This chapter is talking about that one part of The Timeless Way of Building where Christopher Alexander gives a list of patterns and describes his process of mentally building a house by following those patterns. . . Again this chapter merges with all previous chapters to form an even stronger picture. These patterns are step-by-step adaptations, but now Alexander says the order of the steps matters. These patterns are always creating centers. These patterns start from the whole and always work at it through differentiation.

A series of patterns or a 'pattern sentence' is named here a 'generative sequence'.
~ SYNAPSE: Generative Sequence of Patterns

I haven't read the middle of the chapter yet and I'm saving it for later, and you'll understand why when I copy this quote:

P. 302-303

     The following twenty-four steps give the generative sequence for a traditional Japanese tea house. To understand the extraordinary power (and effectiveness) of this sequence you should, if possible, ask someone to read it to you while you sit with your eyes closed, and allow a vision of a tea house to form in your mind. . . . After you have heard all 24 statements, with a bit of luck you will have a complete vision of a teahouse in your mind. The process is almost effortless.
     Please, if possible, do ask someone to read this to you, now. And please do close your eyes while you are listening, so that the images can form freely in your mind (as they cannot if you merely sit here and read the words yourself).

// He asks so nicely. I must comply.

I still love consensus games. If anything this makes me love them more. A consensus game is an identity-risking game. It's a relationship-risking game. To believe in consensus is to believe in flexibility of relationships, of identities, and of ideas. If you're wrong about one, the others will suffer. You have to put yourself out there and trust everyone.

It is the complete opposite of a 'social deduction game', where you are tasked with deduction, while under the effect of a corrosive truth that someone is not worth trusting.

In a consensus game you are tasked with faith and problem-solving, which is or may only be possible under the effect of a -- perhaps even deluded -- belief that everyone is worth trusting, worth working to integrate, worth supporting at being themselves.

Consensus games can be dangerous. It's not just about consensus... It's not about making people agree, but about finding a way forward while respecting everyone's wishes, and requires us to ensure everyone is respecting their own wishes. Someone who hurts themselves to help the group is not helping the real consensus game.

Okay, new term?

I watched a movie called Fall recently. There was some kind of quote from a rock climber character in it, 'If you fear death you might as well do what makes you feel alive.' It wasn't a very good quote in the first place and I'm only further butchering the thing, but the point is I think it's been said before by many people across many works. Oh, and in Point Break, a documentary about tennis. And that thing about bushido. And that thing about the mirror of erised.

Now, how the hell am I going to tie all these thoughts together?

To play with something is to practice lightness regarding it.

To play is to practice lightness.

To play is to practice freedom.

Jack and I were talking a little bit about accepting an external image as an internal image, and it made me think about this idea of consensus games, again, as in some ways a bit of a risk. Is playing consensus games a way to build the habit of succumbing to the external image, or is it a way to play with it to prove (to myself?) that I'm not held in thrall?

To play with agreement is to play with opinion, to play with identity... To play a consensus game is to own the flexibility of one's identity, to risk it, to show that it is not so important. To play with anything may be a way of practicing lightness regarding it.

A cooperative game is what happens after a consensus game. Choosing what game to play is a consensus game. Playing the game is not.

I like a consensus game because to play with consensus implies that we never assume consensus.

As DeKoven says in The Well-Played Game (paraphrasing because I don't have the book in front of me), we can't play with something we can't afford to lose. To play a consensus game implies, because it requires, that we can afford to disagree. We are playing to try and find consensus because we think we can do it together, but if we don't, it's not going to be the end of the world.

Consensus games.

Rather than competitive or cooperative games, games where the goal is to come to an agreement about something that is hard to agree on. Everyone has to come to a consensus -- if you can do that, then everybody wins.

P.S. Consensus decision-making is at the heart of consensus games, but the form described by Mutual Aid.

'We do not get to consent to the conditions we live under. . . . We are told we live in a system of "majority rule," yet . . . the decisions [our] leaders make do not benefit the majority of people. The opposite of this approach is to make decisions together, caring about every person's consent.' (Mutual Aid, p75-76)

This chapter contains a remarkable step-by-step breakdown of a process, which I have seen Alexander do before in his books. (P277-278)

Aside from this, we have a chapter which I can see building on top of the previous two chapters. Making a center is a step, and making a center should enhance the whole. The nature of the idea of centers is that they can be taken in steps (I have added one center), and that they enhance the whole -- becaus a center is nothing but a relationship to the whole:

P. 268

Centers are not atomic, and are not in any normal sense building blocks. . . . centers are above all, labile, they are foci of wholeness, they are not things, but regions, qualities, focal points of centeredness which . . . extend the whole while making that wholeness benefit, while they are fused into the wholeness, as they go forward.

//

Throughout this chapter there is a motif of playfulness and effortlessness. ". . . because it is so simple, yet creates new structure without effort, it is intensely interesting." "almost automatic." "intellectual knowledge is far removed from the practical awakening that there really is nothing else going on in the process which creates life . . ."

And there is one last thing that I thought I'd capture. Alexander criticizes James Stirling's Berlin Library for centers which do not connect or work together, but in part blames this on the fact that they are "quite literally, cut and pasted from history books. One is the stoa. . . . The half circle is like a Greek theatre or arena. . . . [The] plan is an almost perfect replica of an Armenian or Byzantine church." This made me think about using game mechanics from other games... they are borrowed centers without life. They are based on "images" rather than unfolding in due time from a center, a wholeness, a singleness.

They don't have the same RELATIONSHIPS; a center is not a thing, it is a focus.

"The process starts with a vision of a possible whole that comes out of the circumstances, that is felt as something which grows out of the form of the world.

