RCID 813: Class, Game or Battle?

RCID 813: Special Topics – a class, a game or a battle?

Latinist N.S. Gill offers the following definition for Ludus:

Ludus is a Latin word meaning either school or game. Gladiators like Spartacus were taught to fight by people called lanistae in a ludus and then the game at which they fought was also a ludus. The plural of ludus is ludi. The ludi were important occasions for entertainment in Roman society.

Immersion in the world of gaming gave me, at length, a more panoramic perspective on design. After much reading and many discussions and a lot of hands-on interaction, and a plethora of postings, I begin to see the interconnectedness of it all. The rhizomic and stonloniferous intersections of comments and threads and principles and discussions have become enmeshed to form a sort of Zen-like sweater of new understanding. I will try to pull a few strands here for discussion, but I expect such an exercise will be akin trying to show you how warm my sweater is by giving you one of its threads. Nevertheless…

Ludus as “play” – everyone plays. I play. You play. Cold plays. My cat plays. Christ plays (in ten thousand places.) Morality plays. Free plays. Sneak plays. Double plays. We need not be told to play. We just play. There is a force of life at work in the toy and in the game. I see how design must take into account the thirst for play – emotional connection, fun, engagement, obliviousness, apart-mentalization. (I am reminded of Aarseth quoting Mark Twain’s playful boy…)

Ludus as pugna (or gr. Polemos) – My cat’s fights with a wad of paper or a sock or a light beam seem to be part of a larger training for fighting with other things. Mice, snakes, other cats? Is play always connected to fighting? Why do we resist such connection? The dots are already connected in games like Medal of Honor, World of Warcraft and America’s Army. A stick becomes a weapon in play – but not outside a wider narrative of conflict: the normal RPGs of my childhood (which were played outside, btw) were Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, and War – typically America vs. Axis Powers. Even in anti-war games like Sept. 12, the lines are there: anti-war views versus war-hawk views. We pacifists are gonna kick your butt! (Rhetorically, of course. In fact, procedural-rhetorically.) But perhaps our view of pugna/polemos is tainted by a limited (perhaps myopic) cultural framework. Perhaps not all fights have to be against “the Other” or “the Power.” Perhaps some struggles are against obstacles to progress, or against decay, or against injustice, or against death. Removing conflict from design is a silly notion.

Ludus as doctor (teacher) – playing teaches more than it is purported to teach. Playing team sports teaches X’s and O’s of the playbook, but also teaches personal discipline and health issues, and teaches physics and mathematical probability calculations, and teaches social skills. Playing video games teaches the game, but also teaches critical thinking and strategy, and teaches interface design, and in MMORPG’s teaches – in a different way from team sports – social skills. Successful designers should be aware that they are not only designing a game, but a world – a world of learning by doing.

Perhaps future students of all types of design should make their design “maps” larger.
Much larger.
Borges-larger.
And spread them out over everything, everywhere to see whether or not congruities emerge as the design map and the juxtaposed landscape begin to dissolve into each other in a Baudrillardian blending that reveals rhizomic and stoloniferous connections that enlighten, inform and strengthen design in the map and the mapped.

Whether or not 813 Special Topics was GAME, CLASS or BATTLE, I believe, when all is said and done, that if we entered the struggle to PLAY or LEARN or FIGHT,

We won.