 I'm Caleb Jones, and this session is the nerdy title of it, is the gem screen here, ontological normative, strategic roles of the environment and virtual world. What I'm going to be exploring is here is what role do we as the environment play in virtual environments in particular video games. Touching on that a bit and then offering some tools of how we might think about this. Then finally, maybe touch on what would the Mormon transhumanist view of this look like. All right. I'm not going to speak a lot to this, but just I think we're all aware of this, that virtual world, particularly as they're found in video games, is a major form of entertainment. It's a very largely growing form of entertainment. Entertainment has the power to influence culture, create culture, change culture. I think this is something we want to think about in terms of environmental rejuvenation, what we see the role in our relationship to environment being. At a high level, you can look at the environment in virtual world in video games as really a passive world or an active world. I contrast a few traits they might have, where a passive world really forms a boundary or is merely acting as a resource to the player or the person inside the world. Tends to be transactional in its interactions, and often there's only a singular direct consequence. There's no secondary or indirect consequences that are modeled and play out in the world. Often the interactions could be pre-programmed, so things are scripted, closed, and deterministic. Or an active world would be the environment itself and actor within the world. The degree of agency has to be to vary, but it has the ability to act independent of the player's intent. Interactions often create a feedback loop in their interactive worlds where the player does something affects the environment, the environment does something that affects the player, and you have that feedback loop there. There's secondary and tertiary consequences. Sometimes that aren't always, that aren't deterministic, or more complex or less predictable. Then the interactions are the dynamic. You can think of some games where the world is generative where it's different each time. Minecraft is a good example of that. No Man's Sky is another one, and stochastic in nature, so there's randomness that's involved in it. This is at a high level how we might identify and understand whether we're operating in a passive world or an active world in a virtual environment. I'm not going to read all of this, but there's a book called Playing Nature, Ecology and Video Games, written by Alenda Chang. She's a professor of media studies at UC Santa Barbara, focuses on ecology, and she contrasts some of the hypercapitalist tendencies in a lot of video games where the main goal is to level up and accumulate, and how that can lead to certain behaviors that don't really encourage attitudes and subsequent behaviors that will help us address environmental crises. But she doesn't feel like games in virtual worlds have to be that. She notes that games have their own natural system. She calls them mental cosmos, and that these games could teach players the gist of ecological concepts, things like scale, entropy, collapse, and things like that. I'll give an example of that of a game that I grew up playing that did exactly just that for me. But I want to touch on this. There's some work that's great work that's been doing to explore this concept. So what I want to do as a tool is talk about frame analysis. There's a way to deconstruct some of the assumptions that go into worldviews and environments, and then briefly go through what these could look like, and what they do look like in different popular or maybe some less popular and some forthcoming games, and then end on a more and transhumanist ecological front might look like by looking at the transhumanist declaration and the Mormon transhumanist affirmation. So frame analysis, I'm going to go very high level here, but at its root, well, some aspects to it that are core are ontological, normative, and strategic. So ontological think that they are normative, but it's good or bad, and strategic is what can or should we do. And this has been developed, I forget the year on this book that frame analysis essay on organization experience by Irving Gossman is an early work there. But it's a single kind of word. We're talking about facts and axioms, morals and goals. And often they go from top to bottom there, right? Facts and axioms form the language for morals and the language for morals forms, the language or symbols for goals. So Minecraft, how might we frame this? Well, I actually got some of these, at least for Minecraft, the idea of framing it, I don't think anyone's familiar with this YouTube channel, like Stories of Old by Tom VanderLinden, but he actually did this work in constructing Minecraft and framing it. And so I'm going to touch on what he did here because I think it set up a great application of this tool. And so long story short, he goes through a lot of great examples. He feels that ontologically, a virtual environment like Minecraft is the world is ultimately indifferent to the player and exists for the player's manipulation. So an example, so this is actually our own Jones family Minecraft server that we've been running for five years. And these are a few screenshots out of it. And so we've made certain decisions in impacts, in fact, in lower left hand corners of an island with all the like a lighthouse and a fountain and all these different crops actually leveled that island. So I terraformed that island to produce that. I didn't get any bonus points for doing that. I didn't get any negative points for uprooting all the trees that were once on that. And so ultimately the environment is indifference to some of our creations there. On another extreme, these are screenshots of another Minecraft world called 2B2T. It's the longest run in Minecraft server. And so this is screenshots and I'll talk to pictures or screenshots from its world spawn, which is lack of a better phrase, a hellish landscape. And this is all done manually by the players. And so in the lower right hand corner and so at the bottom, you have walls that are barriers that are put up to