Like many of us, I remember the financial crisis of 2008 vividly. My first son Archer was due in February 2009, in December I was fired from my job and in January the crisis exploded. I remember applying for literally any job I could plausibly apply for and being met with silence. The economy had battened down the hatches and rolled down the gates while everyone waited. I was incredibly afraid and had no idea what was going to happen. I’m sure many of you have similar stories and memories of that period. Slowly over the following years it became clear what had happened. The bankers had been playing upside down and backwards Jenga with the economy, pulling bricks of wealth out of the future and stacking them to support the present. The tower had collapsed.

I spent some time listening last night to talks with prominent leftist Yanis Varoufakis. Varoufakis for those unfamiliar was briefly the Greek Minister of Finance for the Syriza leftist government of Greece. Varoufakis sought to renegotiate Greece’s debt and to limit the impact of austerity imposed on the Greek people during their own 2008-like debt crisis.

In this wonderful talk he offers a lucid and concise view of the evolution of the economic system which has lead us to the present moment. His explanation of how bankers work and their role in cyclically undermining and collapsing capitalism by looting the future is particularly worth watching. In a vivid metaphor he explains that bankers have a science fiction like magic extendable arm which they can stretch out through time, capture value in the future and pull it back into the present in order to inject it into the financial system (and of course in the process create and capture more and more value for themselves). This process of creation of debt obligations, by bankers who believe that they can capture value from future productive activity goes on until at some point it becomes implausible. At this moment the bankers have borrowed so much money from the future that people in the present no longer believe it’s possible to be repaid, at which point the system experiences a crisis of confidence, a kind of fiscal collapse of the imagination, the system seizes and the people living in the present must pay the often terrible cost. In the context of the great depression the US government imposed punitive tax rates and placed serious limits on the extent to which the bankers could manipulate the system which lead to about 20 years of prosperity. In 2008 in contrast this process of government getting bankers under control failed. Obama appointed more Wall St bankers to clean up the mess (Geithner and Summer) and they basically allowed the crisis to continue, and even accelerate. In this sense, as Varoufakis says in his talk, 2008 never ended.

The recent political events in the United states make more sense in this regard. Those who voted for hope and change embodied in Obama were betrayed. The banks were bailed out and the people were left to fend for themselves. We experienced a ‘jobless recovery’ and the markets roared back to life while huge swaths of United States descended into misery and despair. Given the chance to express their feelings about this to Hilary Clinton, a significant portion of the population opted to spit in the face of the establishment and throw it an orange, misogynist, racist Molotov cocktail. The people who voted for Trump in this regard are rational. The Democratic party sold them out to the bankers 2008, pissed on them and told them it was raining. So they decided to throw the bums out. This is in my opinion not a desirable state of affairs but it is nonetheless an understandable one.

Which brings us to the present moment. A few days ago on November 30th in Burlington, Vermont the US based Sanders Institute, founded by Jane Sanders and Europe’s DiEm25, founded by Varoufakis announced the launch of Progressive International with the goal of beating back right-wing forces with an organized “grassroots movement for global justice”. The recognition here that this is a problem which demands international effort is wise. Global capitalism is an international phenomenon and it will not be restrained by retreating into the structures of the nation state. We need a new approach which utilizes a global network to meet a global threat. Unfortunately the right wingers are already organizing and working in this way, as typified by Steve Bannon’s attempts to collaborate with rightist movements in Europe.

You can sign up for the call of the Progressive International here, and read the full the call to action below:

There is a global war being waged against workers, against our environment, against democracy, against decency.

A network of right-wing factions is collaborating across borders to erode human rights, silence dissent, and promote intolerance. Not since the 1930 has humanity faced such an existential threat.

To defeat them, we cannot simply go back to the failed status quo of the last few decades. Unfettered globalization promised peace and prosperity. But it delivered financial crisis, needless war, and disastrous climate change, instead.

The time has come for progressives to form a grassroots movement for global justice: to mobilize workers, women and the disenfranchised all around the world behind a shared vision of democracy, prosperity, sustainability, and solidarity.

Our Progressive International will reach out to communities in every corner of the world to help build our shared vision.

Our Progressive International will stand by people who are already fighting to end inequality, exploitation, discrimination and environmental degradation.

Our Progressive International will reclaim our communities, our cities, our countries, and our planet with a bold International New Deal that we will work, together, to deliver.

It is time for progressives of the world to unite.

