Recognizing Play

Lately I have been thinking about play, in a general sense. The various ways it manifests in life and games, and my relationship to it as an activity. Our recent discussion on responsibility helped me recognize the degree to which I wasn’t taking responsibility for my own engagement with play, which was enlightening, and a bit upsetting. So I have been scrutinizing my relationship to it, and it has been productive, in a good way…

I was recommended this podcast episode recently, where Ezra Klein interviews Jeff Tweedy about his creative process. Ezra Klein is kind of like me in a way: much more familiar with truths in logical, didactic forms than the kind you see in poetic forms – he is a bit mystified by poetics, though he can still appreciate them intimately, and is newly intent on figuring out how to express them himself, for his own sake. For me, this whole Haiku Games idea is kind of a project wherein I can convert my logical understanding of puzzle games, and the play of problem solving, and teaching, and the play of logic, illusions, mathematics, and forms – into an understanding of a less rigorous play, in poetics and meaning, which it seems to me can transport an appreciation of everyday life a bit easier than the clinical beauty of logic and mathematics, or at least in a different way that I seem to like. And it seems like understanding my relationship to other kinds of play is key to making this transition, to learning this new skill.

In the podcast, Tweedy talks about using ‘word ladders’ to explore word associations and mine for ideas; he makes a list of verbs related to a subject (he uses the example of ‘baseball’), and makes a second list of words he finds randomly in a book, or somewhere else. Then he starts pairing up words from each list, and just considers them. “OK, how is the star spitting? How did I slide into love?” What do these seemingly incompatible words have to do with each other? What do they suggest? He plays with them (he uses that word), and their meanings, as a way of finding ideas he might not have considered otherwise, ideas that delight him, that he wants to use in a song.

On reading as a source of inspiration (both fiction and nonfiction), Tweedy describes his frequent experience of “skimming over dozens of pages, really only entertaining my own thoughts” – playing with the ideas presented in the book more than seriously attempting to comprehend and internalize them. The book becomes a jumping-off point, a source of play, to discover new ideas. Some of those new ideas are from the ideas as presented, straight, but many are from the wandering he does in response to them. Mer brought up a great quote of Gaston Bachelard, which she summarized as:

… this idea of the reader lifting the eyes of the reading to daydream about some new or old thought that the book had triggered.

Mer – Dripping Self Through the Plotholes

It’s that same activity of spring-boarding off of something to explore your own thoughts, to play in your head and contemplate your own self and understanding, in new ways. I find that this is my main activity when I read haiku, and it happens occasionally with prose too, though I think less for me than Tweedy.

In fact, I think I enjoy art, any art, the most when it is helping me into this kind of play. Droqen linked to the article about John Ashbury’s ‘difficult’ poetry (in Difficult Poetry), which talks about how his poems are so obtuse and elusive that even Ashbury himself can’t articulate what they are about. They are the ideas in their purest form, presented in words as best as he could manage. They are their own explanation. To find meaning in it, the article’s author talks us through his own attempts to string together the impressions that one of Ashbury’s poems gives him, his attempts to play with the ideas as presented, and ultimately accept his own musings as the point of it all (as the poem even seems to suggest). It’s not a puzzle, there is no right answer. And I think this is true of all my favorite art. It is good if it gets me thinking interesting things, if it gets me playing. If the work helps lots of different people to play, wow its really good. The art is a space to play in. This does get forgotten, perverted, and abused in the art world, unfortunately. But finding satisfaction in your own ability to play with a work of art is, I think, the best way to engage with it all. I like the Ashbury article as a nice microcosm of that idea.

Another unusual source of play I have been contemplating recently is: Memory Palaces, and more generally their related memory techniques. (I read the book Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly – an easy and fascinating read if you are interested in the topic.) A Memory Palace is a place to store memories, any set of data that you’d like to remember. You establish a path through some space you are familiar with – your house, your neighborhood, a nearby park, any path you might walk along – and note a series locations along that path. Your front door, the bench in the entryway, the coat closet … your couch, the lamp beside it, and etc. This gives you a list of places/things, located in space, positioned relative to each other, in an order than you can easily recall due to your intimate familiarity with the space.
This path is a memory palace, and you can store any ordered collection of data you’d like to remember in it. To do so, you go down the path, and in each location you imagine a scene involving something that will remind you of the data you want to remember. (Curiously, the more depraved and wild the scene, the more emotionally charged it is, the better we remember it.) So as you construct your memory palace for a particular data set, you are repeatedly coming up with creative images in your mind’s eye involving a myriad of unrelated subjects. It’s a lot like Jeff Tweedy’s Word Ladders, isn’t it? Entertaining (or: playing with) a pair of ideas, trying to construct a relationship between them, a story, that makes them stick together, that delights you, in a bizarre way.

