2005-11-13 Design Engaged notes, day 3 Hyperdimensional Hopscotch Ben Cerveny "Collaborative way-finding in the space of all possible goals" play fills the spaces in our interactions where language cannot it creates interfaces "when animals begin their descent into the recognition of the Other" it's through play that they can do that for humans, it's symbolic systems, the projection of the language of the word. language formalises meaning; games formalise play games have a consensual modelling ability what humans do is create meta-artifacts in the game of chess. structures that are imposed over the game. auras of the interactions between the pieces, projecting. they don't brute force. group forming in roleplaying: it's instrumented, like jazz, improv. it's understood that the roles aren't independent, but are woven together. it gives us a language for how these roles happen together. multiple modalities of play. finite goal. also, a stage of engagement, process oriented. a process we're all engaged with. a distributed conversation about what can happen. it's the game that we are all playing, this distributed idealism. we draw a grid on the ground that quantises the state of things. the smooth spaces of the world. game design discretises the space. lets us address things, make a *place* in the space time of it. games are adaptable. like cards, or approaching the pool table. there are tiny differences in the rules, and there is a handshaking as people approach the game (what happens if you sink the cue ball, etc). "temporary autonomous games" not only do you draw the chalk on the sidewalk, but the chalk washes away after a time. we have the ability to make temporary structures for meaning. you focus taxonomy onto a specific, contained process, and that gets traction. meaning accretes. you can discard the ruleset afterwards. aldo van eyck: he did "in-betweening". modernist break-away. he built 700 playgrounds in amsterdam. through the projection of the possibilities of play on the environment, he invoked habitation again. tiny eddies between the monolithic flows of modernism. the playgrounds were put in pathways. "constant nieuwenhuis" he articulated best "we are all making this now, together" we are all playing this game of consensual rules the whole time, and it's called the city urban planning dept in amsterdam: "the bureau of spatial organisation" apply play to shape the city, which is "Playground" in amsterdam (ben's recent project). this is not without precedent: burning man has been becoming self-aware of itself, as an entity. could it reach autopoiesis? good term: "stim city" before we can activate the city, before we can poke it as a platform that reconfigures itself around us, we can begin to compose our personal and fragmented understanding that various different groups around a city understand the city, can be represented as stimuli, all these things that are our subjectivity, that we can now broadcast at each other. we can build the hopscotch squares from one to the other. "polder modelling" holland: deeply instilled approach to collaboration, called the polder model. when you raise actual land out of the sea, you need to make a lot of decisions about it. there has to be a way of crystallising the way it works. [so is game design the way of figuring out what the political consequences of artifacts are? should we all be engaged in this? game design is a process of discovering, rather than ideology.] my word! "autonomisis" games that create themselves, like law. from autopoiesis and nomic. ben is talking about the loop that goes that creates culture, and culture that accretes. and the process is deformed by the accreted itself. you can't change the culture, but you can change the loop. you can't reset. there is a way of resetting, but often only by revolution. [perfect. it like a continuous extruded phenotype. the gene expression - the loop that creates itself via the phenotype - has to build machines to dismantle and reconstruct the phenotype, just not just churn it out.] good question from matt ward: how does this work with free market economics? [it's the same thing, it's a real problem. the free market has no past tense. same problem.] destructive combat jazz, "Cobra," a performance (dance?). mentioned by adam. #