Games, Play, and Joy: Part 8
Epilogue.
This is the epilogue of my apparently now-finished(???) series Games, Play, and Joy, which is based on a class I taught in 2019 at NYU’s ITP (as part of my residency there), aimed at games-curious artists. As ever, this essay series doesn’t represent the opinions of my employers or whatever — just me.
Hope you enjoy.
Theory
- Part 1: Creating joyful possibilities with games.
- Part 2: Using rules as excuses and catalysts.
- Part 3: Playing with systems of power.
Tactics
- Part 4: The art of finding the fun.
- Part 5: Adding gamefeel and juice.
- Part 6: The promises and perils of simulations.
- Part 7: The joy of feeling seen.
Your Turn
- Part 8: Epilogue. (you are here)
We have talked about joy a lot in this class. Joy as capacity for action; a way to break out of the usual; an experience of visceral pleasure and disorientation; a sense of feeling seen and being heard; a way to envision and inhabit a new and better world. We have talked about games for co-liberation; joy as political action; making cracks in Empire; the paradoxically freeing nature of rules; creating the space for new forms of relation. We’ve covered taxonomies of rules and gut feelings. We’ve learned how to extract game systems from our lives, and how to break the game systems that surround our lives. We’ve talked about making games that others need, that give them space to be, that make them feel seen. Now the job is to do it.
To me, making joyful games — whatever the form — is a way to care for each other. It is a way to envision and share alternate ways of being and living; to say “what if this instead;” to say “me too!” or “fuck ‘em!” or “hell yeah!” or just a shared primal scream.
So I ask you: what is the experience people like you need now?
I hope this series has given you some tools for exploring the power, and the many flavors, of joy in your own projects. One of the best parts of doing this research over the years was getting to trace these lines ever further from where I started: through historical movements, ongoing political activism, and constant Cambrian explosions of indie games from more types of creators. There is more content on this topic than I could ever hope to read, much less teach.
So this is far from the final word, and I hope that with your work, you add your own. Like I said in Part 1, my only concrete hope is that the people who read this go off and make the kinds of joyful games I could never dream of. (And that you let me know about them.)
Hope you enjoyed. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
Special thanks to:
- ITP, SFPC, and YCAM, for giving me the space and support to work on this.
- Doug Wilson and the late Bernie DeKoven, two people whose work fundamentally changed how I think about games.
- Andy Wallace, for everything.
If you want to buy me a socially-distanced coffee (or beer), you can do so here. If you would rather donate somewhere, I’d be delighted if you’d send these folks a couple bucks.
