play reality like a holographic game.

She asked how the game works. Do I plan trips?

No.

I referenced the mirror in front me.

We engage a mirror until it transforms into a vault and then we play the vault until it delivers us into the ocean.

‘Really…?’

Yes.

I’m not ready to talk about everything that happened these last months playing Alien Indiana Jones but there is one story that wants to be told now.

I was living in a castle in the high-altitude forests outside Mexico City. Something happened that destabilized my feedback loop. There was a change. I worried and thought it was ‘bad’ bc we request change and then panic when it doesn’t arrive according to our preferences. But preferences use reference points from our current perspective. Which means preferences aren’t leading us anywhere new.

This is why preference = control; desire = power. Desire drives us into our restrictions. The edge of our feedback loop. Showing us where we are incompatible with the newly requested reality. BUT where we are most resistant is also where we are most vulnerable, available and receptive for change. This is the paradox of gameplay.

Sidebar. Gameplay is a method of perception. How we relate. How we interpret our ‘external’ environment. It’s a guide for discovering ourselves. Transforming our experience of reality through our interactions with other people. 

The game isn’t separate from reality. Reality is the ultimate game. But WHICH game we play hinges upon desire. HOW we play hinges upon logic. Logic is the DNA of pattern.

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When we use desire as a ‘North Star…’ we access a treasure map customized for our reality feedback loop. 

Reality is a video feedback loop. Video feedback occurs when a camera ‘sees’ its own playback monitor. The playback monitor displays an interpretation or reconstruction of what the camera sees. So when the camera looks at the monitor, the camera observes ‘reality’ through the mechanics of its own operating system. This relationship induces an emergent pattern that remixes the source material into infinite combinations. 

This is the hologram.  

The hologram is extremely precise and efficient. So when I encountered a ‘trigger,’ also known as a destabilization, that matched my restrictions, this was the raw material needed to ‘meltdown’ my incompatible logic and replace it with updated instructions c/o ‘making a new choice that dissolved an old pattern.’

Technically, I had the resources to ‘fix’ the destabilization. But fixing is not the same as transforming. 

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Also—fixing doesn’t change time. Transforming does. Transformation changes the dynamics of time. This is exactly what I needed = a jump. 

We revealed ourselves, embraced our vulnerabilities and made a deal with the partners who own the castle. The deal led to an invitation for a road trip the next day. 

I was excited about the deal but also wondered: are we still building ‘The Game’ and if so, where is it…?

Clarifier. Gameplay is how we navigate reality and engage the hologram. But I received a vision depicting a specific game: an AR scavenger hunt to retrieve buried stories from rocks—X marks the spot. I accepted the vision as my ‘target desire’ and my subsequent directions were = ‘sell everything you own and get on a plane, you’ll know what to do when you get there.’ Which is how I wound up in Mexico. 

We got in the car the next day. I fell asleep and woke up with that haze that descends when you don’t know where you are, the time or day. These are the perfect conditions for a jump bc the unfamiliarity unhinges our perception from established set points. 

I settled into my room and was about to turn in when Edina appeared at the door.

‘There’s a guy here who’s building a scavenger hunt in the forest.’

Really..?

‘Yes.’

Edina is my spotter. She sees things I miss. I got out of bed and joined the group on the terrace. We were nine in total. I waited quietly and watched as one of the castle partners—let’s call him Cruise Director—demonstrated his latest creation: a magic carpet. It was intoxicating. Everyone wanted to buy one. The guy—let’s call him Pink Flamingo—played a record he produced for an artist (also present) who co-wrote and sang on the track. Afterwards, he turned and asked what we do. 

At the time, our answer was, ‘…explorers of multidimensional reality.’ Most people didn’t know what that meant but hearing it sparked something. Bc it didn’t match any of their references. We trusted eventually that spark would catch into a flame.  

Pink Flamingo caught the spark. I didn’t have to explain anything. He already knew. He had been building his own version of The Game, called X. He pulled out his tablet and showed me the trailer he made. I loved everything about it. The tone, language, performance, style. I wished I had made it myself but it was so much better discovering it like this. 

I looked and saw the gaffer taped Xs on his shirt and the brim of his hat. Cruise Director had them, too. I noticed them before but hadn’t registered the clue. 

This is gameplay. Remember ‘sensory gating’…? It’s the filter inside the brain that determines which environmental inputs are processed versus repressed. When we recalibrate our perception—via engaging triggers—we can see more of what was always there.