prevent new players from getting out of this landscape. And so there's, but then in the lower right hand corner, you also have subsequent almost surges and riots that people will burst through those. And so it's an interesting kind of environment that's playing out with anarchy as the subsequent assumption underneath it. But ultimately in either scenario, the world is indifference, is acting as a passive resource. So this radical agency enters a normative layer. So morality is more informed by what, in Minecraft life, what it doesn't discourage a player from doing rather than what it encourages. And so an example would be food collection. And so these are a few screenshots of different approaches to food production that extreme approaches people. So squatter houses have been created, both in terms of mass quantity, but also pre-cooking the food, burning the livestock alive and things like that is totally possible. And there's no negative points for doing that. And the lower images, the YouTuber News Elk in a YouTube video he called, I Trapped 100 Villagers in Minecraft, created a work camp for them to do all of his crop work for him. And that screenshot with him kind of lifting up his hands is, in a moment of that video, he talks a little bit about, questions he has about the ethics of doing this. He doesn't, it's not a big, he doesn't want a big ethical discussion, but he gave him pause as he was doing this in the game. So ultimately in the strategic layer, you get resources, you build shelter, you upgrade items, conquer, domesticate the world. Pretty standard. You think back to that quote from the book previously. And the, like stories of old, he compares this to be, and says it's very influenced by the post-World War II ecological frame. So nature is unaffected by human activity. We can treat nature as instrumental and we can extract resources, expand, build as much without much concern for the environment. And he, I'll just read this real quick because I love how he talks about the potential that we're not quite, that we aren't quite tapping into. So the thing I really want to experience, want is to experience my craft like I did when I first started playing it. Exploring, discovering, not really knowing what I'm doing. There's an unmistakable charm to those early days in this virtual world of blocks. I would love to see a new mechanic to revitalize that feeling. I want to mess around in natural environments and find out what the consequences are. I want to learn about ecological cause and effect and utilize them to improve my base in the world around it. I want to feel the danger of new and unexpected environmental hazards, the joy of surprising opportunities and the blissful sensation of after hours and hours of work standing within your own creation, existing in peaceful harmony. And if those mechanics were to invoke you to reflect in our natural world and your own ecological impact to make you question your worldview in a meaningful way, that to me sounds like a pretty great deal. So he doesn't say that Minecraft is broken, but that there are additional directions that it could be taken into and use that frame analysis to do so. So another one, and I'll go shorter on these, is I was thinking of Oregon Trail, but there's actually a really interesting game called When Rivers Were Trails. And it is created by the Indian Land Tender Foundation and the collaboration with Michigan State University's Games for Entertainment Learning Lab. And also it includes the artwork, writing, and musician contributions from over 30 indigenous writers. And so I played through this and it's interesting because you pick a tribe or clan and then you traverse the terrain. And ultimately you're starting by being dislocated and collecting what you can. You have well-being foods and medicines and as you go through this experience you have to balance those things out and survive. Ontologically, we could say the axioms or the foundation of this game or this environment is the tension between well-being from connection to your land or heritage and displacement from it. And so as you go along, you get these warnings. Settlers are coming, allotment and assimilation you deal with. You encounter other indigenous people in similar circumstances. You exchange stories, you collect medicines and you continue on traversing the landscape here. And so this hearing of stories is interesting because one of the meters that you keep up is well-being. And as you engage with story exchange and trading and even helping groups with hunting and entering hunting parties and things, you increase in that well-being. And so that starts to form some of the morality behind the environment and the player within that environment. And you get a lot of these, you know, from a diversity, you know, trade and hearing stories, some positive stories, some negative stories. And countering, I think that person over the hand corner or you call a cousin, you know, someone you haven't seen in a long time. And so the strategy here is you journey through the land, you trade, join with this place, people, and ultimately seek a new home. So that's a frame analysis of that game that we could, and I think about frame analysis, there's multiple ways you could frame things, right? I'm just offering a way to frame it. There could be different lenses and frames that come at this from different angles. All right, so SIM Earth, and this I call my first transhumanist experience. So this is a game came out in 1990 and it essentially models Love Lock's Gaia hypothesis. And ontologically, it kind of sits here in this foundation, that the natural biota collectively works to make the Earth optimal or favorable for life. And so what you can actually do is start early on and just let the game run. And you'll see in the lower left hand corner that you can pull up these different charts and see how the air, the biosphere, the air temperature, sea temperature fluctuate and affect one another. Essentially what they've coded up is more of a, if you just let it go with some of these default settings, you can play with the axial tilt, meteor impact erosion, you can play with all of these meters, but if you let it go with the defaults, it'll just kind of cyclically