Expedition 51! This leaky old tub is still doing the job, just about. Welcome back. This week, Chris thinks about parks and games and roaming. Elsewhere, Florence talks to rats.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

I once had a staring contest with a rat on the flat roof of my old London flat (the rat won). Anyway, in warme sonne, kalter wind you can talk to a low poly rat about queerness and identity. FSN

Interesting things

Chris’ piece reminded me of a short paper on “Gardening Games: An Alternative Philosophy of PCG in Games” by Max Kreminski and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, which contrasts a more extractive approach to procedural content generation, with one that favours cultivating the output of a generator in the same way you would cultivate a garden. FSN

Essay: Down in the park

At the moment, I’m very slowly working my way through Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It’s a short book, and it should be brisk, but it’s slow going for me because it’s so dense with brilliance that I find I have to stop and think about something new every few lines. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten really, really high and then gone to brush your teeth, and you emerge from the bathroom after two minutes of teeth-brushing and it’s like you lived a million different lives all somehow folded into those two minutes? This, weird as it seems, is the power of Solnit’s writing for me. She compacts time with her insight and imagination.

Anyway, today the thing that stopped me for a while was this:

“Children seldom roam, even in the safest places. Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely), the wonderful things that happen as a matter of course are stripped away from them.”

(Quick aside: what enviable writing. The careful caveat that does not interrupt the flow or feel like ugly, protective gantries that have been slapped onto the idea to protect against bad-faith readers. The precise awareness that parenthood is a time of real-and-perceived monsters. I am in quiet awe.)

I read that and thought: I agree, and I also don’t know what the solution is. Crucially, I did not know what the solution was when my daughter was at the age that she could have benefited from it. Like many children born in the 1970s, I roamed dangerously far and wide, and while I look back on that now and think about the horrors I avoided without knowing it, I also think of fabulous days and evenings spent somewhere weird and far from home, far from other people, doing nothing really, having no thoughts, just moving through the world like an idiot breeze. 

I also think of how many evenings there would be when I just went into our small back garden for an hour or so, an hour that was absolutely not boring at all, even though nothing but my own thoughts were really unfolding. Perhaps because we did not let my daughter roam, she didn’t really think to do that either.

I have a couple of tentative solutions now that I consider it. One is videogames, of course, which is very helpful for the theme of this newsletter. The other is parks. But crucially I’m thinking of a specific kind of park and a specific kind of videogame.

I feel like I’ve written about parks before. Game designers like Keita Takahashi are fond of them, and Takahashi’s designed both real-world parks and games that feel like his real-world parks. To me, they feel of a piece with Play Mountain, the playground proposed by Isamu Noguchi, of the coffee table (and much else) fame. Play Mountain is a tidy little multipurpose space designed to encourage imaginative play. It has a ramp that circles around and becomes a set of stairs, and a central area that feels a bit like a small valley. 

Play Mountain’s beautiful, but it’s not the kind of park I’m thinking of here, just as games like Noby Noby Boy are not the kinds of games I’m thinking of. This is because they all feel too openly park-life. They are both so clearly designed and carefully (wonderfully) made. They are too filled with bits and pieces that are absolutely ideal things to play with.

The kinds of park I’m thinking of that, for me at least, suit Solnit’s idea of a place where children can roam are very different. They are overgrown and perhaps a little rundown. The trees have gotten out of control and the bushes have intruded onto lawns. There’s a park just like this near me and my kiddo and I wander there often. It has these areas that you have to know about to enjoy, and these other areas that you can only know about by sort of stumbling upon  them while mildly lost. Suddenly you find benches in odd and perhaps stupid places, copses with lovely little hollows inside that feel like grottoes.

The idea of roaming for me comes with the idea that you’re exploring somewhere wild. And in a park, with parents nearby, that seems a little safer. It’s the wilderness, but there’s a boundary around it, and probably a mini Tesco nearby if things get really desperate. It’s not too curated, but it was once curated and is now pleasantly out of hand.

As for games, I’m tempted to say Caves of Qud hits a similar spot for me. I love this spin on Rogue, and what I love about it more than anything is the stretches of dangerous in-between spaces that you find yourself in when you’re not in a town and not in a dungeon. You’ll have grass and trees and little pools and a sense that anything could go wrong at any time, but also that it will be interesting when it does. So hands in pockets, whistle as you walk, and get out there. 

Once again, I think what I like about this is that it’s wilderness but wilderness with boundaries - and the boundaries are rules as much as geographical entities here. You’re roaming in a place where you don’t know what will happen, but if it does happen, you’ll at least understand the basics of how it’s going to work.

A final note on parks: In Seattle, there’s a Brutalist park built over a freeway that I am desperate to visit. Friend of Bathysphere - and he’s also a wonderful writer and podcaster - Jonny Malks went recently and sent me a few pictures which I’m allowed to share here. Cor. CD