Synchronicity or shared worlds or something in art

IdleRich

IdleRich
Have you heard of geasa? Apologies for wiki link, knee deep in lego & paints. Point is how multiple geasa fuck everyone given them (eventually). “If I do x, y will happen. If y happens, that opens up the monsters of z. There’s no way out.” Different from morality though.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geas
Ah nice, that seems very relevant to what I just said. I wasn't talking about morality at all either though merely the struggle between determinism and free will (or sometimes a probabilistic universe which allows neither).
And I suppose now I've thought about it a bit more I'm talking about it in two ways
1. Explicit in the story when characters attempt to avoid their fate and assert their free will
2. External to the story but where the author struggles to create an interesting and surprising story within a universe that she/he has chosen to make deterministic. In fact there is also the inverse issue where there is a seemingly non-deterministic universe and yet the author has to explain prophecy (maybe the Bible is an example here).
 

luka

Well-known member
Computer games are great because they never present you an unfamiliar world. Everything is an iteration of already established tropes. Whether that be a post apocalyptic wasteland or a faux medieval fantasy world where dragons are born again. Every post apocalyptic wasteland is the same post apocalyptic wasteland. Each corporate-feudal cyberpunk world is the same corporate-feudal cyberpunk world.
i found a book about this today. saw it in a shop window. might buy it.


Recognizable, recurring spatial settings in video games serve not only as points of reference and signposts for orientation, but also as implicit sources of content. These spatial archetypes denote more than real-world objects or settings: they suggest and bring forward emotional states, historical context, atmospheric “attunement,” in the words of Massumi, and aesthetic programs that go beyond plain semiotic reference.


In each chapter, Mathias Fuchs brings to the fore an archetype commonly found in old and new digital games: The Ruin, The Cave, The Cloud, The Portal, The Road, The Forest, and The Island are each analysed at length, through the perspectives of aesthetics, games technology, psychoanalysis, and intertextuality. Gridding these seven tropes together with these four analytical lenses provides the reader with a systematic framework to understand the various complex considerations at play in evocative game design.
 

luka

Well-known member
I've talked a fair bit about how conspiracy theory operates in this way too. There are progenitors and popularisers of some central ideas eg Ancient Astronauts and those are built on and elaborated by hundreds of others to form a consistent plane an ecology of alternative facts.
good work here. scholarship.
 
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