Cosplay is the act of dressing up as a character from a movie, book, or video game. Many people at PAX East dress up in elaborate cosplay costumes and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with them about it.
Read the transcript.
Audience is the key difference between any kind of theater and larp. In a play, the audience watches the actors perform, and the actors perform for the entertainment and edification of the audience. In larp, there are no outside observers, only participants; the roles of performer and audience are collapsed into what researchers such as Dr. Markus Montola have called the “first person audience.” Each participant is the author of their own performance, and the audience for their own emotions as well as the performances of their co-players. And, in fact, reactions to their co-players’ performances often occur through the lens of the character they are currently playing.
The emphasis on participants over audience also shifts the physical experience of the performer. Traditional theater prioritizes what the audience sees and hears and their staging reflects that. Set and costuming must look real, but needn’t necessarily be made of, say, real leather or plate mail. The directors arrange the actors strategically, in groupings that would feel unnatural in regular life but make the performers visible to a wide number of seats. If the actors do a good job, the audience may take the emotions of the plot and characters onto themselves, crying during a death scene, for example, or longing for intimacy during a romantic scene. In theater, the actors enjoy the lion’s share of the alibi to behave differently, while the dark room quietly gives some alibi to the audience to feel emotions more visibly than they might in everyday life.
Larp also manipulates elements such as set, costuming, and physical interactions, but it does so with a different aim in mind. The emphasis is not on how it looks and sounds to an external party, but on how it feels to the participants who simultaneously perform and absorb the larp. How the scenery looks is only important insofar as it helps the participants to feel. Wearing girdles and a long-line bra might help a participant feel that she or he is a 1950s housewife, even though such garments may remain hidden to co-players.
Likewise, how a tender moment appears to onlookers is less important than how it feels to a participant. Instead of asking participants to kiss, a larp might call for a tender touching of hands while co-players gaze into each others’ eyes, simulating the feeling of intimacy. This also dovetails with safety concerns in larp—often designers do not want players and characters to have identical experiences of say, lust and violence, for safety reasons. When one character stabs another, we don’t want the players to use real knives. Characters might have sex, but their players shouldn’t feel obligated to. In a play, of course, these moments are scripted and practiced before performance—the actors work together to become comfortable, and choreograph their smooches or rapier fights. Since larps rely on improvisation, pre-planning every fight or kiss is usually not possible. The solution is to produce a set of actions that stands in for another—different larp communities may call these “mechanics,” “techniques,” or even “metatechniques.” Player-characters might touch hands and make eye contact instead of making out, or use a ritualized exchange of phrases to play through a sex scene. Throwing a punch in super slow-motion and permitting the victim of violence to choose its effect can allow both parties some measure of control. Many larps also use techniques that allow participants to briefly step out of game and negotiate with one another about scene elements such as violence or intimacy before undertaking sensitive scenes.
Larp and theater also differ in other key respects: theater uses trained and rehearsed performers, while larp relies on the improvisation of larpers—a group that can include complete newcomers as well as experienced hands. While theater relies on convention—the actors do stuff on stage, the audience watches passively and applauds at pre-selected intervals—each larp must teach participants how to engage. Larp, therefore, is an art form that revolves around social engineering—the practice of manipulating and subverting social structures in order to generate enough alibi to produce an interesting, thought-provoking, or entertaining experience for participants. A common method larpers use for this is a pre-game workshop. These workshops can take many forms and accomplish many different objectives, depending on the game. Most importantly, the workshop allows larpers to meet and get to know each other before playing, permitting them to establish a base level of trust with one another as people before assuming their roles. During workshops, facilitators might explain information about the game world or act structure, assign characters, let participants practice story techniques and mechanics, reinforce the larp’s theme with sharing exercises, or present a series of activities designed to help players flesh out their characters and social groups. Sometimes, workshops even include scenes that happen before the larp officially starts, as a way of helping players get the jitters out.
