The Designer as Guest, Visiting Their Design

Designer as (enactive) guest

In the following I want to concentrate on how I experienced my design and creation process of the video game prototype Ostrakinda. I do see myself as a software developer first, as a programmer, and I do have the feeling that this influences how I see myself as a designer. To this day I don’t feel comfortable using that term to describe or label myself. But after some exchanges with people whose insights I cherish I see that there is more to the concept of designer as guest.

We have two notions at hand. The designer as guest, because I doubt myself as designer, because I’m uncertain, because this is not my home. I’m a guest in the discipline of design, I don’t feel I belong here. The second notion of designer as guest touches on discourses of design materials as non-human actors, who I feel invited from, and with whom I’m building relations through the construction of a shared vocabulary and friendship.

Which is it? Either, neither, both?

These insights were build through the Materializing Design Method (MDM), an approach in development in a research project of the same name, headed by Rilla Khaled at the Research Centre for Technology, Arts, and Games (Milieux, Concordia University, Montréal). The method expands on the software development practice of versioning, with reflective documentation. Versioning means that the current state of the development of a born-digital artifact is regularly captured. This practice evolved out of the need to collaborate in software projects (as these snapshots can be shared), as well as being more flexible in moving back, forth, or into alternative development branches. MDM leverages this practice in order to capture the design and development process, based on the insight that a lot of design knowledge is abstracted away in the final product, but still accessible in the process. The reflective documentation on top of versioning supports manifesting a designer’s intentions, wishes, questions, and thoughts regarding the design and creation process. Creating such a MDM archive, consisting of material and documentation, concludes the first phase. The second consists of analysing the archive through grounded theory, a way of thinking and conceptualizing data through a tedious process of qualitative coding and theorizing.

It was during this process of theorizing my own reflective documentation that I started to see my design process as a progression of movements. A first distinction was simply between material and immaterial movements. What happened in my head or in the process, or what was moved around, or moving around, in terms of program code and video game assets. Another important category in this regard was the kind of movement: walking in circles, pacing back and forth, strolling and meandering, or a directed sprint are some examples. This thinking of movements regarding my design process felt right, and it led to a first axial coding in which I described my design practice as visiting.

I grounded visiting, and in the following me being a guest, in my own uncertainty and doubt. Equally significant seemed how I often visit other video games and designers, and take bits and pieces as memorabilia from my excursions. My reflective documentation doesn’t speak about myself being at home in any design discipline, or a design practice. My practice is writing code, which goes rather unnoticed in the documentation, as it is something that I simply do. Reproducing what inspired me on my visits was an easy feat, going about in a designerly fashion not so much. Which led to recurring existential questioning about my place in design. Design is not my home, and I’m merely a guest.

Design Materials as Hosts (everything has a grain)

During an exchange about this insight with the MDM research team another perspective started to emerge, entangled with a second finding from my grounded theory analysis. Intellectually formed by design research discourse and new feminist materialism, I cannot not theorize my relation to the non-human. The perspective was brought in by commentaries and questions by Rilla, Vadim, Mo, and Lyne and concentrated on the aspect that a designer as guest can also imply design materials as hosts. This essentially shifts the perspective from an uncertain self to an inviting non-human other.

I haven’t fully realized this in my designer as guest perspective, but it definitely touches on enaction and affordances, and further on designing and creating (as well as programming) as situated and embodied practices, in which cognition is shared among designer, tools, and material. This is designing no longer as forming material to the will of the designer, but design as co-creation in accordance with non-human actors. Being a guest in this perspective sees this design process as visiting, politely. This resonates with approaches of entangling: Vinciane Despret’s politeness, Hannah Arendt’s visiting, Anna Tsing’s arts of noticing, and Minakata Kumagusu’s tact.

