Solitary Meditation

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In the realm of learning and self-improvement, it's vital to look back at one's past work. In my case, looking back at the kinds of skills and knowledge I used to assemble texts in the past.

As an example, take the pieces I created relating to Fluxus games. A lot of the work in those texts was carefully crafted to counter expectations about rules for games. One of my pieces, entitled "Recipe", asks the user to destroy the paper that the rules are written on, disguised as a cooking recipe, formatted with an ingredients section and bulleted instructions. This was done very intentionally to play with the reader's expectations as to what a game could be. Experimenting in this way can be difficult if the balance between experimentation and expectations is not maintained, confusing the reader instead.

These Fluxus games were an interesting collection of pieces to create, as they all inherently needed to be actionable in some way. However, I deliberately shirked normal game design conventions to make more interesting or cerebral games. I found great pleasure in making these sorts of games, so much so that I ended up covering a significant portion of my bedroom wall with these experimental games. I've ever gathered more materials to make even more at some indeterminate point in the future. I found making these Fluxus games to be an excellent exercise in game design, particularly from a critically artistic standpoint. Usually, I'd make these games to make people think about certain things, like mortality or the fragility of fun. Ultimately, the creation of these pieces was an interesting fusion of creative writing and game design structure. Physically creating miniaturized rule sets on sticky notes that were each individually meant to create a whole playful experience was a fascinating writing challenge. I think that making more in the future will help tie my writing skills to my game developer skills.