In response to:

Designing without correctness

This is an interesting, um, example? specimen?

I have been leaning hard into ‘the death of the author’, in a lot of ways for my own mental health, to allow myself to engage with things on my own terms and feel comfortable and confident about my manner of engagement, and what I end up valuing from it. So when I see you say you had ‘misunderstood’ and ‘incorrectly interpreted’ Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, I think “don’t let someone else tell you what correct is!” Down with gatekeepers! Art is not a puzzle!

But at the same time, the poem guide is an interesting essay on the poem. I feel I learned something from it, I got a more expanded reading of the poem. I also feel like the author read much more deeply into little bits of form and things that I didn’t really care about, which makes me roll my eyes a bit. But it goes over the interesting history of the poem, the context of how it was written. It was written as a joke! An act of playful creation! One that nevertheless has sincerity mixed in with it: “I’m never more serious than when joking” says Frost. And from the start, the poem was always taken more seriously than intended, different messages pulled out of it by readers than the one Frost had in mind. “Good for them!”, I keep telling myself.

I myself stumble over the phrasing in the second and third stanzas of the poem, and end up kind of ignoring the bit about the paths looking the same. And at the end it is avowed that one of the paths is less traveled and so I hold on to that. It’s a nice poem, about a simple conundrum, with lots of metaphorical space to explore. The constrained language puts me off balance, immediately astray, and free to wander. But also confused, and prone to ignore certain things.

As for games, I think you are right. There is always some amount of experience and mindset that will help us engage with specific games in a successful way, as with anything. And we can be quick to blame the game when we are out of sync with it. But I can’t help wondering what exactly ‘success’ is when we play games, and how that relates to poems. You seem to be equating success with progress through its challenges. What is success for the poem? Discovering author’s intent? But what if the author is dead?

The fact that games can give feedback (both negative and positive) is an interesting distinction from poems. But still, I’m trying to think less about designing games/art as a way to point to something specific, and more as a playful dance around something that I myself am stuck circling around, inching closer to understanding with each orbit of thinking, appreciating, designing a game around… – all as ways to move closer to the center over time. I want my design process to leave artifacts that readers and players can pick up on and play with, play the same explorative detective game that I am playing, but one that ultimately has no clear or ‘correct’ answer. Each clue I leave behind should be clearly pointed to, but as for the bigger picture...

I think Robert Frost was just joking about the simple conundrum his friend had on their walks. But he was also playing with its relationship to many of the other ideas that were mentioned in the poem guide, perhaps on a subconscious level. A matter of his taste for words and forms and ideas, his eye for beauty. He was playing a game, circling around that mystery of what he found so amusing about his friend’s inevitable (and avoidable!) lamentations.

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