In every sense, Despret’s cultivation of politeness is a curious practice. She trains her whole being, not just her imagination, in Arendt’s words, “to go visiting.” Visiting is not an easy practice; it demands the ability to find others actively interesting, even or especially others most people already claim to know all too completely, to ask questions that one’s interlocutors truly find interesting, to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one’s ability to sense and respond — and to do all this politely! - Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble

Thus, tact can be seen as the limit point where that which one has consciously learned encounters worldly surprises that go beyond this learning. It concerns the cultivation of a receptive attitude toward the surprises of (nonhuman) things; even things that might lie hidden in plain view. - Jensen, C. B., Ishii, M., & Swift, P. (2016)

I’m reminded about Adam Saltsman’s talk about making small games and the quote that everything has a grain. Our brain has a grain, our game we’re making has a grain, and our tools and materials have a grain. Which is to say, they have agency in new materialism speak (looking at you Jane Bennett).

Process Dynamics and Situatedness

Looking at my analysis, I seem to follow an approach in which I try to take various bits and pieces and try to stitch them together. But it doesn’t work out as I imagined or intended to, and I start to struggle. There’s no real ideation (design?) or planning (design?) going on and more like a trying to recreate how or what others have done. Except for that one moment where I run into a systemic problem with the mechanics that I had a lot of fun solving myself, and coming up with something genuine mine/new. Likewise, I’m easily inspired and taken into rabbit holes by a lot of things or what other people are making. Observing seems to be more motivating than doing. Sometimes doing is applied to better understand how other things are done or how other people are working.

This lends yet another perspective on the act of visiting. Visiting not only as guest at my own design, but also in various other places, other games, other designers. Which is, again, very much situated. The dynamics of designing Ostrakinda at this point of reflection include having the financial means to buy a game on Steam that uses coin flip mechanics that somebody recommended to me to on the private MDM Discord server, of which I am part because the Swiss government granted me a research residency. Rilla Khaled commented similarly in our exchange as confusing chat logs with the people we chatted with. The chat logs are not the relation, but they are most definitely part of the assemblage around the relation between two people, enabling the creation of a shared vocabulary. Without further derailing the point I’m trying to make here, Ostrakinda would be something entirely different without having been situated within the process dynamics of the MDM research project.

At this point I have touched on four essential categories from my grounded theory analysis.

1. Self as Guest (Identity, Struggle, and Authorship); Designing through internal conflict and self-negotiation
2. Process Dynamics (Movement, Iteration, and Pivoting); The creative process as a non-linear, meandering journey with moments of convergence
3. Situatedness (Inspiration, Feedback, and Systems); Being embedded in networks of influence and systemic constraints
4. The Thing being designed as Host (Visiting, Inhabiting, Leaving)

I would finally like to touch on a fifth.

5. The Game Being Thought; How ideas about game design, narration, and mechanics form during the making process

Ludemes as Boundary Objects, Enaction and Affordances

What I actually was interested in, besides these invaluable and surprising insights, is how a video game designer gets hold of, and implements ludemes. As refresher, my working definition of ludeme is as follows.

Ludemes are the affordances games offer to become playable—organized in semantic sequences and of memetic nature.

I’m interested in how these ludemes find their way and manifest in source code, which is something I will go about soon-ish. Given the history of using and defining the term, a clear outline of what constitutes a ludeme is difficult to obtain. I do understand the need to be clear about a term in scientific discourse, but I’m also somewhat opposed to go about it regarding ludemes. I am rather in favour of handling ludemes as boundary objects, or their special value for me in approaching source code would be lost. I don’t know it’s a ludeme when I see it, but they change shape depending on the perspective. Rather, like affordances, ludemes are relational entities. If they are composed of a grapheme and a mechaneme (Hansen, Hurel) they already bridge epistemologies.

Among the documents of my MDM archive, the Discord journal channel is especially valuable in that regard. Whereas the other documents hold only my own voice, the Discord journal also captured various exchanges with fellow MDM team members. Going through that channel makes it obvious, how ideas about games free float the community. Mentioning a mechanic brings up reactions on games that use that mechanics, uncertainty, doubts, and struggles are shared, a vocabulary for shitposting or video game design critique co-created. I would most certain not have come in contact with some material, were there not this Discord channel.

There is most likely more to all of this, but I needed to get this out for now.