Siochan Leat
Its taken me a long time to sit down and digest all that I’ve read about Train and Siochan Leat (aka “The Irish Game”) as well as my own experiences playing the games and watching them get played. I know, a good academic like me ought to be able to come up with something worthwhile in under a day or so and a blogger within hours, right? I suppose, but occasionally something gets me thinking enough and my inner game developer moving in a way that becomes very difficult to put into words, though in my conversations with Brenda, and her recent blog post on the topic, I agree: the pleasure of pacing or more slow design. Sometimes speed encourages me to miss a better articulation of what I am thinking of. I have also been thinking about it in a more Foucauldian kind of way, as an ethic of discomfort, for I will never be quite comfortable thinking about these particular games and certainly writing about them, but the respect for that discomfort is part of what hopefully makes this more digested post productive:
…never to consent to being completely comfortable with one’s won presuppositions. Never to let them fall peacefully asleep, but also never to believe that a new fact will suffice to overturn them; never to imagine that one can change them like arbitrary axioms…
What Train and Siochan Leat left me thinking about was more of a focus on “The Mechanic is the Message,” embodiment, and social play. Continue reading »