Dear Ludic Liberators,
The family of a friend of mine had a peculiar tradition. Whenever they got together, they would often spontaneously end up playing a game of “Capitals.” The dad called out the name of a U.S. State, and the sons demonstrated their geographic knowledge by responding with the name of the state’s capital city.
I didn’t play. I couldn’t really. Having moved to the U.S. when I was already older than the age students typically drill state capitals, I didn’t accumulate the necessary knowledge to participate. But I also found this game mind-bogglingly boring. Who cares about capitals? How is this game fun?
This family also liked Scrabble. They were language people – articulate, educated, erudite. English is my second language so I wasn’t very good at Scrabble. I didn’t know obscure words like sthenia or kex, and didn’t understand the tricky point system that seemed to make the players sneaky and competitive. When I got my random array of letters and realized that they couldn’t produce any words I knew, I wanted to invent new ones. But that’s not how the game works. The dictionary is king.
Recently, another friend told me about “Anything Goes Scrabble” in which as long as you could explain what the word means, even if you totally made it up, it counts as valid. I love that! I would actually want to play that game, like I probably would want to play the game of invented capitals and imaginary states. Because I believe those games would be more liberated!
At the Ludic Liberation Lab last Thursday, we explored whether word games can be liberating and what makes them so. We came up with a list of possible criteria.
The chart above is by no means exhaustive, but there’s a general pattern here that coheres with the way I define liberation. If a game (free activity undertaken under a set of constraints) expands the space of possibility and freedom of movement, it can be considered liberating. If the gameplay constantly re-ascribes and polices a fixed set of rules, it’s probably not liberating. But just because something isn’t liberating doesn’t mean it’s bad. Constraints and restraints can be very pleasurable, and can open up pockets of energy and creativity within a narrowly defined space. By playing games with awareness (in both senses of the phrase) we can experience liberation in many scales and sizes and temporalities.
Language is simultaneously constraining and constantly evolving. It’s a living system. Philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that language is a “living social-ideological entity” created through appropriation, internalization, and re-articulation of words in the process of social encounter. Language is formed anew every time it is uttered. He demonstrated his own point by coining a bunch of cool terms like heteroglossia (the presence of multiple languages and discourses in the same language) and polyphony (a feature of narrative that decenters a single authorial style and grants validity to all voices).
At the Lab, when we tested some of our favorite games against our liberation criteria, we found that games like Word Association or Taboo or Found Poetry had most liberating potential because they left room for creative rule-breaking, and could potentially be played multi-lingually. This reminded me of a past lab on Translation, in which we discovered that translation is basically a very challenging and endlessly creative game.
After exploring what makes games liberating and not, I have come to the (maybe controversial?) opinion that WORDLE (now officially NYT!) is NOT a liberating game. It’s a game played with a fixed set (e.g., a dictionary) rather than a mutable set (e.g., language). I do however think it’s still pleasurable and particularly enjoy the constraint that you can only play one game a day. The game’s limitation creates a desire for more (a gamemaker’s rule to remember!).
There are of course gamemakers who are changing and expanding the set while playing with WORDLE’s structure: lewdle is a remake of wordle with lewd and dirty words; semantle gives you clues based on semantic similarity (it’s VERY hard!); word.rodeo lets you make your own wordle puzzle with whatever word you want.
The Lab participants and I tried to invent some new word games during our play time. One game involved using a the letters of a word to draw its representation (see below) - challenging multimodal game that’s easy to play on Zoom!
Another game (and we can actually play this in the comments although a synchronous timed element adds a fun constraint) is starting with a word and taking turns adding a synonym of the original word. The synonym could be a creative or poetic phrase (e.g., if the original word was human, synonyms could be homo sapien or person or earthling or fallen creature or the species that preceded artificial intelligence, etc), but can’t be something that someone else already said during the round. You lose if you can’t come up with or invent another synonym and are left wordless. I mean, maybe this could be fun during a long road trip? We can call the game…. SYNONIMATOR?
What word games have you invented or liberated? Do you have a version of Capitals that is more fun than a 5th grade pop quiz? Do you value language liberation or do you prefer the aesthetics of its confines? Reply and let me know!
🗓 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 MARCH 10th, 2022.
Semantically Yours,
Natalia
Existential Game Maker/Destroyer