Every step is made with he idea that the feeling of this very large whole is being made deeper, more intense.

Even if it is a only a tiny step, this is still the guiding rule." (p.266, end of chapter)

project complete. result: more of an NPC than a PC! realized that an interesting protagonist may be a terrible player character! not every good or even great protagonist would make a good or even passable player character. cool insight.

I have this feeling that I struggle to hold many small parts in my mind at once, much easier for me to hold one large object in my mind. Moreover, I think other people are . . . different? More capable of handling, or more comfortable with, or more preferring, a large body of little pieces? I wonder what it is -- whether rooted in choice, or nature.

In this chapter Alexander highlights difficulties of focusing on the whole. He suggests that we all have "some negative voice . . . discouraging us from really and truly making every process structure-preserving o the larger whole. This is a kind of mental inhibition (something fuelled by ego, sometimes by greed) which continually makes us focus on the local . . ." and forget to focus on the whole.

He says FORGET as if we all know that focusing on the whole is right, and that anything else is a misstep. I am inclined, strongly, to agree, but I also wonder about this idea of a difference in mentality. Is it a difference in ability? Do people's brains allow them to picture wholes and parts better or worse than each other? What he really says is that we "forget that it is our responsibility, at every turn, to heal and make more whole, the structure of the world." As I said: I am inclined, strongly, to agree, but all I can say for sure is that this is certainly my feeling -- that this is my philosophy or very close to it, and to forget that is a genuine forgetting. A misstep.

Then comes "6 / AT EACH STEP DECIDE ONLY WHAT YOU KNOW WITH CERTAINTY" (p 257) which comes from combination of this step and the previous (i.e. THE WHOLE + STEP-BY-STEP ADAPTATIONS): "Each step is, in a sense, a return to the whole and a starting over with a "first step."" One should not, then, jump at the first idea that presents itself... but consider many ideas and "reject most of them. If we do accept one, we should accept it, reluctantly, only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound."

Accept only perfection. Alexander says "If we do accept one"! This implies that we may not accept any of them. I have written in Paradise that I would like to aspire to ". . . perfect games, or perfect art. It's not that a perfect work has no flaws; however, when I produce such a thing, I feel as though I need to make no excuses for what it is, and it makes no excuses for itself." Perhaps Alexander is here to give me another piece of this particular puzzle; a perfect work can have no flaws if we think about each and every decision made in the pursuit of its birth as a thing which can be right or wrong. A perfect thing has unfolded perfectly: without mistakes. Perfection is back on the table, baby.

Oh and the dude literally brings up painting and wholeness and while I wrote "I want to experience a game like I experience a painting, all at once" I of course want to make games like that too...

It's not a perfect bridge but there is an echo. The idea of comparing a painter's process to the process of building an entire building is similar in audacity. The painting is made step by step, without much of a clear idea of how it will turn out (or so he says, anyway). If we can do this with a building, surely we can also do it with something as simple as a game.

"The result must be unpredictable." Alexander invokes the butterfly effect to explain how the building process which genuinely has this feature, which I shall summarize as "adaptation to feedback at every step," must not have a fixed result determined ahead of time. Now, he has constructed buildings with purposes, and I believe that this is highly distinct from a fixed result. To build a school, you shouldn't look at a school and copy it... you should ask yourself, What purpose(s) does my building have? To build a game, you shouldn't look at a game and copy it... you should ask yourself what purposes or needs your game seeks to satisfy. You should seek what they tried to seek. I've struggled with this in the past, and I probably will continue to struggle with it.

What are games for?

Quote from: @droqeni spent a couple decades learning how to program and design computer games. i've become disenchanted over the past few years. please refill my sense of purpose:

how have you - and others you care about - used games and computers to make your life better?

(especially recently)

tweet

Lots of interesting replies there, which shows how long I've been thinking in these terms (if not, probably, longer). But this also explains the extreme difficulty of building up a game from an idea, and depending on the rigidity of the idea, the deadness of the process... However, an idea may contain a nugget of 'purpose' within it.

My thinking now... Game ideas are like concept art, and when building a game, the design ideas are like the wrapper of the feeling you're after. The game idea is not about the mechanics but about containing, deep inside, the secret of what the game is really trying to satisfy. Naked purpose is difficult and uncomfortable for people to convey, if not impossible. Easier to express something so subtle through a piece of art, a higher-level idea. Through a medium. wow

I really need to summarize this later on.

P. 225
I believe future understanding of living process --- if the concept survives in future generations [I will fight for it] --- must have at least [these features] . . . In the next chapters I shall discuss these ten features of living process in detail.

// I'll try to recap each 'feature of living process' chapter in its entirety as I relate to it.

Anyway, returning to the topic at hand, whether it is in line with Alexander's thinking or not, there is a hole in Gage's talk (yes this is the goal but how?) which is perfectly filled by Alexander's living process of strengthening latent centers (i.e. looking for common "invented problems" and making the process of engaging with those problems more satisfying). He also describes how this tends to produce additional latent centers without even particularly trying, and advocates for thinking about the wholeness (i.e. how all the centers relate, i.e. how a change will affect all the other aspects of the game). An additional interesting wrinkle is how much he insists nothing new needs to be, or even should be, added. Everything should be already practically there upon examining the latent center and the wholeness; what exists should be the source of inspiration, and shocking new existences will spring out of that, uninvited.

If I hadn't already felt that way myself I would be hesitant to just follow suit, but I have within me a deep sense that adding new things is always inferior to adding variations of old things, of what is already there or is already obvious.

That is, The Nature of Order is, just as The Timeless Way did, providing a strong framework for existing convictions I already have. He's preaching to the choir, but teaching me what rhymes along the way.

And there are so many beautiful rhymes.