Psychosis for Dummies by Michael Walker
What if the impetus to all our creation started with building our own psychosis?
Michael Walker, who also goes by Smile Bigforgod, is an American artist. He also owns Smilesoft.dev, a research and development company specializing in software creation. He’s the kind of person few people will encounter in their lifetime, and when they do they want to hold them close, feed them fresh fish and put them in some light shoes when they show up to your Italian summer wedding wearing cowboy boots. Rarely will you encounter conversations as sacred and distinguished as you would with him.
In 2018 Walker wanted to start writing for a new world. He set out to make what he called ‘a game of the (needed) future’. The intention was such: inside this video game, the player’s input would matter significantly to the story, and the NPCs (non-player characters) weren’t programmed, but alive. He wanted to create something that spoke to the magical roots many of us have lost connection to, a story built on the universal laws that still hum beneath everything in our world. The reading list that would help him achieve this was long, but he collected all the books and soon started writing. The writing stopped before he finished the books. He had fully lost his mind.
We present you with this week’s list: Psychosis for Dummies.
by Michael Walker
Psychosis for Dummies: R&D for game that accidentally unveiled the game
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1995)
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg (1999)
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark (2017)
Stalking the Wild Pendulum: Mechanics of Consciousness by Itzhak Bentov (1977)
A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness by Itzhak Bentov (1988)
What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (2010)
The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly (2016)
The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long (2018)
The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (2010)
Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman (2015)
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick (written 1974 – 1982 and published 2011)
The Ringmakers of Saturn by Norman Bergrun (1986)
Extra: How to Make a Sigil
Play Azyros World: real-life NPCs, storyline updates based on player involvement.
Play Your World of Text: one scene using a platform where the audience can create stories directly on the website — a kind of group drawer/whiteboard system.