One larp heavily influenced by theater techniques is White Death by Nina Rune Essendrop and Simon Steen Hansen. These two designers were steeped in the traditions Denmark’s highly mannered freeform scene which typically includes games with pre-written characters, discrete pre-written scenes, a strong and very active facilitator, and typically take place in unadorned classrooms. Although influenced by that design tradition, Essendrop and Hansen wrote this larp for Black Box Copenhagen, a festival devoted to larps designed for black box theater settings. At the time, they were both studying for a masters’ in theater and performance studies at the University of Copenhagen. White Death broke the traditional mold of both freeform and black box larp in the way it drew on these disciplines, relentlessly insisting on physicality. The productions of experimental stage director Robert Wilson and French avant-garde director Antonin Artaud, the Danish dancing company Granhøj Dans, Balinese dance, and Laban movement analysis inspired the duo. The resulting larp used simple props such as white balloons, white sugar, white paper, white ribbons, and sheets; lit areas; and evocative music.
White Death revolves around a group of settlers who venture into the mountains to form a better society. But when winter comes, in a very Nordic twist, they all die and turn into Transparent Ones. The workshop transforms untrained participants into skilled players through extensive workshops around movement. The life of the humans is hard, heavy, sudden, violent, and isolated. In contrast, the Transparent Ones move lightly and freely, and like to be together and laugh. Although sounds are permitted, no language is allowed in the game. Participants create a character out of a physical restriction. When I played, the slip of paper I drew from the hat decreed that my character had fingers that always pointed at the ground, and a head that lolled to one side, never in the middle. One character could only move in jumping jack motions. Others have imaginary sticks connecting bodyparts such as wrists and knees. The lack of language and the extreme physical restrictions transformed each participant’s body into a game piece; the experience of playing White Death is insistently physical, and uses that physicality to evoke feeling in participants.
Over the course of the first act, the facilitators introduce three symbolic props: white balloons representing dreams, white cups of sugar representing survival, and white paper representing faith. As the participants interact with the props, balloons—and thus dreams—pop; participants fight over sugar, and get covered in it as their physically restricted selves try to drink it; and meaner characters rip faith to shreds while a few desperately cling to the scraps.
During the second act of the larp, the storms begin. During each storm, the barrier between humans and Transparent Ones thins, allowing Transparent Ones to reach into the circle of light where humans dwell and pull them to the dark peaceful half of the playing space. Gently, the Transparent Ones usher humans into their new existence, massaging out their physical restrictions and gracing them with a white ribbon. By the end of the larp, all the humans have been transformed, and the Transparent Ones are happy and together in the darkness.
This larp is aesthetically beautiful to facilitate and play. Set to a soundtrack of folk rock, participants in black clothes play out their grunting relationship dramas and endow bright white props with the deepest of meanings. At one point, I looked up from my narrative and took stock of the room. In corners, a man showed balloon shreds to a woman and wept. One character writhed on the floor, unable to rise due to her physical restriction and shrieking her displeasure. Shambling bullies chased someone who had a few shreds of faith left. I thought to myself, “whoa, this is some artsy fartsy shit.” But I had been so deep inside the head of my own character, that it hadn’t occurred to me at all how bizarre my behavior would be considered in the outside world. As a participant, after playing one act in the hard, heavy, sudden and violent life of the humans, I felt transformed when a Transparent One removed my physical restriction. It’s a little bit hard to explain how in words. The closest I can get is that I felt suddenly capable of happiness; I felt light; I felt loved.
Essendrop and Hansen got the most out of both theatrical and larp mediums. They used theatrical techniques—lights, music, and graphic props—to set an emotional tone that fit the story, and to demarcate the space and time of the larp as a heightened and abstracted setting. They used movement workshops inspired by theater and dance to transform the motions of their average players into something that looked and felt significant and meaningful. But in the end, the performance was true larp. The alibi of the production freed us from ordinary mindsets and our ordinary physicality. We improvised relationships, struggles, and their resolutions on the spot. The larp’s restrictions palpably located the ensuing emotions and connections within our own bodies. We weren’t witnessing and sympathizing with someone else’s epiphany. We could feel the sugar melting on our skin, the desperate longing for the last sad, half-deflated white balloon, the savage glory of ripping someone else’s faith to shreds.
