Dear Ludic Liberators,
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Last week at the Ludic Liberation Lab we played VERSIONS, a creative writing game created in collaboration with Indigo Esmonde (whose awesome hand-drawn newsletter you should subscribe to!). In just over an hour of actual gameplay, 7 players generated 22 stories, adding up to about 16 pages of double-spaced written content, ranging in genre from romance to sci-fi to paranoid postmodern literary fiction to historical anthropology to comedy horror. There was a great variety of takes and talents displayed, and a sense of shared intimacy that emerged from getting to glimpse each other’s spontaneous writing selves, imaginative inner worlds, and lyrical vocabularies. It was fun, connective, and generative; in other words — the game is good!
With proof of concept achieved, let’s review the research findings!
At the Ludic Liberation Lab, our goal is to collectively explore how changing the rules of the games we play in life (often unconsciously) can expand our freedom as existential players. As our motto reminds us:
🎲 ♾️ We Play to Remember We are Always Playing ♾️ 🎲
Writing has so many rules and conventions that it can feel like the game of writing is primarily about demonstrating mastery of these very rules: grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, originality, wit, etc. Some of the rules have become so practiced it might feel easy to follow them (i Think I’m noW pretty gOod At CapitaliZing?), but others are ever-shifting and unclear: What “slang” is appropriate to appropriate these days? Does using a semicolon correctly make me seem smart or pretentious? What about using it incorrectly?
Additionally, at a certain point, the writing must meet a specific reader, and that reader is likely to have a number of personal rules that the writer wasn’t aware of and hadn’t prioritized. Ironically, sometimes the reader with the most unforgiving secret rules is our own self: the inner critic who has decided to impose a standard that’s virtually unmeetable, certainly not in the first draft.
Whenever I barely even dare to think about writing something, my inner critic loves to show up and stipulate that it be “groundbreakingly weird and brilliant and perfectly coherent!” Even if I was capable of such a feat, it just might not happen on the first attempt! Exhibit A: I’ve just erased and re-written the previous sentence about 17 times, and I’m not even going for brilliant or weird here. Just, like, adequately readable.
Exhibit B: I’ve been “writing a novel” for the past several years. At times, the process has been both surprising and satisfying. Other times though, my inner critic is set on making me feel terrible for failing at its many secret writing and writer rules. Here are just a few I’ve flagrantly violated:
1) the novel must be written and edited in one perfectly disciplined and uninterrupted marathon, otherwise it’s not the real thing —> FAIL, I’ve started and stopped and gotten distracted writing this thing for over 4 years! I guess it must not be real!
2) every character must already be perfectly complex and coherent any time they appear in the text, ESPECIALLY if they have some kind marginalized identity, because who do you think you are writing about OTHER PEOPLE!!! —> Yeah, FAIL, I’ve certainly recycled stereotypes, hodge-podged details from real people I know to make my “fictional” characters, or exaggerated certain identity markers while figuring out what the hell happens in the plot. CANCEL ME ALREADY!
3) every sentence should both WOW and make a reader LAUGH. Every. One. —> LOL, Definitely FAIL. Some sentences are just like “She woke up in the hotel room.” Because that’s what happened! I’M SORRY!
If you try to write anything creative (fiction or not) you can probably relate to being harassed by your own personal secret rule library.
Indigo and I made VERSIONS to break through the writing paralysis created by these impossible rules. The game tries to do this not by declaring the secret rules invalid or irrelevant, but by adding OTHER EXTRA RULES, ones that are extremely easy to achieve and intentionally subvert the official or hidden rules of writing. Rules like: Write in a vampire character. Write in the genre you hate. Write what you’re most afraid of seeming like as a writer. Write a full story in only 7 minutes.
During our debrief, VERSIONS players said that the most liberating experience of the game was having the permission to write in the exact way they were most afraid of appearing to the reader: boring, slow, ditsy, cliche, repetitive, stiff.
Why did that feel so freeing? My theory is that adding the EXTRA RULE reveals and cancels out the SECRET RULE, thus disarming the debilitating constraint.
For example, when we make the extra rule “BE BORING”, our secret hidden rule of “DON’T BE BORING” gets cancelled out just like in long division, so actually, the remaining guideline becomes: “DON’T _____.” Don’t… blank?? Don’t Nothing! BE WHATEVER! SEE WHAT HAPPENS! PLAY! :)
Would you believe that this rule-cancelling mechanic turns out to be an “advanced” move in BABA IS YOU? I’m still developing my theories about this brilliant little puzzle game that requires you to change the rules in order to win, and the many existential insights it contains. You can see in the screenshot below how a rule outside of my reach “BELT IS BELT AND STOP” is partially cancelled out by the new rule I made “BELT IS SHIFT AND NOT STOP.” Now I as STATUE can move across the BELT, to the tunnel where that sweet sweet FLAG (which IS WIN) is located 😎
Of course, there were other aspects of the game that made VERSIONS feel liberating: the fast pace and collective momentum of the experience (our rounds were 7 minutes or less), the ever-important APPRECIATION portion of each round, which allowed us to celebrate every version without critique or comparison, the virality of ideas that recurred and evolved across our stories (the game is not just writing prompts, it sprouts out like a rhizome from an initial collective seed). All of that requires playing VERSIONS live with other people at the same time. As one player said, the game’s rules made the experience of writing feel like having “bumper pads in a bowling alley” – challenging, focused, and fun!
You can, however, try the EXTRA RULE rule on your own! Next time you experience writing anxiety, give yourself an extra rule – one that you’re certain you’d be able to accomplish and perhaps even the very thing you’re trying to avoid. Try it with an email, a tweet, or a manuscript. Assign yourself the rule to BE MESSY. BE RUDE. BE INCOHERENT. BE UTTERLY PREDICTABLE. BE BLAH. And then see what actually happens! Respond to this post to tell me about it! ;-)
I leave you with a profound excerpt from one VERSION generated during our gameplay (1 out of 22!), written by a “Thomas Pynchon” (all names pseudonyms) and entitled Rosy Grit of the Hidden Knowing of Zero.
Tragedy ends in love, if not tragedy or maybe a confused morning of rising dinosaurs and the end of time as we know it just as it did for these two mysterious clowns who transformed themselves accidentally into something that no one expected: the laughing servants of animals who don't know this Earth but would like to.
🗓 Don't miss any more labs! The Ludic Liberation Lab meets every 2nd Thursday of the month, 6-7:30pm Eastern Time, so add it to your calendar. WE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH ON SEPTEMBER 9th!
I’m looking for more Ludic Liberation Lab Researchers and Collaborators! 🎲🔬Do you have something you’d like to investigate through experimental play? Would you like to bring some games you’ve created to our growing network of playful liberation researchers or collaborate with me on new game-based methods to explore an intriguing theme? Email me at ludicliberation@gmail.com!!! Also email me QUESTIONS for the Baba Is You Life Advice Column, which will be released in 2 weeks.
Just Telling One Version of the Story Among Infinity,
Natalia
Game Maker/Destroyer