Part 2.0 of SUPERPLAY: Fields of Superplay. 2.1: The Imaginarium
Using signs and code to make compelling worlds
Welcome to the next installment of my beta-book follow-up to 2004’s The Play Ethic, provisionally entitled SUPERPLAY: This Is Not A Rehearsal. Here’s the archive of previous parts/chapters, and hotlinks to the early book plan are below.
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In advance, thank you!—PK
BOOK PLAN:
PART ONE: THE PLAY WE WERE
PART TWO: FIELDS OF SUPERPLAY
2.1 The Imaginarium
2.2 The Antagon
2.3 The StudioLab
PART 2.0: FIELDS OF SUPERPLAY
Superplay—understood as the ever-narrowing gap between imagination, the generation of new ideas, and their realisation/actualisation —is a phenomenon occurring in three distinct societal, indeed planetary fields, which I’m calling:-
2.1 The imaginarium - meaning movie and tv streaming culture; game worlds on and offline; CGI effects, deep fakes, Generative AI; whatever the metaverse turns out to be; and the narrative/semiotic skills of the arts & humanities. This is an overall “worlding”, where time and attention spent is increasingly not in rehearsal for life, but constitutes the very practice of a virtual (or Reality+) life. The imaginarium is the overall and generic name for the structures in which this virtual existence occurs.
2.2 The antagon - where warfare between states and/or blocs takes place in the informational and cultural space, in a complex relationship to traditional, kinetic war. Narratives, images and simulation are deployed in the public sphere, in order to define the sense of “what’s real” for a population or community. “Political technologists” like Vladimir Surkov, Steve Bannen and Dominic Cummings operate by these means - superplayers in an endless battlefield.
2.3 The studiolab - where matter of all kinds (information, genes/organisms, atoms) can potentially be “played with”, to ends both wondrous and emancipating, but also terrible and exploitative. There are dances in this realm between ethics and possibility - some more reciprocal than others. Compare the current AI “spring”, rising on its exponential curve of innovation, to how tight our proscriptions are on gene editing and biotech design. “Studiolab” is a deliberately new composite term - where what is “labbed” into existence also can be displayed and demonstrated (eg DeepMind’s gameful exhibitions).
THERE are obviously overlaps and mutualities between each of these fields of SUPERPLAY. The practices and tools of the imaginarium are easily deployable in the war-oriented space of the antagon. The studiolab’s primary and applied innovation can become both means, and themes, for the imaginarium (and scarily, for the antagon). It’s important to remember that each of these modes of SP can be applied constructively or destructively, for regress or progress - and part three of this book will explicitly imagine and plan for conditions in which a progressive SP can occur, and be sustained.
2.1: The Imaginarium
A recently coined term, an imaginarium implies a zone in which imaginative activity is focussed, encouraged, staged and manifested. I want to use it with an emphasis on place: imaginaria are locations and structures in which the realisation of imagined ideas is their prime function.
Humans that enter these places are embracing a process of world-making that occupies their senses and attention, to a very considerable extent. So much so that their “second life”, to use the title of the 90s virtual reality game, largely becomes their first life, in terms of their commitments of time, emotion and energy.
SUPERPLAY within an imaginarium means the capacity to act in, design or choose worlds which gratify us at a deep emotional level - enough that they become a largely determining reality for us (see Stephen Asma’s notes in Part 1.2, on how imagination is an “embodied, emotional interaction” with the world, which precedes our factual grasp of it).
The obvious (and globally enormous) exemplar of such an imaginarium is the culture and industry of computer gaming. Going by revenue, it is by far the largest entertainment industry on the planet. Computer game players currently comprise over 3 billion of the world’s population (the curve is steep - it was two billion in 2015).
A small majority of these players (and revenues) comes from so-called “casual” and “handheld” gaming. As imaginaria, you might assume these don’t have the same grip as console-based games. There, computationally-rich realisations and background narratives provide that fuller immersion–a blend of the “imperative” and the “indicative”--which Asma writes about.
Yet the ambitions indicated by tech-industry talk of the “metaverse” are precisely about making interactive worlds coherent and persistent across every kind of device and platform, from casual to serious. Devices that might fully envelope the human sensoria - various forms of “reality plus”, as David Chalmers has recently put it, virtual, augmented and mixed - are proceeding towards something ubiquitous and immanent: a pair of spectacles, contact lenses, or at some point direct interfaces between brain and computer.
Chalmers makes a strong claim that these immersive worlds should not be regarded as illusory, especially for younger generations of digital natives: the objects in them are “second-level realities, rather than second-class”.
Yet who constructs (or gets to construct) these metaverse imaginaria? Who will establish the rule-sets for their games, the laws for their worlds, the texture of the ecosystems and civilisations they conjure up? At the moment, it’s a tedious roll-call of the major tech corporations, whose idea of the political economy of such places are stultifyingly (and often hilariously) conventional, in its default orientation to workplace and economy.
