In which we explore the impact of the World of Code on stories and games… and speculate about its resultant impact on current concepts of identity and even parallel universes!
I had a lot of fun with this one—and, I could very easily keep on having fun with it indefinitely… which I may well do (well, maybe not indefinitely!) in future episodes. Given my own very personal investment in the content of this episode, I was disappointed with my first draft and was actually hoping to re-shoot more of it—but there’s also a dynamism to this first engagement with the content and ideas here that turns out to be delicate enough that I thought better of disturbing it too much. So I restricted myself to tightening up the intro and fixing a minor historical error that I’d inadvertently introduced, and I’ve left the rest largely as-is, with the intention of returning to the conversation that I’ve started here and elaborating further on some of these thoughts and ideas in future. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it!
It’s story-time! In this first episode of a new arc that I’m going to entitle “WordPlay”, I tell the story of my weirdest, most intertextual essay ever and how it and Postmodernism and my studies of literary critical theory helped me to see the ultimate Truth of Orthodox Christianity.
In which we review the characteristics of the World of Code we’ve covered so far, add “data” into the mix, and examine – by applying this understanding to a single simple and personal experience of it – how understanding the World of Code and its limitations can help us maintain our humanity.
To exist and to interact with the world around it, computer code needs to be “embodied” in (of course) computers, and, despite its virtually infinite extensibility (at least in theory), the nature of code’s embodiment has a limiting and determinative effect that we need to understand if we are going to fully grasp the impact of computer code on the world around us.
What value can we find in video-games? My talk at Doxacon Seattle 2025 mines my experience as a gamer, focussing on Starflight, and as a Minecraft Server Administrator for theological and experiential insights.
In this introductory episode, we begin a second “season” of the Geek Orthodox podcast, “The World of Code”, with two new summaries of the first season: one generated by AI, the other by yours truly.
This guest-lecture at Simon Fraser University on Biblical intertextuality in fantasy and science fiction focuses on three excerpts from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (Gandalf’s fight with the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings), C.S. Lewis (Chapter 20 of Out of the Silent Planet), and John Wyndham (an excerpt from The Day of the Triffids). For those interested, the relevant excerpts are collected in this PDF.
The lecture, along with the subsequent Q&A, can also be seen on YouTube.
