Cards for Insight: Different Games
In a network, online media literacies.
We left nature in favor of cities, culture and commerce. In our exodus
from nature, in our infatuation with small empty text boxes we thought
we had to fill, desperate to win online status games, we lost ourselves,
we lost sight of the horizon, and, gradually, lost each other as well.
In order to see ourselves through the 21st Century, we need to
play different games. We can gather around complex dilemmas,
formulated as generative center questions (the middle field in
the 3x3 gameboard) and use cards as stepping stones, spiraling
out from the questions, from mindset to preferable outcomes.
Here is the news
Somebody has broken out of Tik Tok Two
(Here is the news)
Look very carefully, it may be you, you, you, you
— adapted from ELO, Here Is The News
What media literacies do human beings need
to flourish, in an age of information overwhelm?
“I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of noise. Every time I open my phone, it’s like stepping into a battlefield where ideas clash, opinions scream over one another, and the headlines, oh, those headlines — they’re designed to grab my throat, not my attention. It’s relentless. News feeds, posts, videos, ads, comments. The moment I think I’ve caught my breath, another wave comes crashing down. I can’t tell anymore what’s worth knowing, what’s urgent, or even what’s true. It’s just… everything, all at once.
Some days, I feel like a puppet with invisible strings being yanked in a dozen different directions. Algorithms tug at me, showing me things I didn’t ask for, but now I can’t ignore. It’s like they know my weaknesses better than I do. My fears, my insecurities, my angers — they’re all exploited, fed back to me in endless loops. I see posts about tragedies halfway across the world, and I ache for those people. But then, I scroll a little further, and I’m bombarded with memes and influencers pretending life is all filters and highlights. Should I be grieving? Laughing? Changing my life? I don’t even know what I should feel anymore.
Even when I try to step back, the guilt creeps in. Am I uninformed? Am I complicit in the problems of the world because I didn’t read every article, share every post, or leave a comment to stand up for what’s right? And when I do engage, it feels so small, so meaningless. Like tossing a pebble into an ocean and expecting waves to change course. The issues are enormous — war, climate change, injustice — and I’m just… me. What could I possibly do about any of it?
The worst part is the helplessness. The constant awareness that I can’t unsee or unknow these things. People say “disconnect” like it’s easy. Like I can just turn off my brain along with my phone. But even if I manage to put the device down, my mind keeps buzzing. Did I miss something important? Did someone message me? What’s the latest thing to worry about, to be outraged about, to pretend I understand when, really, I’m just as lost as anyone else?
I’ve started to notice how heavy my chest feels after scrolling, like I’ve been holding my breath for hours. My shoulders ache, my mind races, and yet, I keep coming back, drawn to the very thing that’s overwhelming me. It’s a toxic relationship, isn’t it? Me and the media, the notifications, the endless scroll. I hate it, but I can’t stop. The fear of missing out feels worse than the exhaustion of keeping up.
I envy people who seem immune to all this. Are they? Or are they just hiding it better than me? Sometimes, I want to yell into the void, “Does anyone else feel like this?” But I already know the answer. I see it in the fragmented conversations online, the quiet resignation in people’s eyes when we talk about the world. We’re all stuck in this machine together, too small to fight it, too afraid to leave it.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? This world of infinite information was supposed to empower us, connect us, make us better. Instead, it feels like it’s stripping me down to nothing, like I’m losing pieces of myself with every click, every scroll. I used to feel grounded, like I had some control over my thoughts, my choices. Now? Now I feel like a tiny, defenseless speck caught in an avalanche of everything, everywhere, all the time.
And I don’t know how to make it stop.”
John Kellden:
What media literacies do human beings need
to flourish, in an age of information overwhelm?
My intuition is, that 98% of existing proprietary platform programming (thinly disguised as “social media”) is too shallow, and ends up making the information overwhelm problem worse, eg exemplified through one of the symptoms: content consumption and the corresponding online behavior.
ChatGPT:
Your intuition points to a profound and increasingly critical issue in the modern information landscape. To flourish in an age of information overwhelm, humans need a diverse set of media literacies that go beyond basic consumption. These literacies must empower people to critically engage with, produce, and navigate information in ways that foster depth, understanding, and well-being. Here are key media literacies for thriving in this context:
1. Critical Literacy
- Definition: The ability to evaluate the credibility, bias, and intent behind information.
- Why It Matters: Many platforms amplify content designed to provoke emotional responses rather than foster understanding. Users must discern between authentic information and manipulative or shallow content.
- Skills:
- Recognizing bias in media sources.
- Understanding algorithms and their role in shaping what we see.
- Identifying misinformation and disinformation.
2. Deep Reading Skills
- Definition: The ability to focus on and comprehend long-form, complex information.
