(3). puzzling
Often, when you find yourself in a psychiatric facility, they give you a puzzle to work on. This is, of course, after a cop takes away all your possessions and you are heavily medicated. The puzzle is there because the heavy cocktail of medications that you are forced to take makes you barely able to form words, let alone a full sentence. And, the logic follows, puzzles are soothing. They give you a sense of progression.
Take this piece. Sort it into a pile with other pieces of the same color.
Does it fit with any of them?
No.
Rotate.
Try again.
No.
Rotate.
Try again.
I’ve never liked puzzles, and I think it’s because of their simplicity, of the promise of a panacea. The completion of a puzzle lays bare one of the great lies of art—that it is liberatory.
See here, in this puzzle? You made a little picture of some puppies. Good job. Time to go back to your room. Not ready? Maybe you can stay and do this one of flowers. But after that, it’s time for bed.
I am very sentimental, a romantic, even. I’m not exactly sure when it started, but for as long as I could remember, escaping somewhere else, crawling beneath the pages of a book, discovering a clever sequence of mechanics, befriending a new cast of performers—this always seemed more real to me. Maybe because imagined realities and paper consciousnesses offered more to me than reality itself. Reality is so goddamned dissatisfactory, isn’t it?
Sure, dozens of civilization-is-bad-back-to-nature dipshits have extolled the natural, mathematical beauty of nature—how we’ve lost some critical essence as civilization has developed. We’ve lost the beauty of the pines or something like that, some natural essence that they never seem to be able to define. While I find it compelling to look past the illusion of separation between all things, we’re mostly trapped behind the veil. The phenomenal self-image keeps us imprisoned within our forms.
From where I sit at least, it seems that the arc of human life has been to imagine worlds different, more profound, and less brute than our own. We seek the pretty neat little pictures because the reality of the big dark is just around the corner and it’s almost too much to even bear. That darkness, that massive yawning abyss where your consciousness as such ends—it’s panic-inducing. Much easier to distract ourselves from that, to pay attention to something else. Make us laugh. Do a puzzle.
There’s some quote about art that claims that it’s the lie that tells the truth. If so, the puzzle is the truth that tells a lie.
There are plenty of puzzles in the world of board games.
Often, these puzzles are ones where you are set with managing resources, growing something, and building what is often referred to as an “engine.” You often start with a meager set of things, perhaps a whatzit or a gizmo that spits out a few doodads. Then you take those doodads, combine them with some oil you found somewhere, and whammo, you’ve got a thingamabob. Good thing there’s a contract to earn you money for the thingamabob. Turn in that money, buy better equipment, upgrade your thingamachine, get points.
Most points wins the game.
These games are often commonly referred to as eurogames, which means different things to different people. But what they most often are is a puzzle economy with minimal conflict between players (passively strangling opponents with your economy makes sense, considering the modern EU). A designer creates a closed system of some kind, with rules and regulations. Puzzle economies have solutions.
The classic, still in my mind, is Agricola. In this game, you run a small farm, represented by a grid. There is a main board where you take pawns, called “workers” or your “family” in the game, and you place them on spots that deliver certain outputs. Place a worker on the wood spot, get some wood. Place them on the fishing hole, get some food. Build buildings on your grid using the wood. Plant crops. Everything in the game is designed to give a specific and predictable return.
For example, when you plant crops, you know that at a certain phase in the game, you will get to reap those crops. Everything in the game is presented to you in such a way that the only thing you have to plan for is that someone might get to the woodpile before you and get all the wood you need. Agricola might not be the best example of this type of game, as other players have the opportunity to take resources before you get a chance to get a crack at them. There’s a small capitalist critique that emerges from there, in that resources cannot always be assumed to be both unlimited and distributed equally. But that’s more accident than intent.
Agricola presents a model economy. It has rules, structure, and expectations. If you can solve the puzzle the best, given the constraints that everyone is equally presented with, you win the game.
I don’t think it’s fair to expect art to fix the world, or even fix a problem that is a core feature of its design. But I do find it interesting that there are volumes and volumes of this kind of game, repeated over and over again, like a dog digging for a bone that it’s goddamned sure it buried over there, right next to that tree. When I say interesting, what I should probably say is is that it seems unimaginative.
As if solving or finding the puzzle can solve, calm, or save us, or offer us anything but the reminder that our world seems broken, irretrievably out of our grasp. The puzzles of the world are beyond us. This lack of imagination has become almost endemic. And I think people have a sense of it, that this lack, this failure of imagination, to create problems, upsetting ones, ones that are not easily puzzled out, there is a certain politic to that. The mad dreams of artists—a world unfettered by the poverty of what is—freed by possibility.
What might a puzzle worth solving look like? What might the poetics of an art form that imagines worlds that we are capable of achieving if we are willing to go through the fire and be made anew?