Today, on behalf of DiEM25 and The Sanders Institute, we issue a Call to Action: to create a global network of individuals and organizations that will fight together for dignity, peace, prosperity and the future of our planet.

Join us. Join Progressive International.

Visit the website for the new group here.

Metatropolis is a short fiction anthology edited by John Scalzi. I’ve alluded to it a few times here. It’s worth giving it’s own post. Structurally there are a few interesting details about this collection, namely that it was originally commissioned as an audiobook for Audible, and then later released as text. It also take an approach to world building which I’m somewhat surprised hasn’t been taken more often, in creating a shared world which multiple authors flesh out stories within. In this case the five authors commissioned by Scalzi are Jay Lake, Tobias S. Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, Karl Schroeder and Scalzi himself. All contribute interesting stories and judging by the varied reviews various readers will find different stories to love. Sadly Jay Lake has passed away since publication. His novella “In The Forests Of The Night” is a provocative visit to his deep green eco-future of Cascadia in which people live in high tech, low footprint style as anarchists in the forests of the pacific north west. I don’t intend this piece as a review so I won’t catalog the stories, instead I’ll just focus in on a few pieces and concepts that really got me thinking.

Tobias Buckell and Elizabeth Bear’s stories overlap in that they share the concern of retrofitting urban areas for a post carbon world. Buckell’s description of an urban green revolution in downtown Detroit which embroils a down at the heels ex-military nightclub bouncer is really wonderful. I hope you read it so I won’t spoil the plot, but in the story Buckell takes us into a world in which carbon funded sprawl has effectively collapsed but info-tech has continued to accelerate, enabling people’s movements to take on the government and corporations using techniques taken from both guerrilla insurgency and civil disobedience. I wouldn’t classify it as exactly predictive but it’s a compelling look at an interesting moment in a possible energy descent future. The old order has an entrenched interest to maintain the valuation of all the decayed infrastructure based on the idea that somehow carbon based civilization will rise again and return to business as usual, whereas the new order needs to repurpose, retrofit and consume what has been effectively abandoned and rendered obsolete. This is a major concern of Permaculture co-creator David Holmgren’s book “Retrosuburbia” which is essentially about retrofitting the suburbs into low-energy human friendly habitats in a world of receding carbon subsidy. His outlook is a bit less dramatic and apocalyptic but the question of what to do with all of the left behind buildings and infrastructure that can no longer be supported by cheap energy is one that our society may well have to grapple with. Buckell and Bear’s stories, set in these retrofitted urban environments offer jumping off points for thinking about these questions.

Without slighting the other great stories in the collection, the second story I want to talk about which I found absolutely mind blowing is the last, Karl Schroeder’s novella To Hie From Far Cilenia. It shares a bit less of the solar-punk post-carbon theme of the other stories but takes an absolutely fascinating sideways look at what cities may mean in the future. Again, I don’t want to spoil it as I urge you to read it but basically the story follows a nuclear weapons inspector as he gets drawn into a multi-layered series of AR worlds, layered over the existing physical infrastructure. Players of Pokemon Go or Ingress will recognize the rudiments of this, but Schroeder takes things much further. Basically the protagonist begins to explore one world, a steampunk gameworld in which players meet up in real life physical space while looking through AR glasses that layer the game environment on top. They play politics, deliver packages and do quests, all fairly familiar massively multiplayer video game stuff. Where things get interesting is that it is revealed that there is another world which is only accessed by achieving an invitation to a certain restaurant in the first game world. The restaurant exists in the real world and serves real food, but the food is provided and manufactured by people who have removed themselves from the real world economy and exist only in the next layered game economy. They run urban farms, provide living space and have the infrastructure of a distributed city which is hidden and superimposed on the real city. It’s only discovered and accessed by people with the correct connections, social and virtual capital. As you may be able to tell from my short description, the story is mind bending.

