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10:32am on Friday, 24th February, 2023:
Anecdote
I've just finished reading A Book of Surrealist Games by Alastair Brotchie. It's a collection of the games that were played by members of the Surrealist movement.
Most of these "games" are more play than games, but the Surrealists were inveterate players of them regardless and they came up with a lot. The games weren't particularly complex — think parlour-game level — and the Surrealists played them mainly for entertainment and social bonding; they did, however, have theories behind them, largely to do with finding serendipitous connections between otherwise unrelated concepts into which they could read meanings that were not those of the everyday.
They didn't seem to look on ways to subvert their own game-playing. I don't know if this was a deliberate decision, but it's a good one: if you play a game that involves breaking the rules of games, then the rules of the game you're playing can also be broken. You're then no longer playing a game, you're just playing. If play is all you want (and as I noted earlier, this was often what the Surrealists did indeed want) then that's fine. If you want to play a game, though, then rule-breaking is an untenable position. The Surrealists didn't break rules for the sake of it; they subverted conceptions of whatever they thought would benefit from it (chiefly, reality).
Although the Surrealists were very into divining meanings from chance connections by "reading" combinations of the mundane or the imaginary, they didn't look at games that way. They did not analyse the rules of their games, or examine what it was that these rules were delivering; from their perspective, games were constrained systems of chance-creation and a way to while away the hours with friends in a stimulating way.
I do read games, though. To me, what meaning the Surrealists were overlaying their games with was a veneer. Basically, most of the time they were trying to get ideas and were using games to generate those ideas. This would suggest that they were short of ideas in the first place. It's not true of all their games (some served to constrain in order to force the artist to examine what they wanted to say within those constraints, so were like rules of poetry), but it is true of a good many of them, including the most famous ones such as Exquisite Corpse.
It may sound from what I'm saying that I'm not enamoured of these Surrealist games, but that's not the case. I may be cynical about the Surrealists' grand statements about what their games are saying, but the games themselves are fine as forms of play. I occasionally play them (or things like them) myself, as intellectual exercises — "Think of five unrelated words within five seconds", that kind of thing.
The only "game" I recall having invented that would have fitted right into the Surrealists' collection is one I called Isnotis. It's not a great name, because of the accidental appearance of the word "snot" in the middle there (although doubtless that would have amused the Surrealists!). It's not a great game, either, to be honest.
The rules, as with all parlour games, are simple: two or more players agree upon (or have provided for them) an adjectival phrase, then each one secretly writes a (singular, not plural) noun phrase that fits with the adjectival phrase to paint a brief scene. The results are revealed together, the adjectival phrase is forgotten about, and the players discuss whether their noun phrase is or is not the same as the other one(s). It's basically about simile and metaphor, which was behind why I invented it.
Example: "... between two walls" might produce "a hammock" and "a ball being kicked". Is a hammock in some sense a ball being kicked or vice-versa? Probably not.
Example: "... experiencing stress" might produce "an overworked single parent" and "a cable in a suspension bridge". Is an overworked single parent in some sense a cable in a suspension bridge or vice-versa? Well in a way, yes.
Example: "... walking beneath shady trees on a summer's day" might produce "a young lover" and "a man in the autumn of his years". Is a young lover in some sense a man in the autumn of his years or vice-versa? Well literally, no, but you could argue that a man in the autumn of his years could still be a young lover in his heart or his head, giving an effect of either poignancy or delusion depending on how you were to spin it.
Isnotis is not formally a game, because you can't lose at it. It's not something you'd want to play for long, either, because too few of the responses combine in interesting ways. That never stopped the Surrealists from playing their games, but it stopped me from doing anything with Isnotis except remembering its mechanic for possible future use (for example, in a blog post...).
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Copyright © 2023 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).