Survival, Nourishment, Mental Health, Engagement

We’re a lucky bunch.
Our parents emerged from so much struggle to deliver us opportunity. They also delivered us free time. I think we’re undisciplined with free time, or have been. Some of us still are. I think I am at times and I have to improve.

I have to improve because being undisciplined with my free time leads to me being undisciplined with my money and that is not a good thing. I’ve created something cyclical that is compelling and addictive, difficult to give up willfully or forcefully.

In my free time I indulge in cultural experiences. Many experiences don’t cost money but some of the ones that do are quite delicious indeed. Board games naturally are one of these things. There’s a very noble component of buying board games in that they’re intended to be shared. This creates a wonderful sense of community and culture that truly is compelling. We want to always be playing new games. We want to always be playing games with people. We want to always be sharing games with new people.

We could be disciplined with our money, that is to say I could be disciplined with my money but I’m not. The consumption of systems and community truly is addictive. There are activities that don’t incur cost, reading and research, discussion, but having tools readily on hand to share with people is greatly rewarding. The act of sharing with people then is extremely rewarding. The act of understanding people and engaging in increasing intimacies with them the ultimate reward (regardless of activity/board games/social tools).

Board games are a catalyst for intellectual mechanical engagement and also social interaction. Their design reveals an interesting ecosystem: people are extremely varied, thus designers are varied. The games that designers create are varied and there are so many different types of play (mechanically, how the game administers its rules and how the players engage with them) as a result. This means that there are almost as many varied types of play as there are varied types of people. This itself is a wonderful thing to behold.

In the end, I adore beholding things. I will burn through the resources at hand in order to observe and engage. There are questions as to how healthy this is and I’m not just being facetious, I am honestly testing this dynamic. In the past when I’ve examined it, I’ve more or less always concluded that I’d rather engage now and future be damned, I’m not sacrificing opportunities I have in front of me for the sake of simply more time later on in which I will do… something. I don’t want to discover social and mechanical dynamics when I’m older. I want to be literate in them now and develop myself every day so that I’ll always be agile and primed for engagement on as many levels and with as many different people of different literacies as possible.

It means I have little temperance, which may mean I may not be doing enough planning for a sustainable cultural engagement. That shouldn’t sound mercenary, I don’t mean to completely plot out in exacting detail the pace at which I’ll engage, but if I’m not careful I’ll end up with a lot of tools and few other resources to manage other logistical concerns even on a basic level.

At this point I’m quite wary of adding the bipolar mental state into this discussion. It feels to me all too easy to say ‘Oh I’m spending because I’m bipolar’ for two reasons, firstly because I don’t ever want to do anything to alleviate my responsibility and accountability for (and ownership of) my actions. Secondly because I may be spending because I’m bipolar, and that precipitates a whole discussion I’m not entirely confident in having and certainly not online. There is a whole dynamic at work on that topic that I will not explore here. Suffice to say that managing it is delicate indeed.

Board games and of late, some seemingly basic mobile phone games have been greatly beneficial to my mental health. I am currently playing a game on my phone in which one joins coloured dots in an attempt to score highly with enclosed shapes (these score higher than just lines). It’s extremely simple yet there’s a wonderful nano-seconds long process that is engaged during play:

– Assessment of the entire playing field identifying broad distribution of colours and areas of concentration.
– Segmentation of playing field to assess available scoring actions.
– Calculation of possible procedural actions in order to create greater scoring opportunities.
– Execution of action.
– Observation of new colours dropped in to replace those eliminated by action.

There is also a timer running in the top right corner of the screen which is increased depending on the score of enclosed spaces (lines do not pay time, only score) and while I do sometimes look at this, I run a vague internal tracking clock that runs off an impression of how much time has passed.

