Euphemia

i am having vague thoughts about a lot of digital interaction processes and their relation to data harvesting and data harvesting's relationship to classical structuralism

you ever. accidentally write an essay.

So there's a common (and correct) critique of data science, especially when it directly engages with quantifying people's lives and cultures, that it's a reheating of classical structuralism. Structuralism being this wide-ranging idea in the late 19th and early 20th century of examining the pieces of something and comparing it to other pieces to find the underlying universal structures that gave rise to the pieces. For instance in structuralist anthropology there's the idea of comparing aspects of cultures to reveal inherent universals that underly all human culture. This is a very seductive idea for a lot of people because of the way it proposes that we can find some kind of objective solid Truth by analyzing the bits of something. Structuralist practices have been rightfully criticized from many directions, such as it tending to be highly ethnocentric, and the field of poststructuralism is a direct response. The reason all the poststructuralist theories are so obsessed with context and baselessnes is exactly this. They import similar strategies of looking at signs and culture but instead of trying to find some universal grounding to it all, they consider the arbitrary links between cultural elements as where meaning arises. Everything is defined by the context it sits in, instead of that context rising out of some secret universal origin.

Anyway, that was a long preamble but the point is lately I've been thinking a lot about data science and how data-driven the modern internet is and also about online spaces in general. Like we all know and are (hopefully) uncomfortable with the fact that our presence online is constantly being harvested as data by advertisers. And yes advertisers and corporate analysts may not be performing formal academic structuralism in a general sense, but what is stuff like demographic analysis but structuralism except the goal is figuring out how to better market things? This kind of corporate analysis has always existed obviously, but it's never been more Everywhere and it's never been more built into our everyday life. Guys aren't listening in on my conversation with my friends in person to figure out how to sell me things but boy they sure are on twitter!

like, we love coop board games but they all are extremely Commercial Products, with specialized materials.

a thing we love about chess, or go, or to a lesser but still significant extent, card games, is their material simplicity and their openness. nobody owns go. you could make a go set out of literal garbage, you could make it out of dirt and pebbles. you could make a set of playing cards with a pen and paper. you could be stranded in the woods with hardly anything, but you could still cobble together a game of checkers with your compatriots

and you can make weird chess variants, you can invent new card games. they are as free as language, as poetry. the rules are simple enough that anyone can remember them off the top of their head, or at least a workable version of the rules. you dont really need a manual to play chess or rummy or manacala if you know someone who mostly remembers the rules.

but all those games are competitive.

the wikipedia page for coop board games only goes back to the 20th century with monopoly. on the one paw, im like, surely there were board or card games out there in history that were coop, that we just dont have a lot of records of

but also, i want to see ppl fill this void, to make NEW folk coop games. i want there to be a cooperative game that has that same material and conceptual simplicity as go, that nobody owns, that you could scramble together out of nothing, or modify the rules of.

the closest i have ever seen to this is the completely wonderful 2-player co-op card game shamus. it is played with a standard deck of playing cards, so it has a lot of material simplicity. in a nutshell, one player is playing rummy 500, and the other is playing uno, and they share a discard pile. communication is disallowed and a stack of face down cards serves as a turn limit and antagonistic source of chaos against the players.

it's still pretty complicated though, conceptually. it kind of sounds like an elaborate prank you would play on someone. but it's a really cool game, and part of what makes it so cool is the fact that it's a cooperative game but nobody owns it or controls it. it's not a commercial product, you don't need to go to a board game store and pay 70$ for it. shamus is not a registered trademark.

i want more stuff like that!! it would rule to see stuff that is perhaps even more elegant. i want games i could draw lines in the dirt and use rocks to play. unfortunately i don't know that much about game design, so i'm not really destined to invent such a thing. but we just really want to see stuff like that out in the world

heathcliff is the art that celebrates the sign, the signifier, the signified, and the immediate yet difficult-to-explain distinction between these three