Pink Flamingo asked about my findings. I told him we’re in user-generated experience on a shared field of play. Even though everyone is ‘human’ in their game, when they show up in mine: they’re bots, programmed to reflect / reveal my own operating system. Like the camera observing its monitor. 

The artist was wide-eyed.

‘Oh my god, you sound like you’re in a movie.’

Pink Flamingo studied Artificial Intelligence for a year. He said AI cannot respond to ambiguity. It glitches the system. Choices progress the game. 

Yes. 

It took seven weeks of shedding skin in the jungle of Veracruz, a detour with a curandera in the mountains of Oaxaca and one orbit of the moon in a castle built by an architect without blueprints. We found The Game. 

No one slept that night. It was like we woke the dead. The next day, Cruise Director brought us into the green onyx canyons. I arched my back on a boulder and heard: when love appears, don’t insert artificial distance; embrace it. 

We went with Pink Flamingo to his studio to begin our collaboration and then returned to the castle. It was Valentine’s Day and Edina was leading a ritual. Pink Flamingo had agreed to be my partner. But that morning, there was another change and he exited. The ritual and the project.

‘When in doubt, move 78.’

When human creativity defeats machine's computational power.

Another destabilization; another meltdown. I didn’t understand. Why were things falling apart so quickly after they delivered. 

But also: who would be my partner for the ritual…?

We sat with the castle partners who gave us a rundown of the expected guests. Couples. But then:

‘There was a guy who came by yesterday. He bought a day pass for him and his kids but he probably won’t stay for the ritual.’

Edina looked at me.

‘Dana, it’s a Hot Dad. Your specialty.’

I smiled. 

‘He’s for you.’

The night before, Edina and I had placed some orders. I daydreamed a chef. I love it when people cook for me. I also fantasized about someone opening up their magical home during our adventures. 

The guy showed up. He was indeed a Hot Dad. I walked over to introduce myself. He said, ‘I know who you are. I’ve been watching you walk by my house every afternoon. It only took me three weeks to find you.’

As I had been daydreaming my reality someone else had been daydreaming me. Of course! Bc while reality must be observed to exist, I must also be observed to exist. This is essentially the premise of the 1995 Sandra Bullock thriller THE NET. She’s in danger of being erased bc she’s too obscured. 

Hot Dad unwrapped a package of peyote from his woven sack and offered me a piece. It had ALICE IN WONDERLAND ‘eat me’ airwaves so I agreed. We connected as Edina guided and I heard the second component to the message in the canyons:

...each person, project or place isn’t IT but rather a gate, point of contact, through which we can access IT. Or—I am connected to all-that-there-is through my moment-to-moment surrender and open-heart commitment to whatever piece or player is currently visible in my present. The illusion is that I need a specific person. I don’t. They’re just bots / reflected aspects of me anyway. What I need is to springboard off each person so I can catch the next vine. Reality is a series of vines in the jungle. If I hold onto one, I lose momentum. Also: it’s awkward and painful... To hang there. Waiting, gripping. But if I keep swinging (even if I can’t yet see or touch the next X point) then I am in the stream of infinite possibility and available for ANYONE to come meet, support and play with me. 

This is what I would later express to The Mad King who pushed back against all my gameplay languaging. 

I don’t swing vines bc I think people are disposable. I swing vines bc I want to live in the fucking jungle. 

The ritual ended. Edina is commander of special forces so it was truly divine. After a plunge in some mountain spring water, we sat by the fire and ate our dinner. Hot Dad came to ask for my number. He’s a restauranteur and his house is a castle built by the same architect. He invited me to stay there every night ‘while you’re here’ and then ‘stay forever.’

I could see the spell from our order. Spells are code. Code is broadcast and any program with compatible receptors can pick up the signal. I wasn’t going to stay in his castle but I was enchanted just the same. Even though I experience phenomena like this quite frequently now, I’m still starstruck every time. It’s why I’m devoted to playing. Bc it’s so rich, enlivening and maddening. Simple and complex. Like the language of the heptapods in ARRIVAL. It communicates everything all at once.

Some months later, Pink Flamingo resurfaced.

‘Let’s write the playbook. We can do it offline, on a typewriter or a tablet of clay. Since time is relative and clay is robust, it can be accessed by any possible being, at any possible time.’

You were in my dream last night. You told me to leave you messages in the candle wax.

‘Did you…?‘

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what game are you playing…?

xxx

DNA