The larp delivered the primacy of these things into our bones, making tangible the fierce desire to survive. As the experience progressed, we felt an abstract, aestheticized longing for death, not as an end, but as the freedom from humanity’s sometimes inane struggles. And at last, to the strains of Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms,” we entered the transcendental world—happy, light, and together—beyond the grave. ♦
(Image credit: All photographs of the White Death larp being performed in 2014 by Xin Li via Flickr.)
But if you’ve been reading Lizzie Stark’s Performing the Real—a three-part introduction to the world of larping—you’ll find that there are plenty of folks who don’t wait for Halloween to embrace their alter egos. Part 2, in particular, focuses on the key role that wholly assuming an alibi plays in the success of a larp. She goes so far to say that alibis are not reserved for the players alone, but that larp itself can be an alibi for interaction. Part 3 arrives on Tuesday.
Cosplayers of color don’t always have representative characters to model on. Recently, a vocal community united on social media to affirm their presence and prowess—and voice support for one another—after Mic.com interviewed five cosplayers who addressed the role race plays in their character development.
Then there’s cosplayers of . . . construction? This cosplayer got a little meta when he costumed himself as the Javits Center, host to this year’s New York Comic Con.
Meet Gnomen.
File under: just because we can, does that mean we should? Digital Avatars and fake news.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was roundly and justifiably rebuked for “teleporting” his virtual self to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico in a bizarre attempt to show sympathy for storm victims. He later apologized.
Janelle Shane—a research scientist who trains neural networks to create Dungeons & Dragons spells, trendy beer names, and pub names (a pint of Bombie Saison down at the Old Festerian anyone?) has trained her algorithms on designing Halloween costumes this week in case anyone needs any last-minute ideas (sorry, I have dibs on Panda Clam).
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
(Image credit: The Jacob Javits Center by Steven Leung on Flickr.)
In 2014, Chang started recording and broadcasting his gameplay to a competitive gaming world for which Game Boy Tetris held little sway any longer. Once he began recording and streaming on a daily basis, he began to look at his gameplay as a kind of performance.
Dear Nintendo Power, a companion piece to Chang’s live performance, is at once a testimonial to the addictive nature of achievement and a modest homage to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. Chang says in a recent interview on The Creative Independent:
“He used to write these letters to Nintendo Power in 1991 boasting about his top score. I did some stuff like that too when I beat him and he heard about it apparently. He left a comment on a news article about the project. He had claimed he had gotten higher scores, but I’ll believe him when I see him stream it live on Twitch.”
Watch Chang play Game Boy Tetris via the video stream link below, recorded live on October 25. Has Chang bettered his ranking? Tune in to find out!
Watch the live recording from drofrehturgnahc on www.twitch.tv
(Image credit: Courtesy of Heinz Nixdorf Museum Forum. Photo by Jan Brown.)
There were also beeps in this game. When my balls—my extra balls by now, I’m that good—hit one particular bumper and bounced back on it, again and again, piling up points and aiming me for the leaderboard, the beeps beeped furiously. Each one was a half-second, more or less tonal, and—as usual for me—beeps sit on the knife’s edge of puzzling and rapturous.
Beeps belong to nature and electricity and electronics and the Internet. All the centuries. Like the railroad toot but unlike an old telephone ring, beeps have both a distinct start and finish, marked by the twin plosives “b” and “p,” and an elastic center that can generously expand and contract like an accordion: beeeeeeeep. You can create Morse code in beeps. Beeeep beep beep beep. Beep. Beep. Beep beeeep beeeep beep. Yes, they’re a frankensound—but nature can almost, almost suggest them. They certainly seem to have always existed. Maybe art teases beeps out of nature.
The beep is synthetic; it’s manmade, like climate change. Plants don’t beep, nor weather, nor animals, nor birds except Road Runner. If you hear a beep, you know that a person, or more likely his artifact, is signaling. There’s no wondering, Is that a beep or a nightingale? Is that a beep or a tornado? Beeps are also not voices or music.
And still, sonically exotic as they may be, beeps are, as my pinball home insistently suggested, easy to make; they are cheap and light. No wonder everything beeps. E-mail beeps. Texts. Trucks in reverse. Hospital monitors. Stoves, dashboards, cameras, clocks. Coffee machines. Dishwashers. Elevators. Toys. Robots. Toy robots.
