I watched Zach Gage’s talk from PRACTICE 2014, Designing for Problem-Solvers, today, and it really knocked my socks off. Jack: I think this video might be very helpful to you regarding playgrounds! It’s extremely good. I cannot overstate how much I love it.
The key with these goals is that all of these things are in service of improving your Pac-Man skills. If you do any of [your own goals*], eventually you will teach yourself how to play Pac-Man, and you will be good at Pac-Man.
[23:26, Zach Gage, above video]
* Crucially, prior to this quote Gage describes a multitude of possible goals someone might tend to invent when presented with Pac-Man, e.g. “What happens when I eat all the dots?” or “Can I eat one of those big glowing dots?” or “Can I eat four ghosts in one go?”
Thinking about Pac-Man as a sandbox, you can see that there are a lot of weird little goals that you can invent for yourself, and that acting in pursuit of these weird little goals will generally feed into a coherent fabric of ‘being a better Pac-Man player’. It’s not a sandbox of disconnected ideas, but a nonlinear sequence of self-directed experiments that all lead to a greater understanding of the whole.
I’ve often been at a loss for how to design a good playground, and this has knocked some sense into me, given me a clear structural goal to aim for. Although I’d like to take a moment to say that I might not necessarily have the goal of ‘everything in this sandbox will make me a better player of this game’. It is an extremely good starting point, but it’s interesting to think about other types of experiential coherency:
Will everything I try in this sandbox bring me to a greater understanding of some thematic concern?
Will every pondering I have of a difficult line of this poem present me with some new little piece of the puzzle?
To use the language I’ve been developing in this letter: the meaning playgrounds could use more structure, to help us be an active reader and fill in the gaps left by the metaphors. Sure, you can fill them in with whatever you want, in a way that fits with the little structure that is there, and you can satisfy yourself, and that is good. But it lacks conviction, or a strength of connection with someone/something – I dunno it lacks something.
Jack (Recognizing Play)
The value of a constrained play-space, in this case by contrast we have Gris’ highly unconstrained meaning-play-space, does not come from there being more or less constraint.
It comes, explicitly, from DESIGN. Constraints are put into place, and affordances are added!, in order to make undirected play more often fruitful and meaningful to a wanderer — regarding the thing which we’ve brought them here to play with, whatever that is.
I find it wildly exciting to have stumbled upon Zach’s talk about self-directed model-formative goals in — effectively — designed playgrounds, and to then have you (Jack) connect playgrounds to play to meaning play on the same day! Today, right now, it feels like everything can use the same language: everything can be a beautiful joyful playground, a problem-space, a toy. And if they can be, then why shouldn’t they be?
<3, droqen.
NOPE!!! droqen from the future here to say, please read the very important follow-up to the letter you just read ("playgrounds can be designed!"), entitled "playgrounds cannot be designed!" thank you.