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Hey D&D it's Eripsa! Long ago, in the time of Lowtax and Obama, I foretold of the coming attention economy, which I vividly rendered in this very forum as a system whereby marbles shoot out of everyone's head at regular intervals and counting the number of marbles things accumulate would serve as a basis for economic and political decision making. The drooling buffoons of D&D in that bygone era were hostile to the very suggestion of change or progress, and dismissed me as a lunatic. But lo and behold, my prophesies have come to pass, as widely recognized by the wise and thoughtful contributors to this current era of D&D, at least according to the screenshots that people sometimes send me.  But I'm not here to bask in the glory days of my youth, to dwell on my triumph in these long archived debates. I have not returned simply to reiterate the narrative that *I was right the whole goddamned time*, true though it may be. Because, you see, I am not merely capable of just one grand and revolutionary idea in this short life. Nay, dear reader and friend, I hope to demonstrate today that I'm capable of at least two. Over the last several months I've been developing a massively multiplayer analog distributed game that involves gifting beads. This game turns my dream of a marble economy into a reality that you can hold in your hands today. It turns out that beads have a number of advantages over marbles. For one things, beads typically have a hole that allows you to string them together into necklaces and jewelry. Marbles don't have a hole so they just get everywhere. Allow me to introduce to you Chill Pills, the radical gifting game and bead art project in a prescription pill bottle.    [click for big] What are Chill Pills? I'm glad you asked! Chill Pills is a radical gifting game. The first rule of the game is DO NOT EAT THIS GAME. Chill Pills are not candy or drugs. They are beads made of acrylic, glass, and wood, and distributing them in amber prescription pill bottles to people at festivals definitely presents a choking hazard. So it's important that everyone is clear on the first rule of the game. Don't put them in your mouth. They look delicious, and frankly they are delicious, but they will result in instant death if taken orally. DON'T EAT THEM. Chill Pills is a gifting game! We run the game from a small pop up performance space called Playa Pharmacy, where we serve as "Pharmacists" and distribute beads to Chill Pills players, dubbed "Enablers". Pharmacists give each person a customized prescription of Chill Pills (about 9 beads) from our selection of 16 beads. And each bead is itself a gift that can be given to others. We ask that beads are gifted non-transactionally (eg, no trading beads for sex or real drugs). Here's the central hook of the game: when you give someone a bead, you enable a moment. Each of the beads enable different kinds of moments, and the bead prescriptions are customized for the moments that each player wants to enable. We call the beads "context dependent affect tokenizers", and it's for the Enabler to decide on the appropriate context in which to gift someone a bead and enable a moment. We call it a Moment Enabling Distributed System, or MEDS for short. There are many beads to choose from, and enough combinations to give every player a unique prescription. The beads come in four different varieties: Pro-chaotics, Anti-chaotics, Vibe Stabilizers, and SSPIs (social stimulants producing immediacy). So for instance, one of our more popular Pro-chaotics is Mythium, which makes everything epic. Give someone a Mythium to enable legendary times they'll sing about in bar rooms for generations. Side effects include things you wouldn't believe. If that doesn't interest you, we also have Guerrillify, another popular pro-chaotic. Give a Guerrillify to start a riot and burn poo poo up. Side effects might include a night in jail. Or perhaps you're interested in one of our SSPIs, the social lubricant wing of the ombre rainbow that is Chill Pills. For instance, you might try a Palexa, which makes friendship on contact. Give someone a Palexa and you've made a friend. You get the idea. You can read all about the beads, their effects and side effects, and the lore about their manufacturers on the menu. Each bead also has a jingle, and together the jingle forms an epic rock opera. Here's the Chill Pills theme song my partner wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm1tApEsfJg In the music video you can see some stills of people playing the game. Here are a few more pictures of the pharmacy in operation to convince you that this is an actual thing I’ve really done in the actual world.    This summer we have brought this project to several regional burns in the NE (PdF, Firefly, Portal) with great success. Regional burns are basically long weekends of camping and participatory art with between 500-1500 people, and we received some small grant support to bring Chill Pills to these events and give beads to the participants. Over several events we've distributed around 1000 bottles with about 10,000 beads, we've met a lot of people and blown a lot of minds, and we've really just had a blast. At some of these events we distributed bottles of beads to nearly 40% of the event, which means hundreds of people playing chill pills together! I know that massively multiplayer games at large events where a lot of other things are happening is extremely difficult to pull off and do well, so we're really thrilled about the success of this game and the overwhelmingly positive feedback from Enablers. We are currently expecting to bring Chill Pills