The onomatopoeic word “beep” launched in 1929, and prewar beeps were produced by car horns, though sonar, electric elevators, and clown horns may have beeped or protobeeped even before the 1920s. Other car horns of the period, and now especially those of big cars, are usually heard to “honk.” Beeps as the sound of cute cars—makes sense. A small, zippy, nuisancey thing chirping, “’Scuse me, could you move a smidge? Thanks!” That’s a beep.
As a source for beeps, car horns gave way to piezoelectric technology, a breakthrough used increasingly after World War II in labs, hospitals, and military operations. With the arrival of the transistor, small piezo buzzers could be made to beep in devices like electronic metronomes and game-show buzzers. An efficient, low-power way to gin up a tone for a device to emit. Beeps could now be heard in a range of contexts, but the sound still managed to speak of seriousness and technology.
Were those beeps on the pinball playfield digitized? I choose to believe they were not made in sound labs, but date from the bells and horns of J.P. Morgan days. That every time a ball hit a bumper it squeaked because it was weighted metal on hard, smooth rubber, and something in the angle—and I misread it as a beep—but I’m not crazy: Naturally on the Monopoly game the beeps were modulated and engineered to define my experience, the very victories I thought I was creating with my analog tendons and fingertips and wrists.
Beautifully, submissively, we have adjusted to the hegemony of computers. But this Monopoly table, with its rusty screws and peeled paint, suggests one road back or through to an ecstatic, three-dimensional, and entirely mortal form of culture, in which our imperfect and limited bodies might reassert their centrality to culture, politics, and philosophy. This reassertion I anticipate with some giddiness the way, in my Bolshevik days, I used to anticipate the digital revolution. This time I resolve not to be so impatient with my elders.
The material world and our bodies, in concert, can yet reconfigure themselves, as if to prove they can’t be digitized. I believe that. In games like this one, from 2001, before broadband razed our nervous systems, I hear trills of promise. Of course, on this day, I was at forty-five in the middle of the journey my life, lost in the dark wood of an executive hotel. I was a truant; I had skipped a conference for a stolen pinball game. And reader: I was winning. ♦
(Image credit: Pinball by el-toro on Flickr.)
Why don’t female soccer players amp up the sex appeal to increase enthusiasm for women’s sports? “If sports was only about long legs, then women’s beach volleyball would be the biggest sport in the world,” remarks Shammy Jacob, former Director of Sustainable Ventures at Nike. “Of course performance should come first. Only then is it about looking great as an athlete. But looking great does not equal looking sexy.” To prove her point, Jacob offers an historic example. In the 1990s, Nike had been working with the American women’s national soccer team to design their outfits for the upcoming world championships. One of the things the women asked for was a better bra, one designed for sports. “To all of our amazement, Brandi Chastain scores the winning goal of the tournament, and celebrates by sliding onto her knees and taking her shirt off, revealing her sports bra.” The moment was captured in a photo that made the cover of Sports Illustrated and became a landmark image in the history of women’s sports. Jacob rejects the idea that the image was iconic because it was revealing. “What the shot showed was an athlete at the top of her game. To have everyone see a woman so fit, so strong, so victorious, and to receive so much attention, that made a world of difference for women’s sports at that time. Nike focused on performance but made sure the styling was also relevant and tasteful.”
Despite the fact that more women are playing and watching sports, and that general viewership for women’s sports is increasing, women’s sports uniforms in most parts of the world remain stuck in a vicious circle. Without evidence of demand, sports brands won’t invest in creating professional gear for women. Without high-quality gear, fewer women play and fewer still play at their best, making games less exciting for spectators and less interesting for sponsors and sports brands, closing the circle of low demand.
One brand that is looking to break the circle is Liona, a new sports brand from the Netherlands, founded by former professional soccer player Leonne Stentler. Seeing that no brand was taking up the challenge of providing high-quality gear for women, Stentler decided to jump into the gaping hole in the market. Launched in 2015, Liona is already supplying professional league teams across the country with uniforms. Growing up as a child playing and during her entire professional career, Stentler took the absence of women’s kit as a given. “There is no women’s clothing available all the way to the top of the league. It is a huge investment for brands to produce a “second line” for women . . . . It is a men’s game; we are not a priority.”
