Ludogrind Home Research Articles Machinima News Room Documentary Ludocahiers Ludosmack     -Cultural Branding     -Grindless Play Ludotainment Films Hype About Contact Updates 12. 12 Grindless Play 11. 12 Primacy 11.10 Better CS 10.15 Play Cycles 9.1 MMovie 8.31 RMT, Gift Giving... 8.27 Invitation au Voyage 8.27 Research *Beyond Play 8.25 Machinima    *How to Get to Iron Forge Airport 8.24 Machinima *Dude Where's My Mount: 8.21 Ludosmack *Cultural Branding: A Medium and Beyond External Links Ban Blizzard Blizzard CALIT2 Distraction-Economy Freakonomics Julian Dibbell Kotaku Lawrence Lessig Marcus Eikenberry Mark Danger Chen Markee Dragon New World Notes No Sheep Philosonomics Raph Koster Rufus Cubed Productions Second Life Sparter State of Play Synthetic World Institute Terra Nova The Forge The Cesspit Thinking Machinima Tyler C Virtual-Economy Waterthread World of Warcraft WOW Drama WowGlider Wow Radio   LUDOSMACK The path to a global metaverse seems to be predicated on the ability to build a global economy, strongly rooted in physical markets and open borders. Virtual worlds offer the tools to mend cultural gaps and political animosities, while New Hollywood entertainment poses significant risks. Check here for uninhibited smack, critique, and analysis. Welcome to Ludogrind's Jungle.   December 12, 2007 Grindless Play Replicant of a Manifesto We call ourselves players-- as opposed to "gamers," a herd of junkies doing rather well squandering their time. We see no connection between truly exhilarating flow and the cunning and calculation of the profiteers.     We consider the psychological Euro-American MMO-reward drama weighed down with needy apparitions and childhood greed-- an absurdity. To the synthetic frontier with its showy geography and to the mythification of Tolkien lore the players say thanks for the rapid territory transitions and the quests. Good ... but disorderly, not based on precise study of locality and immersion. A cut above the psychological raid drama, but still lacking in foundation. A cliché. A copy of a replicant. We proclaim the old MMOs, based on the experience pellets, rote grinding, repetitive play and the like, to be leprous. -Keep away from them! -Keep your minds off them! -They're mortally dangerous! -Contagious We affirm the future of MMO art by denying its present. "The Grind" must die so that the art of play may live. We call for its death to be hastened. We protest against those grind protecting mechanisms which many call the ladder. The never ending expansion of hegemony, even those ideally suited to flow, produces not amusement, but distractive work, void of meaningful achievement. Drudgery. The ladder should be confined and eliminated from economic reliance and our pursuit of happiness, before art melts into a sea of fantasy.  We are cleansing play of tyrannous authority– of autocrats’ unconscionable contracts; we seek our own checks and balances lifted from nowhere else but the Constitution and the Rights of Avatars. We invite you: –to flee– the sweet embraces of artificial community, the poison of dungeonous toil, the clutches of finger-numbing repetition; to turn your back on PvP, –to flee– out into the open, into the four-dimensions of meat space (three + time), in search of metaversal potential, our own exploration and quest to find humane sociality. The “grind” prevents man from being human; it interferes with his desire for kinship with others and control of the machine. In an art of play we have no reason to devote our particular attention to a million mundane key presses and instanced redundancy for meaningful decision making leads to catharsis. The quest-givers make us ashamed of humanity’s inability to control itself, but what are we to do if New Hollywood entertainment’s unerring ways are more exciting to us than the disorderly freedom of lucid dreams and the collaborative nature of social players? Semi-bounded environments that encourage limit-pushing adventure enable us a joy more intimate and intelligible than that of bars inching across the screen: surprise. For its inability to foster the zen of play, WE temporarily exclude quests as a means towards flow. Our path also leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling farmer to the arrant warden. In revealing the machine’s intellectual soul, in causing the player to love his sport, the hacker his circumvention of limitation, the mountaineer his discovery, the cheat his own game– we also introduce creative joy into all mechanical labor, we also bring collaborative brethren into closer kinship with machines, we also foster new compatriots through cultural refinement of market capital. The new player, free of unwanted constraints and control, will have the rested ability, the practiced mastery and attention to partake in intellectual play, and he will be the gratifying buyer of our games. Openly recognizing the theater of machines, the delight of mechanical acting, the perception of the beauty of participatory processes, WE sing of machinima culture, we compose film epics of revolting peons and farmers, we delight in the movements of orcs and humans and the gestures of community that free the soul. Everyone who cares for his play seeks the essence of his own performance. Play’s unstrung nerves need an autonomous system of immersion. The synthetic universe does not serve the needs of players; Economic conditions and the nature of specialization make it prohibitively expensive for many experimenters and players to create alternate realms independently. Only cheaper amateur modification tools will serve the working class.  We deplore the way New Hollywood gaming misses its opportunity to combine entertainment with education. Mystic boundary-pushing, interaction, and communication; these are the three components of play worth time, money and knowledge.         The verbal extract of interaction through an exciting oral story-telling tradition is what’s required of play to overcome visual limitations and text-based adventure. Grindless play is the art of revealing the value of cultural entertainment in an era of relentless capitalism on the vast hyperstage where all the men and woman are truly players in harmony with the properties of human imitation and natural love. Community can be neither created nor destroyed, constantly in the process of becoming, undergoing transformations as players come to shape their very existence, carrying real world aspirations and practices with them. It is they which draw the flow to kinetic resolution, revealing an underlying conservation of synthetic energy.   The organization of game-making is the facilitation of play, a diverse offering in the rules of constraint within and beyond the specificity of earthland realms.  In each plurality, there is a base-line, customization, and a threshold (expressed in varying degrees) of interaction, protecting against the tyranny of the majority. A community is made of choices, just as choices are made from customization. A player who has conceived an alternate reality or machinima epic should have readily accessible outlets so as to give it life on screen and in the matrix, should favorable technical conditions be present of course. The most omniscient guardians cannot, of course, replace this flexibility, just as bright-line rules do not replace the balancing-tests of interpretation and thus should be assiduously avoided as ill-suited to govern even playful simulations and notions of fun.                 To represent criticism in the name of artistic sensitivity, we need creative imagination. We are in search of a magic circle that never ends. We network, we create, we share... cultural output– games and play,      moments beyond utility, seizure of an instant,     in reclaiming the spectacle, decommodification and narrative exchange,     to the ecstasy, the impossible, vertigo, and the future;     memories bend, yearn, insist, return,     multiply, annihilate and escape through time. Play is, as well, the art of inventing games in wandering space in response to the demands of the soul; it embodies the players’ dreams–be he scholar, artist, designer, or critique; it is the realization by the heart of that which cannot be realized in life. Simulations in hyperspace. Freedom through gift-giving. Paradoxical rationality. A channel for excess production in the ether.     We greet the cultured fantasy of playful reciprocity. Our gifts, sacrificial circulation, take off into the storied realms on the powerful wings of escaping necessity.             We believe that the struggle carries on, poisoned by exploitation, but the time is at hand when we shall be able to hurl drudgerous entertainment into the space of history, reigned in by our pixilated lassoes. Hurrah for simulation, rejecting all that is authority (code, rule, and organization). Hurrah for the defenders of play, propelled and driving remembrance, exhibition, hospitality, and the rebirth of aura; all that is mundane melts into digital play; the blinding grimaces of toxic migration and deafening cries of Sisyphean toil.   Brain Food                          2007 Ludogrind All opinions expressed herein are solely those of Lavant All company and/or product names and logos are trademarks of their respective companies