and Playa Pharmacy to Burning Man in a few weeks, where we're preparing to distribute 2000 bottles and around 32,000 beads at the event. That's 100 pounds of beads. If strung end to end, that's over half a kilometer in beads. If stacked, they would be taller than the Empire State Building. It's a lot of beads! Granted, it would be very difficult to stack beads that tall. Nevertheless, this is definitely the biggest art project I've ever worked on and we've put a lot of effort into getting it all together, and given its humble origins on this forum I felt it was only right to show the project off here. Another rule of Chill Pills: unlimited refills. Give the beads away and when your bottle is empty we'll refill your prescription. Most people don't come back for refills, but the ones that do are told how to "win the game" by collecting Bonus Beads. There are several Bonus Beads that can be earned by completing various quests. For instance, collecting all 16 beads earns a special off-menu 17th bead that is only available to people who complete the set. One person said "Oh, it's like hippie Pokemon" and yes, yes it is. Usually one or two people get deep enough into the game to actually win. There's also a bonus bead for volunteering as a pharmacist, for finding beads that were dropped on the ground, for singing along with the theme song, etc. Since you can't get Pokemon to sing their theme song for you, Chill Pills is in some ways more like a hippie Chuck E. Cheese, and the pharmacists like animatronic rats and birds. A lot of people at these events see the pharmacy and think we're doing some homeopathy thing. About half of them think we're whackos, and the other half immediately talk about how we've channeled our energies into the beads, and treat the pharmacy consultation like a tarot reading. Several people have walked into the pharmacy and immediately said "Oh, you're doing magic." I've tried to be very clear that the beads are just plastic made in China, and that Chill Pills is a game and does not treat any medical or mental health condition, and that the "magic" of the beads is entirely found in the act of gifting itself, and not in some hidden or mystical force. Some people have tried to explain to me that that's just what magic is. I've tried to explain that the real magic is the global supply chain that can get 100 lbs of beads around the world and through customs within two weeks. Other people are just grateful to have a game to play, to have quests to run, to have a ready made gift ready to grease the social wheels of a participatory arts event. It's been a hoot to see the game go viral at these events, people coming to the pharmacy because they got an Igneurontin or a Collexipro and wanted to know what the hell is going on. The burner events are all-ages, so eventually the kids at the event realize that the Pharmacy is basically an arts and crafts game and quickly become some of our best clients. I've taught a number of ten year olds to open pill bottles in order to play this game. I'm sure that's just fine and not a problem at all. One 10 year old pulled a 2 hour shift giving out beads as a pharmacist in an adult's lab coat and it was loving hilarious the whole time. At the end of the event, Enablers can stop by Playa Pharmacy with whatever beads they've accumulated, and we hold a "Stringing Ceremony" where people can turn those beads into bracelets and reflect on the moments they've helped enable. Obviously, the game has a finite duration and it isn't being used to address systemic challenges in political and economic organization. So it's not a full model of the marble economy. Nevertheless, I think Chill Pills is a proof of concept: that people are actually very good at assigning value and meaning to beads, and trading them around in significant ways. Turns out that as a species we've been doing this sort of thing for longer than we've had money or writing. Or rather, assigning value and meaning to beads was the og versions of both money and writing. So people take to the system very quickly. Chill Pills has a huge menu with lots of different beads, but once people get what's going on they pick up the vocabulary very quickly. They know that some people need a Collexipro and others need a Glameron. They become very insistent about which beads they want and which they don't. We were especially surprised with the pro- and anti-chaotics; 90% of people know immediately which of the two they want. The game itself is elaborate and complicated. Also, mental health is also this very complicated thing! But assigning value and meaning to beads is so intuitive to brains like ours that it actually simplifies the process of talking about mental health, makes things intuitive and accessible that would otherwise be difficult to articulate. Affect tokenizers! It'll be the next big thing. I can talk a lot more about this! About how the game works in practice, about moments I've seen enabled with the game, about the theoretical implications for participatory economics. Might drop another prophesy or two, we'll see what happens. Good to be back D&D. Eripsa fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Aug 12, 2022 |
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Aug 12, 2022 06:22
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NGL every so often I think about the attention economy and marbles and attention pests and twitter
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Aug 12, 2022 06:37
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Yiggy posted:NGL every so often I think about the attention economy and marbles and attention pests and twitter Me too, homie. Me too.