Together with a fashion designer, Stentler started to redesign women’s uniforms. Most innovations came naturally to Stentler, who had seen firsthand what was needed. “All girls wear tights underneath their shorts for when they make slides. So our Liona shorts have built-in tights. Their waistbands are wider for more comfort. Shirts are longer than those for men and wider at the hips.” The response to Liona has been overwhelmingly positive. Luckily, it is not just praise that is rolling in, but orders as well. Liona has just supplied FC Twente with its women’s team uniform and the team is raving. “This is what is needed in the long run to create more confidence, to attract sponsors, and to lift the sport to a higher level,” says Stentler.
Stentler is not alone in seeing massive opportunities for women’s sports uniforms. With the availability of great sports gear, the vicious circle female athletes have found themselves in can become an upward spiral: the better the professional gear, the better the player. The better the player, the bigger the audience. With bigger audiences comes more sponsorship, allowing more women to have a career in sports.
Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al Saud, Vice President of Women’s Affairs at the General Sports Authority, Saudi Arabia, is one of the players looking forward to joining Stentler’s cause while focusing on the needs of Muslim women. “The market is not just girls in the Middle East. There is a pan-Islamic diaspora. Imagine a young girl in Birmingham who wants to compete. Why would you exclude her from the game?” Anne Skovrider of Hummel agrees. At the end of the day, access to the sport is what it should be all about: “Let these girls go out, play, get fit, learn teamwork, get confidence, feel good about themselves. That is what we want to support.” ♦
Return to the first installment of “Kit That Fits.”
Photo credit: Khalida Popal, former captain of the Afghan national women’s soccer team. Courtesy of Hummel.
It came as a surprise last month when the company announced a major round of layoffs, but this week came the happier news of a “women of NASA” set that will feature astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, and astronauts Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. LEGO’s philosophy—that learning through play promotes innovation and creativity—is no longer groundbreaking, but its product continues to be fodder for researchers, scientists, and psychologists who have tapped the potential of the toy to illustrate the nimbleness of the human mind.
LEGO is serious play for many psychologists. Researchers are looking at the act of building with LEGO—and the results—as conceptual spaces to learn about play psychology and how to apply it to teaching the psychology of creativity itself.
Maybe some people spend too much time on LEGO: “It is clear that our participants treated LEGO people differently than LEGO nonpeople.”
Academics are looking at the rigidity of LEGO kits and are advocating for the right to “un-make.”
Related: does following the instructions make people less creative? Perhaps. Here are some people who go off-piste with their LEGO building:
Designer Milan Madge built a huge Leica camera in his free time.
Architects at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) have completed an institutional project for LEGO in the company’s home-base of Billund, Denmark: the 12,000-square-foot Lego House.
In 2015, Olafur Eliasson hosted The Collectivity Project on New York’s Highline, a massive collective build that used only white bricks.
Japanese children reimagined their country in 1.8 million bricks during the “Build Up Japan” event in 2012.
Ai Wei Wei both addressed a political controversy in LEGO form, while LEGO courted some in its response to the project. This project, Trace, is currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC.
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
(Image credit: Ai Wei Wei’s Trace installed at Alcatraz prison in 2014 courtesy of Glen Bowman via Flickr.)
The United States intelligence community has a long history with gaming. Role-playing and simulations have been part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s best practices for generations, and are often conducted with the help of judges and mediators behind closed doors to explore complex, real-world situations.
But recently, the CIA revealed that they also use tabletop games—in effect, complex modern board games—to train its own analysts, and analysts from other agencies.
By day, Volko Ruhnke is an instructor at the CIA’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis. By night, Ruhnke is an acclaimed designer of commercial board games best known for the COIN Series, published by GMT Games. He said the CIA has been interested in tabletop games for a very long time, well before he started working there in the 1980s. Applying his knowhow in the commercial space to building games for CIA officers in a classroom setting was a natural fit. The goal, he explained, is to facilitate repetition in the practical application of intelligence gathering skills, about separating actionable information from noise and acting on it quickly.
