Rattlesnake: a game of theme and variations
A single grain of sand can, to the poet’s eye, reveal the whole universe. D.T. Suzuki
Rattlesnake games take a single theme and make multiple variations in different contexts, like a theme and variations in music takes a simple melody, and makes of it a march, a fast or slow dance, a fugue, and so on.
There are versions of Rattlesnake which can be played with paper and pencil only, or with a stick in the sand, and other versions which are played using a special deck of cards to support the development of a game.
The deck itself has two parts. One part contains themes, each of which is used as the focus for a particular game. The other part contains the contexts that players vary their chosen theme across.
This is the background story of the current version of the Variations card deck, which is now available as a print and play version.
Capturing ‘the whole of knowledge’
There’s a separate story about how I arrived at the basic mechanism of the game, which simply applies a single theme in different contexts, using various types of connections. But having got to this point, I needed to find a way for players to explore different domains of knowledge with whatever theme they had chosen for the game.
After reading Tom McArthur’s Worlds of Reference at the recommendation of a friend, I hit on the idea of using a pre-established classification system for a set of domain cards to give the contexts for any chosen theme to be applied to. The first one I tried was the Encyclopedia Britannica’s 41 Propaedia categories. I still like playing with this because of the many and varied paths of knowledge it forces players down, necessitating research and background reading in unfamiliar areas, but the unanimous feedback from playtesters was that it was too demanding for casual play.
I then looked at other general library and museum classification systems. Some (Library of Congress and Dewey classifications) were too biased towards their original authors’ interests and purposes, either too American, English-language or Christian focused to meet my aim of covering global culture. Others (Colon and Bliss classifications) needed considerable expertise and familiarity just to understand how they fitted together as a whole system. None of them seemed ideal for my purpose, but I eventually adopted the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) for the pack, having good breadth and evenness of coverage, with a relatively small number of top level domains and no undue focus on a particular area at the top or secondary levels of classification.
The good thing about using an established system is that the exact details of ‘what belongs where’ are already sorted out, or at least they’re someone else’s responsibility. UDC is still evolving, but it’s well documented and easy for anyone to go into in more depth.
From knowledge to experience
At around the same time, another suggestion was to move away from only knowledge-based contexts. Among the different models for the whole of human experience, I liked the four-fold domains of knowledge, emotional, physical and spiritual intelligence. Now I needed a way of breaking down the non-knowledge based domains in a similar way that UDC breaks down knowledge. And just as there are different ways of breaking down knowledge, there are different approaches to each of these other domains.
A couple of them worked out very quickly.
The physical domain seemed to lend itself well to the seven chakras, which not only cover different parts of the body, but also different senses and physical experiences.
The most famous model of emotional intelligence has only four domains, and doesn’t address individual emotions, so I added the eight emotions of Lövheim’s cube to make twelve in total.
The spiritual intelligence domain gave me most difficulty. Initially I trialled the Zen Bull and Herdsman story with its ten stages, and considered Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Jung’s ten alchemical stages of the Rosarium, but they all had the drawback that they were linked to particular traditions, and you had to have a good appreciation of the whole model, rather than just the card in your hand, to use it properly in an interpretation. I then stumbled on ‘New approaches to qualitative research’ by Maggi Savin-Baden and Claire Howell Major, which presented eight types of uncertainty which seemed to me to be relatively free of any established tradition, and also pleasingly focused on wisdom as a way of dealing with uncertainty, rather than being focused on pre-established beliefs or spirituality of any specific kind. Evidently the authors hadn’t yet developed the ideas further, which gave me the opportunity to elaborate on them freely for my own purpose.
This was the last piece of the puzzle, and the reaction of my playtesters to the expanded set of context cards was immediately positive, especially to the emotion cards I used standard emojis for at first. Job done, for now.