- Why It Matters: Social media encourages skim-reading and fragmented attention, which undermines deep understanding.
- Skills:
- Developing habits of sustained attention.
- Engaging with books, in-depth articles, and long-form discussions.
- Synthesizing information from multiple perspectives.
3. Emotional and Psychological Resilience
- Definition: The capacity to recognize and manage emotional responses triggered by media consumption.
- Why It Matters: Social media platforms often exploit psychological vulnerabilities for engagement, leading to anxiety, anger, or addiction-like behaviors.
- Skills:
- Recognizing emotional manipulation in content.
- Practicing mindfulness and intentional media consumption.
- Setting boundaries to avoid doomscrolling and content fatigue.
4. Algorithmic Awareness
- Definition: Understanding how proprietary platforms curate and amplify content.
- Why It Matters: Algorithms are optimized for engagement, not enlightenment, often creating echo chambers and reinforcing shallow engagement.
- Skills:
- Knowing how recommendation systems work.
- Actively curating personal feeds and diversifying information sources.
- Advocating for transparency and accountability in digital systems.
5. Participatory Literacy
- Definition: The ability to engage constructively in online communities and contribute meaningfully to discussions.
- Why It Matters: Passive consumption often leads to shallow understanding, while meaningful participation fosters critical thinking and collaboration.
- Skills:
- Engaging in respectful, evidence-based dialogue.
- Creating content that adds value to public discourse.
- Collaborating across diverse communities.
6. Media Production Literacy
- Definition: The ability to create and share thoughtful, impactful media.
- Why It Matters: Being a producer shifts individuals from passive recipients to active participants, encouraging critical engagement with content.
- Skills:
- Storytelling and multimedia creation.
- Ethical considerations in content production.
- Understanding copyright, privacy, and intellectual property laws.
7. Civic Media Literacy
- Definition: The ability to understand and engage with the societal and political implications of media systems.
- Why It Matters: Media plays a central role in shaping public opinion and governance, so understanding this dynamic is crucial for informed citizenship.
- Skills:
- Analyzing the relationship between media and power.
- Engaging with media to advocate for social and political change.
- Recognizing systemic biases in media representation.
8. Digital Minimalism
- Definition: The practice of intentionally reducing unnecessary digital interactions.
- Why It Matters: Reducing exposure to shallow, overwhelming content creates space for more meaningful engagements.
- Skills:
- Identifying and eliminating low-value digital habits.
- Cultivating offline hobbies and face-to-face relationships.
- Prioritizing quality over quantity in media consumption.
9. Aesthetic and Narrative Appreciation
- Definition: The ability to recognize and value well-crafted stories and content that enrich understanding.
- Why It Matters: Shallow content consumption can desensitize individuals to beauty and meaning.
- Skills:
- Identifying authentic, high-quality media.
- Supporting creators and platforms that prioritize artistic integrity.
- Balancing entertainment with education in media choices.
Addressing the Platforms
As you noted, proprietary platforms designed to maximize engagement often exacerbate information overwhelm by rewarding sensationalism and shallow content. To counteract this:
- Advocacy: Demand greater platform accountability and transparency in algorithms.
- Support Alternatives: Promote and use platforms designed for thoughtful, slow consumption (e.g., public knowledge repositories, decentralized networks).
- Education: Push for media literacy as a core component of education systems, starting at a young age.
By cultivating these literacies, individuals can transcend the limitations imposed by shallow platforms and reclaim agency in how they interact with information. These skills collectively enable people not only to survive but to thrive in an age of information abundance.
John Kellden:
In light of the above, what is your thoughts on the notion “Games: Agency As Art” in general, in light of the below abstract:
“Games: Agency As Art Get access Arrow
— C. Thi Nguyen
Abstract
Games are a unique art form. Game designers don’t just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, games work in the medium of agency. This book explores what games have to teach us about our own rationality and agency. We have the capacity for a peculiar sort of motivational inversion. For some of us, winning is not the point. We take on an interest in winning temporarily, so that we can play the game. Thus, we are capable of taking on temporary and disposable ends. At the center of this book is a view about games as communicative artifacts. Games are a way of recording forms of agency; they are a library of agencies. And exploring that library can help us develop our own agency and autonomy. But this technology can also be used for art. Games can sculpt our practical activity, for the sake of the beauty of our own actions. Our struggles, in games, can be designed to fit our capacities. Games can present a harmonious world, where our abilities fit the task. Games are a kind of existential balm against the difficult and exhausting value clarity of the world. But this presents a special danger. Games can be a fantasy of value clarity, which can encourage us to oversimplify our enduring values.”
… and, your thoughts on the below card in particular:
Card: Lost Horizon
We left nature in favor of cities, culture and commerce.