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Aug 12, 2022 06:45
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welcome back, eripsaA big flaming stink posted:oh poo poo eripsa is back!!!!!! i didn't even know we had that emoji Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Aug 12, 2022 |
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Aug 12, 2022 06:47
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oh poo poo eripsa is back!!!!!! 
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Aug 12, 2022 07:21
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lol this is rad dude
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Aug 12, 2022 13:41
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I appreciate that you internalized the lessons from the extended debates on the marble economy system and adapted it into something even more complicated and that the vast majority of users clearly do not understand.Eripsa posted:A lot of people at these events see the pharmacy and think we're doing some homeopathy thing. About half of them think we're whackos, and the other half immediately talk about how we've channeled our energies into the beads, and treat the pharmacy consultation like a tarot reading. Several people have walked into the pharmacy and immediately said "Oh, you're doing magic." I've tried to be very clear that the beads are just plastic made in China, and that Chill Pills is a game and does not treat any medical or mental health condition, and that the "magic" of the beads is entirely found in the act of gifting itself, and not in some hidden or mystical force. Some people have tried to explain to me that that's just what magic is. I've tried to explain that the real magic is the global supply chain that can get 100 lbs of beads around the world and through customs within two weeks.
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Aug 12, 2022 17:16
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I thought he said it was a grifting game not gifting game
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Aug 13, 2022 08:18
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Hey Eripsa! I'm sure your bead-version of the movie with the bad man and the kid from A.I. is great, but I was also curious, are you honoured and/or upset that Seth MacFarlane did a take on your awesome ideas about social network societies?
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Aug 13, 2022 09:30
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Rappaport posted:Hey Eripsa! I'm sure your bead-version of the movie with the bad man and the kid from A.I. is great, but I was also curious, are you honoured and/or upset that Seth MacFarlane did a take on your awesome ideas about social network societies? BAIT BAIT BAIT! - My claim is not that the attention economy is utopic, or that it realizes a perfectly just or meritocratic system. My claim is that the attention economy is based in very different values and incentive structures, and so has different dynamics and behavioral outcomes. Understanding these dynamics better might also lead to more deliberate forms of systemic support and control. These claims sound rather trite and obvious after a decade of social media, but there you go. - Haven't seen the MacFarlane movie yet I'm sure it's a hoot. Judging by the title along, though, I want to say that attention economies don't depend on any sort of majority rule. For instance, the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" is an attention economics maxim, not a majority rule maxim. This is important! Attention is a finite resource, but also has limited scope and domain. Even the most popular viral thing on the planet only maintains that status for a limited time. So attention economies are fundamentally fragmented and federated. Zones of influence and control with definite boundaries and constraints. So attention economics make possible long-tail behavior, eg the dozens and dozens of streams on twitch with fewer than 100 viewers. Network TV is majority rule: a half dozen outlets controlled by a handful of companies trying to appeal to the greatest common demoninator. The structure of twitch is entirely different: an unlimited number of outlets controlled by a single megacorp trying to appeal to the attention habits of every niche interest possible.