Ruhnke shared an example of his work, a project called Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo, which he co-designed with another instructor in the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kingpin uses the historical details of the capture of Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as well as some fictional elements to create a challenging, asymmetrical game.
Kingpin is an adversarial game where one side plays the role of law enforcement and the other plays the role of Guzmán’s own handlers and associates. It revolves around hidden information, with each side playing on their own hidden game board behind a screen. El Chapo’s team is constantly moving around inside Mexico trying to evade the law, but the cartel leader has certain tastes and expectations. He’s not just willing to sit inside a hole somewhere, and one viable strategy is for law enforcement to use his proclivities against him. In the classroom, the game is played twice, with students taking turns playing on both sides of the table.
The key to the game, and to every other game played at the Kent School, is the facilitator. It’s their responsibility to keep things moving by interpreting the rules and feeding them to students on the fly. But in Kingpin, the facilitator also plays the role of referee. They have an important role in moving the action forward by revealing new information to both sides.
Unlike commercial board games, Ruhnke’s projects at the CIA don’t need to be fun. They also don’t need to support multiple playthroughs. In fact, they don’t even need to be played to completion.
“For a training game, it’s not nearly as important that you finish the game,” Ruhnke said. “It’s not even important that the game be balanced or have replay value. It might have those things. But our students are probably never going to play it again. It’s more about the insights and the process.”
Games are a very small fraction of what Kent School students will do in their coursework, but Ruhnke said the kind of hands-on work that tabletop gaming provides is invaluable.
“They are a tremendous tool for helping us prepare our understanding of complex affairs,” Ruhnke said. He likened it to studying the ongoing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan. “An insurgency is the interactions of many different actors, interests, tribes, forces, political movements, parties, village elders. It’s a complex compilation of factors, and that’s what we’re asking our analysts to understand. But human beings deal with complexity by forming mental models. So now, as instructors, we have to communicate those models to our students. Games do that very well.”
I was first introduced to the Ruhnke’s design work with a game called Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ?, first published in 2010. In it, one player takes on the role of the United States while the other plays as Islamic jihadists. Each player takes actions by playing from a hand of cards that includes real-world, historical events. In one of my most memorable playthroughs the US prevailed only by keeping Benazir Bhutto alive long enough to drive the opposing player entirely out of Pakistan.
I asked Ruhnke about the potential conflicts that might arise between his commercial work and his classified work at the CIA.
“It is something that I have to watch,” he said. “I use my judgement in choosing to participate in work that’s outside of CIA work, and I’m not alone in that,” Ruhnke said. “I have . . . authorities here to double check. And in situation where I could have been exposed to sensitive information, I need to make sure that I’m okay here. That’s a routine procedure at the CIA. In my case, it happens to be that I’m making games, but if I were writing a book or writing an editorial in a newspaper it would be the same thing.”
The most gratifying part of the job for Ruhnke is in bringing intelligence officers together in a low-pressure environment in the same room with their peers. The Kent School isn’t just for members of the CIA, but provides instruction for analysts from the sixteen members of the United States Intelligence Community and all branches of the armed forces.
“It’s professionals coming together to practice their craft,” Ruhnke said, “separated from the immediate, pressing needs of our country. Of course, they’re interacting with each other every day, but in here it’s coming off the line, getting together as a brotherhood or a sisterhood of terrorism analysts. . . . I think it has to help.” ♦
(Image credit: Detail from Kingpin, a board game used by the CIA based on the capture of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán, popularly known as El Chapo. All images courtesy Central Intelligence Agency.)
As fathers of young children, Jason and Adam have spent many fun hours playing board games, several of which were created by Parker Brothers, which made its start as a game company right in Salem, Massachusetts. These board games aren’t just about diverting play, but about rules you must follow to win. The rules of game often reflect the idealized rules and mores of the culture—by playing the game, you are learning how to behave in the culture. And thus, board games are like a time capsule, a way of seeing the dominant values of a place and time. Our five-part series, Board Gaming the System, honors the legacy of the board game (and the many hours we’ve spent playing them) and reimagines classic boards to reveal the unwritten rules of our culture today.
Come back for next month’s installment in the series.
