{"id":457,"date":"2016-01-08T13:07:43","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T13:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/?p=457"},"modified":"2016-01-08T13:23:57","modified_gmt":"2016-01-08T13:23:57","slug":"457","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/2016\/01\/08\/457\/","title":{"rendered":"Raise Haiku Ratio"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At <a href=\"http:\/\/nowplaythis.net\">Now Play This<\/a> last year, we ran a game called <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.woodlousegame.com\/\">Woodlouse<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(created by\u00a0Jake Simpson and Pete Morrish). To play <em>Woodlouse<\/em>, you think of words (like &#8220;woodlouse&#8221;) that have more vowels than consonants. That&#8217;s it. If a word qualifies, it&#8217;s &#8220;a woodlouse&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>When we ran the game, we had a big piece of paper with some marker pens nearby. We put instructions out, and I wrote up a few sample words (in different coloured pens, with an unconvincing\u00a0attempt at faking different handwriting styles). Then we invited people to write up any\u00a0woodlouses they could think of.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>We had about 12 big sheets of paper and switched them out over the course of the weekend, whenever one got filled up. This means we had quite a lot of repeat words, of course &#8211; things that were written on one sheet and then on the next by people who didn&#8217;t know they&#8217;d already been added.<\/p>\n<p>Some words got written up a few times &#8211; not always the words you&#8217;d expect. For example:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>ocean<\/li>\n<li>airier<\/li>\n<li>quinoa<\/li>\n<li>matinee<\/li>\n<li>onomatopoeia<\/li>\n<li>anemone<\/li>\n<li>release<\/li>\n<li>mouse<\/li>\n<li>seize<\/li>\n<li>bee<\/li>\n<li>beekeeper<\/li>\n<li>ouija<\/li>\n<li>oatmeal<\/li>\n<li>see<\/li>\n<li>area<\/li>\n<li>heroine<\/li>\n<li>elevate<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And one word was written on every single piece of paper. That word was:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>boobies<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In a way, that&#8217;s not surprising. Game design has the term TTP or TTC, right? Time To Penis: the amount of time it will take, in any game which allows it, for someone to make\u00a0a big ol&#8217; penis. Received wisdom is that TTP tends very very low. Game designers like to talk about TTP because it&#8217;s kinda funny, and also in some ways a genuinely useful concept in planning a game or an event.<\/p>\n<p>But the key phrase in that definition above isn&#8217;t &#8220;big ol&#8217; penis&#8221;: it&#8217;s the phrase &#8220;in any game which allows it&#8221;. The question isn&#8217;t: can you be rude? It&#8217;s: do the affordances and the rules of the game mean that you can be rude while remaining in-game?<\/p>\n<p>Notably, nobody wrote &#8220;penis&#8221; on our <em>Woodlouse<\/em> pages, for the really very good reason that &#8220;penis&#8221; isn&#8217;t a woodlouse.<\/p>\n<p>The thrill of making a penis in a game isn&#8217;t the thrill of arbitrary vandalism or a tiny rudeness. It&#8217;s the thrill of using the <em>system of the game<\/em> to do something that&#8217;s rude, whether that&#8217;s something the game intends or not. If you&#8217;ve got an art-making game or a building game then, yes! One of the things people will try to draw or build is a penis. But you probably don&#8217;t need to worry that people are just going to arbitrarily scrawl anatomical diagrams on random walls at a games event &#8211; or at least, not more than they would at any other event.<\/p>\n<p>TTP is about using a system against itself, about finding a permitted transgression. It&#8217;s the joy of a game system making it okay to do something that otherwise wouldn&#8217;t be allowed. It&#8217;s the feeling of being supported by the game in your illicit acts &#8211; like the\u00a0thrill of\u00a0<em>Werewolf<\/em> and <em>Spyfall<\/em> and <em>The Resistance<\/em>\u00a0when they reward you for fooling your friends and betraying them cruelly.<\/p>\n<p>And TTP stops being a useful concept if it&#8217;s just a hur-hur-penises joke. The truth it&#8217;s getting at is: a lot of people love it when game rules give them an opportunity to do something that would usually be transgressive &#8211; when the game enables a behaviour that social norms often limit.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes this can be a real problem. When people play a game and the rules allow pushing and shoving, not everyone will have the same sense of how far this enables you to step beyond the normal social limits of <em>hey, don&#8217;t push and shove<\/em>. As a game design tool, this thrill can be used to encourage bullying or racism or mockery of passers-by or climbing on dangerous bridges, any number of cruel or ill-advised actions &#8211; and it can provide a ready-built defence of &#8220;it&#8217;s just a game&#8221; that can make those actions feel difficult to object to. It can be\u00a0hard to\u00a0object to something\u00a0based on normal social rules,\u00a0because the game has made new rules\u00a0to supplant them.<\/p>\n<p>And sometimes it can be a glorious thing &#8211; transgression as a thrill in its own right, and people&#8217;s attraction to that thrill as a way to explore a game design space that sets aside some of the usual limitations on how people interact with each other.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s not about the penises. The penises are a distraction. And &#8211; if you think about it, &#8220;TTP&#8221; could just as easily be phrased as, say, &#8220;time to vandalism&#8221;, right? Calling it TTP is a way to bring penises into a professional conversation, to be just a little bit rude in an okay way because hey: you&#8217;re only\u00a0talking about game design. &#8220;TTP&#8221; the phrase is just another example of TTP the human tendency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Now Play This last year, we ran a game called Woodlouse\u00a0(created by\u00a0Jake Simpson and Pete Morrish). To play Woodlouse, you think of words (like &#8220;woodlouse&#8221;) that have more vowels than consonants. That&#8217;s it. If a word qualifies, it&#8217;s &#8220;a woodlouse&#8221;. When we ran the game, we had a big piece of paper with some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":458,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}