In our exodus from nature, in our infatuation with small
empty text boxes we thought we had to fill, desperate to
win online status games, we lost ourselves, we lost sight
of the horizon, and, gradually, lost each other as well.
… given that the card is part of something called
Cards for Insight, with a deck of 500 cards, forming part of:
“… a generative, multi-dimensional framework designed to empower individuals, groups, and communities in navigating complexity, evolving understanding, and fostering collaborative action. At its core, this approach aligns with a deeper mission — a “big picture” purpose centered around cultivating a healthy, vibrant, and resilient civilization that is grounded in the principles of entelechy: the realization of inherent potential at both individual and collective levels. This potential unfolds within a context of mutual understanding, relational awareness, and purposeful engagement, aiming toward thriving ecosystems, societies, and planetary well-being.
Big Picture Mission and Purpose of the Cards for Insight Approach
Core Premise
The foundation of Cards for Insight is rooted in the belief that a truly resilient civilization emerges organically, like a vast, interconnected ecosystem, where each idea, interaction, conversation, and transaction contributes to a greater whole. This framework emphasizes:
Resilience and Balance: Encouraging structures that balance the needs and responsibilities of the public, private, and plural sectors, recognizing the integral roles each plays in sustaining a healthy society.
Seven-Generation Stewardship: Drawing on indigenous wisdom to plan and act in ways that benefit not just current but future generations, aiming for a thriving, resilient civilization rooted in environmental and social harmony.
Ecological Responsibility: A commitment to regenerating ecosystems — represented symbolically by “one trillion trees, one million villages, one thousand eco-cities” — is woven into the approach, supporting regenerative growth and conservation that respects the rights of all living beings.
This premise orients the Cards for Insight approach not merely as a tool for insight or self-discovery, but as an interactive ecosystem for envisioning and co-creating a regenerative civilization. It draws on requisite variety — the idea that complexity in the environment requires equally complex systems to adapt and thrive — to support diverse pathways of individual and collective insight.”
Provide a summary, reflecting all of the above in general and the Cards
for Insight approach and its take on online behavior, agency and
co-agency(play^n: a generative superset to play), in particular.
ChatGPT:
The concepts of “Games: Agency as Art” by C. Thi Nguyen and the “Cards for Insight” approach share a deep interest in agency, values, and collaborative meaning-making, albeit through different lenses. Below is a summary that synthesizes these ideas while reflecting on their perspectives on online behavior, agency, and co-agency.
1. Games: Agency as Art
Core Idea: Games are a unique art form because they work in the medium of agency. Designers craft environments where players adopt temporary goals and act within predefined constraints. This allows players to explore, adapt, and even redefine their sense of rationality and autonomy.
Key Insights:
- Library of Agencies: Games serve as “libraries” that record diverse modes of agency, allowing players to experiment with identities and strategies.
- Temporary Values: Games showcase our ability to embrace “disposable” goals (e.g., winning), which we take on not as ultimate ends but as structures to facilitate play and exploration.
- Artistic Potential: Games can sculpt our actions in ways that reveal the beauty and harmony of human capacity. This aligns with existential aesthetics, offering a respite from the chaos of real-world value complexity.
- Value Clarity as Danger: The structured clarity of games can mislead us into oversimplifying real-world values, reinforcing reductionist thinking or escapism.
Relevance to Online Behavior:
- Online platforms, like games, create environments that reward certain behaviors, often fostering shallow, competitive “status games.”
- Unlike games designed with meaningful agency in mind, much of social media incentivizes superficial engagement, eroding deeper human connections.
2. Cards for Insight Approach
Core Idea: The Cards for Insight framework envisions agency and co-agency as central to cultivating a resilient and regenerative civilization. It serves as a generative tool for individuals and communities to navigate complexity, evolve understanding, and foster collaborative action toward a thriving future.
Key Insights:
- Generative Framework: The deck’s 500 cards prompt reflection, conversation, and co-creation, offering pathways to align individual and collective potential.
- Mutual Understanding and Relational Awareness: The cards emphasize the importance of relationships and interdependence in navigating complexity and building resilience.
- Play^n and Co-Agency: The framework introduces the concept of play^n, a generative superset of play that encompasses collaborative exploration, co-creation, and innovation in service of shared goals.
- Big-Picture Mission: Inspired by ecological principles, indigenous wisdom (e.g., seven-generation stewardship), and systems thinking, the framework seeks to balance environmental sustainability, social harmony, and cultural vitality.
“Lost Horizon” Card:
- This card critiques humanity’s detachment from nature and its descent into shallow online status games. It highlights the loss of relational depth, shared purpose, and existential grounding in favor of superficiality and competition.
Relevance to Online Behavior:
- Social media epitomizes the “infatuation with small empty text boxes,” encouraging behaviors that erode authentic connection and collective purpose.