To talk about machine fooling humans isn’t quite accurate, of course. If we are deceived, it is because other people have built machines intended to deceive us. If we endorse an illusion, it is because we have fooled ourselves into seeing it as truth. And if, eventually, Turing’s test is passed, the supposed divide between illusion and truth collapses—leaving us with the question of whether we call ourselves magic or mechanism. As they begin to replicate more and more human achievements, will our creations reveal our minds to be reproducible in software? Will they gesture beyond us to new kinds of mind—to a world in which we must abandon old conceptions of self?
For a vision of the second of these possibilities, you need look no further than the contemporary cult of the Singularity. Named after the event horizon surrounding the quantum singularity of a black hole—that threshold beyond which not even light can escape—the term was first used by author Vernor Vinge in the 1980s to describe how self-improving artificial intelligence might accelerate beyond humans, past a historical point of no return.
The Singularity offers a strange inversion of Turing’s game: a point at which time and technology dissolve into miracles. Two entities are at play. One is a shadow, a simulacrum, trying to convince its master to treat it as an equal. In the world of the Singularity, humanity is the shadow—trying to show its superiors that it still deserves some measure of consideration. After the Singularity, all old rules cease to apply.
I don’t believe the Singularity is coming, but I do take seriously its vision of technological apotheosis, not least because it draws upon the same fascination that Kempelen’s illusion harnessed: a vision of the future conditioned by games in which there are winners and losers, skill is measured on a single scale, and computation is synonymous with intellect.
What does it mean to play a computer at a game like chess? These days, it means losing. In 1997, humanity’s greatest chess champion, Gary Kasparov, was beaten before the eyes of the watching world by IBM’s Deep Blue. In 2016, Google’s AlphaGo did the same for Go champion Lee Seedol, besting humanity at a game orders of magnitude more complex than chess. In early 2017, an AI called Libratus vanquished the world’s best players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em, a game of bluff and imperfect information that some had hoped would remain dominated by humans.
This progression points to a fundamental divide between people and machines. Much like athletes pushing up against the boundaries of biology, the increments of human improvement have hard limits. We advance towards a certain threshold in slowing steps. Across rapid generations of software and hardware, meanwhile, machines advance faster and faster. Since 1997, the world’s best human chess players have got perhaps a little better, helped by computers. Meanwhile, the speed at which Deep Blue calculated—around 11.4 gigaflops—has fallen more than an order of magnitude behind the 275 gigaflops powering Samsung’s Galaxy S8 smartphone, a device you can fit in your pocket. Modern supercomputers are many thousands of times faster than those built in 1997, and this trend as yet shows no sign of stopping. The Deep Blue of 1997 would stand about as much chance against today’s supercomputers as a two-year-old would against Kasparov.
Singularity theorist Ray Kurzweil coined the phrase “the second half of the chessboard” to help people conceptualize the staggering properties of this increase. The phrase refers to a mathematical parable, in which a scholar is told by a king that he can name any price as his reward for performing a great service. What I wish for, the scholar replies, is that you place one grain of wheat upon the first square of a chessboard, two upon the second, four upon the third, eight upon the fourth, and so on, until the chessboard is covered.
The king protests that this is too small a prize, but the scholar demurs. By the end of the first row of eight squares, he has 255 grains of wheat. By the time the first half of the chessboard is covered, he has 4,294,967,295 grains—around 280 tons. After this, the first square on the second half of the chessboard will contain as much wheat as the entire first half, and so on, until the wheat required becomes hundreds of times more than exists in the whole world. Once you reach a certain threshold, Kurzweil explains, any ongoing exponential increase demolishes old frames of reference: its sheer scale brings wholly new phenomena, and demands new ways of thinking.
How can we hope for anything other than obsolescence in the face of this exponential curve, lashing itself towards infinity? Within the bounds of game-worlds like chess and Go, the Singularity has come and gone. Never again in history will the world’s greatest player be an unaided human. Yet the game is not what it seems. By picking games like chess as both emblems of our rivalry and the ultimate arenas for training machine minds, humans have defined a terrain in which they are not only destined to eventually lose, but are also the architects of their own irrelevance—the creators of rule-bounded spaces within which any suitably-defined victory can be won by automation. Beyond this realm, however, the question of supremacy is not even the right one to ask.
