Scribbles and Horrors

Came upon a post by Was It Likely? (https://wasitlikely. … 0-blows-kung-fu.html) and was fascinated by the example game rules-texts at the end of the essay. (I do not pretend to understand the full ramifications of the whole essay here, it is a lot, but I am narrowing in specifically on one point.)

One of the games which is presented has the following rules text:

Flying is bliss. the sky is beautiful, even falling to your death is beautiful . sometimes, rarely, you can survive such a fall and it’s like a fairytale. planes are acrobatic and spectacular and so fragile. the ocean is wild and hungry and lethal unless fortune saves you. on the earth everything takes energy, makes you tired. you can only get so much done in a day and a lot of it has to making sure you can eat and drink. stars fall from the sky every night. they strike the earth and burn the cities and towns so people travel in tents now. nobody is where you left them, but you’re always running into old friends. if you catch stars while they’re falling they retain their speed and lightness, and that’s what makes your plane work and your guns work. engines and bullets yearning to return to star-speed. huge war-blimps with buzzing flocks of star-snatcher warplanes.

I was amazed to see this kind of text be understood as rules-text, and I was inspired by this to further thoughts I have had about pushing the boundaries of rules-text. I came up with a concept for an experimental game which I am calling Mishmash.

The point of Mishmash is to strip a game down to its bare essentials: a group of people interpreting a piece of text as a ruleset instructing them to play a game.

Here is a link to advice for how to play Mishmash.

In Mishmash the rules text is the welding together of player-brought text fragments. The main difficulty in the game is figuring out how to understand the text as workable rules-text. Mishmash is not Nomic: the point is not to amend a ruleset together, or invent a game together. When play starts the ruleset is already made!

At the time of writing Mishmash has not been played, but I feel like there could be plenty of sticky points. It may be quite difficult. On the other hand, I really do think that quite a bit of game can be wrung out of some very non-game-looking text, if only the participants have open enough minds.

I can’t imagine a game of Mishmash would ever last more than one session. But, it is light prep, so hopefully it will be easy to start playing at least.