Magazine themes for a potential project about Game~B, existential risk, virtue, and religion
My friend essentially invented Game B before it was a thing, and went out in public to get support. However, the idea was very vague and he didn’t have a call to action. He’s going to go out again, but this time he wants a call to action. He was thinking of simply signing people up for something like a weekly Zoom call.
I suggested that it’s still quite vague and open-ended, and that maybe he should have a magazine that he would give out in the style of Palladium Magazine. He can compile articles into his magazine, ask for subscriptions, and host events. People understand the magazine format. If he’s out in public looking for like-minded people, it still feels too vague. It’s quite another thing to give people something in some format that they can understand.
The trouble with a magazine like this is it’s still hard to pin down what it should be called or what it would be about. It almost feels like it’s about everything. So, different issues could focus on different topics on the themes of personal virtue on one hand, and existential risks like climate change on the other.
My first instinct was to create something like this:
He wants to set up a booth at something like a farmer’s market and maybe even have people do spin art. He’s inspired by this episode where Robin Dunbar discusses how worship makes people feel like they’re part of a group in the same way that hugs do. He wants people to get that feeling from making spin art which is pretty hard to get wrong.
I was thinking of using the spin art in the magazine, and maybe on the cover. He’s also trying to bridge the large and the small, and there’s similarity to what I was working on with something I called “Christian Mechanism”, and offered to use some of the themes and imagery I came up with for that, except remove the religious stuff.
I played around with names. It’s possible he’ll want none of these names, or maybe I’ll use them? I dunno. We’re both interested in the same topics, but he’s coming from a secular perspective, and I’m coming from a “secular” perspective but I say it’s religious.
The names that stuck for me are: Existems / Exystems by combining existential systems into one word.
Another name I was thinking of was: Axiomat. Both religion and Game-B aim to be operating systems for society. In short, they serve as axioms that are taken to be true and everything else is built up from there. The inalienable rights of life, liberty, and happiness themselves serve as axioms on top of which we’ve built the American project.
Related Posts: