Dear Ludic Liberators,
This week’s Lab Report is a few days late, but it includes an early announcement of November’s Ludic Liberation Lab: Your Fortunate Way w/ Janet Howe. Janet is an amazing game maker that I’m incredibly excited to host at LLL. You need this lab to figure out your next step in life or project! To save $$ on admission, become a Lab Report subscriber 💌
Have you binged Squid Game yet – the Korean Netflix series that’s made headlines by becoming the company’s most popular release ever?
I watched it a few weeks ago, and realized that I had a precognitive dream about the show back in August—a month before I first laid eyes on its iconic, candy-colored visuals. In my dream, I was on a dark remote island playing a game inside a labyrinth of stairs. I didn’t quite know what the game was, but it involved hiding from Asian businessmen and receiving mysterious, bow-wrapped gift boxes to support my gameplay. I’ve known for a while that I’m a little bit “psychic” — but I guess sometimes that just means having your own mind generate trailers for upcoming TV shows!
Anyway, if you haven’t watched the show, this email will contain some spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.
There are so many ways to analyze Squid Game— as a critique of extreme wealth and economic inequality, as a depiction of gambling addiction, or as an exploration of society’s contradictory moral codes. The reason this newsletter is late is because I actually wrote and erased a long, convoluted essay on several of the show’s threads, but then held back from sending it. I realized it’s not my job to try to offer the ultimate take on any pop culture text. In this Existential Game Theory installment of Lab Report I want give you a very specific read of Squid Game, one that can better illuminate the difference between liberatory play and coercive gamification.
When I tell people that I’m an Existential Gamemaker, some think that I what I do is gamification — that I make boring and hard things fun and game-like. But what I do with Ludic Liberation is actually the opposite. In fact, I think of it as Anti-Gamification. This might seem confusing because the method does involve making and playing games, and because Ludic Liberation is fun!
Let me clarify.
I define play as free activity within a set of constraints. A game can specify the constraints by defining rules, roles, and resources – the tokens with which we play. So a game rule might tell you that it’s your turn to roll the dice, but how you shake and throw it is the free form of your play.
A playground can also serve as a set of constraints, by defining a territory with a limited number of playable structures. The affordances of these structures enable different interactive possibilities, or different ways to play, as well as different possible games (rules and roles) to layer on top of the ground. A playground can be a park with swings and slides, a sketchbook, or a kitchen pantry, as long as the player conceives of whatever they’re doing there – even temporarily – as play (creative, exploratory, experimental activity, done for its own sake). A game doesn’t necessarily need a playground, but it often defines one as a physical constraint — a table becomes the playground for a board game or a tabletop RPG.
Finally, a constraint can be also temporal: you have 15 minutes to do whatever you want — go!
In Squid Game, adult players (mostly criminals, gamblers, refugees, or others in financially desperate circumstances) are recruited to play childhood courtyard games with extremely polarized stakes: the winner gets to take home billions, but the losers are immediately killed.
We can analyze the show in terms of the above play components. The enclosed island and its rooms make the playground. The 6 games have familiar childhood rules and resources. There is some room within these structures for players to be creative, to experiment, and improvise with technique—to freely play within the defined constraints. But the ultimate stakes of Squid Game are defined by external game makers, and they are existential in the most literal way: losing even one game equals death. Since there are 456 players and only 1 eventual winner, the chances of permanently losing are 99.8%!
The structure of Squid Game is an example of coercive gamification. The rules and constraints are made by external game-makers, and the odds of winning are extremely unfavorable. Many of us are coercively gated into societal and economic games with similar, although hopefully not as fatal terms. But what’s more interesting to me is that for many of our existential games, the constraints and consequences we play by are not actually material or external; rather, they are held and maintained within the playgrounds of our own minds. There is no fence/slide/spoon, but we believe there is, so we act like there is.
This is something that I’ve been exploring with my 6-week class Games We Play with Ourselves. One of the exercises we did together is called Existential Game Analysis, in which we dissect our internal games, and explore how we can make them more liberatory. What quickly became apparent is that many of us have been playing games with self-imposed rules that make it very difficult to win. A player might play a game of “What’s Wrong With Me?” in which they search for evidence of their fundamental flawd-ness. The game is basically designed to create a sense of shame and depression, leaving a very narrow range for finding disconfirming data. In other words, our own game is rigged to make us lose.
This kind of gamification is the narrowing of freedom of movement, the constraining of possible paths — a maze that traps a mouse into having to solve it in order to eat. While we might choose to play or even create our own confining games for many reasons (such as using a pomodoro method to structure a challenging, multi-step task), coercive gamification happens when the game rules are made by external agents, without our fully informed consent, with terms that are non-negotiable or established by threats or force.
Ludic Liberation or Anti-Gamification is the opposite process — it’s the widening of possibilities for play through the recognition and revising of the game’s rewards, rules, and removal of punishments. Another way to understand the process of Ludic Liberation is as transformation of a game into a playground which allows you to use the existing gameplay structures to make new, more favorable-to-you games.
The most compelling storylines of Squid Game engage us in precisely this dynamic; they invite us to follow various characters as they transform the externally-defined, coercive gamespace into playgrounds for their own personal motivations: finding intimacy in an unlikely setting, honoring their own moral code despite the many incentives for violence, or solving the mystery behind who created the terrifying experiment in the first place.
There are lots of ways to transform our constraining existential games into liberating playgrounds, many of which I’ve written about in this newsletter and played with at the Ludic Liberation Labs. As Games We Play with Ourselves is coming to an end next week, I’m feeling the call to open up to some 1:1 Existential Game Analysis Sessions for Ludic Liberators that couldn’t take the course or who think they can benefit from some personalized attention. This will be a temporary window for 1:1 work because I am finding that I need cycles of expansion and contraction as I focus on different projects, so if you’re interested this process, sign up soon, because I may not offer this particular method again!
I plan to hold sessions for a month, between November 17th — December 15th.
I have been making Existential Game Theory free for everyone because the ideas are too important to keep paywalled, but if you have found these letters valuable, you can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get access to the slab report (where I stop being polite and start getting real, lol) and receive free admission to the Ludic Liberation Labs (a saving of $10 or 67% a month!!).
You Are My Playground 😉 My Only…(?) Playground…. 🤔
~ Natalia
Existential Gamemaker/Destroyer