Limericks, Form, Miraculous Coincidences
[on latte art:] It’s not a very expressive medium, but it is a medium and it’s worth exploring (or nothing is worth exploring).
– Zeigfreid, Miraculous Coincidences
There is a satisfying cant to the limerick’s flow, strongly suggesting a setup, a brief diversion, and a punchline.
We can still meticulously construct a limerick if we choose to, but as an art form, it effortlessly produces beauty […]. And I wonder if that’s what makes it lowbrow in my mind?
Haiku must create a new sort of beauty despite the form which actively prevents it.
“How do we make satisfying games without doing any of the things that easily make game experiences satisfying?”
– droqen, Aside: LIMERICK games
I like this aside about limericks – as you said, they are a great foil to haiku! I agree that the way limericks can more or less successfully fall out of almost nothing gives them a bit of a lowbrow feel. They can be refined, as you mention, and so achieve some greater quality. Though I think the ‘satisfying cant’ will always be some kind of distraction to whatever else it reflects.
And along those lines, I don’t think that haiku succeed ‘despite the form which actively prevents it’. I think haiku is more of a focusing lens, which filters out distraction and other easily satisfying things like a limerick’s rhythm with built-in closure. The form of haiku is not actively inhibiting, it just isn’t helping. By cutting so much away, you are left as close as you can get to that which is so hard to grasp, that ineffable ‘alive-ness’. Still, I think you last question is apt – by cutting away distraction, haiku can help us to reflect on what it is that we are appreciating, can help us identify that top-level pattern, can help us on our pursuit.
And 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.
I’m a formalist. I love form. I love haiku not because I am particularly interested in old ponds, or cuckoo birds, but because I am particularly interested in kigo, and the structure of a clever turn.
– Zeigfreid, Miraculous Coincidence
Make what you want to make! Reflect on what you appreciate!
Make the things you want to make! […] Do what you want to do! […] Just do it!
– Zeigfreid, Translating the Impossible
I think I need to stop thinking, “maybe I could learn a pattern language for platformer and then generate many beautiful platformers” and instead just live my life, and reflect on my experiences. Internalize, and incorporate, rather than instrumentalize. If I want to make platformers, I should make them and reflect on them.
I think the most exciting thing about TTWOB is not pattern languages, but thinking in terms of pattern languages.
– Zeigfreid, Game Designer GO Brrrrr
If you are trying to transmit experiences, and you see the medium primarily as a barrier to that endeavour, then it’s probably pretty frustrating.
– Zeigfreid, Miraculous Coincidences
I have also redirected from approaching art as an act of transmission to an act of reflection. Zeigfreid’s interpretation of The Impossible Games Manifesto echoes this transition. The manifesto rejects the ‘scheme’ of industry gamedev and ‘good game design’, but it replaces it with another ‘scheme’ of hopeful success. But why don’t we just make what we want to make – get rid of the scheme? Make things, appreciate things, to their own end. TTWOB is not a tool to learn to make ‘good’ things, but a form of structured reflection, training wheels for introspection, appreciation in “scheme”‘s clothing. It is like Haiku.
In the past I’ve felt a bit removed from artists who are interested in awe, or in ponds. Now I’m thinking that there isn’t really a divide there. I am most interested in noticing, and celebrating, the miraculous coincidences that make things possible.
To do this I have to work deeply with the medium, to understand how it is expressive, and I need to work deeply with myself, to understand how tides become the appreciation of tides, to notice where the miraculous coincidence of “appreciating tides” exists. I need to try to understand its mechanism, like the way the impressionists understood the mechanism of appreciating a scene.
If I can create something that makes me feel the way tides make me feel, or even just hints at that feeling, then that is evidence that I’ve understood.
– Zeigfreid, Miraculous Coincidences
I like this large-scale appreciation of form, haha. I think I have been largely a formalist too, forming large parts of myself amidst mathematics and computation. But there was always a lingering desire for the rest, only I never managed to understand how to appreciate it. Understanding Haiku Games is a big part of my journey to understand this.
And so again, I am interested in this activity of studying our appreciation, and studying the way that form works, and the feelings they enable, how to create ‘alive’ forms, and pairing them up as a way to understand them, to appreciate them as a form, and as themselves, at the same time. And it is my hope that this will help me create art that is ‘alive’, since it reflects my best understanding of what ‘alive’ is. It is itself an active process, and not a scheme. There are no puppet strings to cheapen it.
Kigo, Patterns, Platformers
I feel as though the structure of these platformer patterns is incompatible with kigo.
Seasons are not a malleable medium. Nature is not an art form. When I evoke autumn it comes with falling leaves, a crisp wind, memories of a fleeting summer already gone. […] Where a haiku celebrates something static, we might say that a platformer celebrates how its own medium is constantly in motion. Breaking.
-droqen, Platformer Kigo
It does me no good to stir myself up into a mania and suppose that, to be worthwhile, a platformer or any work of art must be unnatural or exotic.
SirMilkman’s starchild (pictured above) is an even more natural platformer, and I felt an unspoiled simple pleasure in experiencing it. In some small way I want to say it is a “real platformer” — just like in the old days — and rejoice.
-droqen, Natural Platformers; or, simple art is sufficient
GRADIENT COERCION
-Zeigfreid, –
I think this is just another example of Zeigfreid’s reminder that we are frequently mixing levels. Yes, we can endlessly break apart and subvert the structure of platformers, but that is because they are not the same level of pattern that seasons are, as kigo. Seasons are a malleable medium. No season is the same as its previous years, and though there are patterns that exist within seasons, you can endlessly break apart and subvert its structures. There are also ‘natural’ aspects of seasons, that are not exotic. We can identify ‘natural’ seasonal patterns just like we can identify ‘natural’ platformer patterns, and use these to fill in corresponding top-level patterns in each case. I claim that platformers have a higher-level pattern, one that is compatible with kigo, just as seasons are.
Zeigfreid’s ‘Gradient Coercion’ gets close, though it is still too specific. I’ve always like droqen’s(?) framing of platformers as ‘play in an asymmetric movement system’. The asymmetry of the gradient is perhaps a fundamental part of the platformer pattern, and lo, it can be used as a coercive pattern too! Exploration is another fundamental part of the platformer pattern, and subtle coercion invites us explore.
So, what do we get when we use platformers as kigo? We get to borrow an understood context of exploring the space of an asymmetric movement system, and its world. Within there, we can recombine its structure in endlessly fascinating ways, or keep it simple and ‘natural’. But within that specificity, we are exploring another beauty… what does using platformers as kigo get us to that end? What other kigo can we use in games, that are not genre? Does Awake use stumbling through the dark of a familiar space as kigo? Or does it use platformer as kigo to explore the feeling of stumbling through the dark of a familiar space?