Category: Patterns
-
Player Characters in Dialogue: The Weight of Our Choices
This summer I was reading Plato’s dialogues on holiday (as one does…) and got to wondering: what if the characters from my Player Characters album had their own philosophical conversations? Not the formal Socratic stuff, though, but something messier. More like what happens when three people realize they’ve all made choices they can’t take back,…
-
The Narrative Arcs of “Player Characters”
When you listen to a music album, do you hear individual songs, each with its own melody and emotion or do you perceive a larger story, like in concept albums such as Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” or David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust”? I recently asked myself this question about my…
-
The Ancient Manager’s Chess Game: When Students Outsmart Teachers
Introduction A king playing chess with a student (or peasant) in the middle of the night, while two dogs fight in the corner—this medieval woodblock print from Pérez-Reverte’s “El Club Dumas” provides an example of several forms of power in action (French and Raven, 1959). In addition, the positioning of the characters in the picture…