John you'll need to keep us on track..I will take a stab at this in your 3:16 thread.

Challenge:
Please write a short introduction in the Welcome and Introduction thread,
and tell us, preferrably in this thread,

Your intended give,

and

Your preferred take.

in cocreative interactive spirit,
John

this is a fascinating article.

random thoughts/notes -

1st thought -- funny how this experience is being mirrored in the 9/11 truth movement right down to a T.

<This kind of immersion made the game world less of a
"virtual" (simulated) reality or an "augmented"
(enhanced) reality, and more of an "alternate" (layered)
reality. For four months, players had to adapt to
interfacing with the 2001 real world and the 2142 game
world at the same time. Success in the Beast therefore
required developing a kind of stereoscopic vision, one
that simultaneously perceived the everyday reality and the
game structure in order to generate a single, but layered
and dynamic world view. (In his 2000 book The
Information Bomb, Paul Virilio outlines a similar kind of
perspective, or "'field effect," in which the actual and the
virtual combine to produce a new kind of "relief," or
dimensionality [43] )>

could this be an objective of the game -- how to unfold the sixfold dimensionality of time thru gameplay?
(admittedly i have got quite the jones for virilio, who for all his antitechnological ravings,
pinpoints with uncanny accuracy what technology is doing to alter/evolve our perception)

<This erasure of any and all “metacommunication,” to use
Gregory Bateson’s term for the frame markers that alert
players to a game’s gameness, is an unusual development
for the practice of play [2]. Historically, play has been
defined in large part by its ability to signal a
representational “space apart,” even if its boundaries were
sometimes blurred or its consequences occasionally
leaked into real life. Jay David Bolter and Richard
Crusin, however, discuss in their 1999 book Remediation
the long history in art and media practice of immersion
through an “interfaceless interface” that seeks to “erase
itself so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a
medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship
to the contents of that medium” [4].>

bateson is also a possible patron saint.
see e.g. his view of cybernetics:
www.global-vision.org/bateson.html

<The audience refused to defer to the producers,
and the players felt authorized and entitled to step in when
they believed that higher authorities had failed them.
Could this kind of empowerment lead to a greater sense of
collective agency in other producer-consumer settings, or
in the political realm?>

how to take this one step further - erase the boundaries btw player & producer altogether?
and does this erasure satisfactorily substitute for total immersion?

<Far from merging individual intelligence into some indistinguishable
magma, collective intelligence is a process of growth,
differentiation, and the mutual revival of singularities."
For Levy, communities like the Cloudmakers not only
avoid degenerating into mobs, but also are fully able to
thwart a totalitarian or otherwise oppressive hijacking>

yes but how to avoid this?
www.websnark.com/archives/...the_c.html
or are these cybercollectives short-lived by nature?
like hakim bey's TAZ's or calvino's invisible cities.
disappearing when their purpose is served and reappearing in another evolution once again...
who remembers napster? yet napster lives not in its brand, but in the environment that it created.

"The game is now over… the game has just begun"
indeed it has...