Games for the Mind

So, what does the community of these actual players look like? What we have is not a central agency that helps standardize play, but a number of productive, small centers each fostering their own mode of play. Given some broad similarities in temperament and opportunity, there will probably be a great deal of overlap in the sort of play that these groups create. I like to think of these small groups as ‘cloisters’—small locally-minded groups with connections to a broader movement curious to explore the diversity of play.

Such cloisters are not isolated, but nor are they entirely exposed. We might term this a ‘peninsular’ model, in which they are connected to the main body of gamers by common texts but not determined on all sides by the community of gamer’s activity. They focus upon their own members and their own play more than on the major currents in gaming. There is a certain sense of distance and choice from the large currents, a feeling that they could embrace them or not as they prefer.

This will likely lead to a certain peculiarity in the way each cloister uses and develops terms to describe its play. Those peculiarities are not kinks to be straightened. They are like the stretching of your favorite jeans—not a sign that the jeans are ruined, but that they now fit your body’s actual shape. The peculiarity is a virtue, the outward expression of the group’s efforts to come to terms with each other, to compromise and bolster each other.

The cloister should be proud of its cloister speech, its inside jokes, and ingroup language. It should also appreciate that other cloisters have struggled to produce their own pidgin and creoles. When they go out from their cloister or seek entrance into a new cloister, they should understand that there will be no common language with which to begin. They will have to approach the new cloister with a mixture of reverence and commitment. Reverence for what the group has achieved, reverence for the fact that it will take time to pick up on that group’s peculiarities. Commitment to furthering that group, not just accepting what they have done and accommodating to it, but bringing to bear their own personality, their own virtues which can contribute to the cloister’s development.