Pottery and the Art of Gaming

We were looking around cyberspace and bumped into a blog called mashedmarket (excerpts and essays on the expanding space of games).  The reason why we bumped into this blog was because the blog author mentioned Bulldog Pottery.   As we began reading the essay, "Of Tools and Teapots, Rules and Decoration", our days in art school came flooding back.  We did not know where this fellow's thoughts were going, and we were afraid that by the end of his essay we were going be slammed.  We went through some heavy duty critiques in Alfred, and some of those would knock us out.  Usually a day (or two) away from the studio visiting the  library, or to the Jet (food), or to Alex's (the Bar) would suffice, we would lick our wounds and then go back to work.    We had to read his essay a few more times again to figure out if we were having a good critique or a bad one.   When we realized that this was a complimentary metaphor, we were pleasantly relieved.   

We began to read the rest of his blog, and enjoyed his writings about the art and craft of gaming.  We found that some if his thoughts on gaming could be swapped with pottery making.  This quote in particular caught our attention.  

Quoted from "I am Jack's Smirking Revenge"

"Of course, lots of gamers will feel (and play) differently. There’s an almost sickeningly huge range of ways to approach practically every game that’s ever been made. But, inevitably, our relationships to these experiences change over time. Rules are learned; skills mastered. More often than not, the expressive joy of discovery hardens into an almost-ritual ceremony of performance. And then what? We stumble into brand new worlds, keen on finding ourselves all over again."

One can take the three words gamers, game and play, replacing them with potters, pot, and work.  We now have a wonderful and eloquent paragraph about a studio potter's life.

We have not allowed ourselves to play video games or buy a PlayStation.  We have focused our attention on ceramics with our minds in the studio 24/7.  When we see what game designers have created these days, and watch family members play, we are amazed as well as tempted by the artistry.  The complexity of animation of video games has jumped mountains, since I was a kid playing Breakaway on Atari.  As for the art of playing video games, we will continue to read his writings and extrapolate from them, as metaphor, for our ceramic art.