Your comment makes me think how deeply embedded in western culture is the idea of competition. (This is not a criticism of you, by the way, just an observation about the brackets game you describe.)

I can’t imagine ever playing a game based on asking who wins when:

something VERSUS something else.

Why not, instead, ask what is:

something AND something else

or what is:

child of something and something else

etc.

This reminds me…
When I worked at a restaurant while applying to graduate school, we would play a game we called Brackets. Here how it goes:
1. Someone would draw up a set of blank tournament brackets, like they ones they use in college basketball (GO GATORS!)
2. We’d fill the brackets in with binaries. The binaries weren’t necessarily opposites, and they we’re necessarily interchangeables, either. Whales vs. Dolphins works. Or Cunning vs. Generosity of Spirit. Or Groucho Marx vs. Karl Marx. Or, since it’s a thing now, Eggers vs. Alda.
3. We’d debate until we decided which of the bracket won. Let’s day that Whales, Generosity of Spirit, Groucho Marx, and Alda advanced on the the next round
4. Now it’s Whales vs. Generosity of Spirit and Groucho vs. Alan…
5. And so on… until there is only one winner.

I don’t think we made this game up… My sense is that the idea was bubbling around among a lot of different people. There’s this book that came after I moved to Cambridge. I haven’t read or even seen it in person, but it looks like it tries to turn Brackets into utilitarian exercise. Less fun.

I feel like this relates the mapping game because they both rely on the unspoken cultural feel we have about things… I can’t explain why both Eggers and West Wing are so very NPR anymore than I can why whales beats out generosity of spirit. Brackets can only be played collectively, and in some ways it, too, maps a cultures.

Speaking of cultural maps, George Maciunas (founder of the fluxists, SoHo loft developer and architect) was incredibly infatuated with mapping and made many maps and chronologies of the avant guard and the fluxists and art history in general. They stand as art works in and of themselves.

I think artists make these culture maps mentally. Kanye uses a Japanese graphic artist for his album covers; Japanese pop culture features robots; Daft Punk exclusively appear in public dressed as… robots. Ok, that’s probably a gross oversimplification, but these culture maps exist. I think your idea for a website that creates, catalogs and archives them would be brilliant. I wonder if the guys at PSFK don’t already do this.

PS – BART? That’s a surprising image to see here!