Quotes

Lest academic readers slam this book (or iPad) down in fury, I hasten to acknowledge that the case against bad play is formidably strong. I agree with much of it. In fact, Chapter 2 (“Subversive Play: The Bane of Higher Education”) contents that for the past two centuries higher learning has suffered precisely because American students have been fully immersed in bad play — the boozy debates and theatricals of the early literary societies, the hazings and initiations of fraternities, the football craze, beer pong and binge drinking, and a host of competitive, role-playing online worlds, among other obsessions. But this book also contends (Chapter 3: “Creating An Academic Subversive Play World”) that the motivational power of bad play — of “subversive play”, as I have termed it — can energize students and help them flourish — in college and in life …

… The rationalist merits of higher education are well known, intoned by college presidents and commencement speakers, reiterated in institutional mission statements, and endorsed by most professors — including me. There’s no need to restate them here. This book instead advances what might be called the anti-rationalist perspective. The central argument is not that higher education is all wrong, but that it’s only half-right. Our predominant pedagogical system — rational, hierarchical, individualistic, and well-ordered — often ignores aspects of the self relating to emotion, mischievous subversion, social engagement, and creative disorder.

— “Debate at Dawn”, “Minds on fire: how role-immersion games transform college“, Mark C. Carnes

The Savage Mind: bricoleur and engineer

Lévi-Strauss developed the comparison of the Bricoleur and Engineer in The Savage Mind. “Bricoleur” has its origin in the old French verb bricoler, which originally referred to extraneous movements in ball games, billiards, hunting, shooting and riding, but which today means do-it-yourself building or repairing things with the tools and materials on hand, puttering or tinkering as it were. In comparison to the true craftsman, whom Lévi-Strauss calls the Engineer, the Bricoleur is adept at many tasks and at putting preexisting things together in new ways, adapting his project to a finite stock of materials and tools. The Engineer deals with projects in their entirety, conceiving and procuring all the necessary materials and tools to suit his project. The Bricoleur approximates “the savage mind” and the Engineer approximates the scientific mind. Lévi-Strauss says that the universe of the Bricoleur is closed, and he often is forced to make do with whatever is at hand, whereas the universe of the Engineer is open in that he is able to create new tools and materials. But both live within a restrictive reality, and so the Engineer is forced to consider the preexisting set of theoretical and practical knowledge, of technical means, in a similar way to the Bricoleur.

But even when games find their way into a traditional school setting, they’re hardly an automatic solution. When the stakes are too high, the games becomes a crushing competition that’s fun for spectators but a chore for most students. Think of your typical spelling bee, with its public humiliation and permadeath “one-mistake-you’re-out” rule. When the stakes are too low — well, actually the stake can’t get too low, and perhaps this is the point.

Schools have long relied on games — they call them sports, clubs and band competitions — to get students excited about coming to school. In fact, these are often all that keep kids there long enough to graduate. But schools have rarely used academic competition to reach more than a few top students even through research suggests that kids who aren’t at the top would benefit the most from it. As far back as 1959, sociologist James Coleman was urging schools to use competition as a way to change students’ attitudes about academics. At the time, he was head of the Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Social Relations (later renamed the Department of Sociology). He’d just spent two years studying nine Midwestern high schools and found that more than 40 percent of boys wanted to remembered in school as a “star athlete,” but fewer than 30 percent favored the epithet “brilliant student.” This despite the fact, Coleman observed, that school is “an institution explicitly designed to train students, not athletes.”

In schools from the inner city to the most privileged suburbs Coleman discovered one key similarity: kids were intensely social, spending most of their free time playing sports and hanging out. “Adults often forget how ‘person-oriented’ children are,” he wrote. “They have not yet moved into the world of cold impersonality in which many adults live.” The paradox of modern schooling after World War II, he said, was that just as our complex industrial society made formal education more important, adolescent culture was shifting teen’s attention away from education, prompting adolescents to squeeze “maximum rewards for minimal effort.” Like factory workers or prison inmates, to which Coleman directly compared them, high school students in the 1950s had responded to school’s demands by “holding down effort to a level which can be maintained by all.” They were protecting themselves from extra work by ostracizing high achievers.

It was, Coleman suggested, a rational response to a system whose rewards sat on a bell curve. Schools had created a kind of free market in which every student was competing against every other student for relative rank. Grades, he found, were almost completely relative — when one student achieved more, it “not only raises his position, but in effect lowers the position of others. The result, even in the best suburban schools, was intense social pressure to minimize, not maximize studying.

But these same students didn’t think twice about honoring athletes. Coleman theorized that because most athletic events pit school against school, star athletes’ achievements bring prestige to the entire school, which benefits everyone. A student spending her lunch hour studying “is regarded as someone a little odd, or different,” he wrote. But the basketball player who shoots baskets at lunch “is watched with interest and admiration, not with derision.” So Coleman proposed that schools replace the competition for grades with interscholastic academic games, “systematically organized competitions, tournaments and meets in all activities,” from math and English to home economics and industrial arts. These competitions, he predicted, would get both students and the general public more focused on academics and ensure all students a better education.

The lesson that games can teach us is simple. Games aren’t appealing because they are fun, but because they are limited. Because they erect boundaries. Because we must accept their structures in order to play them. Soccer sees two teams of eleven players attempting to use their feet, torsos, and heads to put a ball into a goal. Tetris asks you to position falling arrangements of four orthogonally-connected squares in order to produce and remove horizontal lines. And yet the experiences games like soccer and Tetris create are far larger than those boundaries convey on their own. That boundary results from the deliberate, if absurd, pursuit of soccer and Tetris on their own terms, within the limitations they erect. The limitations make games fun.

What if we treated everything the way we treat soccer and Tetris – as valuable and virtuous for being exactly what they are, rather than for what would be convenient, or for what we wish they were instead, or for what we fear they are not? Walks and meadows, aunts and grandfathers, zoning board of appeals meetings and business trips. Everything. Our lives would be better, bigger, more meaningful, and less selfish.

Ian Bogost, Preface: Life is not a game, Play Anything

The moral choices we make in the game project backward as well as forward. Aviary Attorney is an inconsistent-reality game. Jayjay Falcon’s background is a mystery in every playthrough, but the truth ultimately revealed changes depending on what you decide to have him do. I know some players find that kind of thing extremely irritating, wanting all branches of a game to work together to reveal the same backstory from different angles. I did not find it bothersome myself, especially because Jayjay’s projected backstory is dependent on a choice he makes at a critical moment: essentially the player is deciding what kind of person he is, and thus perhaps what kind of person he used to be.

Aviary Attorney (Sketchy Logic)