There is a wonderful dynamic of pattern recognition going on in my fore-brain when I play this game. Activities like this are hugely reductionist iterations and sometimes abstracts of real life engagements. Complex events in real life can be long term, or can be governed by unique rules. An example of a pragmatic real life event might be managing and coordinating the movement and storage of boxes and pallets in a warehouse. A longer and more abstract event may be something social that involves emotional investment, physical transport, management of resources and coordination of actions with collaborators/contributors.
Games are wonderful abstracts of these things, many that can in (very) loose ways reflect an entire life (I mention this because last night our board game of choice was Village, in which players’ meeples are marked with generation numbers, 1 to 4, and members of earlier generations (1) eventually pass away and are ‘recorded’ in the village chronicle depending on their vocation). A set of dynamics from real life are extracted and condensed into rulesets, compressing them into an action that can range from minutes to execute to mere fractions of a second.

I suspect this is why games are so compelling – games of any kind, including video games (hurr hurr – but I’ll pass up the opportunity to bash them today).

Games are reductionist system sets that exist in enclosed (virtual) environments (this is true even for board games as the overall system exists in the minds of the players). We are able to learn a set of rules, execute them as mechanics and observe their results as dynamics.

This is an interesting element. In many games, cardboard and otherwise, a poor decision doesn’t often result in a loss, short or long term. Instead it mostly results in a lesser net gain. Success and failure then are measured in magnitudes of gain only. This is probably why games that loudly play loss are so enjoyable, because it’s such a rare thing to experience in a game.

I’m not really advocating a greater balance of real world inspired dynamics in games by discussing this – I am just discussing it as an exercise. At a cursory glance I’d suggest it’s one of the reasons games can offer so much joy and delight at engagement, because of their isolated and almost myopic observation of consequence and determination. We play (board) games mostly to engage in something we enjoy primarily for ourselves and then to socialise thereby enjoying otherpeople and participating and contributing to their enjoyment. These are all good things. Perhaps that’s why reductionist systems have organically been established in games and play, because they better affirm positivity and encouragement rather than being the wild, unpredictable dynamics we may struggle with in daily life.

I’m going to deviate a bit and bring up some of Paul’s discussions of the video games industry, the indie games design and player culture and what’s perceived to be the AAA design and player culture. To summarise with cruel efficiency (it’s definitely worth speaking to him about it and reading what he’s written about it), he discusses the necessity for both to exist, that they need each other and that ultimately it’s a healthy environment while naturally being one that’s far from perfect.

I use that in context to a discussion that often is brought up in video games regarding whether or not they (video games) need to be fun. Naturally they don’t, but a world in which we’re fond of saying everything in context, video games might need to be mostly fun in order for the ones that aren’t to have both context and power. There’s more to that discussion but I’ve not really meditated on it much of late. Another day.

So when I think about board games, they are mostly fun. Not only that, but there’s a specific levity to them. Even in games that feature more serious themes like space colonisation and combat, ‘fun’ components are often revealed in wrangling resources, determining battles and managing the infrastructure of play (Eclipse). Even in games that feature great loss that aren’t at all intentionally comedic (Robinson Crusoe), there seems to be an intrinsic comedy that emerges as a sprained ankle earned two turns previous comes back to halve a player’s available actions in the current turn. Even in games that are difficult to achieve total success in (co-op games including Robinson Crusoe) which result in ultimate failure much more often than defeat, much positivity is created simply by executing the rules and experiencing the dynamic.

So can a board game not be fun?
I immediately think of Brenda Romero’s (nee Braithwaite) Train which unfortunately I never got to play from a position of ignorance, only read about. I’ll leave you to look it up if you’re curious about it and be forewarned, it’s a serious subject of quite a horrible nature, but that ‘game’ is definitely not fun, one often doesn’t ‘enjoy’ it in the usual sense of the term, and yet it is without question a very good game. It is definitely a game because it operates a reductive ruleset with physical abstracts of real life objects and actions. Yet because of the theme and core subject matter which emerge the more play progresses, it definitely doesn’t have any levity of fun that’s found in possibly every other game (that isn’t one of this nature).

Does Train’s power come from its real historical theme? If you made a game that was more abstract, that wasn’t about Train’s subject directly and wasn’t easily correlated to it, would it still be as powerful? Train’s real theme is important because it’s based on events we know really happened, and regardless of the level of knowledge in the subject players have, they are highly likely to have the game’s theme, once revealed, evoke knowledge and imagery from those real life events.

