Lab Report #23: Games of Order

Suggestions for Playing with our Existential Chaos

who remembers this? 🙋‍♀️

Hello Ludic Liberators,

This Lab Report is made possible thanks to your answers to my previous email which, in lieu of a Lab, asked you to answer questions about Order. Check out some of the beautiful responses here (several others were sent to me privately).

Games of Order

Many classic solo games (games that can be played alone) are games of making order. Solitaire, Tetris, Jigsaw Puzzles all involve going through some small bit of randomized chaos and sorting it into various arrangements that fit. With so much stuff in our lives constantly increasing in entropy (=the measure of disorder), it’s fascinating that we make space and time for ordering futile, pointless things on our table tops and phone screens.

Why do we do it?

Because the process of ordering can be immensely pleasurable! Pattern recognition is a primal capacity of human intelligence that is intrinsically satisfying to flex.

a jigsaw puzzle of the original jigsaw puzzle

I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.

- Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the Periodic Table of Elements

In my last Lab Report, I asked you to answer questions about Order—which aspects of your life you succeed in keeping orderly, what being in and out of order feels like, and what kinds of effort does order involve. The answers that were offered were extremely generative for our research into playful liberation! Thank you players! Below is a synthesis of some of the ways we play with Order.

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What Does Order Feel Like?

A positive, desirable order has the qualities of smoothness, simplicity, ease. For the ordered person it creates the experience of virtuosity, mastery, flow, a pleasant certainty. It feels like a lack of obstacles or setbacks or friction.

When There’s “Too Much” Order. . .

It can require a level of precision that borders on stress. It can feel rigid and constrain the freedom of movement by limiting spontaneity.

The Opposite of Order. . .

Is chaos, randomness, clutter. For the player, it creates the experience of overwhelm, uncertainty, fear. It produces circumstances of tripping, hiccuping, getting stuck. Disorder can also constrain movement by presenting a paralyzing disarray of options.

How Do We Create Order?

Across contexts (physical spaces, relationships, workflows), practices of making order involve:

• Removing the extraneous

• Sorting the essential

• Using forms of external accountability such as lists that remind us of what needs to be done, dogs who make us walk them, partners who expect us to see them, deadlines that require us to meet them as win/lose conditions

• Making temporal commitments (plans) to create a chronological order of operations

• Being fully present in the activity of making or maintaining order while doing it

Pleasures of Re-Shuffling Our Order

Sometimes, it feels very liberating to abandon our order/s, and follow a sudden desire or spontaneous opportunity. This feels most pleasant, however, when a regular sense of order is maintained and is neither in constant risk of tipping into disorder or being too constraining.

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Is all of the above too obvious? Perhaps. It’s helpful to start our research by sorting out some obvious things, by stating our foundational axioms. Now we can move on to a more interesting Ludic Liberation question:

If ordering things is so inherently pleasurable that we create voluntary diversions (games) to engage in activities of ordering, why does making (and maintaining) order in our own lives feel so difficult (even, sometimes, impossible)?

what my calendar looks like

I propose a few theories:

1. Games of order are temporarily and spaciously limited. A Jigsaw puzzle typically fits on a table, a game of Solitaire is limited to the 52 cards in a deck. Once started, these games can be finished in a reasonable amount of time – usually a few hours. In contrast, some of the things we want to have ordered in our lives – our digital storage, our uncertain careers, our heartbreaking pasts – don’t have clear limits, boundaries, or finish lines. Emails and documents and Spotify songs keep accumulating, setting us up to play a game of Tetris that starts at level 20.

2. Games of order don’t have existential stakes. Sorting out a deck of cards is pleasurable because the ultimate outcome isn’t existential – it doesn’t affect our entire sense of our identity or alter the course of our future. Sorting out a career direction, however, or cleaning out the garage after a divorce can threaten our core foundations. What’s extraneous? What’s essential? What about myself and my life can go into a discard pile? The increased stakes are scary, so playing feels less free.

3. Games of order have clear win/lose conditions, including many micro in-game wins. Even if we don’t complete a Jigsaw puzzle in one sitting, or beat all the levels of a Tetris game, it’s still easy to experience micro satisfactions in the process: the crunchy click of fitting together two matching cardboard puzzle pieces, the satisfying disappearance of a line of tetris blocks. Each of these micro-interactions produces a small dopamine release. Many of our existential ordering games fail to design for these kinds of in-game satisfactions. We make absolute and ultimate win conditions (impeccable closet, Inbox Zero, perfectly figured out life) and make the process itself be painful and tedious and long. Not fun!

