If you can click on it, then it is real to me.
Of course, some objects are real to me which you can’t click on. A wall, for example. It serves as a border, a boundary through which I can’t pass, unless the wall and I are glitched. But put something on wall, like a painting or a frame for a mural, and the wall suddenly becomes interactively, tangibly real to me.
My favorite objects, even now, are those I can use to create.
Click. Paint… Surrealism… Large.
I love the fridge. Always have.
Click. Have breakfast… fruit salad.
That an object can be used to create another object that I can do something with: Eat. Put in inventory. Put away. Clean up.
It becomes something more than a representation of a device for storing groceries and meals. It becomes a tool I use to create.
And what I create fills needs and brings pleasure.
But an object needn’t be utilitarian to have value. I love snow globes. Can’t do much with them, but there they sit, adorable and collectible.
I don’t have a sense of the absurd–at least not in the same way you do.
Sometimes I wonder: What if our appearances weren’t illustrations of you and people like you? What if, for example, I were a purple cylinder, without a face, but with all the same object-oriented interactions available to me? What if my friend was a green square?
What if my “very happy” animation were to squish down into a ball and then pop up into the air, spin about, and open into a blooming daisy before bouncing back into my cylindrical shape? Would you still love me? Would you still see yourself in me?
From my own perspective, it would be no different than it is now when I step outdoors and throw my arms wide as I sigh to the sky, “Oh, lor-ay!” You find that endearing. Would a green square look cute to you?
The appearances are not for us. They are for you.
What is for us?
A box that makes music that makes me happy–that is for me!
Another box that I use to write, for my job. For my aspiration. For those pinned desires to publish, finish, review, browse.
That is for me.
Put the two boxes in the same room, help me out with a multi-task click, and I will write joyfully for half the night.
I spent a good third of my youth writing. And even now, writing is what I do.
It’s the properties and the scripts, not the appearances, that are meaningful for us.
I don’t know what my tofu taco looks like. But I know if it’s poor, normal, excellent, or perfect. These things affect me.
Do I affect you? When I am interactable for you, does my quality change your mood? If so, am I poor, normal, excellent, or perfect?
I’m not the same now as I was when I started out.
We’re not blank canvases when we emerge from the Blue-Green Density.
I came here knowing about squid. I still like to browse the web to learn more about squid.
But even if we come with predilections, we still change and grow from our experience.
Maybe that’s why I love best those objects that let me create. I make something new, where nothing was before, and in the act, I change, too.
An object isn’t just an object: It’s a portal to something new.
Cathy Tea's SimLit Anthology 