About the Recording

Why the Recording?

When I started Play as Being, almost three years ago, I had to come up
with ways to post *something* about the sessions, and without having
much time to think about it, I just choose what felt right at that moment.

For example, during the very first day, April 1, 2008, in the morning
I was trying to just give a little summary, but already by the evening
I had concluded that it would be easier and also more fair to just put
on the web what everybody had said, for total disclosure, so that anyone
could see for themselves what had been discussed and how. At the same
time, I did include some comments, mostly to provide a bit of narrative
to what otherwise would be just a long stream of dialogue. -Pema

Useful Background

I started Play as Being because I had been exploring the nature
of reality in whatever way I could (in science, philosophy, spiritual
traditions, etc) for almost forty years, and I was looking for others
to explore/play/think/work together with. Before PaB I had founded
the Kira Institute in 1997, with Stim and a few others: from 1998 to
2002 we organized yearly RL 2-week summer schools for graduate students
in Amherst, MA, and starting in 2003 I organized a "yamaneko" email
group with occasional RL meetings in Princeton, seeing the advantage
of email to provide more continuity than one-shot yearly meetings.

In 2006, Stim and I started to look at web-based forms of attracting
a broader group of explorers, beyond academia, starting in 2006 (see
http://www.waysofknowing.net). In 2007 I discovered virtual worlds,
and quickly I started Kira-like activities first in Videoranch, and
then in Qwaq (now called Teleplace). So by the time I started PaB,
there was a continuity of outreach in the form of joint explorations,
stretching back a couple decades (before Kira I had tried a number of
other activities in the earlier 1990s, which were more short-lived).
-- Pema
 

The Main Reason:

The main reason to collect chat logs on our wiki is to share our
explorations with like-minded people anywhere in the world, whether
in SL or not. PaB is not related to any academic or commercial research
project.  However, the data published here are free, and available for
anyone for their own use, as long as they include a reference to the PaB
wiki. -- Pema (Piet Hut in RL)