Something that struck me during our class discussion on Monday was the idea of rules of play, and breaking these rules breaks the illusion of play. When I think back to the games I played as a kid, usually involving Polly Pockets, I definitely can remember the rules I employed to keep up with the fantasy. But, this idea of rules made me wonder something: who makes the rule of play?
During the class chess extravaganza, I made a joke that the two people in our group who didn’t know how to play chess should represent the teams and just go nuts, making up our own rules. This made me think about illusion. For the two of us with our rules, the illusion would remain. However, for the four other people who knew the rules of chess, this would probably be a frustrating nightmare that completely shattered the illusion. So, who makes the rules? Or, maybe a better question: whose rules matter during play?
In the grand scheme of things, are the rules of society more important during play than our own childish, weird ones? Or, is it truly up to the kids to decide how their world operates?
This, I think, is something I want to keep in mind when it comes to the group project because there may end up being two sets of rules. There’s the rules of the creators of the world, and then possibly the rules of the participant. If the creators of the world decide people can walk through walls in their world, but the participant believes that’s against their rules, the illusion breaks. Or if the participant expects one thing that ends up being against the creator’s rules, the illusion would also break?
This makes me think of Calvinball from the Calvin and Hobbes comics. It’s a recurring joke about a game in which the players make up new rules as they go along. The only rule is that they can’t play it the same way twice. It always seems both fun and super frustrating. The illusion of the game threatens to break when Calvin complains that it’s not fair, but Hobbes reminds him that being fair isn’t the point of the game, so they continue with it and the illusion remains unbroken.
Calvinball is a subject I never expected to show up in a college course, but I’d be lying if I said the fact didn’t utterly delight me. It’s arguably the closest to the idea of pure play as it was presented in class, and the causal acceptance of the “rules” in general shows how children are much less likely to question certain illusions, barring rare exceptions like this, while Calvin’s attitude that helps form the punchline of many comic strips, is the fact that he does question the rules of adult society, and that often there isn’t even a completely satisfying answer given.
I absolutely love Calvin and Hobbes, and Calvinball is the perfect metaphor for Wonderland. The players of the game have completely different ideas of the rules that they are playing with, and this leads to a game filled with chaos. Both Calvinball and the chess game in Wonderland have a set goal, but the means by which the players get there are completely made up. This leads to Alice and Calvin sharing the same reaction in the final panel, utterly confused.