But this is not a game. Games may teach new, and if arcade be old school, yet here is something moldier: words in quiet state, epiphone of no body now here, sense with side of absence. We now rejoin authority's disconfigured conversation, always in progress, everlasting con.
Though as the beam races, you see how I miss state, as obz3nka returns to pre5enfe. Words refuse to lie where fallen, get up instead to play. What goes, what gives? If not game what? Monstrous conjugation, discourse across arcade, play upon words, culture += game.
Or vice's verses, not integer increment but collision, confusion. Your culture all over my game. The outcome is more deeply interfused, mixogony, mashup, mishegoss; or something else?
"The formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms," as wise men said in yore days (mine anyway), when remediation was the big idea. But: Formal? But: Logic? That would be scanned.
Yes, in fact, and by the racing beam, a couple dozen times each eyebeat. Scan, scant, scandal. Play on.
But: seriously? Can exploits now in process offer copula of remedy, some handy now for new, swapping dis(course) for dat(a)? Or is there nothing in this world so neat as a transitive remediation?
Lay on to overflowing: Hoopsa, Hobyah, Huizinga. Play is older than culture, bred in marrow of animal bone, every bit as destabilizing as that other critter function calls itself LANGUAGE. We are off the logic map here, halfway out of our formal clothes. Don't try changing this-for-that with words that won't be still.
What we've got here is failure to remediate: not some plausible prosecution of analysis by other means, but bohemian rhapsodies considerably less discrete.
Play mechanic of double senses, pataphysique appliquée. A door is a jar, as told in Anecdote of Car. The game is a foot if it's a centimeter, inch me no incheries. Slippage is only law for crash times like the present. The game is well and truly on, but nothing so simple as scam, or scandal, as we might misspiel.
It's SC4NDA1's what it is: rank, raw, complex and imbricated. What do you say about that, Sherlock?
Because what I'm saying is not familiable for a paper suit. Because you're not reading. Because there is no way to simply play this, game without quarter, of dubious end.
Because there has been, for a while now Sherman, no way back from the machine. Because the time turns no more answerably to and fro, but swings instead to stranger musics, handicrafted eyetunes.
Because we're stuck in endless motion tween, code to the warp of us, codex to the weft, discourse fubar Alice. Because words won't stand, play's not working, and the mind fills up with overflowers.
Diagnosing the condition, Doctor Cool finds weirdness all up in our charts: interference patterns, standing waves, information resistans. Sit down, Ms. and Mr. Amerika, there's no simple way to say this.
In the permanent wave, remediation won't anneal logic to form. You can see the specialists, work the problem posthumanly sideways or premedially back. Some patients experience brief, reality-like interludes; but the problem doesn't really go away.
Something crashes the mesh, figuring us, in the words of the Synner, as "incurably informed," flown far downrange of remedy.
How shall we think this irremediable, unredeemable state? Is it any end of everything, or the biggest of big innings, still later in the game when the lights come on?
What flies in a plane with wingtip vertices at arcade, discourse, culture, and play? Define the formal logic of fun, and don't try nothing funny.
Or set the dial at sc4nda1 and play on.
SC4NDA1: (1337) n. neol. spur.
0. Expense of spare wit on a shameless game.
1. Serious inability to take one's work seriously, often manifesting as cryptotypography.
2. What the 5&&a1s took.
3. See LANGUAGE.
Or set yourself this problem: What happens when computation, paragon of formal logic, syncs beneath the standing wave? Which is also to wonder: When did the circus come to town? At what point did we leave our reasonable seats and saunter away with the clowns? Haven't we always been with the circus?
Stand before the board and write:
UTM != ATM: As Noah knows, the Universal Turing Machine, programmable system, is ever as may be, and never less than more than yet we know. While one (1) may inscribe a finitude of states, encoding cashpoint, typewriter, or gamebox, 0 (zero) demurs: any withholding of content is purely incidental, merely intentional.
We (10, one-zero, base-two twain) do not write with the machine, nor do we simply write the machine. We encode a progressive encoding: fed backwards through perverse engineering, pro-grammaria writes forward. The machine thus loops along; but the long con of computation shines through its devices, immanently self-busting. UTM is resisting-information: it won't contain its multitude.
And so: sc4nda1 us! 1 uses the mage's machine to play silly games, jobbing off formal logic in Cartesian dot tricks. Pong, for Cray's ache. Smells like X teen spirit; or the circus, where virtu of courtesan, warrior, priestess, shaman, is reciprocated (0'd out) in seriated acts of ringmaster, acrobat, contortionist, clown.
