Hi, droqen
I want to describe to you a kind of game that I like to play, and a kind of game that I want to play.
I like to play GAMEFEEL games. Games that give you intimate, direct control over a part of a system. Games that are designed to facilitate your exploration of the system, helping you find the interesting and fun things you can do in it. Games that are focused on this kind of experience, where every aspect of the design is meant to support the player in their exploration.
Platformers, kart racing, mysterious adventures, and the other usual suspects. I include puzzle games under the GAMEFEEL umbrella too, and other discrete, time-stepped games that focus on exploring and manipulating their state space. Really any game that carefully crafts the way it communicates its system so the player may learn it through play, through direct and intimate control of a piece of the system, so they can exploit it, dance with it, FEEL it.
I am very interested in the design of these games, the way they facilitate learning through play. I like learning things this way, and I like doing their dances. There is a beauty to the way these games work; an elegance in their function, in their complete dedication to emphasizing the satisfaction we feel when we are able to manipulate a device with grace.
But the more I play these games, and the more I understand how they work, the more I am left wanting – wanting for something more than the crystalline perfection of the design. I’ve learned this system, but now what? I can dance in it, play it like an instrument, and there is certainly a perennial joy to be found in that!
And yet, I am often dissatisfied – it feels a bit self-indulgent or something. Like this fantastic design for self-exploration and learning takes us part way towards something and then decides to just run in circles. Which, again, can be fun! and satisfying! But I can’t help feeling like there is room for something more – something that helps me understand ‘me’, and my place in the world.
I feel that GAMEFEEL has an untapped power to supply this something, in a uniquely satisfying and intimate way.
And so, I want to play HAIKU games. I want to discover beauty about the world – my world – through play. Beauty of a natural flavor, rather than the mathematical beauty you can find within systems themselves. I want the games to be brief, like HAIKU, and leave me with some space to find some meaning for myself. I want the games to have helped me learn something about me, in my world. I call them HAIKU games because I see myself engaging with these games and with HAIKU in similar ways. I interact with the medium and discover for myself a system that ties the individual pieces of the game (or poem) together. A system of natural beauty that comments on human experience, that feels at once personal and universal.
HAIKU is a kind of minimal form of text that can achieve this effect on me, the reader. They are constrained to be about this kind of beauty, using only a shortened structure of simple words. It seems these constraints allow for easier analysis, and that leaves me asking:
What is the minimal form of games that can do this?
What similarities does it have with haiku?
What can we learn from haiku, and the micro dynamics of this kind of poetic experience, in our quest to make games that satisfy us?
