version lock

Fixed a problem with the online book reader and everything seems… ok for now. So I am version locking everything until after the senior show. 😅

Obelisk version 1.2.3 beta notes

updates since version 1.1

'have fun staying poor'

In Race after Technology Ruha Benjamin describes whiteness as “a form of property.” That excellent phrasing made a connection for me to cryptocurrency “whales”, who are sitting on a massive investment that is slowly being shown to be a useless, massively-destructive waste- but in order to maintain the value of their investment they must convince new people to buy into cryptocurrency, driving up the price, but further shutting the door on legitimizing it as an actual currency. Whiteness can also be thought of as a sort of pyramid scheme- If you can convince someone of their natural superiority, or even their position as a “default” human, you continue to maintain the implicit rationalization of their place in an exploitative and violent social hierarchy, and dangle the hope of in-group citizenship as a carrot for any groups that could threaten to dismantle that hierarchy. I’m also thinking of the smirking cruelty of the all-pervasive crypto slogan “have fun staying poor”, and the edge of desperation that it carries- and how it ties in to ideas of class aspirations bound to extraction. I felt moved to include that slogan in the game, along with a reference to the stones as “whitestone”. I hadn’t yet addressed race directly in the game, but ideas from American Artist’s Black Gooey Universe are definitely part of the mix. And my fixation on the early macintosh was part of my own class aspirations as a child.

impersonal markets and minmaxing through the floor

In Obelisk, the disaster to blame for the state of the game isn’t so much the invention of money, rather it’s a system of extraction and materialism difficult to challenge, since it’s enshrined in the rules of the game. The obelisks in the game can’t be reasoned with, they remove the slippery complexities of human judgement and relationships in order to assign value to humans and to smooth the path for war and enslavement. The NPC’s are just trying furiously to get some pie in the sky, and the ground is collapsing.

Obelisk v1.2b notes

1.2b updates-

• fixes an issue where after dying and restarting, obelisk territory sizes weren’t reset
• build optimization

Obelisk v1.2b notes

1.2b updates-

this was a vibrant land

This was a vibrant land. The limb of the horizon, viewed from the dark rocks of its shores, was engulfed in the green sea and the teeming business of whales. The sun at noon was high and gold and blessed the air and the clouds and the collaboration of birds that bore it aloft. The forests of this land were rich and verdant. Its soils were fecund and bore great and plentiful fruit. The people of this land were close and storied and they sang great epics of their histories. The wildlife of this area was rich and too numerous to name in a lifetime. It is said that even the animals of this land were heroic and had known deeds and adventures that changed the history of the world and of which humans could only guess at. The stones of this land were full of beautiful gems and useful metals that were treasured but never knew a price. The people of this land understood debt but minted no coin. It’s said these people had no kings or queens, and all of those who lived here were equal and valued. It is said that the days in this land were long and the weather fair. The seas here produced enough fish so that the waters were always thick with them, shimmering like quicksilver. This was a holy land. Its people loved one another. This land was filled with music. This was a peaceful land. This was a land that lived in harmony with death. This land knew no borders or flags but was prosperous and storied. This land knew hunger and strife but persevered through work and kinship.

Obelisk 1.0beta notes

There’s some npc behavior now and one “ending” is in (and I need to finish in a week for the Capstone show) so I am calling this version 1.0 beta. ¯\(ツ)/¯ After the show I am going to need to stop working on this and move on, but it would be nice to revisit it some day collaborating with a “real” programmer to make it more deeply systematized. One of the things I wanted early on that just isn’t feasable with my current design and the time I have left was a sort of economy where the obelisks exchanged stones both through workers and then automatically when one territory encroached on another, and then a great obelisk that was some sort of representation of worker’s bodies tokenized in stones. It’s only kind of hinted at here. Also, slightly more intelligent npc behavior, it’s very clunky in my prototype.

Obelisk 1.1.9 alpha notes

Big update that will not seem big to anyone but me.

from Safiya Umoja Noble, algorithms of oppression

Search is also more than the specific mathematical algorithms and deep-machine learning developed by computer scientists and software engineers to index upward of a trillion pages of information and move some from the universal data pile to the first page of results on a computer screen. The interface on the screen presents an information reality, while the operations are rendered increasingly invisible. 36 The media and communications scholar Alex Galloway destabilizes the idea that digital technologies are transparent, benign windows or doors providing a view or path to somewhere and in themselves insignificant-the digital interface is a material reality structuring a discourse, embedded with historical relations, working often under the auspices of ludic capitalism, where a kind of playful engagement of labor is masked in vital digital media platforms such as Google.
Search does not merely present pages but structures knowledge, and the results retrieved in a commercial search engine create their own particular material reality.

(Noble, p.147)