As the worst of the COVID pandemic lifts, we are in the condition to finally move forward with the writer’s residency we have planned with the Fondazione di Comunità Messina.
Dates
The residency will be integrated into the Horcynus Festival. Possible dates range from late August to mid-September 2022. @yudhanjaya and @hugi, are all of these dates OK for you?
Participants
@yudhanjaya is to be writer-in-residence. His participation is funded by FDCM. Edgeryders will fund participation of three more people. I plan to be there myself.
What we will do
After a call with Yudha (for which I am personally grateful, given the difficulties of scheming around long-term issue in the midst of the current Sri Lankan mess), I propose we use the residency to do three things.
1. Start a novel
We will use the bulk of our time to kickstart the writing of a sci-fi novel set in Witness. Co-authors will be Yudha himself, and at least one economist (myself), though we will try to involve more co-authors on the economics side (for example, I think we would benefit greatly from @petussing’s advice). The actual output will consist of:
- Some preparatory materials (plot, list of characters, various notes, mostly care of Yudha)
- Draft prose (first chapter, or something similar, mostly care of Yudha)
- New Witnesspedia entries, or add-ons to the existing ones (mostly care of myself). These will become necessary as the writing of the novel requires new information to be incorporated in the canon: maps, toponyms, notable people and organizations, economic policies and their history, etc.
The benefits of the novel are the following. First, as we write, we need Witness to become more vivid and textured, but still maintain intellectual consistency and incentive compatibility (I think it was @lidiazuin who pointed this out the clearest, over a year ago). So, we need to invent details (and many of them will be shaped by the underlying economic systems) that are fictional, but still make economic sense. Second, the novel is, well, a science fiction novel. It contains plenty of economics, but economics stays in the background. In the foreground, as always, stand imperfect, likable characters and an engaging plot. This is what triggers identification and imagination: “wow, it would be cool to live and work in The Covenant, or be part of the culture of The Assembly!”. Additionally, Witness is an open source world, and the more it is used, the more valuable it becomes, therefore encouraging more people to write (or film, or LARP) their own material set in Witness.
The choice of a specific format for our science fiction follows from two observations. First, short stories are a bad fit for what we are trying to do. This is because they are… short, which means authors have to focus a lot on plot and need their worlds to be as simple and two-dimensional as possible (“like the real world, but with teleportation”, or some such). Second, novellas would have the space for some serious world building, but they are considered “lesser novels”, and most publishers won’t touch them.
In Yudha’s estimation, a novel of his written in collaboration with economists and with an economic slant is likely to be an attractive proposition to publishers (then, of course, the novel still has to be good!). The involvement of professional economists is going to be the equivalent of Steve Job’s “one more thing”: not enough to bring about a publishing deal by itself, but a “nice to have”, especially during promotion.
2. Strategize
Another thing we need to do is to think where we want to take Witness in 2023, and how to do it. 2021 and 2022 have generated some new ideas and prototypes. First, it seems to have some power as a format for getting small groups of people to think about the future without being constrained by the overdetermination of late-stage capitalism (next month, I am presenting it at the Futures Conference in Finland). Second, Witness is also being used as the setting for a serious game (for now an online LARP) used to get people to do “radical” scenario planning about climate change adaptation. This is based on work led by @nadia in 2021. In 2022, a proposal led by @matteo_uguzzoni was awarded a grant as a kind of participatory science project, to begin in September. So, many news, we should pause, re-evaluate, and make new plans. For example: some time ago, when it looked like COVID would not let Yudha come to Europe, Gaetano Giunta and Giacomo suggested we use the residency to think about a Witness-inspired installation on economics (and climate!) in the immersive room of the MACHO Museum. of the MACHO museum. A possible outcome of the residency is an application for a proper project of interactive art, that we could then try to get funded (Ars Electronica)?
This involves all of us, both on the Edgeryders side (@hugi and others) and on the FDCM side (@giacomo.pinaffo and others).
3. Communicate
The residency happens in the context of a festival, and it makes sense to use the opportunity to better interface with the reality on the ground in Messina. How to do this, I am still not sure. We could keep it simple, and schedule a talk where we present the Witness vision; or go complicated-and-interactive and ask Matteo to schedule a play test session of the Witness LARP (Matteo, will you be in Italy in that period?). Not knowing the audience of the festival, I am not too sure here, but we could hash it out easily with Giacomo and Gaetano.
Thoughts?