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Aug 13, 2022 18:50
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I'll grant you one thing: while cryptic, at least it's not cryptocurrency.
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Aug 14, 2022 04:05
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I'll grant you one thing: while cryptic, at least it's not cryptocurrency. I sure don't see anyone funging these tokens.
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Aug 14, 2022 04:12
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THE FORBIDDEN PILLS
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Aug 14, 2022 05:30
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You've designed a LARP tool for stoners at music festivals.
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Aug 14, 2022 14:01
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Ever heard of the Magic Circle? It's the idea that a game suspends the rules of the normal world when you enter into it; for example I can look my friends in the eye and blatanty lie to them in a game of Mafia but it won't impact our friendship since it's a 'separate space'
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Aug 14, 2022 21:04
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Xand_Man posted:Ever heard of the Magic Circle? It has some interesting ramifications. https://gunshowcomic.com/471
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Aug 14, 2022 22:34
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I've read the OP twice and I have no idea what it's supposed to be about.
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Aug 15, 2022 05:36
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I've read the OP twice and I have no idea what it's supposed to be about. I think you get a bead depending on your political alignment and then duel others of different political alignments and collect their beads What's confusing is how do you know who to battle if you've won a bunch of others political alignment beads and use them to play And if you get all the beads of all colors you become champion of the LGBTQRCODE+ You gotta catch em all as it were
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Aug 15, 2022 16:25
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Rob Filter posted:You've designed a LARP tool for stoners at music festivals. This guy gets it. Xand_Man posted:Ever heard of the Magic Circle? Yes! There's a fantastic book by Thi Nguyen called Games: Agency as Art that explicitly develops the idea that what makes games fun and interesting is precisely that they open up a space wherein we can change the norms and constraints around agency. In other words, games momentarily allow us to be different kinds of agents, and to experiment with the consequences of these changes without the risks of actually committing to those changes.
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Aug 19, 2022 01:39
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I'm glad you're back, Eripsa 
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Aug 19, 2022 02:14
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:I think you get a bead depending on your political alignment and then duel others of different political alignments and collect their beads You actually have the logic backwards here. You don't "pick beads depending on your political alignment". You pick beads based on whatever criteria you want (aesthetics, effects, lolz, whatever), and your political alignment is then determined by that selection of beads. In other words, you don't just use the beads to express your politics. You can use the beads to discover things about your political affiliations you didn't already know. The goal of such a system is to make the organizational possibilities concrete and available for computation and manipulation. So the current version of Chill Pills is basically a "collect them all" game. Try to complete the set and all the side quests and earn all the beads to win the game. We printed up some t-shirts for people who actually got that far, I think we've given out half a dozen or so over four events. Of course there's no requirement to play with Chill Pills this way; most people gave them out according to the effects described in the menu and never tried to complete the set. A lot of people just built their own jewelry out of the beads, effectively taking them out of circulation. There's no wrong way to play the game. But there are still winners. If we're successful and we do it again next year, there will be a "Tier 2 game", something like a prestige mechanism in incremental games, with the goal of generating explicit alignments and competition within the confines of this very loose distributed game. If a player collects all the beads from one of the four manufacturers (Meizer, Le Guin, Wernicke's Gyrus, United Grandmother Front, see the menu in the OP for lore), then they become a "Corporate Rep", and will get some new manufacturer-specific beads to give away. The rule with these beads is that giving them to someone effectively recruits them to that corporation, and you can only give those bead to people who aren't already affiliated. We'll keep track of the number of beads we give to corporate reps, and the corporation that gives away the most beads collectively wins the Tier 2 game. Basically the game becomes one of finding the people who aren't already affiliated and recruiting them before the other corporations get them. Hopefully this makes the game go viral as people push beads on the unsuspecting. All this stuff is pretty easy to implement, it's just a matter of introducing a new bead and the rules for how to use it. The actual mechanics of the game are so open-ended and widely distributed that the only real consideration for game play is if it makes the rules too complicated for new players to approach it. But if we've already established a community familiar with how to use beads as game tokens, then expanding the rule set is a breeze.
