Roots & Renewal: The Next Move
Last week, I wrote about games. About how much we seem to love them, whether we are watching football, playing cards, or inventing entirely unnecessary rules for ourselves just because apparently life is more fun that way. You may remember that I love games that let me build things. But I also love games for another reason: you can learn a lot about someone by the way they play and the choices they make.
At the last Open House at 403 W 2nd St, I was hovering near a corner of the dining room. A young woman was standing at a nearby screen, talking quietly to herself as she tried to decide what her next move would be in a game we had designed. It’s a simple game, somewhat reminiscent of the text-based adventures I played as a teenager, back in the days of blue (or green) computer screens. You may remember those: you’re given a situation. You make a choice. A skeleton pops out from behind a wall and swings an ax at you. Then you decide what to do next.
This young woman didn’t have to contend with ax-wielding skeletons, but she read the situation, considered her options, picked one, saw what happened, and immediately began reconsidering everything. “Okay, but now if I do this…” she murmured, leaning closer to the screen. I stood a few feet away, not even trying to hide my grin.
We built this little game because we’d like to know what really matters to people. That might sound simple enough, until you actually ask people what they think about ... anything. Ask what matters in a neighborhood and you get perfectly sensible answers: safety, good schools, nice neighbors, clean streets. Ask what should happen to a deteriorating house and you get equally sensible answers: fix it, tear it down, make somebody take care of it. None of those answers are wrong. They just don’t say very much about what happens when those perfectly sensible ideas crash into limitations, or even into one another, as tends to happen in real life.
A game, though, can offer a little slice of virtual life, complete with choices, consequences, and messiness. Give someone a house with a failing roof, no utilities, limited money, and only so many things that can be done at once, and the tidy answers start to unravel. I watched people pause, mutter, backtrack, laugh, and occasionally look downright betrayed by a computer screen that had merely followed their own choice to one potential logical conclusion. Nobody had to explain to me what mattered to them. I could watch them wrestle with it.
We played a lot of games at our open houses this summer. Some involved tapping on screens. Some involved drawing pictures. Others involved sticky dots. And we just...paid attention to what people did. They stood and stared. They walked back through rooms. They debated with their friends. They contemplated dot-covered poster boards far longer than they realized. Their final answers were interesting. Watching them arrive at those answers was even better.
The house must’ve enjoyed the games, because it just keeps playing. Right before that last Open House, the patch on the roof decided it had had enough of summer storms and started to fail. It didn’t give us much choice as to what to do next. Then, this past week, as the new cladding was going on the main roof, we decided to make extra use of the high-lift and start taking down the ... er ... “atmospheric” garage roof so we could get it properly covered before winter. As the weight of the rafters came off those 1930s terracotta block walls, though, everything started to shift and crumble.
So there we were, standing around a roofless garage while its walls slowly reconsidered just how committed they were to being walls at all. Apparently, the house had made the next move.
Roots & Renewal is where the Pellere Foundation shares the people, projects and occasional mud behind our work. Read along here, check out the podcast on YouTube or Spotify, or find us at pellere.org.
