The Incredible Playable Podcast: Yoko Ono's Chess Set

[droqen]

Regarding Alistair Aitcheson's
"The Incredible Playable Podcast's
"Yoko Ono's Chess Set""

People see the all-white chess set in a gallery and they play through in their heads. Just because they're not physically touching the pieces does not mean they're not interacting with it. {musical intermission.} This how to play piece really resonated with me because I'm someone who finds themselves with a lot of games that they want to play, and a lot of games that sound fascinating and I really want to interact with, but not enough time to actually engage with them. I spend a lot of time watching speedruns and being fascinated by them, but not trying to speedrun games myself. I spend time watching let's players play games that I will never play and going "oh wow this looks really interesting and I'd love to play that, but this is a 40-hour experience, I don't have 40 hours."

At this moment in Alistair Aitcheson's Incredible Playable Podcast with the scent of the facilitator in the air I found myself forming a distinct thought, or question: Is this the era of passively observing from behind glass, or has passivity always been so present in human society?

I can watch a livestream while I'm brushing my teeth.

You can imagine playing Play It By Trust, but your imagination and actually sitting down to play it yourself are wildly different experiences. Just because you can watch a livestream of a 40 hour game while brushing your teeth does not mean you're receiving the value of playing a 40 hour game while brushing your teeth. It is non-transferrable.

Cyberpunk's braindances predict a future where first-hand experiences become increasingly technologically transferrable, fungible between individuals. But in these incomplete transfers of experience I see a life not lived, and a world not lived in.

... Maybe he will talk about this? Alistair says that the experience of observation and imagination is a legitimate experience. And of course it is! It is! But it's materially distinct. You have to play smell chess to know what it is to play smell chess. Please, AA, talk about this, don't let me down.

He makes an explicit claim that putting a playable artwork in a non-playable context "wouldn't destroy" the artwork, it would just "change" it, which I think is the coward's way out, but yeah, sure! It changes it! Destruction is a change. Change is a value-neutral term. How does it change it? The answer is materially clear (it makes the work more likely to be engaged with in a way that does not involve touching it, let's say), but what is the consequence of such a change? How do you feel about it? How do I feel about it?

Unfortunately it sounds as though we are going to move on to another topic rather than digging into this, at least without digging into it right away.

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AA talks about Pawns next for a while. I left off at around the 30m mark.