As someone who spends a fair amount of time at the intersections of all these concepts and technologies: games, AR/VR (or XR as people now say) and virtual currencies this concept is tantalizing because it’s sort of at the tip of the world’s tongue. The cryptocurrency space exploded into popular consciousness this past year and took a lot of flack for some of it’s more unsavory gold-rush type characteristics and characters (which is fair IMO). That being said it represents an enormous proof of concept for the idea that if we create cryptographically secure mediums of exchange and stores of value, millions of people are willing to agree that this is some kind of ‘real money’ and act accordingly. This, combined with the release of technologies like the Magic Leap, Holo Lens and the current tech world focus on AR (augmented reality) platforms means that all or most of the technologies which this story posited nine years ago are more or less real today. We already organize ourselves into various affinity networks and constellations using the internet, and some of the most central and visible people in those networks use the resources of the network to support themselves via things like Patreon. The idea that these types of networks might take on this increasingly physical / virtual parallel city manifestations is a really interesting one to me. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google already wrote about these phenomena on the national level in his book “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business”, positing that the geographical nation state may be supplanted by a kind of virtual, voluntary nation state in which people subscribe with ‘taxes’ to an entity which provides nation-like services to them. The idea of creating voluntary virtual networks that begin to supplant the functions of currently existing society only becomes increasingly more plausible, and I think in terms of loosening the grip of the nation state on economic and political power may be a good thing.

There’s a lot more we could dig into, any maybe I will in a future post, but in short: go read or listen to Metatropolis. There’s tons in there to think about and overall it’s just a great, entertaining and thought provoking collection of short fiction.

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal librarian. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances.” – Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

The Library of Babel is one of my favorite stories by one of my moat beloved authors Jorges Luis Borges. It combines several of Borges recurring themes: words, writing, infinities, and labyrinths. The image of a monumental, indifferent megastructure, an infinite library filled with infinite permutations of letters and words echoes across the decades to feel incredibly contemporary to one of my personal obsessions, procedural worlds and algorithmic art. What would Borges have made of our contemporary capacity to use code (a kind of writing) to generate near endlessly extending and varying worlds and works of art? In this sense his story feels prophetic. His depiction of the library as a kind of nightmarish and unwieldy sea of information in which cults form as they search for the book that will help them decode it also feels like a predictor of our current ‘discovery problems’ in which we rapidly approach an infinite number of human monkeys with typewriters creating and publishing ideas in every medium onto the public internet.

AI research seeks to create general AI which can think, learn and achieve sentience but perhaps a step along the way is a more limited AI which exists only in the realm of words, a much flatter landscape. Presumably as thinking machines achieve various levels of consciousness or consciousness like states some of them will turn their attention, or have it directed to, the task of writing. Theoretically these machine writers could write and compose words faster than any human could read them, even a human who started reading immediately when the writing began. At this point we might achieve Borges vision, as long as these imagined writers were willing to separate their thoughts into volumes “of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line of some eighty letters”. Could a machine intelligence trained only on the existing body of written text in the human world write something which we would find meaningful? A kind of purely reconstituted literature with no direct seed of human experience? In my opinion many writers write this way now, assembly books as a kind of collage of read rather than lived experiences. Would we be able to tell the difference?

I would be disappointed if my community of procedural generation enthusiasts had not already made an attempt at the task. Happily, game developer Nothke has given us a preview of the library with his entry for ProcJam 2015/16 entitled “Library of Blabber” in which he generates books using Markov Chains. You can download his library from the wonderful library of games Itch.io here.

As we set out to create things and do meaningful work, frequently we are fighting against resistance in all it’s many forms. Today I thought I’d share one of my favorite quotes on one aspect of this resistance, the resistance of the critical onlooker. Importantly this onlooker can be either a real person or an imagined, internalized voice that we create for ourselves. It’s from American president Theodore Roosevelt and comes from his speech ‘Citizenship In A Republic’, delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, France on April 23 1910. The quote is justifiably famous, I’ll reproduce it here:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. ” – Theodore Roosevelt

The whole speech is pretty incredible and worth reading notwithstanding the brutally racist and colonialist context from which it arose, you can access it in pdf form here. Roosevelt is fierce and unsparing in his contempt for, as he says later in the speech “those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are.” Apparently the paralytic disease of sneering cynicism is a problem of the ages. Like Roosevelt, I have the lowest respect for those who criticize without doing, comfortable in their inaction, their refusal to take risk.

Fundamentally, risk is what this is about. To create something and say “Here, I made this” is a risk. To believe in something and to take a side is a risk. To fight for and try to create a better world is a risk. The risk is of our own disappointment, but also shame and ridicule in the eyes of the critics. Those who would go out on a limb and say “I believe this” risk being mocked or ostracized, or appearing foolish. As social animals this is a powerful fear, the fear of alienation, of being separated from the herd. This fear of being ostracized is deep and probably founded in a valid evolutionary basis, those who were forced out of the group did not live, much less procreate. So to risk being pushed out is a valid fear, and has real emotional and sometimes material consequences for us even now. The risk is real.

