I like that quote from Basho…. ‘seek what they tried to seek’. mm.
Maybe this [is] “what we do when we do game design”? Using all the mechanisms available to us, we create a beautiful Hedge and tease out the player’s capacity and inclination to perceive it, to invite them to seek what we tried to seek?
droqen, seek what they tried to seek
I keep re-reading this answer, and it makes sense, but it is a bit unsatisfactory to me. I understand how Game Design can help make a ‘beautiful Hedge’, but I am unclear how it helps the player ‘seek what we tried to seek’. Let alone how it helps us seek what we are trying to seek!
An answer to my own question came to me suddenly last week, just before I read your letter. But I wasn’t sure it was a useful answer. My answer was basically straight from The Timeless Way of Building: Game Design is the practice of applying patterns to make a game. To continue with my dichotomy, this game is the ‘game’. My ‘pursuit’ is towards a truer understanding of certain patterns, and how they refract through me (and by assumption, other people). The ‘game’ manifests these patterns, so that players can experience them, interrogate them, understand them… and in doing so, take some steps along a ‘pursuit’, one that, I imagine, will bear some resemblance to mine.
When you experience a timeless building, you feel whole. If you look closely, you can appreciate the careful patterns at play. But I suppose you don’t even have to appreciate the patterns directly. It just feels right. It must be the same for games: when playing a timeless game, you feel at home, your truths are accommodated.
So, hmm, I’m still not sure this answer is useful. Game Design is simply the practice of making a game, crafting patterns. It does not help you point to truths we me be seeking, truths about our world and our experience, perhaps. Games have interactivity, what a dynamic experience they can provide, as a lens into our own experience! Game Design is a way to manifest patterns, which in their plain existence reverberate truths that we can feel, or that we can seek to understand.
I am starting to like this more, actually. In my pursuit, I can refine my patterns, exhibit them in games. By studying them in these games, I can learn more about them, and then refine them some more, and repeat. Game Design is the patterns. I think I don’t want to think about Game Design as a way to entice or encourage the players to explore anything for any specific purpose. But, exploration is a value, a kind of truth, that I want to capture in games. Doing Game Design can help me capture that truth.
This is getting a bit too heady. I am going to leave it here. But I agree: ‘We’re all on our own independent pursuits already’. 🙂