There are dozens of variations of this kind of technique, some going back to early human history, each handling different kinds of data better or worse than the others. A good way to remember dates, or numbers, is to associate each digit, or a pair of digits, with a character (in some manner such that you can remember the association). To associate a number with a location in your memory palace, you include the character in your scene. Then when you recall the scene, which is easy to do, you can decode the number you wanted from it. Another example: to remember a shopping list, associate an animal with each letter in the alphabet, each interacting with the next, (ahead of time, you reuse these animals for different lists, like you can reuse your number map, or your memory palaces), and then go through the letters, pairing each animal with the next item on your list. I have done this myself, and remembered a couple grocery lists, and it so curious how well it works, and how fun the images you end up making are.

There are more creative encodings of information that allow for more expressive images to be made – but the common action in them all is taking some unrelated concepts from established sets, and constructing a small, lively scene that ties them together, in whatever way satisfies you and helps you remember it. It’s an incredibly playful activity, and surprisingly practical at the same time. Lynne Kelly mentions in her book the fact that she occasionally breaks out laughing while she is committing something new to memory – and it makes sense to me how that could happen, and how it is even beneficial; that kind of strong reaction to an image is exactly what will make it stick out in your memory.

There is also something to be said about the way that memory palaces leverage our spacial intuitions, in maybe a similar way that gamefeel leverages our physical intuitions. (Other places to establish a sequence/path to store memories in is are stories, songs, or dances – all other areas we have seemingly innate intuitions about: time sequenced events & chains of cause and effect, rhythms & melodies, physical movements). Practicing these techniques and their playful activities help us learn things, as Lynne Kelly also describes in the book – they ‘learn well’ the same way that gamefeel games ‘learn well’. But this is all a bit adjacent to the ‘play’ thread I have going, so lets move on.

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Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

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… a poem revels in its own form more often than not, even invents its own form and expects the reader to play along, crucially an act which requires, first, learning how to play along.

Droqen – Difficult Poetry

For a while I thought this was a unique challenge of games, the rigorous rules/logic/controls/strategies you have to learn to actually play them, to experience the content, to advance the story, etc. And I thought it helped explain why so many games were so focused on the form of these rules, and playing within these forms – especially in my genres of choice: puzzle games and exploration games. In contrast, I thought, visual or literary arts can just present playful imagery to you and that’s it, you are experiencing it. In games you have to at least get past the tutorial. But – yeah. Droqen’s quote. I was never totally convinced by this thought I had. All art presents some solid structure for you to bounce off of, or hold on to, while you dream within the rest of its soft spaces, the in between. And it can help you out, give you a tutorial (the movie Tampopo does this really well). Or it can be ‘difficult’, like Ashbury’s poetry, where it’s not obvious where the solid structures are, and you need to establish some experience playing in those kinds of spaces for yourself, somehow, somewhere, before you can start to dream in them.

a game you can live inside of, that you love to inhabit

Droqen – Whole Grain Decisions

There is a matter of comfort, and familiarity, in these different play spaces we encounter, and the structures they use. Within different mediums, genres get developed. Boundaries get pushed at from within the genres, as people try to grow them into new play spaces. But between all the mediums, when I look at the parts I like, I see a variety of the same forms of play, existing across mediums, across genres. All different ‘activities’ where you are given a little bit of structure, and a lot of space to play in, to be playful.

I want to think of these works, and their structures, as Playgrounds.

I was playing a variant of Banangrams recently: each player has some tiles (they each have a letter on them), players take turns adding a word to the single grid in the middle, and the only constraint is that each crossing word has to be related to each other. While playing, I again recognized the ‘word ladder’ activity. My tiles, combined with the existing grid, can make a set of words. There is another set of words in the grid. Each turn my task is to (1) find what words I can make, a more form-based mode of play, and (2) find associations between the words available, that meet my own (and the other players’) satisfaction. Some associations will be obvious and plain, and others may be ‘a stretch’. But I really liked making those stretches – wandering through association space to find surprising connections. And of course both of these tasks are parts of what we call ‘wordplay‘.

