Games for the Mind

Talking, even half-heartedly, about sketching out a game again shook loose something in the back of my head.  I started to think about how I design, why I design, and then I started thinking about how I think about play.  What is more, I have been producing a game of PTA for my gaming group, a more active role than I have taken in gaming for a good long while (it’s been refreshing, with a few bumps).

Somewhere over a slice of pizza, it hit me that almost all of my design efforts to date have been presumptively focused toward a Simulationist CA.

What I most want the rules to do is provide the mechanics for the elaboration of a setting, the exploration of a setting.  This (yep, look at me, actually quoting an old Forge classic like Simulationism: the right to dream):

For play really to be Simulationist, it can’t lose the daydream quality: the pleasure in imagination as such, without agenda.

holds very true for what appeals to me about designing a game and how I imagine it might be played, whereas I have not been able to fully come to terms with this, which makes it easy for me to get lost:

For game design to promote this goal, it must be openly valued and its virtues articulated…

Well, I’ll be.  That is just about it.  The games I want to design amount to structured, cooperative, daydreams.  What I want is a game that contains (a) material to prime the pump along with (b) rules that provide some structure as to who can contribute to that base material and when they can.

I tend to drift from (b) toward trying to (c) establish an economy of access to contributing details which, in turn, drifts into (d) looking for mechanics that determine when the game ends.

(c) superficially looks like (b) and may or may not be inimical to my primary goals.  (d), however, is something of a siren, that draws the ship of design onto the rocks.  Artificially determining the end of a dream is inimical to the very process of dreaming it.  It redirects attention away from the dream to rationing, to the mundane.

When does a dream end?  When people drift away from it.  When people get hungry or bored or have to go home to check on the kids.  You don’t need to structure it to end, dreams end well enough on their own.

I want to design a game of the floating worlds, of the ethereal, of the passing moments.

Huh.  How about that, indeed?