birthday ritual, cake and my coffee&pandan jellies.

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