Many NYT-style crossword clues lean into wordplay. Cryptic crossword clues are all wordplay. Scrabble doesn’t have the associative play, but has lots of anagram play. Paperback by Tim Fowers also has a form of word-construction play, and has optional challenges that incorporate the associative play (where you have to play words that are on-theme for some theme). They are all different games, different playgrounds that help you play with words. It all seems a bit obvious as I write this, but focusing on the play that the playgrounds enable is I think a new perspective for me, and its apparent universality across experiences is striking (and maybe a little less obvious). Games (or arts) aren’t about the ‘decisions’ we make while playing, but the spaces we inhabit, the play we do there, and the directions they lead us. I feel like the ‘series of decisions’ view on games is a distraction. I don’t care about the decisions, or how much weight we can simulate them to have. I care about the spaces I am making decisions in, and what it feels like to playfully probe that space.

Paradise was recently talking about physical (or physically simulated) spaces that we can play in – move around in them in different ways and discover curious ways to move through the space. Like Mirror’s Edge but if it was just a skate park, instead of a story. Basically, just turning the game into a straight playground, with nothing added. Games have done very well at finding fun (simulated) physical spaces to move around in, and building incentive structures around them that keep you playing in the space (story, challenges, etc). We don’t need these incentive structures, but they act as promises that it is worth our time to continue exploring – they are validation that we should continue to play. They are the games taking responsibility in the sense we have been discussing, but that promise is maybe an additional and interesting part of it.

Anyway my point here is that there are lots of these modes of play, and lots more playgrounds that can be build around them, with different structures and toys to help guide us to different aspects of the play space.

some name I came up with	playgrounds	the play
word play	word games, some poetry	turn words into other words, double meanings, hidden associations
meaning play	word ladders, “art”, most all media	hidden associations, daydreaming
planning / strategy play	puzzles, competitive games, whodunits	what would happen if? can I preempt that?
physical play	performing, platforming, shooters, skate park, GAMEFEEL	master a skill, develop routines through experimentation
learning play	puzzles, exploration, mystery	explore a system, poke at it, see what happens
improvised play	playing ‘pretend’, improv	making up rules on the fly, honoring them and seeing how they play out

I’m sure there are more of these. But they are all very similar in their play – there is some space you poke around in, exploring connections, finding walls, learning shortcuts that exists…

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Mer brought up Anna Anthropy’s critique of Gris:

… where she said Gris talks about sadness and depression so metaphorically that it loses its meaning. But I think that’s just because it is like poetry. Not that far from your games Droq, or Wombat’s haha. Always Down … the message behind it is very sad, and that is also conveyed through the mechanics, but it requires an active reading to get it. Just like a poem does.

Mer – Musicality of games

It’s been a while since I played Gris, and I don’t remember engaging with the metaphors much, but I think mostly agree with Anna Anthropy… and I mostly agree with Mer too…

I agree, as Anthropy said, that ‘metaphors [in games] often feel trite and insubstantial’. In their extreme abstraction, the impact and meaning gets lost, and more specificity would do a lot to help. 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. It feels timid, and that is … distracting, at the very least.

It reminds me of the way Droqen expressed regret with his own oblique attempts at ‘meaning’ in the past:

The poetry in Starseed Pilgrim is scattered and hidden in a way that marries perfectly with my attitude at the time and my attitude for the next several years:
“What I’m saying isn’t important or real enough to communicate directly, so I’ll hide it behind layers of obscurity until nobody notices what I really meant, and I can forget it ever existed in the first place.”

I think we as readers/players can pick up on this a bit, and without that tangible promise, we (as lazy adults) think we have better things to spend our precious time on, and disengage. Maybe? If the metaphor is too timid, is it still a matter of responsibility that we feel there is nothing to engage with? Is a proper ‘antagonist’ (as Cortázar calls it, in the quote in Musicality of games) – one that will challenge us to look outside of ourselves – just another form of the art taking responsibility? I think I am still a bit confused where I want to be on this responsibility spectrum, actually. But it is curious to consider here, at least.

Either way, I also think that Anna’s proposal – to have a specific story (or idea) to attach meaning too – can add conviction, tangibility, and make it easier to connect with, without losing out on the poetics. With a specific story, you may not relate directly to the story, but you can map it to an equivalently tangible experience of your own. or perhaps the emotional immediacy of the work brings it up for you involuntarily (hence the need for caution warnings). And whats more, you have mapped your experience to a new experience, one you maybe could not have had (due to your circumstance/personality/location/etc), and there is something wonderful about the way art allows these feelings to feel shared. This kind of specificity is different from the ‘difficult’ poetry of Ashbury that Droqen mentioned, but so is the kind of metaphors in games that Anthropy is talking about (Ashbury is specific in his ambiguity, in a way). But anyway, the main thing I guess is that it is an interesting and different structure artists can utilize, and I agree it might be more interesting than the limp abstractions games often seem to use.