As is often the case where there is risk there is a possibility of reward. There is the possibility for growth and positive change. The sneering critic, the finger pointer, the knowing cynic has no possibility for growth. They uphold and enforce the status quo through their fear of being singled out, and they desire to infect us with that fear. The reason that the cynic wants the daring person to fail and feel ashamed is that by daring we shame them in comparison. Some of us may have experienced this as we grow and make change in our own lives. When you begin to change it can cause discomfort in the people who witness that change, as they feel that they suffer in comparison. I would say that as much as they dislike it we do them all a service by setting an example of what a person looks like when growing, struggling, failing and succeeding to become our best selves.

I would never claim that this is easy or straightforward or that I succeed often in living up to these ideals. What’s important for me is to choose a side. I am on the side of the people who try and fail, and I feel compassion and empathy with them. I will never point and laugh at a person who falls on their face while leaping towards their goals. I think that this is the least we can do, as we aspire to do and be more.

Image: BBB by Manoloa Gamboa Naon, May 2018

Lately I’ve been getting more serious about sleeping. I find that sleep is a major determinant of the quality of my day, particularly my emotions. My reservoir of emotional capacity to deal with whatever is happening is massively deepened by a full nights sleep. Sometimes I feel depressed, bitter and hopeless, and then I realize that I’m just tired. If I’m sleep deprived, small setbacks and disruptions can shred my mental state. I become more reactive and much less thoughtful or skillful in dealing with whatever is going on. So I’ve gotten more serious about sleep, and make sure that I get eight hours every night, if not slightly more. It’s a struggle because as someone who works 9 to 5 or more at my salaried job, the night times after the kids go to bed are my small slice of unstructured, unspoken-for time. Giving that up to sleep feels hard, but I realize that sleep has a multiplicative effect for me. If I don’t do it I am facing the next 16 hours of trashed brain and crappy emotions, whereas if I skip the extra hour of whatever night time activity, I’ll be in a much better place.

A few things I like that help me sleep.

1) Going to bed before my bed time. My current bed time is 10:45 PM so I can get up at 6:45 and get the kids to school. If I go to bed at 10:45 and I’m not perfectly tired, I get anxious about any time spent lying awake and thinking, which cuts into my sleep time. This in itself is a self fulfilling prophecy and can spiral out of control. By going to bed a little extra early I can lie comfortably in bed and enjoy this ‘extra’ slightly luxurious time in bed. Importantly, I don’t try to particularly control my thoughts or ‘try’ to go to sleep. I actually relax and just enjoy lying down. This puts me in a super cozy mood and usually I drop off quickly. Easier said than done, but it’s a good one when it works.

2) Reading Fiction. Reading fiction helps me to think about imaginary problems instead of my own, which is great. Instead of mulling over whatever I’m currently working on, obsessing over, or trying to solve, I can think about someone else’s made up problems, which are usually clear cut and solvable. Having a long list of solvable problems, by the way, is I think why people like video games. I once had a student of mine tell me that he liked filling in various name and address fields on forms because he knew he could do it right and definitely give all the correct answers. I find reading non-fiction is less helpful because it might get me too much into thinking about ‘real’ things. My problem is maintaining a supply of good fiction books that I like (which is a dumb problem in this world, but there you go).

3) A Cold Room. I don’t do this all the time but sometimes in winter I like to open the windows and get the room really cold once I’m under the covers. I think there’s some metabolic good to this but I just find it cozy and pleasant. I don’t do it all the time but it’s kind of nice.

4) A hot bath. Again, I don’t do it all the time but when I have time and the patience, it’s great. Super hot, not too long, then into bed. It’s super relaxing.

I meditate pretty regularly in the mornings, when I’m taking care of myself properly and I’ve heard some folks suggest meditating at night as well. Maybe I’ll try that and report back.

Image: Procedural Brutalism by Stefan Kwint

I had a young woman I know ask for me some advice about freelancing since she knows I work with contractors at work. I shared what I could think of at the time but thought it would be a good idea to try to encode a few things here publicly so that I can point people to this when it comes up again. I’ll try to keep this short and to the point and maybe I’ll elaborate on some of the individual points later. Why am I qualified to deliver this advice? I was a freelancer and independent artist for about 20 years and survived and fed my family using these rules.

