This book starts strong. It recaps Book One, and some of the things Alexander writes are so in line with my own 31 unmarked games post-mortem (the game is available, the post-mortem itself is unpublished). Here's what he writes.

P. xiv
I believe that many of these new artifacts and buildings -- including, for instance, the apparently harmless developer-inspired motels of our era or our mass housing projects -- are structures which can be thought, invented, created artificially, but they cannot be generated by a nature-like process at all. . . .

//

I do not agree with Alexander's high-level reasoning for why this is bad (he writes that they "are, structurally speaking, monsters" and implies that they are monsters (i.e. bad) because they are "a type of structure on earth which nature itself could not, in principle, create.")

My perspective is more akin to (a knowing misreading of) this quote from his previous book: "for the sake of our welfare, the world must be made so that it contains, and is built from, living structure." The nature-like process itself, in my mind, is justification enough. We must choose a world which can be built by intuitive human means, because that preserves our agency, our human need to do something meaningful for ourselves and the spaces we inhabit.

I'm looking forward to this book.

P. xvi
How is living structure to be made by human beings? What kind of human-inspired processes can create living structure?
. . .
In the photograph opposite, . . . we see a case of wonderful life. We see the impact of hundreds of acts, done by different people, making a living street where, rich or poor, people are truly comfortable.

It has been a long time since I've thought about this, but at the heart of my interest in MMORPGs has always, at least in part, is an idea precisely captured by the above quote: These are worlds made out of the acts of people. Newer MMOs have moved further and further away from this over time, I suppose because it is harder to maintain the changes of so many people and also make a good game that sells... a good game to play, perhaps a good haven from the screaming noise of the internet.

I have always been terribly fascinated by cities for the same reason: to see all the individual human choices that comprise an entire landscape. Not the people themselves, but the results of their many different "acts" all visible and noticeable to varying degrees -- not in a melting pot which simplifies a great ocean of players down to a single shared metric (e.g. Noby Noby Boy, or Splatoon's splatfests) but in a garden or a cemetery, which maintains as much complexity, as much resolution, as is possible.

However, the idea that Alexander presents also captures something I wish I had thought of or internalized earlier: that part of this garden or cemetery is not a mere collection of any acts, but acts which contribute to a living space, here a "living street" but generally a space which is alive.

Starseed Pilgrim's hub world is such a living space; although it is a living space only occupied and built by one person, it is still composed of many human acts, each one made with human purpose, for beauty and/or comfort.

I have made intentionally acerbic space before (Cruel World) and generally fantasized about more along these lines: Worlds full of thieves and betrayals, which some moral players might elect to avoid. Other cruel worlds where living structure could in theory be built but where it was the exception (the beautiful exception), not the norm.

Minecraft is a more beautiful game than any of these ideas. Minecraft worlds are more alive, though a game could be more attuned to living process. It is certainly not the perfect game, or the only possible way to make such a game.

There is more to this thought but I will return to the book for now.

P. 2
. . . It is my hope that a world of architecture, more suitable for human life, will emerge from this new view of living process and of what process is.
     Book 2 invites us to reconsider the role and importance of process and how it is living or not. It is about the fact that order cannot be understood sufficient well in purely static terms [as those described in Book 1] because there is something essentially dynamic about order. Living structure can be attained in practice . . . the nature of order is interwoven in its fundamental character with the nature of the processes which create the order.

P. 3
     What process can accomplish the subtle and beautiful adaptation of the parts that will create a living architecture? In a certain sense, the answer is simple. We have to make [what was described in Book 1].
. . . It is generally assumed that doing all this well is the proper work of an architect. . . . [However,] processes are more important, and larger in their effect on the quality of building, than the ability or training of the architect. Processes play a more fundamental role in determining the life or death of the building than does the "design."

P. 3
     Many of the processes used today, sadly, are nearly bound to fail. We see the results of this failure all around us. The lifeless buildings and environments which have become common in modern society are not merely dead, non-living, structures. They are what they are precisely because of the social processes by which they have been conceived, designed, built, and paid for.

I didn't quote nearly enough from my watching, but see The Only Unbreakable Law - the way it was summarized to me is that a thing will always mirror the structure of the organization which produced it. I see a sibling idea in Alexander's claim: that "the nature of order" and "the nature of the processes which create the order" are "interwoven", and that "processes" play a fundamental role, specifically that "living processes" play a fundamental role in the production of "living structure."

P. 4
Architects are much too concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure).

yep, this scans

P. 5, under PROCESS, THE KEY TO MAKING LIFE IN THINGS

. . . When I ask [my friend Bill McClung] what makes him keep [making his meadows in the hills of Berkeley], he answers, "The knowledge that I am making life: that something living is being enhanced. That keeps us inspired. It makes it worthwhile. It is a tremendous thing."
     But then I ask him, pushing, "Isn't it really more the actual pleasure of each day? You go, and go again, because each day, each hour, is satisfying. It is simple work. You enjoy the sunshine, the open air, . . ."
. . . I ask him if this pleasure in the process he is following is not worth almost more than the knowledge that he is making something come to life? He acknowledges my comment and admits, "Yes, this daily ordinary thing is almost more important than the other."

. . . it is the two together: the daily pleasure, . . . with the deeper knowledge . . . that in this process he is making a living structure[.]

p. 9
. . . a map of an imaginary future, used as a control device . . .
Like machines, . . . within a mechanistic view processes are always seen as aimed at certain ends, we think of things by the end-state we want, and then ask ourselves how to get there. . . . the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose --- its goal, what it is intended to produce,

P. 10
. . . our era is crippled by this overly-simple, goal-oriented approach.
. . . most important of all, the background underpinning of this goal-oriented view --- a static world almost without process --- just is not a truthful picture.

P. 13
In a good process, each person working on the building is --- and feels --- responsible for everything. For design, schedule, structure, flowers, feeling --- everything.