Ten years ago, I gave a talk at Game City in Nottingham. I called it “New Play Aeon”, and it was an invitation for game developers to weave occult playfulness into their creative practices.
I primed them for some weirdness by telling them all about Aleister Crowley’s declaration from 1904 that humanity had arrived in a new age: the Aeon of Horus. He predicted that we’d witness a decay of the sense of sin and a growth of innocence and irresponsibility. And over the past century, we have indeed seen an explosion in playfulness in every area of life.
In 2014, I could see this playfulness so clearly manifested in the independent game development community: people daring to try new things, to experiment, to use play itself to find out more about themselves and others. There were excellent events around this time, like the Copenhagen Game Collective’s w00t Festival, Zuraida Buter’s Playful Arts Festival in Den Bosch, AMAZE in Berlin, and our own Inis Spraoi in Ireland.
When we gathered together, we knew there was something special in just playing. We could feel in our bones the power inherent in embodying the freedom of the child.
Things change, cultures change. The independent game development community is a fairly different beast these days. But the new aeon rolls on. When I saw the below picture again from my initial presentation all those years ago, I felt a shiver, a real connection between the me-now and the me-then.
It’s a panel from writer and occultist Grant Morrison’s excellent graphic novel “The Invisibles”, and this phrase: “the new Aeon’s dominant motif - a child fucking about with the building blocks of reality itself, restlessly destroying to create” resonated with me once more, from a whole new space.
Look, I know everyone’s bored to tears of hearing about AI by now. About the productivity gains and the job losses and the server farms and the copyright issues and so on. And I get it, I really do.
But the beautiful little spark of potential in it that delights me is the same little spark that delighted me in the independent game development scene a decade ago: dream it up, make it, share it - now using the tenets of consensus reality as lego bricks. Not trying to recreate the media of the past: not novels, not movies, not songs. But some strange new creatures, new forms that are no more than shadows right now, coalescing into shape just out of the corners of our eyes.
Things that will be “their own thing”, incomparable to the art we have now in the same way a video game is incomparable to a photograph, or an oil painting is incomparable to a poem. Not a competition, a whole new thing altogether. When you think of the art that means the most to you, is there anything more exciting than seeing something that’s completely “its own thing”?
A few weeks ago, we went to see the excellent Firelei Báez exhibition at the Louisiana gallery here in Denmark and my soul sang. I was entranced by her combining, her remixing, her luring new meanings, the old maps she paints over like “ghosts of the past haunting the present moment.” How can paint and paper be turned into this completely new form that turns my belly to water, my heart to fire?
Magic.
The magic of creativity and play can alchemise any raw material into beauty and meaning. And the nature of humans is to find new forms, to find new meanings.
I know I’m not alone in this appetite for new forms. You can see it too, right? Structured playgrounds are too limiting, constricting. I want to “yes, and…” everything, and I think others do too. People want to make things, to share things, to take their playing out into the wider world. Look at the growth of Minecraft, of Roblox compared to “traditional” video games. Even social media - itself a new form - rolls on, turning towards production over consumption: streaming, making videos, sharing pictures.
And here in the baby years of AI as a tool, we’re just exploring, interacting. Like a toddler learning more about their environment and what they can create. And sure, right now what we’re making with these new tools is like those first masterpieces we scrawled with crayons as two-year-olds that Mom hung on the fridge. We’re learning, developing. We need to experiment, if we’re going to find the new forms.
So I’m feeling an update to what I shared ten years ago.
Play, not limited to playing a game made by someone else, or playing by someone else’s rules. Toys, more than games. Play, no longer something creators keep to themselves as part of their creative process. Instead, inviting others into the sandbox, rather than competing on the swings.
Play, liberated to the extent that creators can remix all of reality to express themselves.
Will we find the new forms we seek? Ask me in ten years!