Supernal Presence

When you use a construct often enough you find that you need a name for it. Between my roommates and I whenever the real world is described in terms of game mechanics that's "The Grand Metaphor." I use it a lot, but when I use it in my blog I have to use it in reverse.

This is what brings me to the idea of Supernal Presence. In the game Mage: The Awakening, there is the shadow realm, a mirror of the world experienced by normal people, or "Sleepers," which is impacted by the spiritual and emotional presence of items in the normal world. One of the examples of this is that an old church will persist in the shadow realm even after it's been sold, bulldozed, and made into a gas station. This is because peoples faith in the church, their hopes and fears and emotions made that more real in the spirit world then anything that happened at the gas station. I don't know what the word for this effect in the current version of the game is, but in the old version, Mage: The Ascension, it was known as Supernal Presence.

So I went through all that to talk about object association as it relates to habituation.

Wow, this would've sounded a lot smarter if I'd just opened with the phrase "object association as it relates to habituation." That's got a good professional psychologist ring to it.

Anyway, because I am wired into the grand metaphor when I was thinking about object association relating to habituation I immediately thought about supernal presence. I can uninstall all the games from my computer, I can make the desktop much less stimulating, but this will never be my work desk because the supernal presence of me sitting at my computer is recreation. When I'm here I'm either playing a game, or watching pirated TV. The supernal presence of the computer is about play, not work.

Now I just need to find a place to make about work.