[-empyre-] pre-designed decay / gamifing the archive

[davin heckman]

Maybe this is not exactly what you are thinking about, but one
historical analogue might be the published lecture notes of various
teaching philosophers.  What you see, in the form of the published
manuscript is something akin to what you might find in a natural
history museum.

The discussion is distilled into notes, and the discursive nature
decomposes to skeletal form.  Time and calcification of ideas
transforms the remnants of organic tissue into fossil, distorting them
and warping them.  Paleontologists take the fossils, assemble and
inflate them, flesh them out, put clay and skin on the models.
Biologists argue about how bones and sinews were attached and how the
body functioned.  Before long, you have an idea of what this creature
was, how it acted, and what it looked like.

Various people have attempted strategies to preserve their legacies
into futurity, generating cults, recording themselves with ever
greater fidelity, even preserving their heads and corpses in cryogenic
containers.  Probably, the greatest system for preservation involves a
combination of habituation and mutation.  Copying the format into the
consciousness of living subjects while allowing the format to mutate
in response to larger cultural changes.

One example of gaming strategies that have persisted are playing
cards....  although the role that something like a tarot deck plays in
relation to popular card games is quite removed, the rise of televised
poker games seems to capture at least some of the significance of
earlier iterations of the deck (apparently, they were for games,
before they were used for divination, which is to say that divination
and gaming are probably not all that far apart...  if you think of
them from a philosophical perspective).  What is TV poker if it isn't
a metaphysics of our current world.

I have been trying to think at how one might write such a story.  A
story that contains both its decay and its reconstruction, but am
still eager to see what that would look like.  Thank you for bringing
this up....  I'll be following this thread eagerly.

Davin

On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Gabriel Menotti
<gabriel.menotti at gmail.com> wrote:
> “It's sort of unfortunate from a preservationist point of view, as it
> would be desirable to try to minimize the number of strategies
> employed to preserve games, but at this point I don't think there's a
> one-size-fits-all strategy for keeping games alive.” [Jerome
> McDonough]
>
> Wouldn’t it be the case maybe of creating a self-adaptable / malleable
> strategy of maintenance? Or incorporating it to the games themselves,
> so that they have their own pre-designed form of decay (I mean,
> historical persistence)?
>
> In that sense, and considering that archives are themselves
> socio-technical systems, could they be “gamified”? Would that
> facilitate preservation? Or create another problem in the preservation
> of the archive?
>
> (I'm sorry, but I can't think of any examples of either case right
> now. I invite you to speculate with me. =))
>
> Best!
> Menotti
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