go. And so that really is interesting because it creates the ability to deploy with the environment and see the impact and play with that and experiment. But what ends up happening is eventually you have sentience that emerges and it goes through civilization eras, stone age and all the way through a nano tech. And so what emerges is kind of a strategic approach where you preserve natural processes and you want to minimalize the impacts of the artificial, I call it artificial, but essentially the civilization impacts. And so you go through the cycle where you start off with evolution, you can watch the species evolve, eventually one for my game, reptilian species became sentient. And then I see them go through the ages and then eventually the culmination is nanotechnology and what calls the exodus. And the exodus is where the civilization leaves the planet and then the lower left hand corner, they declare it a preserve. And then you start all over. You go back to another evolution and you might evolve again. It might be reptilian, it could be mammalian. When I first played this game as a must have been either preteen or teenager, I had mammals emerge first and then reptiles emerge. And seeing this cycle was really impactful on my experience and they didn't realize at the time but it was very transhumanist seeing it go through these ages and experiencing this on a deep time scale. Now the Gaia hypothesis has these different modes, strong, moderate, weak and the top two are really more discredited. The Gaia hypothesis is criticized for creating more agency, giving more agency to the biosphere than is defensible but even it's critics acknowledge that it does an excellent job modeling or not modeling but articulating and appointing at the close links between evolution of life and the environment. So last one that I'll talk about here is eco and this is right now steam early access 2020 and eco is interesting because it is really bringing together it's one of the best that I've seen at least their attempts and their messaging around it. So here nature is connected and reactive to human activity and nature also faces global risks. So nature isn't just in this perfect harmony all the time and it actually does need stewardship. And so what you then need to do is you need to form these, these kind of need to be mindful of our interactions with nature and see ourselves as beneficiaries and stewards within this environment interacting with it. So you need to build your civilization, you need to build your town and so forth, drawing upon the resources but they model the impacts, secondary tertiary impacts of that into the game as well. And it's interesting to provide a data layer where all of the elements to the game have a model behind them or have data that you can go and explore and see the impacts. And so it's very, very involved game but ultimately you need to create sustainable development and the arc of the game is they, you're essentially the meteor is approaching. And so you need to prepare to develop tools and technologies that can protect the environment from that while using the environment as a resource and dealing with the effects of your use of it. So it's a really interesting concept there. Lastly, I'll talk a little bit about what might a Mormon transhumanist ecological frame look like. So we have the transhumanist declaration and we have the Mormon transhumanist affirmation. And I picked out different phrases out of those where we can start to see ontological normative and even strategic ideas. So if we map those here at the ontological level, transhumanist declaration says we recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most or even all of what we hold valuable. And then at the normative layer says, you can pick a phrase like we need, right? That's a thought statement. So we need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial application. And then at the strategic level that we envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering and our confinement to planet Earth. And I like that last phrase there. Remember, we just went through the SIM Earth, right? That confinement to planet Earth. And there are some visions of transhumanism that sees our destiny as ultimately leaving planet Earth. Others see it as rejuvenating planet Earth. And I think we can see full-fanned. Just real quick, you have about one minute left, Caleb. Okay, great. So moving to the more transhumanist affirmation, it uses at the ontological layer, it starts with the assumption or the axiom that we believe that scientific knowledge and technological power are among the means ordained of God to enable exaltation. And then at the normative layer says, we feel a duty to use science and technology according to wisdom and inspiration to identify and prepare for risks and responsibilities associated with future advances. And then at the strategic level, we can point at phrases like, we seek the spiritual and the physical exaltation of individuals and their anatomies, as well as communities and their environments according to their wills, desires and laws, the extent they are not oppressive. So we see some of these questions in both the transhumanist declaration and the transhumanist affirmation. So this is the last one and I'll end here. So what might a more transhumanist and physical frame look like? Well, scientific knowledge, technological power or means ordained of God, we saw that in the affirmation. And we see this as our duty at the normative layers to use science and technology to prepare for risks and responsibilities associated with future advances. And then ultimately the strategy is spiritual and physical exaltation of individuals, their anatomies, communities, environments that stand there not oppressive. So we get a lot of our frame from that affirmation. And I think we can see a lot of our ties to the environment in it embedded within it. And I guess I'll just end here rhetorically is what frames can we create, adapt and utilize in virtual spaces? I don't know if the MTA is positioned to create a video game, but I think we could point to them as examples and see these as part of our world transhumanist and Mormon transhumanist arc. And I guess we'll end there. Thanks.