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Aug 19, 2022 02:20
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Uglycat posted:I'm glad you're back, Eripsa I'm glad you're Uglycat, Uglycat. edit: holy poo poo the reg dates in this thread could receive social security checks. Eripsa fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Aug 19, 2022 |
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Aug 19, 2022 02:21
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Eripsa posted:
Not yet; not yet.
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Aug 19, 2022 04:23
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Eripsa posted:You actually have the logic backwards here. You don't "pick beads depending on your political alignment". You pick beads based on whatever criteria you want (aesthetics, effects, lolz, whatever), and your political alignment is then determined by that selection of beads. In other words, you don't just use the beads to express your politics. You can use the beads to discover things about your political affiliations you didn't already know. The goal of such a system is to make the organizational possibilities concrete and available for computation and manipulation. This only works for the very high or the very stupid.
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Aug 19, 2022 04:56
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All my beads are red and black because I'm an Anarcho communist. When I get other colors I smash them with a blacksmiths hammer.
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Aug 19, 2022 06:10
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:This only works for the very high or the very stupid. It was portrayed as silly in the show, but maybe the Drazi way of assigning political (or religious? I can't remember if this was said explicitly) affiliation by drawing random lots into green and PURPLE factions isn't inherently worse than our human method. It's a bold effort, to be certain.
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Aug 19, 2022 06:42
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:This only works for the very high or the very stupid. Well my good sir I am both high AND stupid, so it works especially well for me. I don't see why the claim is objectionable. Such things happen regularly in politics, for instance when someone discovers that their party's candidate is receiving significant contributions from groups they don't want to align with. Such a discovery about one's network of affiliations could bring one to a new understanding of how they fit within the political system, and how to proceed in such a way as to realize their political ends. A common example of tools for this purpose are the databases disclosing campaign contributions to political candidates. Or browser extensions for online shopping that highlight labor and environmental practices from certain manufacturers to help shoppers make informed decisions on their purchases. I might think I like thing A more than thing B, but when properly contextualized I actually prefer thing B, or I realize I really don't like thing A. So more things to provide contextual markers to aid decision making might be a good thing. At least, the possibility that it's a good thing is preferable to the default commitment to individualism, where a person's politics is something akin to their soul, something unchanging and unwaivering, and where voting is a pure expression of these deep proclivities, and so politics happens by taking a count of who's on which side of context-free debates and free-floating opinions.
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Aug 20, 2022 01:50
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:All my beads are red and black because I'm an Anarcho communist. There are explicitly radical beads in the set, most obviously: the menu in the op posted:Guerrillify Guerrillify also has a jingle in the rock opera for Chill Pills. Here's the song: https://soundcloud.com/hiplomat/guerillify-2  We would perform the song on demand at the pharmacy. One night I was really drunk and tried to start a mosh pit among the five or so people there. I just fell on my rear end and they ignored me. The other radical element is the new line of beads we've just added to the pharmacy, from UGF, the United Grandmother Front: read the menu fuckers posted:United Grandmother Front
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Aug 20, 2022 02:01
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Eripsa posted:Well my good sir I am both high AND stupid, so it works especially well for me. So I've been sketching out this book, I'm imagining it as a fantasy novel full of fantasy novel tropes but where the only magic system in the novel is a really effective and efficient political bureaucracy and social infrastructure. It's so effective and allows people to become so powerful that they are basically wizards with near total mastery of spacetime, but when you peel back the curtain it's all excel spreadsheets and intuitive file management systems and earnest civil servants So in this system there's this idealized organizational system called Polytopolis, and it's all digital and wireless and sleek as hell and works really well for nearly everyone, but like a century before the novel starts there's a major system crash ("The Glitch") and there's a huge economic depression, and everyone shifts to a makeshift bead system that approximates the old digital system in some ways, but they create this really innovative analog version and figure out all these computation and memory tricks using the beads, but then the glitch is ultimately fixed and people go back to the digital system and all this knowledge falls out of living memory. But then another glitch is found and the system crashes again, and people are trying to reconstruct what everyone did a century earlier, and some of the bead systems are still in use. Anyway, at the start of the novel I need an example of some typical, everyday sort of dispute, where the use of the beads might resolve the dispute quickly and amicably in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system. The example I'm imagining feels weak and I don't like it very much, maybe y'all have better ideas. The idea is that the characters come across a dispute over an unpaid bill in an outdoor restaurant that sort of spills over into the street in front of them. But it's not just an unpaid bill, because in this system there is no money to exchange for meals. Instead, you basically sign up to meal plans from various providers, and you get your meals if you're in good standing with that provider. Different providers with different meal selections (some fancier than others) will also have different constraints on who can sign up for their meals. So the diner in this dispute claims to have the appropriate credentials (eg, the right beads) for eating at this restaurant, but the waiter is disputing the credentials and denying that those are the appropriate beads. They get into an argument, maybe the table gets knocked over or whatever, but it's not violent. The situation is resolved because someone on the street pulls out a set of beads identifying them as one of the organizers for that meal plan, and the person confirms that the beads the diner has are accepted on that plan. The waiter accepts the results and serves the guy. The point of the interaction is that people's alignment and affiliations matter for how they interact, and anyone around can participate or even resolve the dispute if they have the right combination of beads. Not because the beads are themselves valuable, but because they signal the rank and affiliation of others in ways that allow for amicable resolution of disputes. So the diner dispute above has the right sort of structure I'm looking for, but the situation feels a bit too contrived and unrealistic to do the work I want it to do. What sort of disputes do you see beads resolving? Even in just a stoner LARPing scenario.
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Aug 20, 2022 02:24
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I still don't understand how the beads will help me incite a leftist coup
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Aug 20, 2022 02:35
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Eripsa posted:So in this system there's this idealized organizational system called Polytopolis, and it's all digital and wireless and sleek as hell and works really well for nearly everyone, Oh no not this again.
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Aug 20, 2022 02:45
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:I still don't understand how the beads will help me incite a leftist coup I suggest you watch the revolutionary training video "Home Alone" for more detailed instructions. I shouldn't say more online.
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Aug 20, 2022 02:46
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You remembered! I'm so flattered. I'm happy to autograph anything (and I mean anything) you'd like.
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Aug 20, 2022 02:47
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Eripsa posted:You remembered! I'm so flattered. I'm happy to autograph anything (and I mean anything) you'd like. I remember it being impossible gibberish.
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Aug 20, 2022 02:48
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Wait but how do I eventually distinguish the people who are lovely from the people who beat up lovely identifying people and took their beads?
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Aug 20, 2022 02:59
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I once ate a plastic bead when I was a child and I don't recall it ever coming out again but otherwise experienced no harm, so i dispute your primary assertion that eating the beads will kill you.
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Aug 20, 2022 03:08
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I remember it being impossible gibberish. HAY I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND YOUR POINT AND THAT'S YOUR FAULT
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Aug 20, 2022 03:56
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OwlFancier posted:I once ate a plastic bead when I was a child and I don't recall it ever coming out again but otherwise experienced no harm, so i dispute your primary assertion that eating the beads will kill you. eripsa says it's OK to eat the chill pills
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Aug 20, 2022 04:22
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Harold Fjord posted:Wait but how do I eventually distinguish the people who are lovely from the people who beat up lovely identifying people and took their beads? I TOLD YOU THE TOKENS WEREN'T FUNGIBLE
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Aug 20, 2022 04:26
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Eripsa posted:So I've been sketching out this book, I'm imagining it as a fantasy novel full of fantasy novel tropes but where the only magic system in the novel is a really effective and efficient political bureaucracy and social infrastructure. "What if Terry Pratchett, but the exact opposite" seems like a tough pitch, even on the US market.
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Aug 20, 2022 06:03
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