Dream is a world of its own.
Dream is a world beyond our comprehension.
It does not follow our understanding or expectation.
There is no structure in what can exist, no law to bind its reality.
We can find pattern in the chaos, but it never truly is.
Lost in this world, we can only talk through it.
There are no tools in the dream, but dream itself.
And yet, we must find each other.
We can find each other.
Within the dream, using only the dream.
The intent of this design is to explore the ability of people to communicate. It explores the ability to build a language with minimal tools, positing that we have an inherent ability to construct meaningful communication out of whatever we have. The tool provided is abstract idea presented in the medium of art. Due to this, the art required to play has some significant contstraints, which will be discussed later. The game is themed around the idea of Dreams. The players are lost within a Dream, and are trying to find each other.
As a structure, I would call the end result a "shared experience" rather than a game.
The game is, in essence, quite simple.
In the center of the table, there is a arrangement of cards - each with unique art (henceforth referred to as the Dreamscape). I suggest the Dreamscape to be a n*n grid - where 3 < n < 7. More cards will increase the difficulty. Due to limitations of art production, testing so far has only been done with n < 5, primarily 4*4. Within the Dreamscape, both players are assigned a single card. This should be done before the Dreamscape is made. The recommended method is for both players to take the top card of the deck, memorize it, then shuffle both cards in. This guarantees that players are not assigned the same card, and that the cards are then randomly distributed within the Dreamscape.
Aside from the Dreamscape, each player has a hand of cards. This hand should be fairly small, but scale with the size of the Dreamscape. In testing, 5 cards in hand has been a good number for a 4*4 Dreamscape. For 5*5 I think 7 would be good, so a good rule of thumb may be 2n-3. This hand of cards is the only tool of the players.
The goal of the game is for players to flip cards in the Dreamscape over, until only the two cards initially assigned to the players are face up. Should at any point one of those cards be flipped, the game is considered a loss.
In play, there are only 3 actions allowed. Players may, at any point:
A player may only be displaying one card from their hand at any given point, Meaning once a car is played, it must be picked up again before another one can be. A player may only reach to the Dreamscape with explicit intent to flip a specific card, Any reach must result in the flip of a card, and any hovering or deliberating over a card is considered a flip - and must be followed through with. (A player considering flipping a card is an explicit statement to the other player that the card is safe for them to flip.)
A very strong restriction is for the players to exclude all communication that is not the revealing of cards. This, I think, is an extremely difficult thing to actually do. Although it is easy to not speak to each other, other things are harder. Looks of surprise or thought, small gestures, gazing eyes - all of these are tools of communication. To truly experience the game as intended, players would have to be entirely shrouded in darkness, with light only on the space of play. This is, of course, impractical, but for the best experience it should be emulated as best as possible.
There is also a strong recommendation to restrict discussion of the game outside of it. Discussing anything done within the game will strongly affect future play experiences, and it is documented within the playtesting that any pair of players who discuss what they did with each other are unlikely to play more games. The hope of the game is to build a language with another player, creating meaning internal only to the experience of the game. By discussing it outside the game, we begin to root this language within our broader language, and as such ruin it and its unique state.The art for this game needs to be very specifically crafted, and I have struggled to find the words to properly describe the needs. The intent is for each card to be in a sense "meaningless" or "nonsense". There needs to be no identifiable idea or concept, no pattern or meaningful structure. Yet, each piece needs to be describable. The intent is not to just have random colour, shape, and pattern. I think this places the art in some form of surrealism, which makes sense given the intent of representing Dream.
Much of playtesting has been refining what makes for good art for the game. The first true tests were done with cards that had mostly abstract designs and patterns. This resulted in a game that was too simple, as we have an uncanny ability for recognizing patterns of shape. To this we slowly added more cards, beggining with mostly singular concepts (a cup of tea, or an eye). Although more interesting, pattern and idea were still too easily identifiable. The current, and most functional and interesting, state of the playtest set is primarily surrealist scenes. Each piece of art is composed of many identifiable concepts, however the final scene is not one that is relatable - and hopefully not identifiably meaningful.
I think that, with the emphasis on nonsense and unrelatability, this game could be an actual use for AI art - capitalizing specifically on its failures. I suspect that with enough prompt engineering, one could quickly produce a selection of usable pieces of art. I do not intend to go in this direction, but anybody who wishes to experiment with the idea is free to do so.
To an extent, this design has been inspired by my study in Philosophy of Language. I intend to, at some point, do some proper research and place it correctly in the field, But even at a basic level, I think that there is some insight for discussion of Wittgensteins concept of language games and language learning.
In developement, I am constantly surprised by people ability to suceed. Although I have not tracked it, I think the rate of success is higher than that of failure. I am also surprised by the speed at which people are able to play. When initially concieved, I imagine a game that might take an hour or more to get through - and even so end in failure. I imagined a game where people would be suceeding many plays of it in, not the first time they met each other. And yet, people suceed at the game the first time they play with each other, and most of the time it only take 10 to 15 minutes. I think that these values will change once the game is expanded, a set of more curated art that also has enough of it to test larger Dreamscapes is the most important step. I will leave myself the permission to not yet be truly surprised until this next step has been tested.
Some example sketches, in progress from being converted from playtest materials.
