I experienced this playing freeorion while listening to Carbon Based Lifeforms as a kid. A few ambient tracks from CBL made me tear up: they used field recordi

I experienced this playing freeorion while listening to Carbon Based Lifeforms as a kid. A few ambient tracks from CBL made me tear up: they used field recordings of the world (birds, children, trees, cities), woven through low frequency drones and rifts. It would sort of create a distance between the recording samples, and then, through sound, you zoom out, glide, become ephemeral in the face of the planet, like a cloud. Freeorion primed my mind to think in some detail about a reduced form of state-level strategy (as 4x games tend to do). I realized that the first 10 rounds were highly predictive of success for the next 100 rounds, and so forth, so I understood that my actions could have the same non-linearity and influence (and the predictive power of that influence was based on my model of the world, which is easy in a 4x game but difficult in meatspace). Combined, I saw in detail the cybernetic flows around the world… i was a world systems thinker. it’s taken some work not to pop my head out of frustration. Now that part of me is applied to more localized systems and small things: seeds around me that grow via the world into things i may never witness directly, and putting out small fires around me that I hope to never witness as big fires. Memes, basically (or anti-memetic memes? Not so sure).