Making Games is play
A downloadable Manifesto
Making games is play.
Play is not productive, you cannot survive on play. You cannot survive without play. You need to make money to play. A terrible bargain. For now. But remember. The making is play. The art is in the making. Play is fun. The fun comes from the play. There is no skipping this. It's all in the act, the essential verb. Play-Making. No machine can play, no machine can make. Let those with broken hearts marvel at their imitation. We grew on this planet to play. It comes from the only place within us they can't sell. The fuckers would try, if they could. But play cannot be done so cynically. Making games is play.
So go play.
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this is from armed joy by Alfredo bonnano.
“In the physical confrontation with capital play can take different forms, even on this side of the fence. Many things can be done ‘playfully’ yet most of the things we do, we do very ‘seriously’ wearing the death mask we have borrowed from capital.
Play is characterised by a vital impulse that is always new, always in movement. By acting as though we are playing, we charge our action with this impulse. We free ourselves from death. Play makes us feel alive. It gives us the excitement of life. In the other model of acting we do everything as though it were a duty, as though we ‘had’ to do it.
It is in the ever new excitement of play, quite the opposite to the alienation and madness of capital, that we are able to identify joy.
Here lies the possibility to break with the old world and identify with new aims and other values and needs. Even if joy cannot be considered man’s aim, it is undoubtedly the privileged dimension that makes the clash with capital different when it is pursued deliberately.”
Armed Joy PDF
this is from Maxine Greene’s Releasing the Imagination. What she calls imagination can also be called play, creativity, art. She did a lot of work to get more art in schools, arguing that the imagination is probably necessary for empathy, or at least it usually is how it works. If everyone of our students leaves school with greater empathy imagine the benefit to the world.
“Imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible. It is what enables us to cross empty spaces between ourselves and those we teachers have called “other” over the years. If those others are willing to give us clues, we can look in some manner through strangers’ eyes and hear through their ears. That is because, of all our cognitive capacities, imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities.’
Imagination may be our primary means of forming an understanding of what goes on under the heading of “reality”; imagination may be responsible for the very texture of our experience. Once we do away with habitual separations of the subjective from the objective, the inside from the outside, appearances from reality, we might be able to give imagination its proper importance and grasp what it means to place imagination at the core of understanding’.”
That’s why for a long time my slogan has been “playing at making games since 2010, because development is the best game”. Thank you for this.
Making games IS play <3
Such true words and sentiment 💖 Play more games, because games are art AND heart! Go play!!
Thanks Alix! <3
There’s something human and lovely about making (and playing) games.
There is something to creativity being true entertainment, but with creativity, it is something different. It is not just making something up, there are plenty of games allowing this exactly and yet they just remain games. Creativity is love and genuine love is the purpose of being.
It can be frustrating too, which can be good (within reason) since that’s an opportunity to grow. It’s a process and there’s joy to be found in there.
Thankyou <3
yes! really love the use of the hand prints for the cover. it’s all play babeyyyyy
Exactly! This particular cave (Cueva de las Manos) has over 2000 hand prints (among other forms) over a period of 8000 years, showing several waves of different peoples contributing. And I think that’s just lovely :)