The car is stolen but as long as the police don’t see you steal it, it won’t matter.

thanks Cunzy1 1 — that’s more accurate.

Small point, but people don’t make ice cream, they make “ice cream” (drugs).

Yes, should be in inverted comas — thanks

I see your message, but there are a few details that don’t seem right.

You don’t use hotels in Vice City. You stay in a “house” where you can park your car and regenerate for the next day.

Also, there is a storyline. The goal for the character is mostly materialistic- getting a bigger house or a better car.

You start out in a hotel, then move on to condos. I’ll fix that. thanks

this is good, David Choe (street artist) plays San Andreas without completing missions, he just photographs.
theres no manufacturing economy because things in the game engine just materialize, like when you cheat in a tank or turn around and see new cop cars exist. but there are some services happening, like cops chasing crooks and cabs carrying people around.

this is a funny thing to argue about in these comments, whether you are describing the game accurately (its almost like a test of who has played the game thoroughly and recently)

It’s important to get the details right, but not to get fixated on them.

Where you say, “there’s no storyline here,” most would argue that their is a distinct story line which is oddly similar to that of the Al Pacino Scarface movie, which is now a game as well.

William Kelley writes: ” their is a distinct story line which is oddly similar to that of the Al Pacino Scarface movie”. Yes, you are quite right. I take up the questionn of story elsewhere in the book. I argue that the story is essential to the game, but external to it. The story nominates a start condition, but gameplay itself is not ‘narrative’. This is a thorny question in game studies.

As above, so below, apparently: one of the most thought-provoking things I’ve heard said recently is that “there can be no utopia on a planet with six billion people.”

Or maybe we always already live in Liberty City.

Mark Stewart had a great song called Liberty City in the 80s, including the line “control units are laid out geometrically.” GTA reminds me of that. Except that control isn’t external, like a network of bunkers. Its internal, in the form of code.

Perhaps, on a planet with 6 billion people, its now ‘utopia or bust’. But then i just saw the Al Gore film…

Since this is my first comment, I must start off by saying how great this design interface is and how it works well with Ken’s aphoristic style, a style I was impressed with equally in his blogish fiction Dispositions and The Hacker Manifesto.

“What is utopia?” is my question. Not what was.

I have oftentimes asked myself this question because there are times when I think I’m experiencing it. That is to say, for me it must be something that can be experienced – and not just in some sci-fi sort of way. I think I have experienced it on the page (my first reading of Henry Miller’s “The Tropic of Cancer”) and outside the page as well (in the heat of composition, a body-brain-apparatus achievement where my unconscious is clicking with whatever “readiness potential” I may be tapping into at any given moment while creating – I’ve felt in writing, VJ performance, and even on the set of a film I’m directing). How do I know it’s utopia or what I imagine utopia to be? It’s hard to put into words but I’ll try: the world stops.

Carlos Castenada learned how to stop the world from his shamanic mentor, Don Juan. The Don said to Carlos:

I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking , and stopping the world is the first step to seeing .

Stopping the world is not a cryptic metaphor that really doesn’t mean anything. And its scope and importance as one of the main propositions of my knowledge should not be misjudged.

I am teaching you how to stop the world. Nothing will work, however, if you are very stubborn. Be less stubborn, and you will probably stop the world with any of the techniques I teach you. Everything I will tell you to do is a technique for stopping the world .

The sorcerer’s description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it. I’m going to give you what I call “techniques for stopping the world.”

When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.

In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world . Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world. The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.

Around the time he invented video art in Germany in 1962-63, Nam June Paik was also interested in what he called “stopping the world for three minutes!” (nice exclamation point – Paikstyle). I think his stopping the world came before Castenada’s which is interesting. Paik was tuning into what eh called “ecstasy” (not the synthetic drug but the dematerialized pharmakon) and explained it as “going out of oneself”. He was an artist and immigrant coming from Korea and had Buddhist leanings (even though he made fun of it all in works like “TV Buddha”).

This idea of Utopian space not being imaginary makes sense to me. It is real – but in the sense that Ron Sukenick understands the real as in “without the unreal – there can be no real.”

Maybe You-topia is a kind of alternative tense of being, a negative hallucination where instead of seeing things that are not really there, you don’t see things that are really there. Because if you did see them, you would have to move away, and as we know, there is no such place as away.

Thanks for your marvellous comment — there’s some juicy lines in there that i may want to quote. But i think i was interested in a slightly different question: not “what is utopia?” but “where is utopia?” It isn’t plausibly in another time or place any more. It can’t be in another place in a postcolonial world. It can’t be in another time when, as Baudrillard says, we have already ‘colonised’ all of the future as well, not to mention all of the planets.

A A Bogdanov and Kim Stanley Robinson made a last-ditch attempt to save the spatial utopia by putting it into the recent past and near inter-planetary space. But perhaps that’s the end of the line.

The shift from utopia to atopia is one from a nowhere to an anywhere. The paradox of the exclusion of a space for utopia by gamespace is that it proliferates now within its grids.

Ken, I think you’ve really hit a kernel of possibility in your line “[t]he shift from utopia to atopia is one from a nowhere to an anywhere.” It made me look back at the dedication to my second novel, Sexual Blood, “FOR FREE SPIRITS EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE” and got me thinking more about the anywhere. So I did what all good art-researchers would do in this case, and Googled “free spirits”+utopia+Nietzsche and found this site here:

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/introser/nietzs.htm

with section headings like:

The Free Spirits, New Philosophers

The Value of the Self-Created Game

Games as Cultural Metaphor

Is the spirit of Nietzsche to be found anywhere in this move from utopia to atopia?

Google is a great writing tool isn’t it? Some of this book happened that way. One of the rules for the finished article (sometimes broken) is that only book length texts make it into the notes. If i really feel indebted to something its notes, so there are exceptions.

I’m going to check out yr nietzsche guy, tho’ — that sounds interesting.

Nietsche is a problem for me at the moment, so i can’t answer your question. he’s too dependent for me on that orginal act of unmasking of the will to power. I don’t want to credit him with the legitimacy which comes from the act of unmasking.

“When Germany wanted to identify the Jews by name, IBM showed them how.”
Case study – box – great quote
As data architect would love to know more…specifics

It’s from Edwin Black’s book, IBM and the Holocaust. The Nazis used Holerith machines, proto-computers.

A very interesting documentary called “The Corporation” has a section dealing with this specific topic though has a very negative view of IBM for their participation in this.

Bryan: Thanks for the tip about ‘The Corporation’. I have not seen it.