By which, in remedias res, we arrive at Circus Circuit, pocket-sized sublime, chia pet god, aura shrunk to gimmick by Tom Thumb and his four fantasticks, or the Missus and her misses. Digital entertainment. Keep it in your pocket.
So why this dotty matrix in place of imaging more humanly divine? Sc4nda1 of circus circuit (or Babel): to know how to build is to know how to build higher. Code of pro-grammaria is the law of Mo(o)re: impatiently awaiting wonders. In the one-liner of the Prophet, "the most sublime act is to set another before you." Satanic rimshot.
Yet we seriate not high but downwardly, scanting erudition in favor of a ludic riff. Why oh why?
Taking as read the ad hominem of foregone mediocrity, it could be that we fall to riffing precisely because we cannot operate the UTM, can't humble its omniference to unity of function. Lacking this economy of grace, we can only slouch backwards in the sore uncertain hope of impossible remediation.
Thus we join the circus, 1 + 0 + the rest of me, hoping through professional foolery to stem unthinkable tides, to distill googolplex to some plausible design: riverrun, road of excess, walk of shame, some passable way in wildness. Breathe big in and out, ergon-hodos. Then settle down to work the paths.
In the sand box eye play the dream ergodic, blitting polygonally down limitless seeming lanes of run and shoot, every bit still shiny from the silent churning cores. Down in polyAna's Transverse City we find ourselves in iterated situations, haunting the garden of many curses, arena of suffering and joy, plenum ludus est.
World as dream in box of sand. Go where you like, do what you will; you will prosecute the path and thank us by your efforts. So play it, worka! Run fast, run anywhere, but run straight down.
Down in fact to this: City of Sand - gamasutra, cyberspace, videodrome - insinuates its own remediating bargain, binding emanation of UTM in artifice of Automated Toil. Betrayed to undeniably finite state, all those twisty little passages drill down to numbered spaces on a vast but ordered graph.
From which it follows the ergodic, as in media All Things Must, grounds upon inevitable reversal, catastrophic supplement or overflow, its very own sc4nda1. Which remains to explain.
SC4NDA1 (Javascript): Str. deprec.
000. Computable expression wherein divers values run superposed, as in Unix "man woman"; failure of disambiguation; puntime error.
001. Excess, surplus, generous economy: more than 1 can know, more than 10 can say.
010. Piece that passes understanding en route to other scenes.
011. Coming soon, or too soon.
Don't tell Coach, but sc4nda1 isn't in the game!
It's no surprise, really: sc4nda1 is never native property of process, but profuse, emergent, other; integral exteriority. Sc4nda1 is that which escapes the formalogical tuck and roll. It's overflow, outgraberei, bellyment of beast.
Which is to say, glancing downwards, the sc4nda1 isn't in game, but of player.
Not far outside Ireland, Doyle writes The Woman, who seals the letter to become sleuth's muse. But as scandal morphs polyagonally to sc4nda1, the work of detection demands chorus or combo. Behind the music: Nancy always first, constant partner, forbearing all my stunts; also Prof. Dorothee Metlitzki, who when I first blurted hypertext said, "you must create a new language"; and Anne Balsamo, genius of genres, daughter of computer; and Pat Cadigan, who wrote the last word on new things: "change for the machines."
They perceive, these women, what falls outside the working paths, escapes directed graphs. I just pass along.
A final muse and source to name: N. Katherine Hayles, great American reader, who double-taps the truth within these games, which is that reading, once work of eye alone (lips long since stilled), now gathers in a not so idle hand.
But you will say, what the diff? Twitch is to scratch, nitpicking with your primates: so what if we point and click, pinch and swipe, or scroll the page? Mere mickey mouseplay. What's in or out of hand is nothing but a joke.
Hands up, who's wrong? As mirrorshades once failed to see, old new romance went down with books in print, idyll sadly sweet and mostly done. Reading now is no more just the eye's habit. Beings digital do chiromancy; hand is always in the loop, and as Hayles explains, the loop runs through that space between your ears.
Putty in the pan, the plastic brain adapts, transforms. Reading-to-hand springs new fluors of effemarei, fresh breaks for fun and function. Congress with machines, perverse where lawful, reweaves the neural net without benefit of surgery. Hand over the change.
And what of mind thus comes to hand? If as cousin Wesch says, "the machine is us/ing us," are we inscribed as UTM, or to speak glass-backward, modalities of transformation unlimited? What can it mean to imagine an infinitely rewritable awareness, text of being ever and always in the game?