And yet, I like all the quotes from Cortázar and Bachelard, the idea of the active reader, and leaving space for the reader to look up from the page while reading, to entertain their own thoughts.

I think you first need to immerse someone, but in an incomplete world, with enough holes so they can emerse through them.

Mer – Dripping self through the plotholes

I think that Gris, and many others, fail to immerse into the metaphorical space. They are all holes. And sure, you can still emerse through them. But in a way, they might as well not even be there. There is a sweet spot in the middle, I think, where there is enough stuff to bounce off of but still enough space to wander in between.

Gris has a fun physical playground, with a beautiful art style that is easy to parse, but the metaphorical playground feels lacking – just a lonely swing in the middle of a sandy patch of ground. You can have fun there, but you can’t help thinking there is room for more. (I suppose you can debate about the good of that urge, haha.) I played Always Down since Mer mentioned it, and I think I feel the same way about it. But let’s talk about some other game playgrounds I did have fun in.

I really enjoyed ‘how to be born‘. It’s a bizarre and mysterious game, but has a specificity and vigor that is lacking in Gris or Always Down. Figuring out how the game works in the beginning is fun, I am at home in the ‘learning play’. It’s cues were subtle, but there is so little going on that they might as well be screaming at you. I figured out what to do, and struggled a bit, it is surprisingly awkward. And then finally got it, and the game switches you to this ridiculous scene that is so full of energy, with slow text extolling how great it is to be born, congratulations, etc. It is so much more inviting to think about, to play with the associations and feelings you are having. How stupid the challenge was, and yet how happy I was to have pulled it off, and now the game is demanding you treat that all as ‘being born’ (something specific, not just something ‘good’), and it’s just a bizarre but fascinating word ladder for you to play, with some real tangible experience and visuals and music to bounce off of while you do. It is specific, but through its strangeness, not specific at all. I’m not sure I can come up with a definite analogy that ‘fits’ the same way I can come up with something specific that ‘fits’ into the metaphors of Gris or Always Down, but I think I prefer that, actually. It gives it more life, and I can get more from it over time, while it sits in my brain, ever-morphing in strange ways.

Ynglet is a really wonderful physical playground, and just exudes playfulness from every direction. There is structure, goals, ‘platforms’, but you are also free to just bounce around. With the way that check-pointing works, and the seamless way you reset by ‘sticking’ into the checkpoint ‘platform’ after falling long enough, the game gives you an amazing feeling of safety to wander, and it is fun. But everything else is just pushing on this playfulness too: there is a variety of platforms that and briefly encountered, some that affect the physics, some that are just visually or audibly playful. The procedural synth soundtrack is overly complex and made just for the joy of making it. The doodle graphics are clear and cozy, friendly creatures are everywhere. It is wonderfully playful in every way, and excellently crafted as a physical playground.

The playfulness of Ynglet’s playground reminds me of Keita Takahashi’s games, and it understandably they are frequently referred to as ‘playgrounds’. But I am also reminded more literally his playful playground designs (a small bit seen here), and his appreciation of playful playgrounds. I like the idea that the playground itself should be playful, playing along with you. Maybe that relates to my desire for Gris to have more structure, for it to participate a little bit too.

Ordinary slide pic.twitter.com/a2eSwIW83t

— 高橋慶太 (@KeitaTakahash) January 28, 2017

OK, lots of words going on here. I wanted to explain it all in detail, apparently a lot of thinking and discussion has happened since I last wrote over a month ago. And maybe I went into too much detail, but I have enjoyed having these thoughts, and writing them down to share, and they have helped me think about what it is I want from Haiku Games, what the Games in Haiku Games is there for, and what the Haiku part is there for too. I think.

I want to make playgrounds. and the question now is: how do I design them? Jeff tweedy talks about play as essential to the creative process (and even the business process). That it is easier to get work done when you approach it as play. Basically when you are taking chances for their own sake and seeing what happens, and learning from them, and enjoying the process. It is also curious how it is an essential, useful part of an active memory (re: memory techniques). Ynglet and Keita Takahashi’s works seem to also see output as a result of play, and that the work should be a participant in the play. In general, it seems like an important part to the creative process, and one that I have been a bit shy about I think, especially in these playgrounds that are not the learning play, which I was able to tap into with my puzzle design excursions.

So, lately I have been focusing on figuring out how to let myself play, to take responsibility for my own playtime, and where I do it. It is one of the reasons I am interested in practicing these memory techniques (besides also wanting a better memory in generally). Making these micro-games for Paradise Train Jam is another space for me to practice playing. With this play perspective, I can finally let myself play with gamedev, and not care that the results don’t perfectly capture my intention, or that they don’t reveal some deep inner truth of mine. I can just play, and conveniently it is productive. It’s something everyone says, and something I knew, but still it has been difficult to internalize.

