August 2014 – Leapfroglog

There’s a lesson here. The greatest thing I learned from my formalist training in painting was actually not about painting. It was about the nature of knowledge itself: what it means to define a creative practice as a craft, or as a discipline, or as a set of ideas, and how such a practice relates to culture at large. In other words, the important thing to ask is not What is painting? or What is game design? Instead, the real question is: What is gained and what is lost when we define it in a particular way?

(via How I Teach Game Design. (Lesson 3: Games and Rules) | being playful)

Superstition, myth, and religion offer rationales that fill in the empty spaces between performance and results. Their sorcery acts as a mortar that plugs the gaps between the physical and mental bricks that form the walls of our performances. Without that glue, the edifice would crumble. For peak performance, superstition isn’t a defect but a necessity.

(via Swing Copters: The Randomness of the Universe, Captured in Pixels – The Atlantic)

“Playing a song changes your understanding of it. Playing music changes how you listen to it. Doing changes knowing.”

Great piece on how the internet is facilitating a new literacy of media production. Doing definitely changes knowing. However, I disagree old structures of power and access are no longer in place on the internet. And I also disagree learning to play a song on a guitar is the same as “learning” to post a tweet. There’s a different relationship between the tool, the media and the person going on there.

(via Doing is knowing: “Sweet Jane” and the Web — Wordyard)