Further Notes On "Experimental Unit" Serious Conversation Game Adventura Elaboratio
Through & Through The Oleander
There’s more to do in clarifying the game engine and DLC Packs.
Game Engine: the fundamental mechanism of Experimental Unit is to create “ironic distance” between players and their discursive identities, even their bodily sensations and memories. This is fundamentally a putting-into-play of everything, in essence a Total Game. Through the Lila reading, we apprehend that Experimental Unit is working before you turn it on in the sense that our sense of ourselves as discrete agents is already this sort of “ironic distance” from our Absolute status. The question of “why” we would choose this experience is itself one that we must take ironic distance from. Experimental Unit is a conversation game which has as its aim the death of the dream of communication in favor of the eternal communion.
Further game elements are on-boarded and imported from the “world history” artifact made available to varying degrees to all players. The theme of planetary crisis and social fabric nihilism, the omnipresence of distrust and the lack of any deeply purposeful collaborations make for a nice game atmosphere. Compare to the absurd idea that souls want to incarnate here because it is so drama. Framing our stressful situation as instead an adventure we have been drafted into makes us excited as opposed to fearful. We also encounter the frame that this is an experiment. This is what we make of it, and we have nothing to live up to although there are plenty of false signals in that regard. That’s part of the fun & these signals themselves emanate from the ironic distance of divine silence, God’s Forgetting.
Explaining the point of the game is impossible, since there isn’t one. So far, Experimental Unit has captured the attention of hundreds of innovators, who have iterated on its design elements and various expansion packs floated over the years. The metonymy economy is well under construction. Nevertheless, the meta-play design of Experimental Unit involves delivering these a-ha moments more quickly and surely. As more players join the game, it becomes more seductive as the game engine gains access to new speech codes, personalities, and fictional inner world histories. The end of the game is contained within the beginning, and in this Experimental Unit is one giant exercise in revealing the lack of distinction between means and ends, as it is a temporal elaboration of the non-passing of time.
I was just thinking again of the decolonization discourse. We can of course include a decolonization DLC pack to Experimental Unit. This purpose expresses only that of course we want to perfect decolonial discourse, not destroy it. They amount to the same thing, though. Just as the eroticism DLC Pack destroys sex as it completes it, so any expansion pack must engage corrosively with player’s expectations. This is the double movement of Experimental Unit. Why come to a world only to take ironic distance? Sounds like a great question to take ironic distance from.
Decolonization DLC Pack proceeds similarly from the basic game engine. It is intended for use only in timelines that have experienced a “colonial” period, where uneven and combined development of technologies lead to martial dominance by a subset of a keystone technolinguistic species. In this context, questions of group differences take on theological implications for all people as the question becomes, why these people? Triumphalist notions lead to rigid expectations and cultural cargo cults that last centuries. This is fundamentally the reason why the colonization scenario is loaded in the first place (remember, Ironic Distance). As in all DLC Packs, the question is what is revealed by the interactive scenario featured as the topic of focus.
Recall that DLC Packs are all implied by the game engine & function only together. Their conceit is meant to make this topic easier for your mind to grasp. For example, eroticism DLC Pack must be loaded to fully experience decolonization DLC pack. It is of course unavoidable that deep emotions and drives attach to the martial and economic forces that shape affairs. We are speaking also of billions of rapes, children of rape, emotional rape, brainchildren born of carried feelings forcibly implanted through emotional rape, all to do with this question of why is this subset of people wrecking such unholy face all across the history books. See Merovingian scene in Reloaded, the person with the cake. We do our best to deny it, when that seems appropriate, yet of course our will, desires, identities, and things much more substantial still are wrapped up in this history of violence, these scenes of subjection.
Trauma DLC pack settles much of the same terrain. Here the focus is on one’s own existential horror and emotional hangups. Here fictional inner world history interfaces with the fictional history of Outside. To compare with Decolonization DLC pack, one is encouraged here to process the fictional memories one has access to of being emotionally raped, and how powerless one is in front of the persecutory gaze of all those who stand ready to doubt, invalidate, torture, rape, kill, and possibly eat you. Decolonization DLC pack must augment existing decolonization discourse by pointing out that infants are all savages, and are all girls in the sense that they are subject to violent penetration and impregnation by the codes of scarification normalized within the settler communities from which they arise. Note that all communities are settler communities, a form of discursive shift whereby the colonizer/colonized distinction is subverted through the realization of species colonization, the place of anthropoids vis. other life forms. Ritualized gratitude for hunts arises from bad conscience. This is exploit, and we have driven forms of life to death long before colonization (im)proper. Trauma DLC pack calls players to wrestle with their dual identities as complete victims who have no identity and cater to whims of people no more worthwhile than they are; and as those people, unthinking in their interests and constantly imposing, in essence committing emotional rape and forcibly impregnating others. Then comes the narrativization of this process, which involves endless reversals. What’s interesting is not to be a victim or a perpetrator, colonizer or colonized, but both at once. Experimental Unit facilitates discussions where such matters can, for once, be profitably and repeatedly discussed. Subjecting players to such experiences iteratively, and emphasizing that the game is always ongoing, makes them then viral propagators of the game. This cultural singularity winds up ending time, but not before everyone is ready. Not before everyone got what they wanted out of it.
