"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."

"Digital games have a hard time with the free-for-all game with the exception of [the Battle Royale genre]. I think these are the most important games that have been developed since Minecraft [..] they are truly multi-lateral conflict games."

VIDEOGAMES

Alternate win cons are great if victory is the only thing keeping players in your game but if players are playing for other things, if those things are keeping them in the game, victory starts to become a little less important