Writing books takes a long time. Publishing a finished book, even more time. I started working on Playing Software some time in 2015, when I was a guest at the Computational Media group at UC Santa Cruz. Back then, the present and near future was VR, AR, voice assistants, gamification, and digial-physical hybrids. Social media was a mess, but some interesting things were happening there as well. Thanks for reading Playing Software! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I finished writing Playing Software in early December 2021, while in isolation due to a COVID infection. That was a different world. VR was alive but in the hands of Meta and not of users, so it was mostly as stale as your grandparent's Facebook update. AR was still struggling to move on from its Pokémon success, trying to find good use cases. Alexa and Siri were still around, but mostly as timers and music players, and not as the novel interfaces we thought they would be. Gamification ... well, that was still alive and "well". Social media was only alive, but slowly losing its mind. The future of technology was on the blockchain, while generative AI systems were clumsily showing themselves to the world, requiring cumbersome Jupyter notebooks to be useful - well, that, and a sort-of-but-not-quite-niche game, AI Dungeon. I finished editing the book's proofs sometime in May 2022. Blockchain and NFTs had died (well, as one of the ur-philosophers of blockchain would put it, "that is not dead which can eternal lie", but that's another story). Amazon was scaling down its Alexa services. VR was still on the brink of making it, while helping sink the dream of the Metaverse. And some new tools were taking the internet by storm: Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, or Midjourney helped the world understand what deep learning could do to our visual culture. Playing Software was published on February 14th, 2023, the year of generative AI. While the visual systems I have mentioned helped make generative AI popular, it was ChatGPT that made these systems visible in our culture. Seeing an AI compose believable text, even computer code, in real time, was something like magic. All of these generative AI systems are a mess, propagating nefarious ideologies and predatory economics, as well as hinting at new possibilities for expression and reflection. The world in which I thought the core ideas of Playing Software is somewhat different than the world in which the book reaches its audience. I hope to have written a book of ideas that do not depend on specific examples, but that can be applied to manifestations of play in computational culture, from social media to generative AI. That's why I have decided to start this substack: to think in public about this novel technologies that affect computational culture, and the role of play in shaping our experiences of and with these technologies. This is then an updated and abridged version of Playing Software. The book is a recommended reading, but you can still follow my arguments without having read it (and you can read more about the book in its website). In this substack I will be writing (maybe weekly, maybe every second week) about the play element in generative AI, and in other "popular" technologies that are not covered in the book. I will also be adding recordings and slides from talks I give about the book, which sometimes expand its contents to other audiences. I started writing Playing Software when Facebook and Twitter and a website were enough to keep a book alive. Time passed, and it seems now that the best option to keep Playing Software relevant is a mailing list with an RSS feed. I really expect my next book to be kept alive on a BBS. In the meanwhile, if you are interested in receiving 2-4 emails a month with my thoughts on the role of play in computational culture, you know where to find them. Thanks for reading Playing Software! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. |
Playing Software, one email at a time
Writing books takes a long time. Publishing a finished book, even more time. I started working on Playing Software some time in 2015, when I was a guest at the Computational Media group at UC Santa Cruz. Back then, the present and near future was VR, AR, voice assistants, gamification, and digial-physical hybrids. Social media was a mess, but some interesting things were happening there as well. Thanks for reading Playing Software! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I finished writing Playing Software in early December 2021, while in isolation due to a COVID infection. That was a different world. VR was alive but in the hands of Meta and not of users, so it was mostly as stale as your grandparent's Facebook update. AR was still struggling to move on from its Pokémon success, trying to find good use cases. Alexa and Siri were still around, but mostly as timers and music players, and not as the novel interfaces we thought they would be. Gamification ... well, that was still alive and "well". Social media was only alive, but slowly losing its mind. The future of technology was on the blockchain, while generative AI systems were clumsily showing themselves to the world, requiring cumbersome Jupyter notebooks to be useful - well, that, and a sort-of-but-not-quite-niche game, AI Dungeon. I finished editing the book's proofs sometime in May 2022. Blockchain and NFTs had died (well, as one of the ur-philosophers of blockchain would put it, "that is not dead which can eternal lie", but that's another story). Amazon was scaling down its Alexa services. VR was still on the brink of making it, while helping sink the dream of the Metaverse. And some new tools were taking the internet by storm: Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, or Midjourney helped the world understand what deep learning could do to our visual culture. Playing Software was published on February 14th, 2023, the year of generative AI. While the visual systems I have mentioned helped make generative AI popular, it was ChatGPT that made these systems visible in our culture. Seeing an AI compose believable text, even computer code, in real time, was something like magic. All of these generative AI systems are a mess, propagating nefarious ideologies and predatory economics, as well as hinting at new possibilities for expression and reflection. The world in which I thought the core ideas of Playing Software is somewhat different than the world in which the book reaches its audience. I hope to have written a book of ideas that do not depend on specific examples, but that can be applied to manifestations of play in computational culture, from social media to generative AI. That's why I have decided to start this substack: to think in public about this novel technologies that affect computational culture, and the role of play in shaping our experiences of and with these technologies. This is then an updated and abridged version of Playing Software. The book is a recommended reading, but you can still follow my arguments without having read it (and you can read more about the book in its website). In this substack I will be writing (maybe weekly, maybe every second week) about the play element in generative AI, and in other "popular" technologies that are not covered in the book. I will also be adding recordings and slides from talks I give about the book, which sometimes expand its contents to other audiences. I started writing Playing Software when Facebook and Twitter and a website were enough to keep a book alive. Time passed, and it seems now that the best option to keep Playing Software relevant is a mailing list with an RSS feed. I really expect my next book to be kept alive on a BBS. In the meanwhile, if you are interested in receiving 2-4 emails a month with my thoughts on the role of play in computational culture, you know where to find them. Thanks for reading Playing Software! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. |