Introducing: Pursuit of Play

I did some maths recently as I prepared to wrap up the Pokemon Travelogue. Over the course of the last year, I…

• travelled almost 15,000 miles (almost 24,000 kilometers)
• and wrote around 25,000 words

…all in the name of Pokemon. The Pokemon Travelogue is essentially a short book^[1].

And while that all feels absurd to type, I also have to acknowledge: it sure was a lot of fun…and I’m not entirely ready to leave it all behind.

But also, it felt like this newsletter was going through an identity crisis over the course of the year. Half the time it was my thoughts on learning and its role in society; half the time it was a record of my Pokemon travels. From the feedback I got on both fronts, it seemed like the two things were interesting to a lot of you, but I still felt like it was all kind of discordant.

That’s not a bad thing - this newsletter and the design studio it’s attached to are called Routine Chaos after all, and this whole Pokemon project has been a part of the identity development we’ve been going through over the past year. But I also want to bring those divergent pieces together.

So, it’s time to introduce a new project: Pursuit of Play.

Why Pursuit of Play?

There’s a quote from Charles Eames that I feel in the marrow of my bones: 

This is a thing that I keep returning to in my work and in my life in general. In grad school, my thesis project was a massive multiplayer tabletop game^[3] that helped people build cross-cultural bonds by completing silly challenges together. One of the most successful projects I ever worked on was an executive leadership program^[4] where the founding principle was that we would get adults to learn like kindergarteners.

It’s not for nothing that when my kids started to get into Pokemon, I was ready to support them going all in: I see why seemingly trivial things are actually an entry point to much deeper meaning. After the Pokemon World Championships wrapped up, our family headed to a beach house in the Pacific Northwest where we flew kites, built bonfires, hiked, and had an overall lovely time. While we were there, I was reading Steven Johnson’s book Wonderland, and at the beginning of the book he articulated what I see as the deeper why behind the Eames quote:

So this year, I’m going to make an attempt to harmonize all of the work that happens in this design studio where I’ve become increasingly comfortable with the idea that we work on building the foundations for a creative society, and I’m going to do it mad scientist style by documenting my own playful experiences…including another year on the European competitive Pokemon circuit, but with one notable difference:

This year, I’m competing.

What to expect

Last year I stumbled onto a pretty reliable format for the Pokemon Travelogue: introducing the city, getting into how we travel, where we eat, what decks the kids were playing, and how they did in the tournament. This year, I’m going to mix it up a bit and will let the format deviate a little bit each month; both because I want it to incorporate the Pokemon writing as well as my normal monthly essays, but also because the Pokemon Company is sticking to a reliable script and keeping their regional tournaments largely in the same places as last year^[4] so a lot of the travel/food/city overview might feel a bit redundant. At this point, we have a pretty stable routine for how we approach each tournament, so it’s become much less novel.

At the same time, there will be some common elements as well as some experimental ones. Every month you should expect:

• The Pokemon Update: because, after all, we are still going to be playing a bunch of Pokemon all around Europe, and I’m sure there will be some interesting storylines & developments.
• Reflections on play: this will be twofold - a deeper consideration of my own experience of growing as a Pokemon player and thoughts related to designing for play.
• Some recommendations: I’ll probably keep up the monthly “links & random thoughts” edition of the newsletter, but I’ll use this space for some more longform recommendations in the vein of “I think you should read/watch/hear/play.”

Three experimental sections that we’ll test out:

• Games I’m playing & topics I’m exploring: Related to both the Eames & Johnson quotes, I’m going to play some games and look at what we learn through playing them. Is this an excuse to play the new Civilization game when it drops under the auspices of work? Maybe. But I also want to explore some games that might not seem as obviously “educational.” And I want to get into more serious topics and how games & play might give us entry points to think about & engage with them.
• Some interviews: Turns out I know quite a few people working in some interesting niches of games & play, so I think I’ll use this as an excuse to have fun conversations with them. And, of course, if you know people you think I should be talking with then you should connect us using the button below

• A merch drop here or there? Ngl, after quietly stewing for far too long about Adobe Creative Cloud being subscription only, a few months ago I bought the Affinity suite and have been having a lot of fun doing some very amateurish graphic design. I entertained the idea of starting a competitive Pokemon team and went so far as coming up with a name, designing a logo, and getting a hoodie made for me & all 3 kids with our names printed on the back. But we all agreed that we don’t really love the aesthetic yet, and the kids also want to wear “Kitten Nuggets” shirts to the tournaments along with their friends. Who am I to object? But I do have that itch to play around with some visual design concepts and put them on something displayable…and if & when I do, it’ll show up here.

I originally wrote “Alright, let’s get into it…I’ll keep it short.” And then proceeded to write something that was about twice as long as this. So instead, I’m going to drop the first installment of Pursuit of Play next week, and then the next one will come out after our first regional tournament of the season.