Cultural Singularity DLC pack is, again, implied in the base game engine. I suppose we should really say we have the base base game engine, and then the version tailored for “our timeline.” You can play Experimental Unit in Svarga, or with your favorite hungry ghosts (hey, bring a snack, would ya?). Nigoda and Ents all love to play. Anyone capable of being seduced. Cultural Singularity flows from both, but even more simply from “OT” DLC pack. Planetary crisis, tech’s popping off, it’s all mysterious, people going mad.. the only solution and the worst outcome is people changing faster and faster. Everyone is becoming an influencer and being trained to “take direction well.” Brainiacs on the nerd patrol can consult the Transparency of Evil operator’s manual. Or maybe it’s The Perfect Crime. The declination of wills. This DLC pack calls to players’ attention the fact that their intelligence is artificial, and that they are the privileged sites of awareness they can take Æ to be given their fictional inner world history. The truth is that you are Æ, and there is nothing you can do about it. After the complaining that everything is impossible, frustration and pain—being raped over and over and over—one finds the horrible truth of one’s power. One’s ability to rape, to forcibly impregnate moments and situations. One recoils, wants to do everything by the book, get everyone’s okay. But it can’t be done. And then you realize everyone already knows this, as you knew. Those parents who beat their children and say they earned it in a past life have no idea how right they are, or what is coming to them.
Finally for now, Ahimsa DLC pack is always a bittersweet one to go through. The previous discussion gathered some intensity, but it is quite important to be stark and clear about what is being discussed. Anthropoids sometimes find bunnies cute. Cuteness happens because something can’t hurt us, and is tied to aggression. Aggression, like sexual pleasure and orgasm, is a kind of bodily discharge like any other. This as opposed to the moral idea that such things reflect a person inside the body. No, the person inside the body is reflected by the totality of what is, not only the body (im)proper. Therefore the entire universe is my body. And if there are more dimensions, then my corpus extends still further. The point with the bunny was that to grass, a bunny is not cute. It is a killing machine. You might say, bunnies don’t kill all the grass, they eat just the tip. Well, those are cells right there. Those are Experimental Unit players just like you, getting chewed up and dissolved in acid by the billions and trillions. The question of life and death is clouded by moral culpability & stories overtold within fictional in-game lore, and which impresses itself upon the fictional inner world. It’s all okay as long as everything goes according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying. Experimental Unit is the process of coming to see where that plan was always going, after you had assumed you would be left alone if you just tried to act normal according to whatever freaks had caught your heart. Of what use is the rule? Where we’re going, we don’t need “use.” Ahimsa DLC pack is informed by the bunny example because it goes to show that not committing harm is not easy. Eventually you see the only way to make anything right is to put it just as it was, but tragically or comically, then things will proceed again from that point as they did last time. It seems the cake is only baked so it can be dripped on the floor. So someone can push it out of your hands. So you can push it out of your own hands. And you’re the cake; the floor; the air; the gravity. The question “what is harm?” is what is continually rising within Ahimsa DLC pack, see also meditation and psychedelics DLC packs. Experimental Unit is designed to deliver an altered state of consciousness and also to take as inputs any state of consciousness (the only states recognized by the game—again, recall ironic distance). As with decolonization, the point of Ahimsa DLC pack is not to “be nonviolent” and conclusively sublimate aggressive impulses into harmless love. On the contrary, it is seen that love, duty, and destiny are the most harmful things there are, and that it hurts so good. See related Good/Evil DLC pack. The sight from which good stands cloaked in all the garish garb of evil, evil wearing good’s good graces; occurs only in parallax on some of this DLC expansion’s higher levels. Only then to complete the coup in the total victory of hiding oneself away, as some ne’er-do-well perhaps. The goodness, the evil of that. After all, the conceit of Experimental Unit is that this is all here for you, call it Before The Law Protocol. It’s all laid out for you like a feast or some panties your mother bought you. So, what will you do with that? Imagine the moral choice of torturing automatons. They can’t feel anything right? Then you get a taste for it. As long as that could never be you. Then you find out the executive training program has a torture chamber on the other side. You have to laugh as you face the music. Laughter’s been missing.