I was looking for a decent definition of “gaming the system” for my own interest. I was wondering wether people’s acceptance of mail fraud has to do with their sense of ownership of their society’s infrastructure and how that relates to their acceptance of system-gaming by people in positions of minor power. Anyway.

As usual, when looking for decent definition of any reasonably geeky terminology, I turned to the Jargon File. I admit, I have wasted hours trolling through the jargon file (‘bucky bits’ leads to ‘space cadet keyboard’ leads to ‘cokebottle’ leads to ‘bang’ leads to ‘bangpath’ and on and on). But I couldn’t remember where it was located, so I googled it and discovered something I didn’t know: it’s maintained by none other than Eric S Raymond.

Turns out Mr. Raymond has a website (I know I should have been able to guess that) and it’s located at www.catb.org/~esr. It’s quite a site. In addition to pictures of ESR dressed like James Bond and shooting guns, it also has a lot of really interesting material.

It seems (just for instance) that Mr. Raymond is proposing that the the form of the ‘glider’ from the game of life be adopted by the hacker community as their symbol. Hacker in this case meaning “a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary”, or more generally “one who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations”, as opposed to “a malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around”. Definitions used here are of course from the Jargon File.

I think using the glider is a neat idea. It’s kind of visually dull I suppose… not cool like a penguin. But still. Probably I mostly like it because I knew what the hell “the glider from the game of life” meant when I read it in a google precis. The game of life is an old chaos-programming tool/pastime that emerged in the early 70s and was a big deal with early systems theorists and AI coders. I played it once on a big screen in the Ontario Science Centre when I was too young to grok it, but I finally had the experience explained to me when I came across a longish reference to it in Complexity. So I’m all for the use of the gliders, cause it means I can get one of the old hacker’s in-jokes.

Also on the site is the text of How To Become A Hacker and A Brief History of Hackerdom which are probably seminal reading if you find yourself somehow drawn again and again to the paradoxes and fascinating granularities of geek culture. Like, um, me.

And there is of course, The Cathedral and the Bazaar which may be the closest thing the open source movement has got to a manifesto, and which Bruce Sterling isn’t very impressed by.

So there is quite a lot of good content at that website. Whatever else you can say about him, ESR is an interesting guy with interesting ideas. I think I like him, ego and all. And he has a cool self-imposed job title: observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture. I want to be an observer-participant anthropolgist now. Especially since I’m re-reading The Telling, which I got for Christmas.

The jargon file does not, however, have a definition for “gaming the system”. Useless.