Behind accounts of our near future such as Kurzweil’s lies a way of thinking called technological determinism. Determinism offers an account of the world in which the old is driven out by the new, sometimes violently, via mechanisms that nobody needs to have chosen. In warfare, guns beat spears—and people who choose to keep on fighting with spears will sooner or later find themselves on the wrong side of history. In business, advanced autonomous systems beat old-fashioned labour—and corporations who sentimentally refuse to replace their workforce with robots will sooner or later find themselves overtaken. Determinism’s logic is one of ceaseless winner-takes-all games between old and new—a context within which humanity itself is easily viewed as yesterday’s news.
Is this true? Evolution certainly requires no intentions in order to unfold. Yet inevitability, I would argue, exists only in retrospect—in a pattern that our minds project onto the world. We see a Turk seated at a chessboard, and so we also see intent and elemental opposition—a struggle for supremacy complete with winners and losers, old and new. Yet, while a machine may today beat us at chess, it is not actually playing in any recognizable human sense. Somewhere inside its circuits, human players remain hidden—programmers, designers, past grandmasters, creators of a history that has been uncomprehendingly digested and optimized. Our loss is also our victory. The only rules and measures we can lose by are those we have ourselves created.
What isn’t captured by such metrics? As the philosopher Bernard Suits put it in his 1978 book The Grasshopper, a game can also be thought of as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” We may play a game such as chess in the hope of winning. But this doesn’t make winning its purpose, any more than the purpose of listening to a symphony is getting to the end as fast as possible. Rather, the possibility of victory (and of losing, and of drawing) exists in order to create meaningful play: the exercise of skill and tactics, a pursuit undertaken for its own satisfaction. Constraint create the possibility of play, but it does not constrain the experiences play enables.
As strange it may seem to say it, this is also true of warfare, economics, and the other arenas in which we compete on a daily basis. Victory is the means to ends—power and influence, wealth and glory—that cannot remain meaningful if victory is the only value that matters. Economic rivalry may mean outdoing your rivals, but it also demands common aspirations if there is to be any economy worth succeeding within. The exponential logic of victory after victory does not hold for the human world—not when constraint and common ground are the places that any ultimate purpose resides. It’s our confusion of purpose with conquest, not any inherent property of machines, that’s most likely to destroy us.
In his 1986 book Finite and Infinite Games, the religious scholar James Carse makes the case that “finite” games played for the purpose of winning are secondary to “infinite” games, played for the purpose of continuing further play. In Carse’s account, finite games are preoccupied by the kind of conflicts that determinism puts at the heart of history: power clashes in which faster, harder, bigger and better tools perpetually supplant weaker ones. Infinite games, however, take an interest in the process of play itself—and are alive above all to the possibility of surprises, transforming the trajectory of all that has come before. “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained,” writes Carse, “To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
How should we think about the games we play with and through our tools? The philosopher of technology Luciano Floridi uses a very different parable to that of the chessboard to describe our interactions with technology. Imagine a relationship, he writes in his book The Fourth Revolution, in which one partner is accommodating and adaptable, and the other is extraordinarily inflexible. Over time, if the relationship persists and neither partner’s personality changes, they will end up doing more and more things in the way that the less flexible partner insists upon—because their choice is either to do things this way, or not do them at all.
Even the most adaptable machine is orders of magnitude more inflexible than the most rigid human. Once design decisions have been made—once the boundaries of the game together with its incentives have been defined—our creations will be able to maximize its outcomes with ever-greater efficiency. The question is not whether this automatically makes us redundant, but rather whether we have meaningfully debated which incentives we do and do not wish to see relentlessly pursued on our behalf—a debate that can only exist between humans, and that has significance only in our interplay.
Few people learn chess because they wish to be the best in the world; fewer still because they wish to bring the history of chess-playing to a close. Play and learning are themselves the point—the spaces within which value resides. Similarly, when it come to humanity and history, neither our velocity nor our theoretical destination are the metrics that matter most. In constraint, in life and the playing of games, what counts is the experiences we create—and the possibilities we leave behind. ♦
(Image credit: Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment via Flickr.)