Don’t Worry About Competition: In our heads many of us worry that there are so many other talented people out there competing for the same opportunities. There are a few reasons not to worry about this. The first is that for any given opportunity the person hiring generally has to pick one of the limited number of people who has actually shown up. You only need to be the best candidate out of the people who have actually applied. This is a much much smaller pool of people than you think because…

Most People Don’t Show Up: There are a lot of talented people out there who are defeated at the starting line by their own psychology. Don’t be one of them. Be OK with starting before you’re ready, going after things that are a little too hard and frankly admitting when you don’t know how to do something. Many people spend their lives waiting for the stars to perfectly align before they start, which never happens. Just starting whether you’re ready or not will give you a huge advantage on everyone else. Don’t worry too much about it because…

No One Actually Knows What They’re Doing: We all try to look like what we know what we’re doing, but mostly we don’t. We start, run into obstacles and climb over them one at a time. You can do this too. Modern life and work is way too complicated to know more than a fraction of it before you begin. Get good at learning quickly and overcoming obstacles by doing research and asking for help when stuck. These are priceless skills that actually get things done.

Network Laterally: Build a community of working friends who are at a similar stage to you. Befriend people who are dealing with the same opportunities, problems and challenges. Reach out to them and help them. Over time the rising tide of age and years of work will lift all boats. Before you know it the person you made friends with while they were an intern will be a manager or running a company. People often focus on impressing people above or ahead of them. Usually you have much less in common with these people and they are not encountering problems or creating opportunities that you are able to participate in. People closer to your level in the process will know about similar jobs, projects and have much more in common with you to talk about.

Market Yourself: Whether you recognize it or not you’re running a one person business and you need to sell your services. Make sure what you are doing is public and visible which is super easy nowadays thanks to the internet and social media. Create a stream of documentation of everything you do, both in terms of commercial paid work and your personal work. I personally use Twitter, YouTube and a WordPress blog which are all free. You don’t need anything fancy.

Keep Your Costs Low: Don’t develop a fancy lifestyle when you are attempting to build your career. You need to be able to invest your most valuable resource, your time, into your work. If you are struggling with debt, high rent or expensive lifestyle you will not have the time freedom to take on valuable but potentially risky or low paying opportunities. Importantly the most valuable and potential highly rewarding opportunities are usually low paying and high risk. High paying stuff is usually boring and fairly straightforward, that’s why it pays a lot. Keeping a low cost of living allows you to take chances so you can…

Say Yes To Weird (Paid) Stuff: The debate around exploitation, getting paid, working for exposure is a complex one, especially as it pertains to people who are starting out. Generally speaking if you are working for free it should be on stuff for your close friends where you’re effectively gifting your time and learning or on your own high risk / high reward projects. Working for exposure for free for other people is usually a bad idea. Generally speaking, if your working for free for yourself and marketing and documenting your activity you can create your own exposure. Also, people who are not willing to risk money on a project usually are not that serious, so it’s probably not going to generate a lot of exposure anyway. However, doing low paying work is a different story. Saying yes to low paying work often will lead to more interesting and higher paying work. Unless there is a big line of people waiting to pay for your time, if someone offers you low paying work in your chosen field, give it a shot. You can always stop or quit if it turns out not to be good. It’s a chance to make business connections and get around people who are working and getting paid. If you’re smart this can lead to a chain of further opportunities.

Be Worth Recommending: The biggest source of work and income in life is your network of working friends. The way this works in most freelance business is that you build a reputation as a pro and then you vouch for other people. This is a very serious commitment in all the businesses I’ve worked in. I can’t stress this enough. If I vouch for a person for a job to a contact of mine, it’s as if I hired them myself. My work contact who hired them did so based on the strength of my word. Very often that is the ONLY reason this person got hired, not because of resume, not because of anything but the fact that someone solid vouched and said that they were also solid. This means that as a professional, you need to…

Be Solid: This means that no matter what happens you keep your word and make sure the job gets done. You show up on time, complete your work at the highest level of quality and do everything you can to make the job a success. If something goes wrong like you get sick or you have a death in the family, you have someone else from your network step in to cover and complete the job. You never leave someone hanging, never flake out and never allow a job to get fucked up. This is almost all that matters and this is basically the only reason people will hire you, because they believe in your capacity to deliver and they believe they can count on you. Critically, you extend these same standards to anyone you recommend. If you have a friend that you know is talented but not solid, you do not recommend them as they will destroy your professional credibility.

