Artistic license can’t outwit evidently bad rhyme or bad meter.
-droqen, coy form
I thought, ‘nu-uh, I’ll show you!’. But it is true, without some greater trick, a limerick with broken form is hard to get away with. The form is limiting, but as always, that can be a source for creative expression – constraints demand inspired solutions.
I can’t get away from your comparison of limerick and haiku though, it is an endlessly curious one. I want to say that you can have haiku that rhymes, but maybe you are right, it becomes a distraction, a rut to fall into, instead of allowing your mind to readily wander in any direction. At the same time, I can’t help feeling like expectation must be a critical aspect of haiku too. Juxtaposition is at the heart of haiku, and its interest must derive from some kind of play with expectation. But maybe that’s just it – haiku seeks to subvert expectation, while limericks seek to satisfy expectation. Ah, no – haiku would be just as dissatisfying it it broke its form, if its third line simply continued from the first two instead of providing some juxtaposition. Likewise, limerick can subvert within its content, but its form must always be satisfied.
Does submitting to “fun” and “engagement” in game design have the same consequence as utilizing a “lowbrow” rhyming scheme in poetry?
droqen, coy form
Mapping this line of thought to games now. Are ‘fun’ and ‘engagement’ elements of form in games? Fulfilled on their own, without any subversive of labyrinthine content prepared to provide some space for a creative and curious brain to play in, are they ‘lowbrow’ just like a straightforward limerick that only seeks to satisfy the rhyme? I can see the parallel. I can see the rut they can form, which activates our blinders and locks us up in anticipation of our next ‘rhyme’.
The thing that comes to mind here for me is that haiku are so short. Haiku games are so short. They don’t want to leave enough ‘length of road’ for a rut to be even relevant, to even have enough time to form in the first place. To me, haiku games are played in that time from when you start reading a rhyming poem up to the point where you recognize the rhyming scheme – and then it stops.
I’m not sure how ‘good & useful’ this insight is, but I do find it interesting. I think this is a useful prism to separate content and form, which I so often find entangled in my brain.
I’d like to take a quick diversion to talk about ‘play’ and ‘games’ some. I read ‘The Grasshopper’ by Bernard Suits, and have recently started ‘Rules of Play’ by Salen and Zimmerman.
The Grasshopper is fascinating, providing a broad but satisfying definition of games by walking you along the edges of its domain. I could go on about it, it is relevant, but it requires too much setup, it would be a distraction.
An early section of Rules of Play seeks to define ‘meaningful play’: when actions in a game successfully create meaning for the player(s). It says that meaningful play happens when actions are both ‘discernable’ and ‘integrated’: meaning you can discern ‘what’ you action does, and the outcome is ‘integrated’ with the future state of the game – it has some bearing on where the game will go.
These are definitions of the form of play. They are the prerequisites for ‘engagement’. ‘Discernability’ address the connection of the cybernetic loop between the player and the game: the book supposes the frustration you would feel if you were not made aware of activity in an RTS that was happening off-screen, or if shooting an asteroid did apparently nothing – no feedback was given. And I thought ‘sure, but can’t you outwit this requirement by making a game where the challenge of keeping up all your units across many screens, or the challenge of not knowing when your shots at asteroids had effects – couldn’t you make that the game?’ And I think you could, but it would be hard. And a different game, with a different form of play. And a different content of play too, maybe?
The ‘integration’ of these actions with a larger system is what demands the ‘discernability’ of your actions. When you want to play the game defined by the integrations, you want a closed cybernetic circuit with which to play. You want to be ‘engaged’, ‘plugged in’.
Perhaps haiku games seek to define just enough discernable action, suggesting a mysterious integrated system that it might be a part of, and let your mind to wander. Have just enough game for you to determine what you are doing, what your rhyme scheme is, and then leave you to imagine the integrations which would provide some meaningful play in concert with the ‘rhyme scheme’. Perhaps with a good enough juxtaposition to get you started, dreaming.