The Technodelic Manifesto

Author/Creator

Robin Arnott

Quick Summary

Technodelics aim to enhance mindfulness and connection in a world facing rising loneliness and depression. They focus on the present moment, using abstract audiovisual elements to stimulate the brain and engage the body in feedback loops. These experiences are immersive, reflective rather than prescriptive, and extend beyond screens into real-life settings, emphasizing the importance of ritual and ceremony.

Summary

While for many in the Western world, material quality-of-life has been skyrocketing, rates of loneliness and depression are climbing to epidemic levels. These times call for mindfulness and connection. They demand we ask ourselves difficult questions about our practices and technologies, and the values they embody.

While technological means grow exponentially, the same cannot be said for our civilization’s core wisdom and values. Like every medium, games cannot help but express and respond to those values, and they do so with incredible technological sophistication. Game developers, with ever-deeper knowledge of player psychology, must choose to build ever-more efficient slot machines or ever-more polished mirrors.

The principles of a technodelic are:

Technodelics are abstract, so as to negate the player’s critical thoughts. Words and stories are avoided wherever possible, in favor of geometry and music.
Technodelics keep a player’s attention focused on the now. They will usually eschew the use of goals entirely, as goals tend to focus a player’s attention away from the present moment. Where goals are used, they are tied to on-going in-the-moment performance, and engineered to produce a flow state.
Technodelics use the audiovisual field to invoke mystery and the sublime. Light and sound are used, not to describe objects, but to directly stimulate desired activity in the brain.
Technodelics engage the player’s body in feedback loops. This creates a synesthetic relationship between sound, vision, and the player’s own biorhythms.
Technodelics are unbiased feedback loops, meaning instead of rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others, they reflect all player expressions in myriad ways. Their systems are reflective rather than prescriptive. This both inspires a player’s sense of wonder, and turns that wonder inwards.
Technodelics expand beyond the couch-and-screen into real-life set-and-setting. They make use of ritual and ceremony to amplify the depth of the experience.
Technodelics are fully immersive experiences that require 100% of the player’s attention.
Technodelics cannot be reductively designed. Instead, they must be intuitively channeled. Technodelic experiences are doorways to the ineffable, and the reasoning mind by definition cannot comprehend the ineffable.