I think these are a good place to start. If folks are interested I might expand on some of the individual ideas. If you found this interesting and would like more, leave a comment on this post.

One of the main topics that I’m interested in in video game design is the concept of procedural generation. Procedural generation is the use of code to create things, usually in an indirect or unpredictable way. Most procedural generation techniques use some source of randomness in order to send the system off in surprising directions and to produce large numbers of variations. One of the most prototypical and beloved of these applications was the random dungeon creation in the game Rogue, which lead to a whole genre of games called Roguelikes which have since splintered into sub-genres of games inspired by them. Some call these offshoot games ‘roguelites’ but Raigan Burns has also put forth the term neo-roguelikes or Spelunkylikes, after Derek Yu’s seminal roguelike / platformer fusion Spelunky. In the context of games like Rogue or Spelunky the purpose of procedural level generation is to create a game in which the rules are always the same but the playing field is always different. It becomes impossible to memorize strategies or ‘brute force’ your way to victory. Instead you have to learn to understand that system and in it’s fundamental workings to be able to respond to an endless array of contextual situations thrown up by the procedural level generation. It focuses attention on the area of games which I find most unique to games and interesting, their underlying systems.

The book Procedural Generation In Game Design, edited by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams is a wonderful exploration of the thinking and practice behind procedural generation in games, specifically as it relates to game design. Tarn Adams, who I’ve interviewed in the past on my YouTube channel, is a towering figure in the world of procedural games. He and his brother are engaged in the decades long creation process of the game Dwarf Fortress, a game which generates worlds with seemingly fractal complexity containing layers of history, mythology, natural systems and emergent complexity. Adams’ presence as one of the editors of the book lends it tremendous weight in my eyes. His partner in editing Tanya Short has made her own creditable contributions to the world of procedural games through her games Shattered Planet, Moon Hunters and soon Boyfriend Dungeon in which you get to date your weapons. In addition to her work as a developer at her studio Kitfox games she’s made invaluable contributions to the PCG (procedural content generation) community via her talks, articles and contribution as an editor here.

The book collects articles by a wide ranging group of authors ranging from solo indie developers to devs from major studios, each offering unique and interesting perspectives on how PCG can influence the fundamental design of games. I’ve come back to the book again and again for inspiration and read my copy so much that I might need to buy another one. I also left it out in the rain one summer in Upstate New York which didn’t help. I am loath to pick out single articles from the book for unique praise as I think different people will find different articles of value at different times depending on what they are working on. For me the I particularly enjoyed the various contributions by the members of Freehold Games, creators of the awe-inspiring and terrifying Caves of Qud. It’s important to note that the book focuses itself on thinking about PCG, as opposed to listing code samples and algorithms. I think this is a sensible approach as the algorithms and code are fairly easy to find and implement in your favorite language online, whereas the theory and thought process is often less well documented. For those interested in an implementation of many of these ideas in C# for Unity, I can of course humbly recommend my project Strata, which is shamelessly inspired by many of the ideas in the book.

Procedural Generation In Game Design is available via CRC Press. I’ve also heard rumors that there’s a second volume on the way, which I eagerly await.

In my experience of discovering house music on YouTube the channel CMYK has been a central fixture, and one of my favorite discoveries is the music of So Inagawa. Selfless State is a track which I come back to again and again. The track has a kind of calm, propulsive energy and open feeling of space that is a mood I love for when I’m working. I listen to this a ton when I’m writing and programming in the morning, two moods which are quite similar. I want something which is instrumental, interesting to listen to but not attention grabbing and with a certain degree of energy to it. I listen to a lot of pure ambient music as well but in the morning after I drink my coffee and sit down to work I often am not in the mood for anything that is too placid. I want something with some momentum.

Inagawa’s music sits beautifully in that pocket, and it’s also just clearly very lovingly crafted with a high degree of refinement and confidence. For me it fits in the category of sort of minimal ‘clean design music’ that I particularly enjoy. It’s possible to apprehend the piece in it’s parts and appreciate it’s construction out of carefully crafted loops and deliberate progression, without flashy moments or hand waving. In an interview for Resident Advisor collaborator and label partner in Cabaret Records DJ Masda writes “We like this hypnotic lock. In Japanese we call it hame.” This feeling of hypnotic lock, perhaps comparable to the often discussed flow concept in game design is one of the things I love about Inagawa’s music: the feeling of being engaged with a piece of music but not overwhelmed by it, a kind of attentive dance between progression and stasis. It’s funny to me because in the past I think on a superficial level I would have hated Inagawa’s music and called it ‘coffee table music’ because of it’s understated and elegant aesthetics. During that phase of my musical interest I was only drawn to music with a ton of energy and attitude, either aggression or brash weirdness. I suppose part of maturing is the rounding of these edges and laughing as you become that thing you might have previously despised.

