Day two of London game designer Hide And Seek's Wonderlab sessions, and it's a morning to be substantially impressed by the taste and sensibilities of the organisers. (The videos of all our presentations are piling up here).
Maurice Suckling, a computer game scriptwriter, first delivers us a small conceptual tap-dance around the idea of infinity. It involves Hilbert's Grand Hotel Paradox, the infinity of decimal points between 0 and 1, and our own coming longevity crisis when we figure out how to switch off cell decay.
Maurice's charm overcomes my long-standing maths anxiety, though I find myself prodding away at my iPhone Google to look up Antonio Negri's elevation of eternity over infinity: “It then becomes clear why the eternal is not equivalent with the infinite. Love, indeed, is not infinite but eternal, it is not a measure but rather measurelessness, not individual but singular, not universal but common, not the substance of temporality but the arrow of time itself.” Luckily the poor man escapes before I can regale him with this counter-mathematical thesis.
Yep. It's one of those kinds of events. Godel, Escher, Bach and Italian Marxists in a baking hot room in the Pall Mall.
We then have a refreshing round of what is effectively Call My Bluff – give two statements about yourself, one a lie and one true, and subject yourself to the audience for verification (mine's is: I was once a Lord [true: I was the Lord Rector of Glasgow University 1990-93]. And: I have a Polish great-uncle – false, it's actually my mother's father). Thoroughly rubbish at dissimulation and easily rumbled, I'm given two great techniques for lying well: tell the fake story in the wrong order – liars always try anxiously to make their stories sequential. And lie with as much natural unevenness in your presentation as possible. And I won't tell you whether I ever apply these (or not).
Then Nick Ryan, a music and sound design consultant, gives us a startling tour de force of his work (all videos here). He shows a 1944 Polish animation rendering a classical choral in graphical shapes (though I do remember Disney's Fantasia making the same move a few years earlier), and some elegant materialisations of sound: a bucket that you make noises into, which you can then physically pour out; a psychedelic projection of graphic shapes onto a vapor cloud, matching the howls and roars of the crown; and a textured wall piece where your touch on its surface modulates a mutant orchestral wail.
The only lurch into inelegance is a piece called Bicycle For Two Thousand, where Ryan used Amazon's Mechanical Turk – a site where you do little bits of informational piece-work – to make a bellowing, lurching version of Daisy, Daisy from over 2000 tiny contributions (never did “the wisdom of the crowd” sound so unattractive, which I guess was the point).
I wanted to know whether we were getting anywhere near the Cantina scene in Star Wars, where the alien bands play new instruments; Nick replied that he was reverse-engineering musical instruments from any sound you could imagine, using CAD to visualise the cavity in which they'd sound most true (a project called The Shape of Sound for PRS). Tom Armitage of Berg sidled up to me and showed me a musical sock puppet they were designing, in which a blues scale could be expressively performed by opening and twisting its knitted maw (all this inspired by the Japanese tradition of musical toys, exemplified by Maywa Denki). It's been quite a few days for casually sharing the motivating obsessions of capacious people, as we take respite from the rule-dominated juggernaut of the games-making process.
Jason Anthony gave a thrilling presentation on how games and religion could have an amazing relationship together in the 21st century (see video), as exemplified by his own Ten Year Game project. I've been fascinated by play and spirituality since the Play Ethic book in 2004, and it was a delight to hear such a theologically informed talk. The core of his notion – that religion is both deep truth and active ritual, both logos and praxis, and that games might be a new medium to extend and develop the second term – is summed up by his beautiful axiom: “the Jews have preserved the Sabbath, but the Sabbath has also preserved the Jews”. (And as the Buddhists might retort, mindfulness surpasses all reality anyway).
The comments came thick and fast: if we think about religion, are we thinking about system design rather than game design? Is the difference that games are played for a short time, but religions has to sustain themselves for a long time? “While technology evolves forwards”, quipped Jason brilliantly, “religions evolve backwards”, reflecting endlessly on their originary moments. But that hermeneutic dimension doesn't mean religions can't be gamed – it just shifts the nature of the gaming. Both the Olympics (as an originally religious event), and gambling (where the Gods of luck are propitiated), are both games where skill and strength wrestles with chance and cosmic luck.
I wanted to know what Jason thought of the 'basic rule set' of all Axial religions as outlined by the theologian Karen Armstrong, in her attempt to bring about some peace among the fundamentalisms: that Buddhism, Islam and Christianity are all founded on the Golden Rule of com-passion, doing to others as you would have done to yourself. Too soft a rule to generate something ludic? Someone suggested the board game Pandemic – where players have to collaborate to stamp out a whole range of different diseases – but is a game of collaboration the same as a game of compassion?
I asked whether Scientology was a caution to Jason's ambition for the religious opportunity for games – a pyramidial belief-system, founded on ever higher levels of adeptness, cynically invented by a bad SF author in California! Tom from Berg gave the characteristic designer's response: as a religion, Scientology is just a terrible game, where participation is stratified and kept at its appropriate levels. Where's the fun in definitively knowing you're a lesser being? But essentially, he conceded, there's no difference between Scientology's world-imagining and a game designer's.
Momus leant over to me and whispered a distinction between orthodoxy (which compels Western Christians to feel guilty when they violate the deep truth of their religion) and orthopraxy (which means that Confucians feel shame when they're caught in a misdemeanor, but hope that a speedy apology will return them safely to their web of relationships).
That was useful (as Mr Currie endlessly is). I sometimes wonder with this lot whether their game orthodoxy is too limited - “where's the win-state in this?” I hear all day, as if there hadn't been thousands of years of koans, paradoxes and non-zero-sum games where “winning a game” is at least an exercise in irony and hubris. And that, indeed, they don't think enough about their game orthopraxy – the fact that games are not little abstract machines for sorting out winners and losers, but are always embedded in the thick physical-emotional soup of multitudinous humans interacting with each other. That was my lesson from playing Nomic the other day – how an open, rewritable rule set generated conviviality, performance, laughter, social capital among us. Where a game of Monopoly, a very tight and competitive rule set, often just generates – at least in my family experience - the worst fights and the most unpalatable behaviour.
I'm writing this before the beginning of Day 3 of Wonderlab, so I'll stop here at our lunch break on day 2. But look out for the next post on the afternoon of day 2, in which some of my real misgivings about the culture and mindset of gaming gets put through both spinner and tumble-drier, and comes out feeling crumpled but definitely cleaner. In any case, all props to Hide And Seek - a genuinely demanding and illuminating event.
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