Again the overflower, or animal irruption. Is this the critter's sweet revenge, happy puppy nipping at our heels, play tumbling over culture at last? Who's been chewing these sc4nda1s?
Or set the terms more practically: who indeed? On what handy body do we drape these arrayments, to what brain salad add dressing?
Here sc4anda1 may indicate not overcharge, but coefficient lack or gap: not just the basic theyity of other minds, but of mindbrains in medias spacetime lately self-assembled by what remain to me uncommon practices.
Talking to tupleware: this is your brain on what, now? Trust me, I'm not that kind of doctor, but how can I proscribe when you keep changing your mind like that?
You're some kind of serious player if you've come this far; better far than I, who truth be told will always game against my years.
This is your brain of new mediations: finely coordinated hand-to-eye, spatiotemporally adept, tuned and attending hyper and deep. See how the screen lights up in ways till now unknown.
Your headshot, not mine.
Say we have, each and all, signatures of our extended selves. So I'm basically televisual, born mad as hell in blue light of Now This Day Tooned; though from the get I never could just watch the flickering thing, must always set by with something in my hands, sketchpad, notebook, iPad now. Come too soon, chiromane before the letter.
Or just having my TV as Radio, as editor said when Laurel pitched Computers as Theatre. My case may be all about head voices, trance state, lucid dreams: marks of peculiarity, if not illness. My marks, not yours. No two signatures alike.
These days some style themselves in microbial blogspheres: Facebook, foursquare, Twitter. Raise a glossy tombstone here some minutes hence, when they and I have passed.
Reading these in-signs, the poet Cayley says: "ever younger minds may have machinic familiars and mediators who will help them remove any mystery from their secrets. When that happens, the 'electronic' will be long dead and literature will die."
As we shake our greying heads, Miss America bids bye-bye with kiss and standing wave. It had to happen here.
Or set that thought aside: Why this summary obsession, this strange attraction to full stop? I blame the sentence and its serializers.
Parricide's for poets, say the Word Wrestling Fatherators; but why is that a belt you need to wear? I blame myself, and all who sometimes type in blood.
What are we playing at, J.C.? The world may end in 2012; The Simpsons never did. Play persists, against all signs of ending.
Am ever go, as always: Final level now.
And so you're still alive, perfect defender of the near frontier, returning every word, ready to backflip all my jive. Then what's it yield, this busy beckoning froth? Is there a text in this gamey classic? Shall old arcade with gilded arc be framed? Enough with the giggles, I've got more.
Have we fulfilled your five and twenty senses? Or was there only quarter drop, and never the full tumble? Has game been worth its sc4nda1?
If play's itself the thing, game on. Maybe these crude etudes for hand and eye suffice to probe or incite, as crazy lungfish slouchings toward a not-so-fatal shore, nosing over boundary layers, messing with your branes.
Perhaps these stunts point elsewhere in the gallery where finer masters hang, T. Memmott, J. Nelson, first urchin-archons on this tip. Check them out.
Or maybe these amusements will start your own muse running, leaving you to weave still finer nets of work.
As America's Army decants the message in a battle, every victory is a recruitment. To find best end is to become what is required, writing the solution in your head, answering game's desire.
So after all (or nearly), you are here, and this is who you are. I dub you One, O zero-index neomorph, dauntless playareader who would not be pwned, who succeeded in failing to give up at every bounce. I ought to say prettier , but you know how it is.
The game wins the winner.
Yet really, can the game win? Its ploy aims at finite state, grafting tree of outcomes (sometimes also incomes) on incurved vine of mind. Where infinite player was, let simple winner be: ex nulla unum, all down to one.
But this is remediation all over again, with player as remediand; and by now you know where that will get us, burning the sc4nda1 from both ends down to singularity, at last igniting that impossible nullpoint to pleonasm, backsurge, breakdown, or
what's next
ENTER THE MEGAVORE!
Megavore is the last thing. Megavore first appears as planetary doomling of lost cosmic books, in horny helmet and mask of sidereal ennui. Megavore d.b.a. Determinator, O.F. Staxx, Heavy Jesus. Megavore will not be confused with existing trademarks. Remorseless eyes of Megavore ride the horizon like hard reminders of the Outer Boroughs. Megavore is here for a reason, I guess. Megavore consumes the mind, the will, and any available drive space, but is omni rasta, never vector. Megavore knows the secrets I have not hidden here.
Megavore! Megavore! Megavore!