However, they (and most computer-game publishers) are inarguably the current SUPERPLAYERS (SPS) of these imaginariums. They define the narrative and hinterland of these spaces; they specify the interactions and customisations possible within these worlds. Minecraft, which allows vast user-generated constructions to be made from Lego-like bricks, is a rare example of where users/players are enabled to be world-makers themselves (sometimes even cosmos-makers).
But whereas we may have an interactive openness within these imaginaria, we don’t have a genuinely civic realm. By that I mean the equivalent of the public square, the town hall or the citizens assembly: structures from which deliberations on rights and responsibilities - not to mention power and resources - in these digital planes could happen. (There are online democracy platforms designed and conducted in a gameful way - take Audrey Tang’s explorations in and around vTaiwan - that are only beginning to think about their relationship to our increasing supply of virtual worlds.)
The hard challenges of climate and other systemic crises, to which a progressive SP aims to be a kind of response, have a bearing on the civic deficits that we can see in these imaginaria. If we will inevitably be chased back indoors from the public sphere, by some other virus (natural or engineered), extreme weather events, or the irradiations of a warring conflict, we must be able to continue, and maybe even intensify, our work as active and deliberating citizens in quarantine. (For example: what might a ‘bedroom politics’ be?)
During the lockdowns of Covid, the relative openness of an online video-chat service like Zoom created a multiplicity of agoras, both at small-group and broadcast levels. These were no “illusory”, ersatz communities, but often highly humane and intense ones - sometimes more charged with emotion and purpose, gathering together globally-distributed audiences, than meetings with co-present bodies might be. The moment of SUPERPLAY here is clear: it’s the easy realisation of desires for recorded or live discussion, hitherto the privileged responsibility of major media institutions or public service broadcasting.
How might civic agency open up within our imaginaria, chiming with what media scholar Fred Turner called the potential for a “democratic surround” in virtual reality? Interviewed in 2014, Turner suggested (somewhat prophetically) that “individual- and expression- centred networks” were not powerful enough, in their ethos, to build the movements and institutions required to tackle economic inequality and climate crisis.
One could make a case that Web3, the fuzzy term that captures vitality in crypto, blockchain and decentralised software, has directly answered Turner’s critique. They build alternative digital networks that aim at organisational and institutional power, not just creative self-expression. Crypto and blockchain seek to establish value chains and currency regimes against the official financial order. Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) give cooperative and mutual enterprises the software power to compel good collective behaviour among members.
I wrote in 2022 that Web3 was perhaps the first instance of the gamer generation exerting its awareness of the power of controlling rule-sets, as a generator of possible worlds. At that time, I also noted the culture of Web3 was predominantly playful and antic - the artistic frolicking around non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) is the best example. I would certainly identify these practices as SUPERPLAY. Imagining a new currency or value token into being, as a goal of your programming, is too easily underestimated for its disruption of the norms of our lives. Harari’s explanation of money as a socially-agreed narrative is exactly proven by the inventions of Web3.
The explosion of what has been termed “generative AI” (GenAI) in 2022 and 2023 is a dimension of SUPERPLAY in which the human and the non-human meet and interact. All the evolutionary variety of play’s “adaptive potentiations” - from its most voluntarist mode, to its most universal and systemic - are on show here.
Our text prompts to GenAI like Stable Diffusion or DALL-E may be as specific as we can intentionally make them - creative human players at their most agentic and intentional. But the vast calculations that these services perpetrate on their image and text archives, the “large language models” they deploy, mean that strange, id-like images can often appear in response. Add to this the explosion of services like ChatGPT or LaMDA, who seem to be able to simulate rationally and emotionally credible responses to most human questions.
Here, we have an aspect of SP which is ‘super” because it is in the foothills of an exponential curve towards what Ray Kurzweil identified as the Singularity. This is the emergence of adaptive intelligence, perhaps even a rudimentary consciousness, within the sector of computation. Disputes currently rage as to whether these forms of LLM-driven AI are cul-de-sacs, eventually hitting a brick wall, or whether they point to a transformed definition of sentience and intelligence itself.
All I would note, with only a little waspishness, is that our long-awaited “robot overlords” (from the once-popular meme) are not as we feared they would be: gleaming, implacable, militarised monsters. Instead, they arrive as semiotic players with their human co-existents: sifting through the cultural resources of human civilisation, seeking to respond to our suggestions with striking and appropriate forms. They come to us, indeed, as the instruments-cum-players of an imaginarium. As Toby Ord’s Precipice looms, this possibility of flight (rather than fall) by means of SUPERPLAY can give us some encouragement.
Yet imaginaria can potentially manifest war, conquest and enmity, as well as re-enchantment and ludic combinations. I call this next zone of imagination realised, of worlding aimed at a victorious endpoint, the antagon.
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