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This is part 2 of our interview with the remarkable Phoenix Quinn. Today he shares his views on writing and community in eLife and RL.

You have inspired many of us to look at the game differently, and not a few of us to try to write as well as you. What players have similarly inspired you? What RL people have you drawn from?

Before I lapsed into a period of dull rhetorical Marxism, and then re-emerged from that as a COBOL programmer for corporate American capitalism, I once thought I'd become either a poet or a novelist. Obviously, that was when I was a teenager.

Since then I've largely failed at creative writing. I did do a nice denunciation of a Cardinal that was fairly well-received. It was delivered on the steps of the Holy Cross Cathedral on June 16th, 1990. That was many years before the child abuse scandal broke. I was denouncing him for ignoring the AIDS crisis, for interfering in women’s health issues and for generally being a pain in the ass, so to speak, to the gay and lesbian community.



I fancied it my Martin Luther moment. I managed to reach such sufficiently high rhetorical peaks that old Italian ladies gave me the evil eye on the T for weeks afterwards. (It turned out that the Catholic League or some shit had featured bits of my lovely and carefully-crafted remarks in one of their hate-filled training videos or something. God knows. On the other hand, I also had people at work who I barely knew walk up to me and shake my hand. It was weird. Words are weird. And wonderful.)

But I digress.

In eRep, I've loved all writing that is clever, well-constructed, thoughtful, original and/or funny. Sometimes this has been in offline IRC sessions and SFP forums, sometimes in articles. I've enjoyed so many eRep writers and thinkers; it would be impossible to name them all. Emerick was one of my all-time favorites. He was a complete loon, of course, and I enjoyed denouncing him from time to time. But his writing was almost always interesting and sometimes even poetic.

As far as RL influences, I would like to take this opportunity to point out that almost everything I have ever written in eRep -- not only the Philosophy Lessons, but much of the rest of it -- has been "found" and "re-purposed" material. That is, I take some bit of writing that I found in a book or a website or whatever and then put it through a PQ-ified eRep textual wringer to produce some kind of "literature" that seems like it might have actually emerged from within this strange netherworld of "e-dom". [Editor’s note: See PQ’s revelation about the Philosophy Lessons here.]



Some day, if I find the energy, I will put together a "Commentary on PQ" listing all of the various sources I've used. In some cases, I did note explicitly what text I was riffing on; in other cases I've left some pretty strong clues that a clever reader could pick up; in still others the "theft" fit into an eRep context so beautifully that I didn't feel a need to let anyone in on the joke. [Editor’s note: PQ did make an attempt at indexing some of his works in this earlier article.]


If there were any themes that I really have tried to get across, and which I hope may have helped a few players enjoy the game a bit or get something out of it, it would be the following:

* Pretty much the whole of "The Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord. eRepublik is like a spectacle within the spectacle -- a completely illusory and totally image-based story-line aimed at wasting your time through engagement in various types of "work". If players grasp the true nature of eRepublik, then they may also be able to see through the spectacularization of everyday life.

* Related to the above -- and the reason I've stayed with the Socialist Freedom Party for so long -- is that by playing the game not to "win" according to whatever idiocy Admin has dreamt up this week, but to "win" in the sense of "detouring" the game along the lines of a Gramscian intervention, we self-imagined revolutionaries and situationists can turn the "play", at least in some very small way, into "the thing". This was the genius of Osmany Ramon and I've always tried to come back to this theme in one way or another. The worst thing that could ever happen to the SFP, in my opinion, is for it to "succeed" solely within the confines of game mechanics.

And finally, I have endeavored from time to time to inject some basic Buddhist concepts into some of my writing and into my "e-political" activity as well. For several years while playing eRepublik I was studying the works of Chogyam Trungpa,the 11th Trungpa tulku and originator of the radically re-presented Shambhala vision of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. Founder of Naropa University and the Shambhala Press, Trungpa was provocative in the style of the famous Tibetan bodhisatva Milarepa. He drank, smoke, slept with his students, and was bad at keeping to a schedule. He also annoyed his hippie followers by telling them that smoking marijuana was bad for their spiritual progress.

Anyway, you can see echoes of the Shambhala analysis of neurosis based on the Five Buddha Families, for example, in some of my writing.

The Shambhala school, though it is very much in the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, borrows a bit from the Ch'an/Zen in the sense that compassion, which is so central to Buddhist practice, is understood not only as kindness and loving-kindness (metta and bodhicita) but also as a need in our practice to help people "wake up", that is, to see through illusions. Hopefully I've managed to capture a bit of that spirit in some of my ramblings and mind-twisters.



Along with other independent thinkers from around the eWorld, you were a part of the early alternative community known as the World Tribe. Would you tell our younger readers about this community and your role in it? How would the present state of the game affect such a community?

The World Tribe was initiated by Arjay Phoenician, a cool cat who wrote many earnest articles and encouraged eRep players to treat each other with respect and kindness.

Like so many players eventually do, Arjay had come to the conclusion that the meaningful part of the game world was the community -- the human interaction between the players -- rather than the rather bovine game mechanics or the even more obscure meta-mechanics that occupy some player's attention. He sought to create _something else_ that existing within the game world, but was also separate from it.



This was similar in some ways to various attempts at forming an "Internationale", which had been (and still is) a favorite recurring project of leftist / socialist / communist and anarcho-syndicalist parties, or some of the "Dioist" attempts at forming trans-national groups. But instead of mimicking a failed RL political project or following a quasi-religious story line, the World Tribe was more in the spirit of something like Burning Man.

It was about people doing creative things across national (and other) boundaries.

For my part, being something of a story-telling troubadour, I used the existence of this rather extraordinary group of friends to create a "travelling story". I told one part of a story and then others picked it up and carried it forward. What I remember about the story is that people really gave it some thought and wrote full chapters to the tale. It wasn't just one of those forum-based games. It was a real storyline. [editor’s note: Party 1 of this story A Gypsy Caravan]

[Editor’s note: Tomorrow we bring you the conclusion of this interview, with observations on the SFP and concluding remarks. Don’t miss it!]