In the spirit of Ludic Liberation (which reminds us that we are always playing and have the power to change the game whenever we want), I’m sharing some *NEW RULES* for the Ludic Liberation Lab and this newsletter!
The Ludic Liberation Lab will now be 90 minutes instead of 2.5 hours! I believe that after 1.5 years of LLL’s, we’ve gotten better and more efficient at the game of play-based participatory research. So the Lab will now be a strict & structured 90 minutes: 15 minutes = intro + warm up; 60 minutes = play experiments; 15 minutes = meta/debrief. I hope it means more players will feel up for joining and look forward to trying it out at next week’s lab – which will be on Playing With WRITING ✏️📖 !!!!!
This Newsletter will now be published EVERY MONDAY 🗓! I really love to write about play and liberation and maybe will eventually assemble some of my theories into a book 🎲 📙 ! This newsletter will be the place where I share my thinking first and hopefully refine it through conversations with you! Specifically I will be writing more *existential game theory* and sharing my own *personal existential experiments* in the slab report (the secret and special lab report!).
Don’t worry, if you don’t want to receive all my fresh-baked thoughts every week, you can select just the sections you want in your substack profile, and of course you can unsubscribe from this email at any time. But I do hope that if you’ve somehow stumbled on this corner of the internet and got a piece of yourself (i.e., your email address) stuck here, you might enjoy digging around with me a little bit more 🕳
This month, everyone will get all the sections so you can see what they’re like! After that, the slab report will go only to paid subscribers, perhaps with an occasional public share here and there. You can become a paid subscriber for $5/month through substack or contribute whatever amount you wish or are able to through Gumroad. My initial goal is to have enough paying supporters to pay my own digital rent and have a steady income to pay Lab facilitators a fair honorarium regardless of how many participants join.
Ok, now here’s a taste of the slab report and my existential game theory . . .
Have you heard of the game Baba Is You? I’d heard the name buzzing around internet game circles last year, but I don’t usually play video games so I let the excitement pass me by. Then, last week, I was feeling unwell, and wanted something to distract me from my achiness and nausea. Reading and watching TV weren’t absorbing enough, so I found myself for the first time in a long time craving a video game. I don’t have any game consoles (yet!), but luckily, Baba Is You was recently released for iOS and Android, so I could play it from the comfort of my phone!
Baba Is You is a puzzle game. You have to solve little problems to progress through the levels. Each level is a two-dimensional space populated with various objects that fit onto a square of the space. One type of object is a square of text. Putting certain pieces of text in a sequence creates the rules of that level. These rules can be moved and manipulated, and in fact, must be moved and manipulated in order to solve the puzzle.
So for example, BABA IS YOU is a 3-unit text sequence that defines the player identity. BABA is a cute little white Squigglevision creature. When BABA IS YOU, scrolling up and down or sideways on the screen makes this character move. Something has to be YOU for play to happen, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be BABA. ROCK or WALL or FLAG or BOX or KEY can be YOU and will move in the same way.
The WIN condition of each level is similarly contingent. Often, the rule FLAG IS WIN is either defined or definable, which means the little BABA avatar must touch the yellow FLAG avatar to win the level. But other things can as easily be WIN, including BABA itself. Sometimes an object IS DEFEAT, which means that touching that thing will make BABA explode. But DEFEAT is not a universally present condition, and can often be changed in order to solve the puzzle.
Playing Baba Is You involves logic, strategy, and creativity. It’s very fun and more than a little bit addictive. But the game has also been having a deeper ambient effect on me. Its logic is both existentially profound and contagious. Seeing the rules of the game so explicitly spelled out, and being able to manipulate them as part of the game dynamic has made me see my own life in floating BABA IS YOU syntax.
For example, I’ve started seeing short-term tasks as little contingent and shifting WIN conditions. DISHES IS WIN means I conquer the level once all the dirty dishes are washed. 2AM IS STOP means I’ve hit a non-negotiable limit to my awakeness. The applications feel endless and improvisation is welcome. INBOX IS FULL. EMPTY IS WIN. BOOK HAS TEXT. READ IS WIN. I watch my cats play games of MOUSE IS WIN, CAPTURE IS DEFEAT, WINDOW IS STOP.
But larger, longer-term existential puzzles are also translatable into the rules of BABA IS YOU. My partner and I have developed a shared BABA language to talk about our existential anxieties. I complain how everyone around me seems to be playing a level where JOB IS WIN, but my level has placed JOB IS DEFEAT in an unchangeable position.
As I progress through the game and learn new available rules in the BABA world, it expands the tools I can think with about my own life, potentially liberating my previous existential constraints. Learning the new rule “HAS” as in ROCK HAS BABA (meaning that when ROCK is destroyed in an encounter with something that is DEFEAT or SINK or HOT, a BABA avatar is released), I gain a new way to talk about my own spiritual and psychological puzzles. Maybe EGO HAS SOUL, and if I let it dissolve in an encounter with something dangerous to it, I’ll release something hidden that can move more freely?
Many other aspects of the game have hidden existential lessons. There is no time limit on any levels and you can restart as many times as you want. Whenever I restart a level to its original condition, after trying and trying to solve the puzzle for sometimes hours, I can’t help but think of the karmic cycle of endless death and rebirth, samsara, and casually wonder what number attempt I’m on in this lifetime. I also sometimes observe my own deep absorption in the game as the state of being lost in illusion, maya. It can be hard to break away, despite knowing that this is just a game I’ve voluntarily chosen to play.
While changing the rules is a primary game dynamic, due to their positions in the landscape, some rules in a level may be completely inaccessible, and I am reminded of the famous prayer for serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Finally, while many rule conditions are intuitive (e.g., FLAG IS WIN), in some levels, object-rule relationships sound absurd and nonsensical (e.g., SKULL IS SINK), but that too has a lesson for appreciating subcultural differences. Everything makes sense in its local context.
Is Baba Is You a Ludic Liberation game? My criteria for what makes something ludically liberating is whether it reminds us that we are always playing and so have the freedom to change the rules. Its rule-revealing and manipulating mechanic certainly makes Baba Is You ripe with liberating potential, but of course it can also be just a clever puzzle game if the player isn’t also playing the meta game of asking WHAT IS THIS EXPERIENCE REVEALING? HOW IS THIS LIKE LIFE?
As its loving fan community demonstrates, it seems that existential gamemakers like me are not the only ones applying BABA language to their broader life situations. It’s a game that wants to creep into the everyday to reveal and revise its hidden code.
The games we play have the power to structure our thinking and seeing, which has implications for the opportunities we notice and obstacles we perceive in our world. But we often forget the games we are playing because they aren’t categorized as such: the academia game, the adulting game, the money game. So it’s exciting to play an actual game game whose self-awareness encourages more existential game awareness in turn (another game like that is Everything which involves traveling through space while continuously shifting the point of view to any being in the game universe, from microscopic to galactically-sized entities).
I’m intrigued by this phenomenon and will be tinkering around with the concept of existential pseudocode inspired by Baba. I hope to have a game prototype to offer you in the next slab report at the end of the month!
Have you played Baba Is You? Have you found it as entracing as I have? What other games are you playing that are affecting your thinking? Feel free to hit reply and send me an email or click on the chat box to respond to the public post!