Game assumptions

This week, Daniel Solis started an utterly fascinating discussion on Twitter on the implicit assumptions that people make about how games work.

Daniel and most of the participants are game designers. I'm not a game designer, but I love thinking about the unspoken boundaries of an artform or medium.

And I love how in each of these tweets, there's a challenge. In defining an assumption of a medium, you implicitly point across the border to the possibility of an object that would subvert that assumption.

I've always thought that avant garde is sort of a misnomer. Because the rest of the army doesn't always follow. Avant garde artists continue to work in ways that foreground assumptions and questions about the media in which they're working. And in at least some mainstream art, the boundaries remain more-or-less invisible.

Which is not to say that experimental and traditional work cannot coexist or contribute to each other or share an audience or share practitioners. I think one of the main things that define the current state of the poetry world is the swiftness with which the rules jump between the foreground and the background.