thread: 2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome
On 2011-05-12, Josh W wrote:
Now to bring that back to Vincents point's, how does that relate to "unwelcome" stuff?
I'm more than capable of making stuff for myself I don't like but will stick with, by just clashing two patterns of causality. I don't need a game design to do that, or more strictly, I don't need to play a designed game to do that, many struggles of game design can be exactly that!
But actually, what I do there sort of is what game design does: On two different levels I commit to events that are at one point mutually exclusive; I want to play this game here and now, and see the consequences of it's rule structure, and I also want to play this character this way.
Crap, suddenly my athlete's got a broken leg and has lost her job. Everything my character was to me just went up in smoke. Ok looks like if I want to stay here, I need to dig into this character and rebuild her interest to me.
Now if the game works for me, it will not get in the way of me solving that double bind, maybe it will even help. It will provide some way to keep playing the character if I want to, and start her new life training to do something else.
So like with your guy Vincent, presumably you had to go back to the core of how he worked and find a new tack, build depth by imagining underneath what you'd already made.
But I don't think that's the sum-total of how games can add new focus content and dynamics to a group though. Or more productively, I think there are other good ways too.
