Eversion 6 - Gaming
Is there anything here that could be used for gaming?
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I could see playing a number of evolving iterations of a story with the players deciding what changed in between, and deciding when we got to the real story, That could work well, if everyone were on board with the premise.
Yeah, I could see that too, but would not be excited enough to try it. Might be more interesting if each 'version' was run by a different GM.
So I don't quite know where to put this. Might go better in the Story question, or the Gaming one.
Anyway, I'm not sure if Eversion can be "used" for gaming, but I did think about how the structure does in some way reflect the fact that as we play in a game space we become "better" at knowing how to play in game space, independent of its content. I believe this has been shown for memorising random sequences of numbers: As we memorise more and more sequences, it becomes easier and easier to memorise these kind of sequences, even though knowing the content of any particular sequence does not contribute to knowing the content of any other sequence. In some way there is learning of how that is distinguishable from acquiring knowledge of what.
So what? As it becomes easier to play a game it becomes more difficult to respond as someone who does not know the how of what is going on. In this way games are quite different from actuality. Also, we will find from playing that any closed and finite system (e.g. a game) which uses deterministic but random processes will generate new content it will begin to feel old / boring. I think this applies to everything, e.g. genre literature. Of course this is easily fixed by meeting new people, who instantly make situations new in ways that things cannot.
However the idea that we can be our own "other" (solipsism) is, I think, sterile. Clearly Eversion wants to show solipsism can be fruitful in an uncaring universe etc. I couldn;t get to the willing suspension of disbelief that both fiction and games depend on.
If I was going to find something interesting for ttrpgs here, this sterility of solipsism would be it. There is some inkling about players and characters and their relations with other players and characters that would be interesting to explicitly play. However I didn't find that here. He was up his own navel. I thought this book was a missed opportunity.
This is a fascinating thought, and of course you're right - any game tends to get stale, even if there are random elements within it (eg position of starting tiles or whatever). For me it also linked into current discussions of AI, along the lines of whether a human is intrinsically different from other living things (or, if you prefer, any living thing is intrinsically different from non-living thing), or whether it's simply a matter of degree of complexity along a continuous spectrum.
In the former case, full AI is inherently unachievable, whereas in the latter it's just a matter of time and resources. It's a question that kind of bridges scientific, philosophical and religious thought, so I don't suppose we'll get a definitive answer anytime soon!
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> This is a fascinating thought, and of course you're right - any game tends to get stale, even if there are random elements within it (eg position of starting tiles or whatever). For me it also linked into current discussions of AI, along the lines of whether a human is intrinsically different from other living things (or, if you prefer, any living thing is intrinsically different from non-living thing), or whether it's simply a matter of degree of complexity along a continuous spectrum.
I think a lot of the difficulty in thinking about complexity lies in facing that there are no existing continuums in actuality, only things recognized within them, and yet there is order. What I mean is that causality is not the cause of anything, and there is no causality thing found anywhere, but things seem to not be entirely random, while random things and events keep happening. This knowledge occurs in perception, which when checked conceptually/ sequentially is found to be lacking completeness.
In games these incomplete situations are fixed with new rules, which introduce new continuums that need to be managed/ controlled to get to the victory state (there ought to be a law i.e. there is nothing beyond causality). This is seductive to some (minmaxing), but I think it is sterile as a model of living, but a good and fun way to think about it.
People often approach science as if it should be this same way, and think that if we just increase precision and complexity control over what is beyond us will follow. This is how science functions as a religion.
Maybe if we could be an infinitude bigger than an infinitude bigger than ourself, like we are in games, imagined worlds, etc., but the math for there being a thing like that in actuality is not yet clear. Nonetheless those things, despite seeming to be things that cannot exist, function. Perhaps we are like that. However we neither can be, nor are, our own (m)other.