Reading Response 6

My uncle raises goats. Every evening, he returns from his job and goes to work in the field. He’ll fix fences, tend to any sick or pregnant animals, feed the herding dogs (I’m not sure what breed they are, but they’re HUGE and probably closer to wolves than the yellow lab I grew up with), make sure trees are safe, and work on this year’s unused areas of land to make sure he can safely rotate the goats around next year. Is this work or play?

This was one of the main questions running through my head as I read chapter 6 of “Artful Design,” as this chapter sets up play and work in opposition to each other in multiple places. Perhaps surprisingly for my demographic, video games don’t resonate a ton with me, so I found myself looking for other examples to apply this opposition to, and I found my uncle’s situation very interesting in this framework. While on the surface, my uncle’s evenings are not spent in play, but in something done for extrinsic value. Is that actually the case though? I’m convinced he does this hands-on “work” more for its intrinsic value as a meditative act than any future benefit, and while it may seem governed by a set of rigid rules, he’s constantly reacting to surprising new environmental challenges as an expression of his unique humanity. I believe this act lies somewhere in between the work-play dichotomy, as do most things that I truly love doing.

What then, can be gained from looking at raising goats or gardening or working out as play, even if they may not quite fit the definition of play? This is different from “gamifying” these things in the common peripheral sense (which I love the advantages of from a teaching/learning perspective, but seem to very often fall flat when I’ve implemented them for myself without some deeper core gamification). Rather, what about assuming play is already built into the core of these things? If this is the case, the mechanics of my uncle’s evening game are extremely open-ended. He is presented with very rigid rules in his game, but they are so numerous, and to an extent, so intuitive, that he can quickly reach a flow state by responding in one of many ways each time one of the rules is invoked. This would then be my uncle’s expression of the dynamics of his game.

An aesthetic analysis is where my uncle’s game, if there is one, gets really interesting. It’s got plenty of challenge, visceral physical interaction, a narrative that stretches as far back as the geological history of the land my uncle lives on, discovery of new worlds within a narrowly-defined area, and is a key part of my uncle’s self-expression and identity. Importantly, my uncle’s game reflects his beliefs about his relationship with the natural world that I would call beautifully sublime. The parts where this analysis breaks down are in asking whether my uncle’s game has any fantasy (He’s not a prepper per se, but I’m sure imagining the world in that framework or another similar one is a fun part of his game, so maybe!) or fellowship (He’s one of the most solitary people I know, so not likely). This in turn leads to another set of very open-ended questions about games in general: Do all 9 of the modified MDA framework’s categories have to be present for a great game? If so, to what extent? Are some more or less “important” than the others? I don’t think these questions have answers, but they’ll be good to keep in mind during my design processes!

Unrelated: a potential counterexample to the tofu burger principle from one of my old roommates: Indian cuisine! It’s got loads of great vegetarian dishes, but was, for example, much less familiar to me in undergrad than a tofu burger. Despite this unfamiliarity, it’s super great by itself, enough that it was a much more appealing introduction to vegetarian dishes than a tofu burger for me personally. One is not intrinsically better than the other, but entirely new things are cool too!