Episode #2 (M4A) of the Anthropik Podcast is up (RSS, iTunes), in which we interview Michael Green, the artist who made “Afterculture,” about his art, The Fifth World, and a hopeful vision for humanity’s future. I mention this not only to plug the podcast and hype up The Fifth World a little more, but also to mention some things I’ve found, that I wish I’d found while I was still writing “The Fifth World Manifesto.” It could’ve been even longer!

The first I found was at the Forge: “Ritual Discourse in Role-Playing Games,” by Christopher I. Lehrich. Here’s a taste:

Virtual Experience correlates well with Ronald Grimes’s and Victor Turner’s focus on “performance,” which ultimately amounts to a notion of total involvement in ritual activity. In ritual, according to this perspective, humans engage the totality of hearts, minds, and bodies, setting them to work creatively and dynamically to produce effects within the social and mental worlds of the participants. Thus in zazen (Sitting Zen), one does nothing but sit, generally in an approved posture; one’s mind and heart should be similarly focused on nothing but sitting, not in the sense that one should think continuously, “I’m sitting,” but rather that one’s mind should be in a state parallel to the body’s state, thinking nothing, resting, yet remaining alert and awake, receptive to outside contact. In the Catholic Eucharist (Mass), to take a quite different sort of example, liturgical tradition emphasizes that the communicant should be fully involved in the process, such that when the miraculous transformation of the substance of wafer and wine (Transubstantiation) occurs, and when in fact the communicant receives these into the mouth, it is not only one’s body that receives the body and blood of Christ, but the totality of body, mind, and soul. Thus this understanding of ritual emphasizes what in RPG terms is called “immersion,” a total involvement in the activity. Failure on this score would be seen as ineffective (zazen), impious (Eucharist), or shallow (RPG).

I also discovered a great blog on game design, “Only a Game,” with this blog post on Roger Caillois’ 1958 book Les Jeux et Les Hommes (usually translated as Man, Play and Games). Caillois was a noted French sociologist, who took a sociological look at games. He suggested that all games existed on a continuum from the most free-form extreme of Paidia, to the most rule-bound extreme of Ludus. Callois further subdivided games into one of four types: Agon, or competitive games; Alea, or games of chance; Mimicry, or simulation games; and Ilinx, or games of vertigo. “Only a Game” offers an article apiece on each of these:

• The Anarchy of Paidia
• The Complexity of Ludus

1. The Challenge of Agon
2. The Rituals of Alea
3. The Imagination of Mimicry
4. The Joy of Ilinx

I also tracked down the origin of an idea I’d heard long ago, but did not know the source of: Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun, which suggests that “fun” is the sensation of noticing new patterns. Very interesting, and very relevant to a hunter-gatherer’s evolution, no?

Finally, I think I may need to buy a copy of Rules of Play.