Is that it? Maybe as adults we need… validation?

Mer – Responsible childs and lazy adults

Validation! Yes I think that has been a big blocker of ‘adult play’ for me. Achievements can validate. Friends can validate. A job can validate. But there is an extra value in being able to validate yourself, a self esteem, that I haven’t given myself in a while, but am starting to again.

And now I wonder: if Jeff Tweedy’s word ladders help with the wordplay, or association play, what is a similar technique for the other play modes? One with ‘game’ elements? Maybe in the physical play space? What does that look like? Hopefully I will better understand with practice.

I like the playful leap in my lizard micro-game (play here), of ‘lizard pushups being the force that moves the sun across the sky’. And though it is a maybe simple first step, it’s a poetic mechanic. A bit strange, a challenge for the player, some structure to play off of in that associative space. Why does the lizard control the sun? How would I explain that? (emersion!) (whole grain decisions!) It doesn’t matter much what the designer had in mind (though I do have my own answer). It’s not a puzzle. But it is (starting to be) specific, and the gamefeel of it all helps communicate it, gives weight to the actions I want to give weight to, though it could still be better. It’s maybe not much more specific that the metaphors in Gris, but it is a bigger portion of the game at least, and I hope to broaden it with more practice too.

I have been stuck thinking about games in a didactic nature for a long time, and it made it hard to think about these looser designs. Looking at lizard game under this playground lens, and after watching a couple classic talks on juice, I think there are some things I would do differently. I would make it easier to do something before you know how the game controls. You should do more than bob slightly and think ‘oh weirdly sometimes I can bob more but not sure why yet’. It should be immediately something, but maybe not anything particularly interesting. Then there should be a playground of movement interactions that you can do, maybe pushups only needs to be one of a few. So you have a physical space to play in while you learn what the game is, and how things work. Then you wander around the mechanic space, looking for more interactions, playing the game, and you find that the pushups are actually turning the sun, making the world turn. Maybe after the first day it should zoom out to a view of the whole earth, and you can see the solar system stop when it reaches dawn, and it zooms back in to lizard as you are give control again. But my main takeaway is having that immediate, direct control, and a physical playground to bounce around in while you learn how the rest of the game is wired up, that the sun is connected to pushups, and whatever the other poetic structures are.

The leap is a single playful move with the core idea, that these pushups are all important, for the lizard, and the world. I could continue to riff on that, play with it, suggest to the player there are more ways to take this, get their dream ball rolling. But I think Haiku do focus on just the one example – and there is something nice about that too.

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‘Learning play’ seems to be my comfort playground, and I want to use it as a form to establish structure for a poetic association-playground, where I can play with everyday ideas and thoughts. It is like the ‘reading’ part of a haiku. Figure out what it is saying, literally, and then dream in the holes it has left unfilled.

But I am still left with a nagging question: is there any reason to use ‘learning play’ as my structure? Why have the ‘game’ part at all? I could just write haiku. But I like the way games communicate their structure, that design problem fascinates me. I suppose that is a good enough reason. I want to explore how that works, more than I want to explore how to string words together and the different ways they leave impressions on us.

Or now I have this other question: do I want to make systematic creative playgrounds – do I want to systematize the associative playground? Like Increpare’s ‘Place Animals On The Grid‘, perhaps? Sets of stamps players can place in a scene, however they like? Or even something more explicit? Painting programs? Design tools? I think my answer is: no. I don’t want to systematize that, I want to systematize the learning play, and have it leave you with some fun ideas to ponder.

Phew, that’s the end. A good summary of my last ~2 months thought, in a way. Curious to hear what you all think.

-Jack

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P.S. – a few unsorted thoughts and questions that I wanted to leave in, but they had no other place:

• How do you go from unrefined, whole grain sources (process, ideas, art, etc) to whole grain decisions (ones which include the person and their world?) Is it automatic?
• It is interesting to relate the Cortázar quote with the ‘Abusive Games‘ paper – similar worries about passivity, similarly combative language: ‘antagonist’ vs ‘abusive’.
• Ian Bogost’s ‘Play Everything’ is another valuable reference on this play-centered viewpoint. I read it years ago, and probably it had something to do with the way these thoughts crystalized here. And parts of it are similar to the way Jeff Tweedy approaches ‘work’ as ‘play’, but it has some other good insights too. Anyway.