Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Tilting at reality

    Tilting at reality

    I’ve read a lot of popular science books over the years, but never until now have I felt a real urge to go and learn the maths I’d need to properly understand the work. I feel as though, if I had read this book twenty, or even ten years ago, I might have done just… Read more

  • Narrative serving violence

    Narrative serving violence

    The experience of being the protagonist of a story, rather than simply the player of a game, became a characteristic form of engagement with videogames with the arrival of the first-person shooter, I guess. I recall reading a prediction by Gary Gygax, the co-author of Dungeons & Dragons, sometime around the mid-eighties, that role-playing games… Read more

  • Oblique unfolding

    Oblique unfolding

    The world of stable objects and simple, obvious relations between them is not the real world. It’s one we like because it’s easy to think about, but it’s a fantasy, lacking in both beauty and truth. Truth emerges in art when it makes its way obliquely between the big colourful blocks with which the cognitive… Read more

  • Insightfully commonplace

    Insightfully commonplace

    I was initially underwhelmed by Michelle Theodore’s Cavity. Where were the insights? Where was the peek into an unfamiliar experience? Where was the pleasure and escapism? Then I re-read it, and realised that I had resisted its affect and dismissed its perspicacity because the subjective experience it represented was so familiar to me – precisely… Read more

  • The cost of survival

    The cost of survival

    Late the year before last, when I bought my first console, and played Red Dead Redemption 2 quite soon after its release, I was completely bowled over. ‘This game changes everything!’ I ranted enthusiastically to you, my journal. Of course if I hadn’t been in the Mac gaming ghetto all my life I’d have been… Read more

  • A trajectory

    A trajectory

    General relativity tells us something enticing about time. It doesn’t tell us what many would like it to tell us, that time is simply another dimension which our limited perspective turns into the one-way-street of our experience; it tells us instead that time has a particular relation to entropy, that it is tied to the… Read more