Strategies for making Existential Games of Order (EGOs? 😉) more Liberating:

1. Limit your Game Space. Make the game space smaller and have clear boundaries. Rather than sorting a whole closet, start with a single drawer. Call it Level 1! Or make it a goal to fill a single trash bag with stuff that can be donated or discarded. If ordering something digital/hard to see, create temporal limits. Maybe it’s organizing emails or financial transactions just from last month. Or commit to doing only what you can accomplish in 5 minutes. If ordering something more abstract or internal, like your career or life direction, play with approaching it like a Jigsaw puzzle: describe the big picture of what you want to create, with any essential specifics you can clearly define. Then see if you already have any puzzle pieces in your existing life that you can assemble. Great! You’re not starting from scratch. The game can be finding the missing puzzle pieces one at a time, trying on stuff that life offers you to see if it fits.

2. Reduce the Stakes. This might require some self-inquiry. If a Game of Order feels too scary or overwhelming, ask yourself, what do I think is at stake? Am I creating unnecessary pressure? As I shared in my last email, I’ve been dealing with a family crisis for the past few weeks after my dad had a stroke. Many things fell out of order as a result of this event, or revealed an underlying broken order that’s been held up by snot (as we say in Russian). I believed that I had to solve everything as soon as possible, and that self-imposed expectation unsurprisingly made me extremely stressed. It appeared like putting things into immediate order was a matter of life, death, my family’s and my own future. But as I realized how big and difficult I was making the game, I allowed myself to reduce the stakes, by dealing with whatever was most pressing or solvable in the day’s situation. Rather than expanding the stakes to your whole life, ask – what’s at stake for today? For this week? For this month? Instead of playing for stakes of status or identity, try playing for the stakes of peace, safety, and well-being.

3. Maximize your Satisfaction Opportunities. We can create more micro-wins in our Existential Games of Order by learning to see opportunities for maximizing small satisfactions and intentionally lingering on little wins when they occur. Rather than deleting one email at a time, it’s more fun to search for and select 47 promotional emails and delete them all at once (TETRIS!). Each 3 or 10 things you declutter can be a winning set. Give yourself a high five, scream Huzzah, or take a picture to send to someone you’re playing along with, or play a cheerful song as your celebratory anthem. One of the things I’m helping to order in the post-stroke family landscape is teaching my mom to develop some more independence. To do so, I made a progress chart inspired by the one my dad has in his rehab hospital that tracks his walking and speaking skills, to mark my mom’s skills progress for getting grocery delivery, paying bills, or ordering a ride on her phone (all things she didn’t know how to do before). It has check boxes even for activities that she can accomplish partially or with supervision, on the way to complete independence. We hung it in the kitchen and celebrate each step towards the right direction with a high five and a fun drawing inside each little box. This simple tool makes a game out of something that’s really existentially scary—supporting my dependent parent to be a primary caretaker for herself and my now disabled parent. But I truly believe that you can PLAY WITH ANYTHING. In every situation, there are opportunities to feel satisfaction and accomplishment, and to make the experience more playful and pleasurable. Even in a shit situation like this.

I hope some of these strategies help you revise and liberate your Existential Games of Order! I am really enjoying reading your comments and making these Lab Reports more participatory, so if you have responses, questions, ideas, critiques, ways you might apply these tips to your situation, please consider responding to the post or replying directly to the email! :) It’s a lot more fun to play together!

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Opportunities to Play!

I want to shout out two exciting opportunities to play with others online that I will be participating in myself in various ways:

1. The Deep Play Institute (DPI) is offering GROUP: PERSONA(S) – a 2-month relational play laboratory aimed at exploring the big questions of self and other – what am I, who are you, how does our togetherness shape us, and how does this influence our daily interactions with others? GROUP will be facilitated by Aaron Finbloom, and co-facilitated by DPI’s four Team Members (including myself!), who will guide the group through diverse relational exercises and creative togetherings.  Participants will construct a semi-fictional character which they will play for the entire duration of GROUP.  Read more and apply to join here (by January 31st). Sliding scale pricing is available!

2. My brilliant friend and frequent collaborator Indigo Esmonde is hosting Pretend Art School – a performance art piece that’s like a combination of a collaborative storytelling game, an improvisational theatre piece, and a bunch of scruffy kids playing pretend in the courtyard. There will be a Pretend Art School event every Wednesday 7:30-9pm EST for the next several weeks. This week’s event is called DOLLHOUSE AS SELF-PORTRAIT: Imagine yourself as a dollhouse, with as many rooms as you have personalities, decorated in all your different styles and for all your different preferences. In this hands-on class you’ll start to make a dollhouse self-portrait. No art materials necessary, but all art materials are welcome. You can also join Pretend Art School as a Pretend MFA student and play out a more elaborate and intimate storyline as a character of your choosing. Read more about this program here. You might see me there as a ghost of my art school dropout!

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May you Discover an Existential Order that Makes you Feel most Free!

In Play & Liberation,

Natalia

Existential Game Maker/Destroyer

P.S. FEELING COLLECTOR game guidance is coming soon for paying subscribers! Have you decided which feeling you want to have more of in 2022 yet? Reply and let me know!