I want to describe to you a kind of game that I like to play, and a kind of game that I want to play.
Jack, HAIKU games
I want to describe to you a kind of art, a kind of activity, a kind of part of the world that I always notice — that I always want to join in, live in — that I want to experience more and more of, to no end. I’m worried it will get a little abstract. This idea applies to so many things beyond games. But that conceptual interconnectedness is a crucial component of it, and must be discussed. We will go far away but we won’t get lost. By the end of this letter, I will have returned us to the very center of the idea, and we will find that games are there.
In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander described some things as living, or alive, or having life, but across our many letters here, I never used the word ‘alive’ once: I kept the concept at a distance. What did it mean, for something to be alive, to have life? I did not know and I supposed Alexander did not know. There was a hole in the middle of that book, ‘the quality without a name.’
What a surprise, what a delight it was, to discover that he had already filled that hole, had discovered answers, and had defined what he meant by life, in The Nature of Order — it took him over two decades, but he got there. This letter is deeply inspired by his writing, but I will refrain from endlessly referring back to his books. Much of what I write below is practically an interpretation of what he has already written but in my own voice, with my own convictions behind it.
The feeling of ALIVENESS
When I say “life” or “alive” or “living” or “aliveness”, I refer to a common feeling of what to us appears to be, feels, alive. It is not important right now whether this sense accurately detects a logical reality defined as life, but it is important that it is a common feeling. I will define common feeling straight away.
As humans, we have feelings in common. We do have different feelings, but we also have common feelings. Suppose that I hand you a feather, and a brick — one of them feels heavier than the other. In this example, chosen for its simplicity, it is easy to see that anyone who disagrees is in the wrong, rather than merely having a difference of opinion. This “feeling” of weight is of the sort I call a common feeling.
There are many common feelings. Not all common feelings are as simply and obviously common as the example, but I suggest that more subtle and complex common feelings exist. It is just harder to identify them as such.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is a statement which suggests that beauty is not a common feeling. Modern values suggest common feelings are not that important, and rather it is individuality that has an overriding importance. “It’s not for everyone.” “There’s no accounting for taste.” “Your difference is what makes you beautiful.” And so on.
I point this out because this feeling of life cannot be fully understood without first acknowledging that underlying feeling which it contradicts. There may be other such feelings (or there may not) — what I know is the one I have a hold of right now, in its commonness and its depth.
Life is both common AND profoundly important.
What is LIFE?
What exactly is the feeling? What does it mean to feel this feeling? What is felt when we feel aliveness in something?
This feeling is associated with things produced by living process, or “structure-preserving transformations“. When we consider a whole object, we are simultaneously considering everything that we know and can intuit about the process of its creation and ongoing existence. (There is a related school of thought in which being is replaced with becoming — things are not static, but always dynamic — not results of a process, but a constant ongoing process themselves.) In this context, the feeling is associated with the living processes.
The ‘aliveness’ of a process is a huge topic. It is defined by the way it progresses: the degree to which it preserves, adapts to, and strengthens existing structure. This can be seen in living organisms: they contain many structures at many scales, all respecting one another, all related, all connected. Contrast the cells in the body (all touching, all related, all communicating) against the rigid and awkward shapes of a modern apartment building (all placed ahead of time, all identical, all part of a contrived plan to fit things into a contrived plan). The latter are less alive, more dead.
Life is not a rootless, magical feeling. The word is not chosen in a poetic way. It is bound tightly to genuine life. We are living things and we depend on our relationships to things like us: other living things. This feeling allows us to determine whether we are looking at a cricket or a rock, a whale or a cloud, a rainforest or a cave, not only individually but in general. We feel a general way about all living things as a category. We feel a general way about the degree of life in things: A forest has more life than a single tree. An elephant has more life than an ant.
We can access this feeling or related feelings in many different ways, but one of my favourites is given in The Nature of Order (I could not avoid a quote after all!), by one of Alexander’s students: “Assuming for a moment, that you believed in reincarnation, and that you were going to be reborn as one of these two things, then which one would you rather be in your next life?” [TNoO, Book 1, p320] This question is a way of performing the ‘mirror of self’ test, which identifies life by asking: Which one is more like your whole self? You know, deeply, that you are alive; which one of these is, too?
(This sense of ours, aliveness, is not unbiased or perfect. I say, embrace the anthropocentric pareidolia — rather than life perhaps the word human could be substituted.)
Imagine a simulation which feels alive: everything in it is moving, but not just moving, moving in relation to itself, to the other things, in patterns.
Imagine a gathering — large or small — which feels alive: the people there are interacting with each other, neither isolated nor completely drowned out, but connecting on a human level.
Imagine a game which feels alive:
Can you?
A system that is ALIVE
I have long been in love with cities, emergent systems, creative collaboration which respects its participants and their ideas, MMORPGs which have a certain quality…
I’ve never been able to name or describe to my satisfaction that “certain quality”. One might say it was a quality without a name! Finally, this particular idea of life seems to be my answer.
What is it about a good MMORPG that makes it feel alive? It is a world where people can interact, where I can see the traces of their movement and individuality. This is the same thing that makes a creative collaboration go: everyone is heard, can see themselves becoming a part of the project, can see traces of everyone in the final thing. This is the same thing that makes an emergent system’s emergence coherent rather than chaotic: global order produced by local interactions — an order which could have only come from all those relationships, patterns which show the performing of every little thing and yet produce bigger patterns, too. This is the same thing that I find beautiful in a city: not the tall buildings and streets, but the narrow alleys produced between buildings, the flow of traffic, the strange stair, the secret door, the skeleton of a skyscraper, all these results which reveal years or decades of fluid transformation, and human activity.
At the heart of it all is process, not just process but human process. And, what art form is the most noticeably about human process?
To me the answer is obvious and immediate. It is games, it is play.
⁂
Our LIVING conversation
Dear friends,
This is a different sort of signpost, because of how rooted its starting point is in Christopher Alexander’s oeuvre. I’ve tried to keep the letter accessible, without requiring any of you to read along with me, and of course I don’t want this conversation to revolve around these books more than you want it to! The most important thing is that this conversation remain, itself, ALIVE. We’re good at that, building on top of each other’s ideas, exploring in new directions without losing or overriding old ones.
The Nature of Order is really excellent; though I will write in a way that does not require it, I still recommend it! I have mentioned the impact The Timeless Way of Building had on me — well, in the words of the one who recommended I read the newer books (Hi Rory! Thank you!), it was “like the equivalent of switching from a weak green tea to a triple espresso shot.”
I turn this over to you, letterclub. I have a few burning questions, but I’m just as interested in your questions as I am in mine — maybe more so. Still, here are my open-ended thoughts as a starting point, a kicking-off point. To another year of letterclubbing!
I want to make more living games, but I don’t know what that means yet. Does the living process describe how a game is made, or how it is played? (It’s both, right?) What is the relationship of aliveness to good game design? What is the relationship of aliveness to the well-played game?
Zeigfreid asked me, “Is it important that thing I do clearly feel be something everyone feels?” This question inspired the section on common feelings, a simple take on some of Alexander’s philosophy, using new terminology. I’m still thinking about my own answer to this! It obviously does matter to me. I value it. But why, and to what degree? Is it important to you? Is it important?
Is there a better name, a better word, for all this? I have been mulling over the phrase “creative play”… Something that respects the player’s living process, as opposed to a game which boils play down to a number (e.g. a high score). But the word ‘life’ may be the better one, after all.
What games are alive? Is that the wrong question? What play is alive? Is play, perhaps necessarily, a living process?
