Well, it begins. What am I doing? I’m avoiding working on other projects like a “game poem” and also the next step along the way of the It is as if projects. I’m doing that by making a sequel to SNAKISMS called SNAKISTS which allows me to do another suite of these stupid things with a slightly different flavour. Don’t know what that flavour is yet… for now I literally thought it would be fun to use IST instead of ISM as the sequel indicator.
Let me list a bunch of ISTS and worry about them later:
(Taking these from a scrabble dictionary because it’s what I found)
That’s to the end of the 7-letter words anyway.
One thing that I find fun here is that unlike ISM, the IST ends up with a bunch of words that are not about philosophical positions because IST is just a more common suffix (e.g. persist), and you also end up with kind of quite negative words (agist, fascist)… these are less abstract and more forceful? Maybe they’re harder or easier to turn into snakes?
As I wrote stuff down I confess I usually had no fucking idea of what to do for them, so let’s not get too excited. But still this is at least a funny experiment for now.
Spent my time on Friday morning moving away from “designing in the journal.” Which strikes me as a whole thing to think about relative to MDM. Where design happens versus where reflection happens. And they’re of course incredibly intertwined but at least for this project it has felt like it makes sense to have separate documentation of elements of the design process. Specifically there’s now a separate ists list that just contains all the ists pulled from a Scrabble dictionary that I’m going through to check which ones lead to design ideas. And then there’s a list of candidates where I’m building up a list of the ideas that feel like I should at least prototype.
One thing about these two new (design) documents is that they’re not (in themselves) chronological but rather… what… topical? Taxonomic? And as I’m writing this I realize how much I think of design as a chronology! As a passage through time with a person grappling with ideas and materials and figuring it out. Which seems like… an odd way to think about design perhaps. But that is for sure what seems natural… either because it’s my brain or even because of the way I’ve traditionally kept a journal relative to design practice that makes it seem like design should/can be framed in terms of a passage of time.
This may merit further thought… there’s more to this and I think it’s important in the context of MDM.
Anyway, the listing of ists and just combing through them one at a time has been a really pleasant activity. Almost like a series of flash cards or actually those verb noun subject cards Rilla and I had where you just are shown some information and try to snap out a game idea. Feels like improv perhaps? Never done improv but I sure have ended up hearing a lot about it. Yes, and. Improv with yourself? (Is that a euphemism for masturbation?) Improv with the materials? (As distinct from conversation?)
The process also reminds me a bit of PONGS which was epochal in terms of that idea of coming up with lots of (separate but related) designs, rather than trying to come up with “the design”. SNAKISTS (and the others) is even “easier” in the sense that you don’t need to generate the idea from nowhere but rather in reaction to a word, a definition.
So yeah, it’s a fun design exercise. As I write this I’m remembering that I was maybe walking somewhere and thought to myself I (or with someone else?) could write a design “textbook” that is, say, 10 exercises for design, premised on stuff I do “naturally”. This would for sure be one of them. And the book could offer the exercise, resulting work, and get into the weeds a bit on the subtleties of how the exercise functions, how it relates to design as a practice, what aspects of your designerly practice it might shape, and so on. The bridge to it being relevant to game-y-game folks might be tough but might not be. (I’m being put in mind of Jon Sharp and Colleen Macklin’s book here which I should check to see if it’s somehow exactly what I’m proposing?)
(Though note how this would be a potential format/approach for MDM-based reasoning to be applied at the level of teaching design? Learn from the “master” ahahahaha)
As I type this I’m not actually in a “fun mood” but yesterday I treated(?) myself to doing some prototyping as a break from the ist-defintion-to-candidate grind to build a couple of the variations to get a read on how they might plausibly turn out. Most of my focus was on Gist because it’s such a “simple” idea (an abbreviated experience of playing Snake), but at least intuitively I figured that protoyping it would also engage other design and implementation muscles (because you can’t have one without the other, or you can’t make an omelet or whatever). And indeed:
Well so… doing a bit of prototyping was: nice. And I’ll keep doing that alternation probably because it just feels generative.
That feels a bit grandiose, but I’m trying to get at the way that this project seems to have some kind of structure around design… targets? Processes? Somethings?
snake.md where I’m reflecting on, laying out the nature of Snake explicitly? This taxonomizing is getting to me.And I guess the Schön-y argument about this is that each of those processes/documents/levels is still part of the design practice (maybe either writ large, but even all for this specific project).
Which doesn’t really take me anywhere, but it’s been interesting to think about.
