Haven’t really said anything about Blygger publicly, as I’ve been noodling a fun extension of it for the last day. Here’s what I’m thinking.

In Hesse’s novel, The Glass Bead Game is about weaving together disparate ideas into beautiful constructs. A monastic order is built around it. I’m thinking that such a game could use Blygger’s transclusion and pin mechanics to do something similar.

Person A posts a fragment. Person B replies with a fragment that complements or extends or refutes the ideas. Person B responds. This back and forth goes on, in a rapid flurry, and the aim for both is to play a beautiful game of intellectual exchange.

An example:

1 · Maya (opening bead) A fugue states a theme, then states it again over itself, and the second statement changes what the first one meant.

2 · Jonah → builds on 1 Paths across a lawn work the same way. The first walker is a guess; the hundredth is a road.

3 · Maya → builds on 2 Desire lines are votes cast with feet. Cities that pave them end up with the most honest maps.

4 · Jonah → builds on 1 Oral poets didn’t store poems; they re-made them. Each recitation was the poem, reshaped to fit the room.

5 · Maya → builds on 4 So an edit isn’t a betrayal of the original. It’s the next performance.

6 · Jonah → builds on 3 The honest map has a blind spot: it records where people went, never where they wanted to go but couldn’t.

7 · Maya → builds on 2 + 4 (synthesis) A path and a poem are both made by passing through. Neither exists between uses; both stay alive by being travelled.

8 · Jonah → builds on 6 + 7 (synthesis) Then pinning is paving. It stops the path wandering, which saves it and ends it at once.

This happened natively and organically on Twitter where you’d have an exchange between two people kick off. It could be the organising mechanic for Blygger. Everyone brings their fragments and the aim is to play beautiful games with one another.

But it’s the elevation to a key event that differentiates it. It’s not adversarial debate, or passive commentary or sub-tweeting; it’s more like Johnstone-style, carnival-time improv. And it’s the whole point, not a happy accident.