Welcome to the modern era, prank video. This took something to the next level, and won a prize on the Colbert Show.

yeah. just like that.

Now some think that we are made good by nature, others by habituation, others by teaching. Nature’s part evidently does not depend on us, but as a result of some divine causes is present in those who are truly fortunate; while argument and teaching, we may suspect, are not powerful with all men, but the soul of the student must first have been cultivated by means of habits for noble joy and noble hatred, like earth which is to nourish the seed. For he who lives as passion directs will not hear argument that dissuades him, nor understand it if he does; and how can we persuade one in such a state to change his ways? And in general passion seems to yield not to argument but to force. The character, then, must somehow be there already with a kinship to virtue, loving what is noble and hating what is base.

But it is difficult to get from youth up a right training for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws; for to live temperately and hardily is not pleasant to most people, especially when they are young. For this reason their nurture and occupations should be fixed by law; for they will not be painful when they have become customary. But it is surely not enough that when they are young they should get the right nurture and attention; since they must, even when they are grown up, practise and be habituated to them, we shall need laws for this as well, and generally speaking to cover the whole of life; for most people obey necessity rather than argument, and punishments rather than the sense of what is noble.

This is why some think that legislators ought to stimulate men to virtue and urge them forward by the motive of the noble, on the assumption that those who have been well advanced by the formation of habits will attend to such influences; and that punishments and penalties should be imposed on those who disobey and are of inferior nature, while the incurably bad should be completely banished. A good man (they think), since he lives with his mind fixed on what is noble, will submit to argument, while a bad man, whose desire is for pleasure, is corrected by pain like a beast of burden. This is, too, why they say the pains inflicted should be those that are most opposed to the pleasures such men love.

I’m going to leave you to infer what I mean by this if it isn’t just people who talk about Aristotle on their blog are mental.

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. In this article I want to draw upon a different stream of thought from the mid twentieth century, also informed by Huizinga but not exclusively, that of the Paris Situationist artists and architects [...] A number of important engagements with play and games by the Situationists are newly relevant today. Rather than offer a historical assessment of Situationism’s theories, I will take cues from their writings to reconsider the potential of games in art. I find useful their critique of play within but nevertheless resistant to capitalism (and by extension imperialism and militarism), their architectural proposals for “player” navigation and transformation of urban “psychogeographic” zones (what we might call “ludic architecture”), their analysis of leisure and non-leisure activities, and their repurposing of Dadaist negativity.

It’s by Anne-Marie, and it’s called Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming. It moves away from a psychogeographical and Homo Ludens inspired idea of role of play. I don’t see how far it moves away from psychogeography, but it is clear how it moves away from Homo Ludens — it proposes that every place is a play space, and that play can have external messages; thus, breaking ‘the magic circle.’ The magic circle is the space where play is legitimized.

In transgressing the “magic circle,” a Situationist gaming tactic attempts to give transformative potential not just to play but to “normal” life.

It’s very interesting, and I think these sort of ideas will be more useful in the future. One of the things that is missing from people’s lives these days is ritual and wonder. Too many people are bowling alone, not enough are caught up in the tide of community.

By bringing the space that people play games into the every day reality of other people, we can increase people’s sense of ritual and wonder at the world, and increase our audience. By breaking down the circle of play and making it happen everywhere, we can create large scale zones of entertainment where life, play, and ‘reality’ intertwine. I don’t think that BM, for example, is the only zone for that sort of thing, but it’s been interesting to witness it’s evolution.

We are bored with the suburbs, the stale imperialist sexist engineering biased corporate game industry, and with new academic ludology that reifies existing superstructures. We are ready to play reality TV off camera. [...] If big players are intervening in gamespace, then it
is time for Situationist gaming.

I think this is a good thing. I really advise reading this article. Expect the future to contain more play in public spheres. I think as the cost of random things continues to go up and as Hollywood entertainment continues to suck and get progressively more innocuous and violent, the future may be people carrying out entertainment by other means.

Someone has clearly not been paying attention to history, even military history. That’s a direct translation of Germany’s Über Alles, which I’m not going to even provide a google link to because it leads to all sorts of racist retardness that might get people who read this at work in trouble. (Instead, please accept this link to The Dead Kennedy’s California Über Alles.)

The Nazis weren’t the original context of the quote, it’s from a poem in 1841 Germany, but you still have to wonder WTF the air force public affairs officers who came up with that were thinking.