(Yeeg - I need a stiff unicorn chaser just for having been reminded of Costner's The Postman.)

I'd say you may be overlooking some fantastic examples of this genre just because they're often excluded from the SF genre. Nobel Laureate Doris Lessings' Canopus in Argos series is, IMHO, exquisite literature on this theme...her Canopan agents (maybe they should be called Canopaners?) are basically an intergalactic Peace Corps (although as a Disgruntled Returned Peace Corps Volunteer myself, I must say their organization kicks the US Corps' ass), and in "Shikasta" in particular they're trying to help the people of Earth cope with their decline and collapse. "The Making of The Representative" etc. comes to my mind often these days as well, since it's about a planet coping with massive climate change (with Canopan advice). Like the Peace Corps, public school teachers or any realistic Outquisition, the Canopans can only achieve as much as human stubbornness allows, which makes them precious role models for me.

The myth that the postapocalyptic future belongs to gun-toting cowboys fighting for freedom etc. is one of a classic set of swell myths that make fine fiction for firearms afficionados...but if the events of the past few years stateside have proven nothing else, it's that a well-armed citizenry will amiably surrender all their other rights to an oppressive government rather than fight back with bullets or even ballots, as long as the guns, TV and beer are still available...and maybe as long as the price of petrol remains sound?

The studio notes duplicated in "More Dark Than Shark" list backgammon dice as essential to Brian Eno's early studio hardware; being based on powers of two, they're a great way for relatively conventional composers to decide how many times to repeat something. This goes back at least to Mozart, though, who famously had a dice game for composition - google "aleatoric music" and you get the whole history of chance-based (more often than not, dice-based) music on up from Mozart to John Cage and, more recently, the generative music of Koan (championed by Eno, no surprise there, and later shrunk down by Thomas Dolby's Beatnik system), and other software packages that do for aleatoric music what Neverwinter Nights did for dice-based RPGs.

This sort of thing works great for techno, especially if a DJ's ultimately gonna decide when and how your composition begins and ends, but it doesn't generate much emotion or plot...luckily Homo sapiens are already MUCH too good at projecting their own ideas of emotion and plot on any random data they're presented, giving us the concept of stochasticism.

FNC: it's possible you're going about it the wrong way...why look for GMs when it's an open source project?

N0wak - Thank you! That's been driving me nuts all day.

What I love about the GameSpot review is what I love about a good Life Sim game: both make me return to my life and view it with fresh wonder and appreciation. And lately, as I slide deeper and deeper into accepting the "we're all living in a sim" hypothesis, these seemingly whimsical and/or satirical exercises seem rather profound on a meta-level.

First, they beg the question: how would, say, a Sim in The Sims (or fill in your own preferred analogous "game") review the world/game s/he inhabits? Second: since there really is a pretty persuasive and reasonable argument to made in favor of the possibility that we really are living in a computer simulation (I'll try to flesh out my thoughts on this better at my myspace and/or livejournal in the next few days), shouldn't we be doing more of this kind of critique?

People who think of life as a story tend to get very depressed when it doesn't go the way they thought it would; suddenly they're tragic heroes, and generally want to end it soon. People who think of life as a game, on the other hand, seem to be having a lot of fun, and want it to keep on going. The graphics are great, it's all extremely open-ended, and anyone who's not having a blast probably isn't trying to.

GameSpot did a much more thoughtful and artful review of Real Life, I believe as an April Fool's piece back around 2003 or 2004...sorry I can't provide a link, but the effort to find the original has collided with the cats' campaign to be fed breakfast. The latter one.

Well, if we're plumbing the Campbellian/Jungian depths for just how essential the Three Rings are to western civilization, it's worth noting that a truly remarkable DC band called Senator Flux (a buncha Dischord alumni producing really catchy postpunk for semiotics grad students) released an epic on the subject, I believe on their 1987 "Shotgun for Cosmo" LP. "Riding shotgun for Cosmo through the foothills of time/In search of the three rings of Ballantine" it begins, and when the protagonist speaks the words "purity," "body" or "flavor" some kind of psychedelic transfiguration takes place.

I've shown this footage to students for years as a lesson: if you ask a stupid/closed question, you deserve a stupid/cryptic answer, and if that's good enough for you, you're a lousy journalist.

It's not that Warhol's being stupid or autistic, it's just a strategy he used to employ when doing interviews with morons. I remember reading Warhol talking about the actual strategy being consciously used here: "When asked a simple/stupid yes/no question, give a random yes/no answer." The strategy was one of many things David Bowie borrowed from Warhol, and you can see it in Godard's 1968 "Sympathy for the Devil" movie as well. This worked great for both artists and interviewers; the latter could ask really inane, loaded questions like "Do you think cinema/sex/America/Elvis is dead/the answer/bigger than Jesus/whatever?" and get the kind of shocking quotes they wanted, and the artist could get press attention with minimal effort without really saying anything.