I was playing Kingdom Death: Monster and noticing how random everything is. As a player I make decisions, of course, but a huge part of the enjoyment I derive from this game is perceiving the algorithm at work, and telling stories about what happened, with my friends.

This isn't new (see Blaseball, for example, and the ages of sports fandoms that inspired it), but it's a really great alternative lens to seeing the pleasure of randomness as the pleasure of gambling. Stakes are merely an optional force that strengthens one's commitment to the magic circle. But the fundamental pleasure is deeper, and exists even without stakes.

When I visited Hong Kong for a few days, we noticed that a horse racing venue - a huge stadium - was on the way to where we were going, so we decided to drop in. Watching the horses race without a stake in the game, without any way to tell who was going to win, all I could do was watch and see these animals and their riders prance about in the pre-show, and then watch as some horses won, and others lost. We had picked some numbers, but didn't bet anything.

I don't remember if my guess was right.

Infinite generators churn out content without stakes.

Wordle and other daily challenges have stakes - there's only one today - it's a stake in time. Generative NFTs have stakes - there will only be however-many of these, they're worth something and have value. (I'm not a fan of NFTs and do not recommend getting into them, just like I don't recommend getting into gambling, which also involves stakes.) Cruel World had stakes - it would only be available for 1 day and would fall apart. (I sort of gave up on those stakes, an action which I now regret.)

Stakes grant meaning to the algorithmic unfolding, but there is an underlying beauty that can be appreciated, and cannot be denied. It's pleasurable to observe a random process. Somehow stakes give that pleasure meaning. I only have an hour, what will I see? This will only unfold once - how will it unfold? If I can generate a hundred thousand outcomes, no singular outcome has much meaning... unless it's meaningfully unique... once-in-a-lifetime.

Rarity.

Taste Is Over! If You Want It
We can just avoid the algorithms and do things analog.

Echo, Echo, Echo
Nothing original emerges from algorithm feedback loops.

Style in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Technology enables mass recreation of things once considered unique, original. Not just a photograph of a painting - AI can replicate the style of an artist. 3d models can stand in for real people online. All this, "cheaply and infinitely."

One Tenet of Algorithmic Culture
The author describes "the Generic Style", a style which falls naturally out of a well-explored system. The way people act in a virtual space is informed by the space itself, resulting in this "Generic Style". However, this can be a comforting thing, and it even exists in real life. Offline.

Content Luddism (Ethically Sourced Culture)
"I could abstain from algorithmic culture", writes the author.
But "effective" stylistic quirks will always be captured and become part of the "Generic Style".
It's hard to abstain.

Piracy
Internet piracy a decade ago felt more like a human experience than the Netflixes of today.

Hipster Platforms & Platform Hipsters
Now there exist services and platforms which present something more human than those algorithmic feeds.
You can hire someone to make a mixtape for you instead of listening to the machine's readily-available one.

The Style of No-Style
There's a service that will just ship you mostly-generic stuff (clothes, toiletries) every month. The algorithm age seems to wear away at individual taste - why not give up the fight, just let the algorithm decide?

A Pledge for the Self-Aware
We have taste, but we're also a drop in the river that carries us along. The "Generic Style of my time".

Algo-Clash
"Augmented creativity"
How can we use algorithms as a part of the creative process?
Glitch aesthetic indicates an understanding that algorithms exist, without resigning ourselves to their dominance.

The Innate Humanity of the Algorithm
Algorithms are generally driven by mass human flows.
Remember, you always have a vote!
(droqen: You're a drop in the river that carries you downstream.)

"Collapsing Dominant"
The author talks about how we are "in the midst of [a] shift in taste," from the mass-media television-driven mode to the current, driven by "Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags," etc.

"Do I understand the new or am I stuck in the old?"

The Death of Svpply
Svpply was a fashion social network with human-designed collections/feeds of fashion items.
As it grew, it found it had to rely less on human curation and more on machines.
And then it died.

"If everyone's editing Vogue, it wouldn't be Vogue."

Human- v. Machine-Curation
Machines can replicate style, but they don't have taste yet.
A friend who recommends a blue shirt will have a greater depth of interaction and reasoning than will a targeted ad. (e.g. Ok, you think I'll like this blue shirt. Why blue? What will it mean?)
The author wonders if they're just falling behind the times. Maybe the next generation will be fine with machine curation. Or the next.

Taste Optimization
Machine choices are bland and uninspired because they're driven by algorithms tuned to get attention, not to express an underlying taste. "Same same but different."

Machine-Generated Content
We now have creators creating things based on this non-existent algorithmic taste:
They do what the numbers say works.
They do what gets attention, rather than doing work to express their underlying taste.

(droqen: can't it be both? i can walk to the grocery store along my favourite path and still get there on time.)

Data-Based Fashion
What if instead of someone deciding something is in fashion, data decided what was in fashion? The author isn't sure which one is better, or worse.

droqen's aside: data can't decide what's in fashion, and in a way data is already one of the tools in use today for exploring new avenues of fashion. data is just information. someone needs to process the information. here the author could be talking about one of two things, or both:

1. what if fashion designers used more data when making their decisions? (this is already happening, i am sure)

2. what if artificial intelligence were involved in decisionmaking? (again, ai is certainly involved at some level)

Section Summaries.

The Seeing Robot
There's an app that gives you a % score for an outfit. It doesn't tell you how it comes to the decision, really, but for example it might judge an all black outfit at 73%, and an all grey one at 27%.

Theories of Taste
Taste is "knowledge through pleasure".
"We don't calculate or measure if something is tasteful to us; we simply feel it."
"This is principally founded on surprise."

But Fashion Is Already Arbitrary
Is its own summary

That Scene from The Devil Wears Prada
Claims that things are in fashion because someone decided it was in fashion.

droqen's aside: my own ruminations on this topic: when I see what games are fashion, it's a fascinating activity to predict and theorize how the culture of gaming will react to a variation of what we have now, or to a revival of something that once was. someone has to make a new game to push 'fashion' forward, but it's not a choice. it's a tactical move, bound up in limitations as much as in creative freedoms.

...

Last year, and now this year again, I've been thinking about videogames as fashion, not in terms of it being something that you wear and that you can use to express yourself, but in that it is something with trends, not wholly predictable but certainly recognizable, something that can be theorized about, responded to, and seen.

I liked this quote a lot and I'd like to think about it for a while:

QuoteWe might say that "taste" is the abstract, moralized knowledge, while "style" is its visual expression.

Fashion makes taste easily visible as style, in part because its distinctions between color or cut in clothing are so specific and yet so random ("rules which we don't even know").

Unknowns, and unknown unknowns, are quite beautiful to behold and consider. But, in order to begin engaging with unknowns, they must first be visible. The result of a six-sided die roll is "unknown", while the next card to be drawn from a deck of 100 unknown cards is an "unknown unknown". In both cases, however, it's known that we are contending with the unknown.

By contrast, if I am playing an action game where my gun can jam randomly 5% of the time but it hasn't jammed yet, then when I press the fire button I'm not grappling with the unknown... my mindset is prepared for what is known, and at some point in the future I may be unpleasantly surprised.

agency surprises.

break the horizon.

By contrast to malicious game design which is built around... pranks at best and cruel jokes at worst, magical game design is built around magic tricks.

superceded by: MAGIC TRICKS, HORIZON BREAKS, ASTONISHMENT

"Designs that feature high player interaction[..]" have big storytelling and strategic value!

"They have amazing storytelling capacity."