Sixian

God games invite us to peer at human society like it is an ant farm. In playing god games, we replay the systems that have failed us, in shrunken-down, simplified form. The repetition of these systems at miniature scale sustains the notion that they are natural, the infinite complexity and incalculable possibility that characterizes human society... See more

...a lot of people make businesses to compete with tools where people are already making money. I know in marketplaces, we often see people design marketplaces to try to intermediate or digitize transactions that are already happening.  But the big mental breakthrough is to say, “Can we create something that creates new transactions that aren’t... See more

So let's use video because I just think it's a great example. If you think about music and how you consume music, you actually consume catalog product a lot. I certainly do. And I think most consumers do. Songs that I've listened to once, I will listen to again and again, and again, at some point. With video, that's less the case. Once I watch... See more

The opportunity space must be somewhat legible, and seen to be correlated enough to inspire cooperation, but if you can see it too clearly, and especially see its limits too clearly, cooperation will break down. At the edges of visibility the opportunity space must dissolve into myth.

In an interview with Roxana Fabius, Patricia M. Hernandez, and me for The Scalability Project (2020), adrienne maree brown described relationships like a spiderweb—diaphanous yet strong, thick yet porous. “A web allows things to fall through, like a sieve,” she said. “Some things are not meant to be caught.” I like to think of these webs as... See more

It’s our prediction that large corporations will adopt the gig-economy and freelancer network-style operational approach adopted by SMBs over the last 8 years. EGMs are how large corporations will implement this shift.

Desire always needs something to latch onto; it can’t stay free-floating. In this sense, it operates like a bivalve that has to be attached to a substrate (a rock, or some other surface). As soon as it becomes detached from one thing, it immediately attaches itself to something else: another model.

“the viewer gets lost in [miniature] objects, and that in the process of projecting mental scenarios onto them they lose sense of themselves physically.” This disorienting disembodiment might account for god games’ lost-time effect, their inducement of compulsiveness. By entering that “private time,” a player is “disarticulated from embodiment and... See more