Lexicon

(These are entries from my notes file that are currently relevant to my practice.)

Audience Design

Audience Design is a theory of language style Proposed by Alan Bell (1984), who derived the term from Clark (Clark and Carlson, 1982). Audience Design proposes that speakers' Language Style choices are primarily a response to their audience. Audience Design is generally manifested in a speaker shifting their style to be more like that of the person they are talking to.

Flow vs Practice and Mimesis

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed the idea of "Flow states" as a neoliberal panacea for alienation, wherein humans can enter gratifying states performing any task that is tuned to the edge of their mastery, regardless of the material reality of the task and other conditions of the subject's life. This idea has been turned into a pop-psychology self-improvement system and has insinuated itself into game studies and is often uncritically praised as a central element of videogame design. I'm proposing that the phenomenological experience of flow is actually a mimetic process of feedback in which a remembered embodied action is somatically re-experienced in the senses as it is executed. This is a process that is deeply linked to the roots of music, language and ritual, which are all part of a mechanism that serves essential social functions. Related- mimesis and pure music.

Akihabara Arcade Notebooks

> An underdocumented part of Japan's video game history: arcades had (and, to an extent, have!) communal notebooks in which people would write game tips, comments, ask questions, and generally communicate – GameFAQs before GameFAQs! These were core for Japan arcades' social aspect. - Samuel 💻✨ Messner (@obskyr) October 13, 2020

Deterritorialization

In critical theory, the process by which a social relation of components, a territory, has its current organization and context altered, mutated or destroyed. The components then constitute another new relation, and become reterritorialized. In Anthropology, a symptom of mediatization, migration and commodification, a weakening of ties between culture and place.

Permacomputing

Data Gardens

The idea of a non-heirarchically assembled space for knowledge production, a web space that is a work in progress or workbench rather than a polished presentation layer separate from notes and indexes. This website is a data garden, as is my offline personal wiki Everest Pipkin's Data Gardens Syllabus

Assimilation

The material program of granting "whiteness", with accompanying economic benefits and access to a group in exchange for complicity in helping to oppress another, and in the process undergoing a multigenerational loss of cultural context, language, and values, resulting in culturally unmoored individuals to whom family relations are largely only either a financial risk/burden or accumulated capital to be liquidated. Related- Du Bois historical account of the "Wages of Whiteness" and Graber's anthropological study of debt (Graeber). This connects to my work both in refutation of flow, creation of new embodied rituals and games connected to constructing family histories, and specifically to the migration of Bohemians to Texas. "Turning immigrants into Americans" was the name of a xenophobic pamphlet that called for the renunciation of "barbaric languages" by immigrants.

House Rules

Everest Pipkin's concept of retopologizing or applying folk rules to an existing game:

Critical Retrocomputing

Kusoge

The Japanese term for a "shitty game", esp if it has some other value or charm, if it is humorous in its brokenness or has some other fascination.

The Hairball

The hairball is everything. The hairball is all of the histories and ideas and issues that you want to try to keep out when you make or play a game or an artwork. Presumably it's also all the things you would not think about in a "Flow" state. The hairball will always get dragged into what you create, like tangled laundry following the shirt you're trying to pull from the dryer to fold, depositing clean socks and underwear onto the dirty floor. You might as well let the hairball in.

Situated Cognition

> According to the situated cognition perspective, learning is seen as a process of enculturation, or participation in socially organized practices, through which specialized skills are developed by the learner as they engage in an apprenticeship in thinking (Rogoff, 1990), or in legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991).[...] > Using the methodology of field studies, Suchman (1987), Hutchins (1995a, 1995b) and others could demonstrate how much people rely on cues and representations provided by the environment. While traditional accounts of planning rely on mental representations and processes exclusively, human planning can be shown to rely on maps, road signs, guidance by other people, and other external sources. The importance of external representations in problem solving has been repeatedly demonstrated (Zhang 1997). > “Unfortunately, students are too often asked to use the tools of a discipline without being able to adopt its culture. To learn to use tools as practitioners use them, a student, like an apprentice, must enter that community and its culture.” [link to science direct article](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/situated-cognition)

Zones of Permission

Peter Burr's Cave Exits describes a game like zone with its own ontology, Ian Cheng describes art as: > I think of art as a zone of permission, unlike anywhere else in culture or anywhere else professionally. Even though many artists don’t take advantage of the permission that art offers, it is nonetheless the one zone in culture where you can explore the present and cannibalize the past with relatively little oversight. It is an ideal home base. Games and art negotiate that 'permission', just as their consequences in the real world are negotiated. They are not immaterial or encapsulated, they are materially situated in many ways and not distinct from the normal world, but they create another ontological layer as an emergent and dependent feature of the quotidian one we know.

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