It’s been really noticeable how “unneeded” my journal has been for this project. It’s only 2000 words long for cryin out loud! And there are obvious factors here that I think play into MDM stuff writ large:
Hard to quite say whether this highly structured document approach is something I could do for any project? Would it have worked for “on your phone” for instance where I feel like the process was a bit more messy? Less clear what the divisions would be up front and more something I had to feel out? But would it still have been worth having some sort of file division around different practices/levels of design? Unclear maybe.
Anyway, the point being that the journal has not felt as immediate in the day to day; but secret I think it maybe has meant that some of the higher level reflection is being missed around what this particular game project means about design and also some of the more thematic drawing together of different kinds of observations at the project level too… so let me… at least try? It feels exhausting but…
As part of running through the dictionary and just trying to design in immediate response to word definitions I feel like there are a few categories of design “move” or… something… that come up repeatedly? Or that are just worth noting…?
The idea of -ists that end up just being Snake with no modifications. Purist, Nudist, Individualist, … – that’s both funny and kind of about the question of how you characterize underlying value or other systems of a game like Snake. Is Snake “fascist” in some way? Do videogames have inherent political or cultural alignments? It’s a pretty interesting question at the level of design? It might also be a (truly weird) kind of language/insight into why some forms of design are just harder than others? If Snake is a Fascist is it harder to create progressive revisions?
With SNAKISMS the whole point was to channel -ism as a conduit to philosophical (and perhaps political) positions. But in just going through the dictionary understanding of -ist as a suffix, there’s a big broadening out. There are a bunch of words ending in -ist that aren’t “ISTS” in that sense. Like “twist” or “delist” and there’s been a pleasure in how kind of practical they are? Could also be a verb form thing that works well with games? Getting across to that Noun Verb Adjective design approach or whatever? Grammar-based design? Design language. Etc.
It’s come up more than once that the text presented at the end of play with the game over can be quite a powerful spiking of the ball or context giver or… just emphasis on the joke/idea? “At least you died nude” “You get the idea”.
Have said this plenty of times, but good to keep it in mind. An obvious way to think of this whole project is that Snake presents you with a language (or play) and the process becomes about how the Snake-language can “say” or “define” the word in question. And one thing that happens is you do run into how limited the Snake language is… it can’t say everything, some of the things require adding or changing so much stuff it’s questionable to say it’s still Snake? So that kind of range of power… the question of where the borders are, the question of which words are easy/difficult to say in Snake feels… revealing? About Snake?
There’s a whole category of words that I want to be able to Snake but don’t have an idea right away. Like, say, Fascist. But this also makes me wonder… if there’s not an idea almost instantly, given how simple the Snake language is, does that mean… there’s no idea to be had? To what extent can you worry the bone of Snake until you make something fit into it? Or is the language so simple there’s not much to be done?
So many words are insanely hard to recognize. Lots of them are archaic, or actually Scots, or just not popular. And some of those words have really fun definitions but it raises the question (somewhat helped along by the definition pages) of whether I’m interested in “teaching words” to the player. To what extent does the game work best with more immediate/low-friction words the player just knows and so can anticipate… versus using weirder words and defining them? Or is a mix the right sauce?
There’s something in here about how you view/frame the materials of making for this. Most obviously it’s Snake. But you could also say “Snake as implemented in Snake.js”. Or “Snake as it exists in Pippin’s mind” (reflected in my Snake document?) But you could also say “Snake as in the entire game including the menu” at which point you get something like “delist” or one of my ideas for “persist”.
Expanding outwards from the obvious can be satisfying and effective, a moment for designer and player to metaphorically look up from the computer and recalibrate their eyes and brains? Narcissism in SNAKISMS was a good example of that. “Oh yeah, I’m playing a game on a computer with email, the person who made this game has an email address…”
Are there even bigger pictures? What did I even mean here? I think I meant something about what this game and process says about Design Writ Larger, or about MDM as a project? I’m running out of steam though.
Well I do think design by holding a play language (relatively) still and bombarding it with just “words from the dictionary” is a pretty amazing design exercise regardless. It’s fun. It also makes me think in this moment about (weirdly) some sort of science setup where you fire electrons and something to understand it better (is that a collider? something else?). The words are the electrons, and the snake is the thing we seek to understand. There’s something to that; I think there’s a bigger and more substantial argument to be made about this form as a way to explore and understand forms of design.
And then as for MDM… I mean the fact I’m writing this is really the outcome I want. I don’t want to lose the higher level reflections that the journal allows for. The “stop and think” that’s really important; or like the “practice review” that’s important. And… I suppose I’m not. Go me.