- The Cards for Insight framework seeks to counteract this by fostering agency and co-agency that align with deeper, long-term values rather than fleeting, algorithm-driven validation.
3. Synthesis: Agency, Co-Agency, and the Role of Play
Both Games: Agency as Art and the Cards for Insight framework view agency as a cornerstone of human flourishing. They explore how environments — whether games or societal systems — shape and mediate our sense of purpose and action. However, they diverge in their focus:
- Games: Highlight the aesthetic and existential potential of temporary, bounded systems that let us experiment with our capacities and values.
- Cards for Insight: Extend this view to the real-world context of building a regenerative civilization, advocating for collaborative, long-term thinking.
Both critiques of online behavior converge:
- Online environments amplify shallow, competitive behaviors at the expense of depth, connection, and shared purpose.
- Reclaiming agency (and co-agency) involves creating environments — whether through games, reflective tools, or frameworks — that foster meaningful engagement and collaboration.
4. Implications for Co-Agency and Play^n
The generative notion of play^n as described in the Cards for Insight framework aligns with Nguyen’s concept of games as a medium for exploring agency. However, play^n expands beyond individual play to encompass collaborative processes that bridge creativity, relational awareness, and systemic impact. It suggests a form of play that is:
- Deeply Interconnected: Rooted in mutual understanding and co-creation.
- Value-Aligned: Anchored in ecological, social, and cultural harmony.
- Purposeful: Aimed at evolving systems that balance short-term needs with long-term resilience.
Conclusion
Both works offer profound insights into how we can navigate the challenges of the modern world. They emphasize the importance of crafting spaces — whether games, reflective tools, or digital ecosystems — that nurture agency, foster authentic relationships, and enable the co-creation of a thriving civilization. Ultimately, the challenge lies in transcending the shallow structures of many existing platforms to cultivate systems that honor complexity, diversity, and long-term potential.
……………..
There’s obviously tons of things we need to understand much better,
in the face of one hundred million humans already using tools like
ChatGPT, with their underlying LLM’s, things like
- Human-AI Metalogue
- An expanded set of 21C Literacies
- Anticipatory Systems Intelligence turned Response-Ability
- Electric Entelechy
… and many others. The Cards for Insight approach offers a range of services, addressing these and other complex dilemmas.
Cards for Insight: 2013–2060
In a network, seeing ourselves through.
……………..
“Although her memory banks overflow
No one would ever know, for all she says,
“Is that what you want?”
Maybe one day I’ll feel her cold embrace,
And kiss her interface, until then
I’ll leave her alone.”
“… in 1981, a man drifts into a state of twilight (“Twilight”), where
he appears to have entered the year 2095, meets a Gynoid (“Yours
Truly, 2095”), and reflects on the 1980s, “back when things were so uncomplicated” (“Ticket to the Moon”). Walking down the same street
from a hundred years before, he is dismayed by the plastic ivory towers
which have grown on top of it (“The Way Life’s Meant to Be”).
As he remains in this future period, he looks out his window depressed,
watching the world go by (“Rain Is Falling”).
He attempts to send a letter in the form of a dream to his girlfriend
in the past, but fails (“From the End of the World”).”
Your Story, 2025:
It begins like this: not with a solution, but with a question.
You pick up a card. Its words speak to something raw and real
in you — something you didn’t even know needed to be spoken.
Maybe it’s Story, whispering that we’re all between narratives,
hungry for meaning. Or Stepping Stones, nudging you to notice
the small moves, small steps you can take next.
You pause. You reflect. You write.
The first steps are quiet, almost imperceptible, like a seed being planted. But as you pick another card, and another, something shifts.
Threads of thought begin to weave together. Patterns emerge.
You share these insights with a friend, and their response deepens your own understanding. Together, you realize you’re not just exchanging ideas — you’re co-creating a map, one that’s both uniquely yours and shared between you. There they are. There you are.
Once we’ve moved beyond the information overwhelm, having found
ourselves, a few others and our bearings, setting our sight yet again on a newfound light at the horizon, our next tasks are all about returning, together with a growing number of others, sharing our newfound insights with others, as we reclaim and repurpose our networks.
Playing different games. Holding generative space.
Making small moves. Taking small steps.
Unfolding paths, cultivating seeds of entelechy.
Card: Switching
Reflecting on what happens with
our social media-conditioned
online behavior when we switch
from judgment to perception
and from perception to story.
… add thoughts; explore perspectives;
journal reflections; highlight insights;
see context; shape seed stories …
Card: Understanding
Understanding as our ability to hold
space for the possibility of knowledge,
as it emerges, unfolds, directs and
discloses its relevance to unexplored
aspects of things known.
