Leaders of Hyperreal Civilizations

Hyperreality is the inability to decipher which is real and fake in the real world. The concept comes from Jean Baudrillard and he sees consumerism hampering our ability as a culture to see the real. I accidentally found one the best examples of hyperreality when I Googled the other day for Mansa Musa.

For some context, when you search a famous person on Google the site will pull in an image of that person like so:
Ada Lovelace

Pretty nice feature right? Look at the image below of the search results for Mansa Musa:
Mansa Musa

You see that? Where Google usually puts an image of the person in question they have parsed the web and found that the best image to use is from the game Civilization IV!

I wondered if the other leaders from Civ IV and the newer Civ V (leaders) suffered from the same fate, and below are other leaders that get the hyperreal treatment:

Pachacuti (Incan):
Screen Shot 2013-01-12 at 12.17.24 PM

Huayna Capac (also Incan):
huayna capac

Gilgamesh:
Gilgamesh

Hammurabi (Babylon) gets a Civ 4 screenshot only in the thumbnail of his pictures:
Hammurabi

All the other leaders are too popular or too well documented to have Google deem a screenshot from a video game is the best image. If I’ve missed any leaders please let me know!



January 12th, 2013 by Adam

Walden, a Game?

Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, which is a book about leaving the industrial, technological, and modern life of civilization for a return to the essence of nature. Basically, the book is about a dude who hangs out beside a pond eschewing conveniences of modern life.

It turns out that someone has thought it wise to emulate that idea in a video game.

I don’t know where to begin on this, luckily someone else has thought about it more than me and you can read their thoughts.

Responses to the game so far have been mixed. While some have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of virtually recreating Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond, others have scoffed at what seems to them a rank violation of Thoreau’s tenet of living as part of nature; one online commenter noted, “Thoreau would be spinning in his grave knowing that people were about to commit the ultimate in abstraction and try to connect with the natural world through completely mediated means!”

Thanks to a certain Flea!



May 7th, 2012 by Adam

Ever Lost Your Sense of Time While Playing Games?

Anybody who’s played the Civilization series knows that it’s possible to lose one’s sense of time while playing a game. In fact, games themselves are good at removing a sense of time by design. Level designers rely on the ability to mess with our perception of time. Heck, I’m not going to lie, I lost track of time playing a few casual games too. I digress, the point is that it’s easy to lose our temporal connection to the world around us thanks to games.

How we understand time is based on our time perception which can be altered in various ways and understood in others. Our understanding of time can be influenced by everything from how hungry we are to what language you speak.

This video is here so the block of text appears more welcoming. It’s the first music video that I saw when searching time on YouTube.

Things get more messed up when physicists look at time because some of them conclude that it all might be an illusion. How very zen.

A very interesting thing happens when we combine the social and the natural sciences, and this is evidenced in how we loose track of time while playing video games.

After analyzing the data, the researcher found that time perspective was indeed connected and related to how frequently someone plays video games. Specifically, that “larger amounts of playing time correlates with lower level of future time perspective and higher levels of present time perspective — especially present fatalistic.”
…

Present fatalistic is connected with dissatisfaction, aggression, and depression. We could hypothesize that people who spend significant time playing develop the present fatalistic orientation.

However, it is more likely that people who already are present fatalistic play more, because playing helps to decrease their negative feelings. This would support Yee’s suggestion that extensive playing is an indicator of mood management.

Source paper:

Lukavska, K.. (2011). Time Perspective as a Predictor of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Playing. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. doi:10.1089/cyber.2011.0171.



March 5th, 2012 by Adam

Civilization Far From Equilibrium

Yesterday this talk came up twice in two very different conversations, one related to game design and the other related to the nature and necessity of complexity and energy in society. This is a talk worth watching (or listening) to.

The talk in question is a Civilization Far From Equilibrium: Energy, Complexity and Human Survival by Thomas Homer-Dixon. It was delivered last June at the Equinox Summit in Waterloo.



January 12th, 2012 by Adam
%d bloggers like this: