We have now in twenty years moved half the world’s population, give or take, to one city. And we all live in one city. And we keep walking out into the street and getting pasted by trams. And we don’t even understand what the trams are. We not only do not know how to live together online, we don’t even really understand that it’s a problem.
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I think of larp in a couple different ways. And one of the ways that I think of it is as storytelling for the network age. This is storytelling in the first-person present tense plural, and it is not very often that humanity comes up with a new tense in which to tell stories. That’s actually kind of a big deal.
I’m going talk to you guys about larp and. Larp and a whole lot of other things. Because I think the most interesting things about larp are maybe not actually larp itself, but when larp meets a whole bunch of the rest of the world.
The whole point of myth is that it’s just the kind of ambient stuff of culture that you can reach out and do whatever you need to do with. Yes, it means things, sort of, it has dispositions, it has tendencies, but you could rewrite all of that.
As any working mage knows, the first thing that happens when you bring up a lot of power is that you have to figure out how you’re going to channel it. Now ideally, if you’re not an idiot, you figure that out before you bring the power up. Unfortunately this is Silicon Valley we’re talking about, so that’s really not on the table.
What I’m talking about here is not what we need to do culturally or politically, it’s not the roots of online harassment. It’s the design tools that we can use to shape the environments that people interact in to reduce the impact.
Geek culture and hacker culture used to be relatively apolitical, but now every action that you take and every piece of code that you write has political effects. You may may intend some of these effects, you may not intend most of these effects, but they’re there and we need to start thinking about and understanding these changes.