mihono.moe

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what is play? we just don't know

from 2024-12-12
by hexeaktivitat

I've been poking at jesse schell's Art of Game Design as something to engage my brain with during certain downtime points at work this week and I feel like I'm already staring down the "am I wrong or just in the incorrect universe" question. it's a very good read so far and I think the lenses talked about are very helpful even outside the scope of game design in terms of outlining what is a "useful" question to ask or interrogate when designing something, especially when I'm feeling like "design" is a difficult task for me when I already try to compact a lot of decisions into heuristics and heuristic chains rather than apply what I assume is "creative thought" to a problem.

an example: let's take music. there's a lot of music forms (sonata form, canon, verse-chorus, etc) that largely exist to provide the scaffolding for a generalized exploration of a musical concept, and this is largely to make the process of exploring the musical concept easier to deal with - there's a set pattern, you can follow a structure, there's a fairly large decision made for you that you don't need to make again. this makes Sense to my brain, like I Get It. and then when I sit down to try to work within a particular structure it just does not work. I understand what the task at hand is: take a bit of rhythm and frequencies and fuss around with them in various ways to move away and come back to the origin point to some degree. but I get stuck at the "fuss around with them in various ways" portion - this bit doesn't sit with me, because I don't understand what it means, or how to do what it means, and when I try it I either immediately lose the original idea (turning it into through-composition or ambient timbral soundscape, which isn't necessarily incorrect either) or it sounds artificial, like it was created through algorithm (which, by running it through heuristics, it more or less is).

essentially "fuss around with things in various ways" is more or less this giant black box to me, a sort of imposing instruction where the only practical advice to be given is "idk just do something I guess" which has never sat well with me. there's no framework for that part, and I don't understand what is meant by that. or rather I do understand what is meant by it, because I can observe it and recognize it as what is happening and appreciate it, but I don't understand how to do it myself. it feels like there is a concrete, internal process that I don't have that is supposed to be like "just do shit it'll be fun", or if it is there it gets immediately overridden by a strong need to know a procedure and methodology to follow, a template or pattern, a definite answer, something that isn't provided by the frameworks of structure and form.

I'm like 95% certain that this is just undiagnosed autism and it's just been throwing a wrench at me for most of my life. I have never liked doing things just to see what happens, because I find that what I care about is knowing what happens before I do them. and from what I can tell, there seems to be a basic assumption amongst the (neurotypical?) world that "doing things just to see what happens" is a concrete requirement for whatever "play" or "creativity" is. I don't necessarily think that I lack "creativity" since systemic thinking, logical thinking, and analytical thinking all require it, but I definitely feel like I have a shortage on whatever is generally meant by the term "creativity", and I can't remember if I had it and forgot, or never had it to begin with.