Gesturing, not quite a manifesto

I am crossing some of the same terrain as this post, but along a different route, watching for the crossings, for how they support each other and overlap.

I have been sketching games and using them to feel my way around the way I want to proceed from creatively. Concepts and values woven together. Soma and situation, phantasia and relation, psyche-heart and symbol, eros and affect. Embodiment, imagination, reflection, and love. The body dreams, the psyche loves and hopes, and it is through the play of imagination and love that the psyche and body come to know each other. A session in which the body's fantasies receive the psyche's symbols and are saturated with affect, feeling, atmosphere.

That is what I have sought inchoate in gaming materials since I was very young, and it is at least part of how I used gaming, though it is very much not the framework in which most games were proffered, intended, or played. Otherwise than intended, I sometimes found my fantasies and others' in communication, their symbols and mine in affective concatenation.

More often, I did something other than this, played at finding the decorum of appropriate improvisation for the social milieu I found myself in. I held myself back, at best sharing a mask of the symbol and a facsimile of the fantasy; I had fun. Maybe not as much fun as I wanted, but still.

(I keep saying that, don't I? I had fun, but. I need to make less compromises like that going forward. At the very least, I had fun and then I had this other fun, too. But the qualification still stands in the present. So to continue.)

But when I sat down to create, well, too often I looked to the standards of games that did other than what I sought. I found my vision constantly compromised by standards of play at tangent to it. That happened with game design, leading me to step back from doing it, That happened with game mastering, especially as I tried to settle worlds into games that abstracted so much of them. That happened when I played, as the symbolic charge of characters often dissolved into the improvisational play of these games at the table.

Design, run, play. The three fields. I want to get better at operating from love, hope, and imagination at each of these levels. I want to find the games that I can turn most easily toward those ends, and I want to design games that begin with these as their premise and rationale. Games that acknowledge the tenderness and vibrance of our lived bodies in the shared fantasies they develop. Games that welcome the multitude of ways that our desires can permeate and transform our fantasies, and in which psyche and soma glimpse passions that might find a place outside the session, might change the way we think or feel or act.

In short, games that presume curiosity and exploration toward various sorts of intimacy, vulnerability, and sometimes understanding. Some of those likely must be more infrequently played, because it is not always easy to maintain intimate and vulnerable curiosity with others, especially groups. Some of that, though, is just finding ways to reorient play toward the sorts of intimacies and vulnerabilities that we can sustain, and through which we cultivate wholesome curiosity.

And, well, also some other fourth field like I explored as a child that is akin to literature, enriched my imagination, and provided a medium into which I could project the symbols of my psyche and feel myself and the world suspended, however crudely. I wonder if this is a space from which solo play may emerge, but if so, I want to guard against too much polish and form. The crude joints between fantasy and hope, fantasy and love, should show more clearly, because it is precisely those joints that lead me back to my body and heart.