This presents an interesting challenge then for board game designers and players. After people play Train, I wonder if they want to play it again. After reading about it and experiencing the revelation via proxy, I’m not even sure I could play it at all. It may be a game that players may only play once and not want to again, yet it has so much power and is such an important game to have been created. It may be valid saying that it’s an important game to have been played, possibly because of the unique perspective it may offer on the passengers of the train leading up to the events to come (I don’t believe those events are ever directly referenced, only the name and location of the final destination of the train).

By now you may have figured out what Train is about so I hope some of that makes sense. It’s a truly harrowing topic and one many of us wouldn’t ever imagine making a game out of, but I’m glad Brenda did. It gives us a healthy kick out of assuming what a game is, what it can do and what it’s for which I believe we need.

That is one immensely meandering discussion. I’m going to be a little circular now and come back to mental health. I love that Brenda made Train (Sam – this reminds me of our discussion in which you emphasise the importance of art being created by human beings and not a nebulous notion of a culture), and I love how exhausted I am even discussing it in the most pragmatic of terms. Its power extends far beyond its play, even when I haven’t played it. That’s one immensely important piece of art right there.

The pattern recognition I experience in my mobile game is beneficial to my mental health because it allows me to burn excess energy (believe me, it’s without question in excess). It allows me to burn it in a safe and productive manner. Board games do a similar thing with the added benefit of community with people. My near religious fervor for contemporary board, card and dice games is approaching the absurd point of [insert plant grown in a remote location] fads in that they can cure anything. Not quite. But something akin to the way that animals are greatly beneficial to those with serious illness (or any illness to be honest), I’m beginning to (rationally or irrationally) feel that board games are greatly beneficial to mental health.

Similar dynamics to those mentioned in my mobile game are at play. Any combination or all of the following may be on offer:

– Maintenance/awareness of core rules in fore-brain.
– Assessment of the overall status of play including any shared play area and also individual play areas.
– Planning.
– Observation of other players’ actions and extrapolation of score/change of status of play as a result.
– Testing, iteration and modification of strategy.
– Observation and celebration of emergent dynamics.
– Facepalming.
– Gambits based on procedural ordered play in which other players take actions between two desired player actions.
– Usually more facepalming.
– Swearing.
– Laughter.
– Snacks and drinks.
– Players that learn faster organically (not asked to by anyone else) offering assistance to players that learn slower (this is very much game specific, not person specific. Individuals will learn unique systems slower or faster).
– Celebration of other players’ good play, particularly when taking advantage of multi-layered and complex dynamics.
– A sense of accomplishment regardless of final victory determination, that players have often built something or scored highly by understanding and successfully executing often complex rulesets, or built a really cool looking farm (Agricola).
– Wonderful and detailed post-mortems of each round of play.
– A lovely insight into the personalities of fellow players.
– Plans for the next gathering to either play games again or spend communal time together.
– Often a desire to share these experiences with others (and this is how you get into buying and teaching).

So I was quite manipulative inhow I hijacked that list, but hopefully it’s clear why.

I keep repeating myself over and over again. That all of those things can be found in one activity (sometimes as a result of playing even a single game once) is truly amazing. It’s beneficial in so many ways to individuals and to any broader cultures.

There are some negatives and negative dynamics worth examining but I’m consciously excluding them from this discussion. They’re important, and handling and mitigating them is also important, but that’s for another day. For the most part I feel like the positive dynamics are more inherently easier to precipitate, directly or indirectly so I’m focusing on them. Alphas can be problematic but not all the time. As I’ve stated before, playing and in particular teaching games (and running groups) is so much more about people than it is about the actual games.

Oh yeah wow, teaching warrants a list of its own but for now I think it’s less interesting to this particular discussion (lols – particular… dear lord).

I think I’ve had enough for now, or rather you have. You possibly being me, in a few days, months or years when I inevitably read this again.

I bloody love an anticlimax.