[..] haiku does have a magical, marvelous form of its own, when it works – it just doesn’t fall out of almost nothing. And that is a good thing, a useful thing.
— Jack, Appreciation as Practice
A limerick’s satisfying nature can be maximized, and irreversibly completed; once frog is rhymed with snog it doesn’t get any better than that. The form of a limerick can be fully satisfied, and it’s easy to intuit when something is being done wrong. Artistic license can’t outwit evidently bad rhyme or bad meter.
And, submitting to good rhyme and good meter invalidates a vast expressive space. It’s hard to get away with a limerick where the last line doesn’t rhyme, or is suddenly shorter or longer, because the reader’s expectations are bound up in an instinct that does not like to be disappointed.
By comparison, haiku eschews these binary, provable constraints. Perhaps the only clearly measurable rule is that a haiku must not, ever, adhere to any other explicit, intuitive, scheme of rhyme or meter. A rhyming couplet will never be a haiku, and vice versa. The form of the haiku is designed to keep poet and reader out of the trap of becoming too emotionally invested in expectation, allowing the poem to move and subvert in any direction.
Does submitting to “fun” and “engagement” in game design have the same consequence as utilizing a “lowbrow” rhyming scheme in poetry? ‘Explicit’ goals and rewards create the expectation of more of the same, causing subtler ‘implicit’ goals and rewards to fall by the wayside, to be lost in the demand for another rhyme, and another, and another.
What do you think? Does this capture some aspect of what is good & useful about the form of haiku, and perhaps what we should hope to find in our exploration of haiku games?