Author: MK

The recent election of David Miller as Toronto’s mayor produced a bubble of hope and pride for the city, the likes of which I hadn’t witnessed in my seven years living there. The politically apathetic (mostly due to lack of options on the ballot) became excited by the possibility of Miller in the Mayoral office, and seemed genuinely inspired by Miller’s victory.

And where there’s a bubble, there’s people eager to prick it. So along comes John Sewell (a former mayor of Toronto), who recently wrote a scathing indictment of Toronto’s tentative plans to prepare a bid to host the World’s Fair in 2015.

At this point in the tale, I will note for those who do not know: I love Toronto and consider Toronto my home, but I currently reside in Montréal, a city that has many charms and that I am growing quite fond of. To ever compare the two is rather unfair, since the two are so different: and preferring one over the other can be akin to saying you love your son more than your daughter, but I digress.

Despite their intimate relationship as (I will dare to say it) the two most culturally and economically important places in Canada, and both “world class” cities in their own right (Torontonians will get the joke), I will indeed attempt to compare situations in the case of the hotly-disputed potential World’s Fair bid.

A friend and I were recently talking about video games and the idea of control within them. Specifically, the ways in which users might lose control from time to time, and how this could be more interesting than having unlimited control.

Little things that are unrealistic but keep game play moving steadily forward slip under this control radar. For example, you can endlessly run at full speed in first person shooters like Halo. If my Halo character ran like me, I’d get tired after about 100 paces, slow down, catch my breath, run again, my shins would start to hurt, I’d complain about my shoes, and then keep going for a while. Though this would make the game hard to play, and maybe too slow, I would be interested in controlling the Halo character much like I control my own body (or how it controls me).

Games like Shenmue tried to address this issue of control by allowing you to pick up or interact with nearly any object present in this detail-rich game. Also, another dose of reality comes in the form of time. You have to kill time if your character, Ryo, has nothing to do until later in the day. However, Ryo says whatever he wants to say, and so throws out the notion of total control. One reviewer notes that “Rather than giving a sense that the player is in complete control, the game feels a lot like taking possession of Ryo’s body while leaving him in control of his mind.”

In an interesting gaming control experiment, Jim Munroe takes his character for a walk in the game Grand Theft Auto, exploring the desolate landscape. Using this character for what would be a normal human activity, ignoring the goals of the game, is an interesting (and amusing) way of taking some control back. We’re still left unable to let the character’s mind wander, but games with large and intricate maps allow us to let the character’s feet wander.

So what kinds of games do I want to play? Perhaps one that reflects more human frailty, lets me run like a girl, and where my very human flaws and charms can either propel or stall gameplay.

I was on a panel discussion called “Hybrid practices: humans, machines, networks, interactivity” last Saturday at the future_feed_forward festival.

Something that became a touchstone for all the speakers was the idea of “the crack”.
I first had a conversation about the crack (the first one where it was called “the crack”) at the BRIDGES II research summit in Banff last year. At a dinner table, several of us discussed this notion of the crack as the place where the most interesting things happen – a place that is between categories, that is ephemeral, ad-hoc, impossible to generate on purpose, and where cross-pollenization of ideas is most likely to occur.

The crack in this sense interests me because rather than having a negative connotation (“He fell between the cracks”) it has a positive one, and reflects the true nature of how new things happen – increasing pressure and movement between two or more components causes ruptures, breaks, cracks. Pieces of one thing break off and join another, or go off on their own. (Part of California breaks off and becomes an island. Imagine Los Angeles Island! …but I digress.)

We talked about the crack as an infinitely delicate and fertile space. I thought the conversation paralelled nicely with the work of one of the panelists, Maria Legault. One of her pieces involves filling cracks in her environment with pink icing. She also does this for others, in their homes. This kind of offering can be read many different ways: she provides utility (the cracks should be filled), whimsy (they should not be filled with pink icing), and ephemerality (they won’t be filled with icing for long, once the bugs get to it.)

And lastly, it draws attention to the cracks in our lives that perhaps should not be seen as flaws, but places of departure from which to examine what is possible.

yo