In my post yesterday I referenced progressive agriculture models that I’ve been learning about. Chief among those in my mind is permaculture. Permaculture was developed and coined as a term by David Holmgren, then a graduate student, and his professor Bill Mollison in Australia in 1978. Permaculture uses a holistic systems thinking model which seeks to understand and mimic nature while working to create a ‘permanent agriculture’. A way of living with the land and growing food which is not only sustainable but regenerates damaged land, captures carbon and renews the environment, while taking care of humans and animals. It’s a beautiful concept and people have been successfully putting it into action around the world for the past forty years. When I first started to learn about it I was freaking out about peak oil. I remember one night before dawn taking a taxi back from my job editing video of baseball games in New York City. I was driving up the West Side Highway in Manhattan and looking at the blazingly lit, empty buildings of the New York City and New Jersey skylines. Those iconic images we love to look at of cities at night with their twinkling lights, when we look at it from an energy perspective are sort of shocking. The people are all asleep! Why is the city lit up like this? This momentary insight got me into thinking about energy and the concept of ‘peak oil’ was surfing the zeitgeist at the time. Websites with terms like ‘die off’ and ‘collapse’ in their title were capturing peoples attention and sowing a narrative of the collapse of western society.

Being a new father gave me a new perspective on the idea of societal collapse. I might die, but my descendants would have to survive in this degraded environment. I started studying homesteading, survivalism and various threads of people retreating from society and living off the land. My first impulse was that I needed to get a bunch of guns and dogs and go build a fort. My family were horrified. Interestingly, in the Venn diagram of people who think the world is going to end there is a large degree of overlap between people with what we’d consider ‘left wing’ politics, (mostly people with hippie back to the land view) and right wing survivalists, or ‘preppers’ as they call themselves (people who are preparing for the collapse). One thing that both sides agreed upon was this Australian style of farming and living called permaculture. It came up again and again in the various podcasts I was listening to and I became interested, and studied it. I never did move to the forest and build a fort, farm, or really take any specific action about any of it. Life continued, being a young parent (a musician at the time) was incredibly busy and distracting and my focus shifted back to daily urban capitalist survival.

Lately, for reasons I’d be hard pressed to articulate (the general apocalyptic climate?) I’ve been thinking about these things again. Nowadays YouTube is absolutely filled with people around the world doing these kinds of things and making videos about them and I find it very relaxing after working on abstract computer marketing problems to sit back on the couch and watch some guy in California explain how he built his chicken coop out of salvaged materials. Last night I watched a video that I feel compelled to share, and offer some commentary on. It’s a long one (~90 mins) so I recognize most people won’t watch it, so I’ll try to offer a few thoughts and summarize a bit.

The video is an interview with David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture. In it, he talks about a few very important concepts in my opinion. The first is the concept of “energy descent”. The idea here is that the era that we have been living in for the past few hundred years was massively accelerated by access to ‘free’ energy in the form of fossil fuels. In a sense, contemporary post-Enlightment western civilization has been built on a kind of energy bubble. Access to free energy has enabled this incredibly rapid acceleration and expansion of human activity, technological development and overall complexity. As many of us are aware, fossil fuels are finite and this bubble era may well be coming to a close. The fact that it is becoming economically viable to go after increasingly difficult to access sources of energy like tar sands tells us that the fossil fuel industry may be beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel. As this process of declining returns in the excavation and exploitation of fossil fuels continues, we will see a contraction in available energy which will trigger a contraction in economic growth. Since our economic system is essentially predicated on the idea of endless and unlimited growth, ignoring externalized costs to anything that can’t be measured economically, this will trigger an economic contraction as well. How extreme and how sudden this contraction will be is a big question to which we don’t know the answer.

