December 2024

“you must be the letter written in uncertainty” —Vivec

“to find, despite everything and everyone, true problems” —Villani and Deleuze

In his interview with Arnaud Villani, Gilles Deleuze remarks that “Bergson says that modern science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs. It is that metaphysics that interests me.” At once a scientist concerned with “determining the conditions of a problem” and a “pure metaphysician” focused on elaborating a new set of categories for philosophy, Deleuze’s program is one I assume as my own.¹

I take my understanding of a “research program” from the philosopher Terence Blake, who in turn derives the concept of a “metaphysical research programme” from Karl Popper. For Blake, such programs can be evaluated with regard to a set of criteria he finds in the work of Paul Feyerabend: “openness, pluralism, testability, realism, diachronicity, apophaticism, and democracy.”² These criteria have served as a useful framework for my ongoing philosophical investigations since I first encountered them as an undergraduate.

My present efforts range across day-to-day games industry employment, longer term research projects, and periodic creative outputs in game design and poetry. In these domains, my special focuses can be categorized, respectively, as organization, metaphysics, and design, which together form an interlocking concern originating in the program of thought summarized above. To mark this concern with a proper name we can use a term from Merleau-Ponty: praktognosia.³ This we might define in slantwise manner with another Deleuzianism, what he speaks of as “belief in the world.”⁴

Notes