First, see process philosophy, or ontology of becoming. In broad strokes, it appears to suggest that “becoming” is a more accurate depiction of reality than “being.” I will now propose that our picture of LIVING must be understood as a process. There is no having or embodying ALIVENESS; one can only be becoming ALIVE (or not).
game-space, game-play
I’d like to put forward two loose terms to help us clarify what we’re talking about. I don’t think we’ll need them all of the time or even too often, but I am confident they will help.
game-space — loosely defined, the environment in which the game-play takes place. In videogames, it is a created virtual space, it is the controller, etc. In physical games, it includes our bodies, physics, as well as the actual space itself. “What is being played with?”
game-play — again loosely defined, the play itself, the activities. Actions undertaken as a player rather than as a maker. The lines blur, but hopefully this gives us a start for talking about the next thing:
LIVING game-space, LIVING game-play
It seems that we have had the beginning of a clear picture on what it is for the game-space to be LIVING: it is the result of a LIVING creative process — but not what it means for the game-play to be LIVING: what does it mean to play well?
Let’s propose that LIVING games are made when LIVING creative processes meet with LIVING players. LIVING players are players that seek to play well. [..] there must be something more than playing well. Playing well is how you access it, it is the form. Pursuing a high score is not enough. It must be done as a way to play well, as a way to preserve something else. If there is no play, there is no transformation. And if there is no transformation, there is no preservation.
Jack in Play to LIVE
This line of thinking was the key that unlocked the thought for me. Jack likens “playing well” to “preserving something else”, and relates that to “transformation”. What, then, is being preserved or transformed?
I don’t have De Koven’s books at hand but the way he described playing well always seemed like it was pushing at something, playing with something important, something we needed to be playing with.
Jack’s suggestion that play is an activity which acts upon something else was particularly key. It’s in the title of his last letterclub, too: Play to LIVE. I suggest a further clarification, which I sort of mumbled through in my first post but which I am now confidently clear on:
Is play, perhaps necessarily, a living process?
droqen in LIVING games
Playing well is becoming ALIVE
There are other words I might have used in other contexts; for example:
- growth: I want a game that helps me grow as a person.
- life-changing: I want a game that “changes my life.”
- emersive, emersion: I want a game that makes me more aware of my own life.
However, in this case, the stronger parallel exists in ALIVENESS as a process, in LIVING, and especially in becoming ALIVE. (perhaps even “becoming more ALIVE”, but i think that is a little too pushy, and unnecessary)
An aspect of this which is particularly hard to pin down is that “What is becoming ALIVE” is still undefined. I am tempted to say that playing well is when the player is becoming ALIVE, although it may have an effect on other things — related things. De Koven described games that strengthen a community. It is not so easy to draw a line between effects on a community and effects on an individual member who is truly integrated with that community. In general, it is not so easy to draw a line between the part and the whole when they are well-integrated.
I might even go so far as to say this is a defining quality of LIFE. (Oh, already identified by Alexander, too . . . “Deep interlock and ambiguity” is one of the fifteen properties he gives in Book 1.)
What games are ALIVE?
Is aliveness a thing that exists when a player plays a game? Or is it something inherent to a game’s design? Or a game’s visible history of being played?
Jack in Understanding Aliveness
Ultimately the differentiation between game-space and game-play, as all LIVING differentiations, is not to permanently divide and separate, but to understand how we might need to approach each piece differently before putting them back together again.
Jack wrote “Let’s propose that LIVING games are made when LIVING creative processes meet with LIVING players. LIVING players are players that seek to play well.”
I am proposing almost the same thing. Here are a few attempts at different phrasing:
- LIVING games are a LIVING game-space which is designed to facilitate LIVING game-play. (?)
- LIVING games are produced by a LIVING process with the goal of facilitating the LIVING process of becoming ALIVE. (?)
No, those aren’t quite right. I can’t quite abide by any definition of game anymore, how strange. Perhaps the order of nesting is incorrect. One more try.
When you are becoming ALIVE you can feel it deeply.
The deep feeling of ALIVENESS rests at the center of games, not space or play. I think that serves as a better anchoring center than the idea of “LIVING games.” There is a feeling given by them.
There is still some yet undefined specificity in games’ relationship to people becoming ALIVE. That is, even without game-space or game-play, there are other ways that people become ALIVE. There is no way I can presently say that “this is the domain which we game-makers, as a collective profession, can take responsibility for.”
Even aside from the question of responsibility, it is not only game-players who become ALIVE . . .
- When a player is becoming alive through play, we describe this as playing well. . .
- When a player is helping some other person or larger whole of which they are a part to become alive through play, we describe this as playing well. . .
- To play, one must have something to play “with,” which I have above defined as the “play-space”, though “play-thing” may be more appropriate in the general case. . .
- When a player is helping their play-space or play-thing become alive through play, we describe this as playing well. . .
Perhaps then a LIVING game is a play-space or play-thing which is itself ALIVE in the first place, itself produced by a LIVING process, and which allows a player to feel the feeling of becoming-ALIVENESS, which is always about something becoming ALIVE.
In the case of an MMORPG, the player can feel the LIFE of other players, of some society.
In the case of a local multiplayer game, the player can feel the LIFE of people who are next to them, becoming ALIVE too.
In the case of a game which simulates a changing world, the player can feel the LIFE of this world changing, this feeling of that world becoming ALIVE.
I wanted to come back to this final topic, Jack.
Becoming ALIVE within oneself. Single-player games.
In the case of a single-player game which does not simulate a changing world, we have a situation where the player is the only thing which can be becoming ALIVE.
This is no different from the examples given above — in some cases what lives in the player’s mind is something that has no need for connectedness, perhaps yet, or perhaps ever. We should not create connections where none exist or need to exist; a LIVING process strengthens existing centers and relationships, and accepts what surprising new centers and relationships appear serendipitously.
There is a boundary between private experience and the public world . . . though we can communicate our thoughts, we cannot actually think the same things, we cannot know exactly what it is like to be each other.
Play which explores internal phenomena must respect and accept the internality of such phenomena, must build upon nothing but that which is already there.
Until, perhaps, something surprising arises.