In previous posts I’ve talked about the techno-optimist green tech utopian view that the progress of technology will continue to accelerate and outpace our dependence on fossil fuels. Holmgren address this view in the interview pointing out that for solar panels, for example, to go exponential as the tech people predict, we will need to arrive at a point where the infrastructure used to create them is not subsidized by fossil fuels. Currently we are not there. So the current acceleration in solar and green tech is still operating on a fossil fuel energy subsidy. If that subsidy is removed, the economic cost of those things will become much higher, which will stunt the current curve that they are on. In an earlier post I referenced Moore’s law about increasing semiconductor capacity. This is a law that has been established during the fossil fuel bubble, whether it will hold true in an era of more scarce energy without fossil fuels remains to be seen. The question becomes then whether we have enough of a fossil fuel runway to accelerate the progress of renewable energy enough to launch them into an independent and self-propelling state. Time will tell.

The energy descent that Holmgren predicts is a future in which global society begins to reduce it’s energy consumption as energy supplies decrease. Those decreases may either be a gradual drift downward to a less energy consumptive future or a more step wise process of rapid declines in the form of crises, followed by periods of stabilization. This process will occur in parallel with the ongoing process of climate change, which will also be disruptive to an unknown extent. Holmgren goes through multiple potential scenarios which consider both our progress in reducing energy consumption and the severity and rapidity of climate change. Each scenario is a mix of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes, for example in one scenario we may see energy descent trigger an economic crisis, which stops a great deal of economic activity and thereby slows carbon emissions, a kind of self regulating situation. There is also the possibility that climate change will not at this point be slowed by a reduction in carbon emissions and has already entered an irreversible feedback loop. As he points out, the point of scenario planning is to discover useful opportunities for action. Holmgren advocates a process of withdrawal from the global economy into a more localized and non-monetary economy in which individuals specialize in certain areas and develop useful skills, although to a lesser extent than the total specialization capitalism demands, while developing skills like growing food, repairing their own homes and generally becoming more self-sufficient. For me Holmgren’s thinking is probably some of the most sane and reasonable response to our contemporary apocalyptic storm clouds. If any of these are things which you think about late at night like me, I strongly encourage you to check out the interview and learn more.

Image: Barnhouse settlement by Martin McCarthy (Tumulus)

Lately along with thinking about tiny houses I’ve also been thinking about various sustainable and alternative farming techniques. Many of the deep patterns of contemporary human civilization began to form with the development of agriculture. The movement away from hunting and gathering and living in mobile nomadic bands to staying in one place and domesticating the land and animals lead to concepts of private property and hierarchical human societies. This was called the Neolithic Revolution, from Wikipedia:

“These developments, sometimes called the Neolithic package, provided the basis for centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g. writing), densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, more trade, the development of non-portable art and architecture, and property ownership. The earliest known civilization developed in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia (c. 6,500 BP); its emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age.[7]”

What a list! The more predictable ability to produce food clothing and shelter allowed humans to move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and begin to create new civilizational technologies, like cities. Without this development our contemporary society wouldn’t exist. But looking over that list we can recognize the seeds of many of the modern forces of alienation and destructive human behavior. Centralization of power into hierarchies in my opinion being chief among them. In order to create efficiencies of scale and stability we ceded individual and small group autonomy to huge political and economic hierarchies, which in many cases produce terribly unequal distributions of influence and resources. My hope is that hierarchy and centralization will prove to be outdated technologies which we can overcome, like the fossil fuel powered internal combustion engine. Centralized systems are rigid and prompt rent seeking, authoritarianism and misguided attempts to organize the periphery from the center. With the explosive acceleration of decentralizing technologies like the internet, renewable energy and sophisticated sustainable agriculture my hope is that we can wrest back some of the control we’ve granted to these entities and usher in a new era of more localized autonomy and decision making both within cities and outside them.

One of the trends I see as hopeful in this regard is the emergence of cities as a more prominent social unit. When the current occupant of the American White House refused to ratify the Paris climate change accord we saw a number of mayors of cities worldwide stepping forward to say that they would instead, including Pittsburgh and my home of New York City. We increasingly see cities beginning to create their own international foreign policy. This seems like an inevitable trend as populations continue to urbanize and economic and political power concentrates in cities. Perhaps we can see a rebalancing of power from the nation state down to the level of the region and municipality, smaller units of government in which citizens can interact more directly and have their needs better met. Richard Florida has written on this subject and I find his thoughts about it illuminating, you can read some here.

In the long span of human history we may discover that centralization was a necessary evil required by the need for food security, and then in support of information density in cities. As we move into the next stage of human history and unlock new technologies in food, energy, information and communication my hope is that it becomes possible for humans to become more loosely tethered to the system and reassert their individuality and agency in order to live more productive and less alienated lives.