Like, could I make a practice of making haiku games? I don’t know that talking about haiku games would get me to that place, I expect (and fear!) that trying to make a haiku game every day would bring the concept crashing down about my ears in an uninteresting way, that is, in a way that did not do much except prove to myself that I can’t make haiku games.
Uninteresting in the context of haiku game discourse.
droqen – excuse my letter silence, here is a poem
I have also recently been more driven by doing and less by talking. I also value our haiku games discourse, and generally talking through our half-formed ideas about ‘what are these games we dream of? why do they feel so distant? where are the stairs that lead to them?’
I wonder: why don’t you think you can make haiku games? What is interesting about haiku games discourse – which part of it do you value? Strange, I’m not sure I could answer these questions myself. But it sounds like… you imagine it as this thing that should always be out of reach! And as soon as you would start to treat it as an everyday thing, it would lose its satisfaction.
Perhaps it’s the same as yours: I have a fear that I won’t actually be able to make haiku games the way I imagine them because I’ll inevitably get interested in the shape of a system, instead of how I am feeling about it, and so all my good ideas will be about ways to better ‘see’ the system, and not about anything emersive. I am rarely motivated to make something to help me understand how I feel about it. I am way more often motivated by something I can kind of ‘understand’ or ‘explain’, but there are some tantalizing gaps there that I want to bounce into, get to grips with, and absorb into my brain map, something I can mentally navigate with swiftness, maybe even do tricks with — I want to make it ‘ready-to-hand’ in Heidegger-speak. To make it invisible, so I can… hmm. What is it that I want to do with it?
And then, about the discourse. I suppose I like the discourse, because it constructs a framework within which I can feel like I am beginning to understand it. So that it may become ‘ready-to-hand’, so that I can… hmm. What is it I that I want to do with it?
Perhaps I want to make games with the same knowing, zen wink about nature, as my favorite haiku. A moment to stop and appreciate, in the language of systems and reactions. But you don’t need games to recreate reactions – games enable inter-actions! Am I interested in ways to probe a natural, zen moment? Perhaps this is where it breaks down… I like probing puzzle systems, theoretical frameworks, programming problems. I like having a haiku show me something, wink, and then show me something surprising, and yet mundane.
My partner is interested in making haiku games with me. We have brainstormed a bit. We have fun ideas, but I think there is a pattern where we get stuck figuring out what the interaction is. Maybe we are just looking to the wrong feelings and moments for inspiration.
I like your poem, though I trip on some of the loose grammar. It strikes me as an affirmation that we can see and know, without first organizing. But do you think the process really leaves nothing behind? No imprints of knowing? No experience internalized?
RAIN WOGGLE
droqen – playing the rain woggle
This story feels very close to home for me. So close that I scarcely know what to say about it! “Yes, this is the way it is”. I do feel that I often lose sight of the feeling while making an instrument. And even playing it after working on it feels…different. I suppose because the discovery is gone, already spent. But then, I also suppose there are things there even beyond discovery, that I like to trace through with my fingers, and smile at. That must be my song.