A Blog About Making Culture
Rules to the Game
March 11, 2005
One of the recurring ideas that's been reasserting itself in my head recently is the idea of constraints being useful, and even necessary for creative work. Stewart once did an excellent presentation on how constraints can improve the results of an effort. He made a profound (to me, at least) demonstration that the difference between work and play wasn't the tasks being completed or the rewards earned, but rather the presence or absence of rules.
Games have rules, and that's what makes them fun to play. Tedium happens when there are no boundaries or limitations to mark completion, success, or progress.
Of course, thinking about working with constraints brings me back to playing with the web. There are all the limitations of doing something creative in HTML, from technical limits like browser capabilities and software distribution and user savvy, to cultural constraints like flame wars, aversion to payments, and mistrust of strangers. But there's also tremendous creativity brought on by requiring any project that wants to find a wide audience to meet a really stringent set of constraints. (You can't crash browsers, you have to be able to be bookmarked so people can pass on the link, you need to work even on slow dial-up connections.)
This came back to mind on one of hte plane flights I was on last night, as well. I ran into Dave Shea, who built the CSS Zen Garden and co-wrote its companion book. I read the book last night (I'd recommend it to people who are into that sort of thing) and what I was struck by wasn't the cleverness of all the designs that people had implemented, but rather the fact that all that creativity was unleashed by having had such tight constraints on the paths into which innovation could be channeled.
Importantly, there is something freeing about finding that constraints don't really place limits on what can be achieved. That's a bigger point than just the web, of course. There's a recurrent theme in nearly every culture that being an ascetic can lead to inner peace, of the principles that are usually grouped under the concept of "zen" in popular culture.
I'm hoping to post more about the topic, but I'm constrained by time right now and I figure I might as well obey the constraint.
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You need walls to build a tower: Reading Anil Dash's post on Rules to the Game brought back similar conversations with coworkers. read more »life (over IP)
If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it...: A while ago, Anil Dash ruminated on the necessity of constraints for creativity: Games have rules, and that's what makes them fun to play. Tedium happens when there are no boundaries or limitations to mark completion, success, or progress.... read more »Titingo
wittgenstein has some elaborate thoughts on play & rules (which he applied to language, of course) maybe somebody more versed than me can point you to some bits & pieces of his writings on that ;~}
John_K
Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” and “Lectures on Aesthetics” are two good starting points for his discussion of “language games” and rules, though he’s talking more, I think, about systems of communication, structures of discourse and meaning, how our various language games develop through societal and political interaction and community, and how they sometimes can be incommensurate, etc. But every work of art, for example, is governed by a particular language game. Sometimes it’s one we get so we understand the work, while others seem initially opaque and are difficult to describe. BUT, even more germane to your post is the whole OuLiPo group in France, who actively used constraints—linguistic and mathematical in their work. For example, Georges Perec wrote an entire novel, La disparution (A Void), without using the most common letter in French (and English, I believe), “e.” That particular constraint is called a lipogram. Other famous OuLiPo writers include Jacques Roubaud, Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. The Americans John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara wrote constraint-driven poems in the 1950s and 1960s. Christine Brooke-Rose is an English author who has used extensive constraints in her works; her book INVISIBLE AUTHOR discusses a lot of them. Finally, TS Eliot, I believe, suggested that even something as simple as a sonnet could be useful to capture emotions that threatened to exceed free verse structures. So there’s a long precent. Take care, J
Ray Daly
I’ve always used the concept of Road Kill to discuss constraints on creativity. I have a graphic of Road Kill in the middle of the road with two yellow lines painted over it. It is the constraint of the line in the middle of the road that lets us drive at 70mph without becoming roadkill.
Or think of an artist’s blue period.
Vadi
I cannot help remembering Advertisements by Satchi and Satchi for the cigerette brand when UK banned ( or imposed constraints on )the verbiage that can go on these Ads. The Ads showed cut Silk and nothing else. Once the viewers ‘realized’ it is an Ad for ‘Silk Cut’ brand, it was hard to forget the brand name since viewers felt they ‘discovered’ what is being communicated throgh these Ads. Constraint perhaps are necessary components for creativity.
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