Strangely Loopy

  Monkey Plays Monkey Go Happy

Speaking of self-referential games , I would be remiss not to shout out the award-winning Baba Is You , a block-pushing video game where some of the blocks literally form the rules. (The goal is behind a wall? Disassemble the "Wall Is Stop" rule to let yourself walk right through it. Or assemble a different "_____ Is Win" rule to change what the goal is, or a different "_____ Is You" rule to change which object you can move around.) Also it has cool music . Unfortunately the difficulty ramped up so fast that I only got maybe a third of the way through it, but it was still well worth the money just for that much entertainment.  

I was recently reminded of a period in Agora Nomic where the in-game meaning of "person", among other things, was only implicitly defined by vague reference to "legal definitions" and such. Agora does have rules for adjudicating rules disputes, so naturally they were used: "Zefram is a pineapple." (Dismissed as irrelevant; nothing in the rules depended on the answer.) Ah, but you can make some things relevant by creating a situation that depends on them. If Zefram and Goethe agreed to a partnership, including terms for wielding power of attorney, would it count as a corporate person? "The Pineapple Partnership is a person." (Allegedly called by the Pineapple Partnership. Allegedly judged true by Goethe, who totally didn't have a conflict of interest.) Well, not everyone bought that, so to make sure the question was formally raised at least once: "The Pineapple Partnership is a person." (Called by me. Judged true by checks notes ...

Mandelbrot memes Murder, You Wrote (26 Oct, Tasmania, interactive mystery)

AVJam (29 Sep, Berlin, reactive audio et al) Rone - L(OO)PING (four bonus tracks) Tripping up people speaking by echoing their words back at them with a 0.1 second delay

  Music That Listens to Itself "The underlying idea is to produce music that, so to speak, listens to itself. This would be music that employs techniques to revisit itself — repurposes itself — as it proceeds. From reverb to echo to tape loops to granular synthesis to accessing a buffer, various techniques serve such a compositional and performance purpose. Consider a means to achieve this result."