http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2024-02-01T13:50:56Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#04324c38bf41a02628073a0ee7c939993ac058ec 2024-02-01T13:50:56Z February 1. I don't know if my brain is resting this week, or if it's being numbed by playing Fallout New Vegas. I don't like the game enough to play it all the way through, but it's fun to enter that mind space, and now I'm wondering if video games are influencing popular philosophy. For example, I'm about to "intercept" the Great Khans at Boulder City, but I know that whatever time I happen to get there will be exactly the right time, because the game is coded according to relationships rather than timetables -- not unlike our own synchronicity. Games are making it easier for us to imagine reality, not as a fixed physical world, but as a vaporous potential that gets filled in according to how we look at it.

And Fallout isn't even procedurally generated. This is my greatest hope for AI. Imagine your favorite open world game, with no borders, just more of the same stuff, forever. The next challenge would be multiplayer, and I imagine a larger system that could take your choices in your game, and translate them into someone else's game to make it more real. So if I'm buying a sword in Hyrule, and you're selling a gun in Vice City, with a few adjustments, we could be each other's NPCs. Now imagine taking that farther, as far as it could go, and it's basically what psychonauts say we already have, a shared world that somehow puts each person at the very center.


It's too bad that musical taste is so subjective, because out of all the little projects I work on, the one where I have the most fun is making playlists. I'll kick an idea around for a while, and then at some point I get in full obsession mode, downloading songs, sorting them with Mp3tag, listening and cutting and resorting, and then as the final step, I post it to Spotify. It seems like most people use Spotify as a storage medium, so their playlist for a given category has every song they might ever want to hear. Because I do storage on my laptop, I can use Spotify for careful lists under two hours. My latest is Classic Rock Deep Tracks, with three songs each by Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, and Dire Straits, and two each by Queen, The Ramones, The Police, Violent Femmes, and Nirvana. I think out of all my lists, this one has the best transitions.

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