How Rattlesnake rules redesigned the Variations theme cards
Something interesting also happened to the theme cards at quite a late stage, even though they had remained relatively static as the context cards changed completely. Frustrated by not having copyright to the ‘placeholder’ images I’d used in my first drafts of the deck (pictured here on the left), I started looking around for stock images and creative commons images, and eventually landed on game-icons.net and the simple, iconic images of Delapouite and Lorc (pictured on the right). Initially I’d been looking for images very similar to the ones I already had, but then it became clear that if the principles of the Rattlesnake game held true, I had a lot more freedom available to me than that. For example, rather than looking for a slipper to replace the Disney image of Cinderella, the underlying themes of a one-to-one fit, identification and authentication were just as well served by a fingerprint icon. Instead of a bronze age necklace of radiolarite and silicate beads, the theme of mixing the organic and inorganic became a cyborg. Kekulé’s discovery of the structure of benzene through a dream of Ouroboros becomes a dreamcatcher. Vasanizomai graffiti (suffering through austerity) in the first drafts of the theme cards becomes a parched desert landscape. An Inuit amulet with Venetian glass beads becomes a surfer trying to control the uncontrollable, and the Tarot Ten of Swords a checkered flag. Under Rattlesnake rules, in the language of theme and variations, they are equivalent.
Some different problems were also solved in a similar way. Instead of wondering how to represent the Confucian maxim that you must govern yourself before you can govern anything else (family, province or empire), an icon of ‘mineral growth’ serves the purpose of linking the ordered structure at the atomic level to larger scale crystal growth, which amounts to about the same thing. Entropy is represented by ‘ancient ruins.’ Conservation of momentum by Newton’s cradle.
Overall, though all the images were replaced, the themes in the game didn’t change much, and using the icons helped me to pinpoint the essence of what I was trying to get at, rather than a particular narrow aspect of it. Hopefully it will help players too, by giving a broader basis for analogical variations and leaps of the imagination.
It would be interesting to have a pack with themes from a particular source: a selection from the 100 objects Neil MacGregor of the British Museum uses to tell his history of the world; photogenic minerals of different types and sources; Chinese calligraphy characters. I particularly would like to see a pack based on Lois Sherr Dubin’s works on beads, bringing my project back to its source in Hermann Hesse’s glass bead game, and I’ve given many examples elsewhere of how beads in their most abstract simplicity can provide a very creative springboard for imaginative Rattlesnake games.
Ways of connecting
We’ve discussed the evolution of the contexts and themes in the Variations deck, and now we turn to the impact of these developments on the last of the three signature characteristics of Rattlesnake games: ways of connecting themes to contexts.
I’d already codified the ways of connecting using The Loom of Form and Meaning, which I’ve written about separately. The types of connection were already not only fact based, and allowed for personal and imaginative reinterpretations, substitutions and analogies. But the effect of broadening the contexts was to further emphasise non-knowledge based ways of connecting such as uncertainty, and physical and emotional experiences. Now, as well as connecting to a context by knowing a fact, I can also connect by asking a good question about something I’m uncertain about. I can connect by saying why something makes me angry or excited, or what I think it physically feels similar to, and these types of connection don’t have to be reserved to the contexts most directly associated with them.
It’s my hope that opening up the contexts and connections in this way will make the game more flexible and enjoyable, and I very much encourage experimentation with different sets of context cards to read across, just as much as introducing themes of special interest to players, and finding personal ways of connecting them.
Games on the beach
Interestingly, it’s only after designing a deck of cards to play the game that I was able to develop a version of the Rattlesnake game which doesn’t use a deck or any other physical components: the long awaited ‘game on the beach’ I’d been striving for all along. I like playing with the deck, especially for solitaire games, and to introduce unexpected and non-obvious elements into any game, which often prove to be among the most enjoyable to grapple with. I also enjoy playing the Rattlesnake game without the deck, and without scoring the games. (This way, AI can never win!) To each their own.
Meanwhile, I’ll stick to the games.
