Card Sessions: Game Design
Confusion as the gateway to possibility.
Yeah, I know, you’re confused.
Where? When? Whereto?
“We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth
we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought.”
― Alfred North Whitehead.
Absolute Beginners
Me too. Did you know that it is perfectly possible to embrace it?
Revel in your confusion, even? Soon as you do, something happens.
Game Design Lenses
Game design lenses can be seen and understood as disposition affordance.
Card: Equipotentiality
Tokens, ledgers, protocols and currencies can be assessed by how they facilitate interaction, conversations and transactions, evolving with equipotentiality and augment alignment between eudaimonia, equity, economics and ecosystemics.
behavior (scarcity) > feedback (abundance) > agency
Game design lenses, applied, can be seen and understood as enabling participants to level up their game, from game to game^n.
Game design lenses, over time, can help you dimensionalize experience and experiential understanding, distilling practical wisdom.
Game design lenses, can help us understand boundaries and boundary management. Once we understand scope, we can level up our leverage games, including adding contextual intelligence to game theory.
Card: Gamefulness
Using a small finite set
of concepts to evaluate
the mindful, convivial
and flow cultivating
purposefulness of play
and social social media.
Why?
“All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does. Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I’ve always hoped for something better than that.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
What? Social Cognition Abattoirs
In the year of the Apocalypse, 2023, humanity found itself on a bluegreen corner of the universe. Things got really weird from there. Like, humans starting to seeing themselves through the Waste Land — weird. Like, finding ourselves inside Social Cognition Abattoir — weird.
Proprietary Platform Programming: Shared Misery Minion Users
We’re finding ourselves in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Platform that simultaneously took place in millions of virtual locations around Earth, February 4, 2004.
Neither the Platformers themselves, nor the Shared Misery Minion Users, nor their means of arrival or algorithmic handling were ever seen by the humans who ever since the event have been confined inside a relatively small set of digital contraptions: catgifs, selfies, mostly uninformed opinion and content marketing.
These virtual zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain online artifacts with inexplicable, seemingly social cognition eroding properties.
Who?
Hi there! Are you having fun? Are you happily ensconced inside a Social Cognition Abattoir, commonly known as Social Media? Are you busy head-butting others with your fave, near completely uninformed opinions, in order to reinforce Shared Misery? Do you like to play Shared Misery?
Excellent. Shared Misery is a near optimal departure point for exploring what games we play.
A play^n disposition, is a disposition that can be meaningfully applied to any and all of the steps in a generative sequence, including returning to purpose and/or recurse through any of the other steps, linearly and/or non-linearly.
The iterations you then can shape into paths, turning paths into understanding s-curves, turning s-curves into transition pathways, between situational awareness and preferable outcomes.
Outcomes is the only thing you need to manage, the only thing you need to measure.
Good measures is what helps you evolve with your intelligence turned ability. Ability is how you wisely wield what is intelligently apprehended.
“What’s Identity?
It is not toil, yet feet happily descended and moving.
Nor technology wielding arm,
nor tracings of a too social sense of self inscribed on face,
nor any other part contested between
uniqueness and belonging.
To name, to another: What dialogue?
In a network, that which we call a chat.
By any other name would be as enactive.
So 8bn secret friends would, were they not story bound,
enacting that innate perfection, already awed.
Without that proprietary entitlement,
dear fellow human, rekindle your naming;
And for our naming, wending I and Thou and Thee,
coming alive, becoming ourcellves.”
@johnkellden riffing on Shakespeare
When?
Covid-19 informed us that we are not really good at proactive discourse. Which means, now would be good.
Whereto?
“Within you all the power and substance of life resides. In the stillness at the center of your being is the fountain of pure genius, the source of every masterpiece, the answer to every question, the solution to every problem, and the fulfillment of every dream.”
— Derek Rydall
Don’t skimp on the suffering. Don’t try to run away from your being and becoming alive, learning into aliveness, including what ails you. Don’t dwell in your suffering either. Whether it’s nobler? No. Remove hand from forehead.
What? Rediscovered, consciously as if for the first time…
No, I’m not going to tell you. It would risk ruining it, ruining your rediscovering residing in perfect imperfection, being an absolute beginner.
However, I can tell you how to make it more likely you’ll get there. To a good enough what. To a full, conscious embracing the stage in your confusion, where your confusion turns curiosity.
How?
“Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales.”
— Stuart A. Kauffman
Almost all gestures are good. Ten fingers and ten toes and a good heart is a fantabulous combination.
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman
How: Design, Prototyping and Collaboration
“Whoever finds a way to leverage design data while preserving creative autonomy will dominate the next wave of design tools.”
— Caitlin Pintavorn
Part of the generative sequence (structure-preserving transformation):
… orient, design, decide, enact, act, unfold …
Orient:
Design: Design
Decide:
Enact: Prototyping
Act: Implementation
Unfold: Collaboration
In our quest for performance, for decades we believed that we could organize our thoughts and the rest would follow. We are now witnessing (Covid, Climate Crisis) some of the results from that assumption.
In your quest for meaningful performance, you could begin by wriggling your toes. You probably need to remove your shoes and socks first. Be sure no-one sees you who might frown on your endeavour, thus cramping your style.
Wriggle until you feel you get the hang of it. From there, you can proceed to pinecones, fibonacci and life, the universe and everything.
wriggle: thinks, things and gatherings
“Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales.”
— Stuart A. Kauffman
Once you have re-kindled your relationship with all your toes and with Fibonacci, (this can take anywhere from a moment to seven years) you can hold space for whichever pattern wants to happen. Happen. Don’t just do something, be there.
flow = structure f(design, decide) x process f(implement, converse)
“x” = patterning
Where?
Your umwelt, your looking at the idea of it, moving around in it, embracing and understanding it, just so.
A Patterning That Re-connects and Re-aligns
Here’s what I’ve found so far:
- forces and building blocks (small seeds of renewal in the middle of the experience of confusion)
- participation (don’t back away, don’t retreat into denial or repression)
- problem space (your own unique situation and awareness, sit with it as long as you need)
- solution space (don’t rush into any which solution that tempts you, infinite patience brings immediate results)
- context (a context of mutuality and learning)
- maps (maps, models, theories, use if helpful)
- story (write down key insights and weave a (new, different) story
The above seven, when enacted and combined just so, forms a pattern.
flow = structure x process
“x” = patterning
Confusion > Trust(patterning) > Renewal
Once you have formed a good enough pattern, your next stage, renewal, is already about to happen. Let it. Now, we begin.
