If the premier article is indicative of things to come Joshuah 
Bearman's new video game column for the LA Weekly and Village Voice is going to be a must read. In the June 24 article Pass the Paddles: The Moralgorithm, Bearman talks about NBA Live's seeming ability to look beyond the stats and apply momentum, team chemistry and flow to the virtual game of basketball.
The story bandies about ideas like the concept of Zen's mushin and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi s Flow as it looks at how a game transcends its program to combine the lesser parts into a greater whole, creating moments that in NBA Live are viewed as glitches, but in the real NBA become moments of sport's history.
A glitch? Perhaps. Over time, Batty says, the programmers have fixed most real glitches in the game. It could also be that those improbable pyrotechnics are accidentally reflecting that fundamental intangibility in real basketball. What are the flashes of mushin in sports if not human glitches momentary suspensions of reality? Maybe spontaneous supernatural power is not just a digital artifact. Afer all, wasn t Dr. J s famous floating reverse adjusted no-look layup in the 1980 finals an error of some kind, a brief, one-in-a-million window into the realm of impossibility?
Pass the Paddles: The Moralgorithm [LA Weekly]




















