What’s the deal with TGD Junta?
TL;DR version : They are trained to Play, but what is “Play”?!
Prologue
It’s 7 PM on a Thursday. I have just returned from work and have to go workout. I look at my workout plan and see that’s its back day. For a heavy person pull days are a nightmare. As I was dreading the thought of failing at completing 5 pull-ups again, I had an epiphany…..
As kids, we never had a workout plan, we just played.
I went to the gym without a workout plan for the first time in my life and just played and it was EPIC. As I worked out, there was an avalanche of thoughts about my journey as a TGD student and I thought I finally graduated, in my own head. I finally got what TGD is about and this is my attempt to capture that here, mostly for myself.
Some context before we begin
For the uninitiated, TGD Junta collectively refers to all the past, present and future students of the Toy and Game design department at the National Institute of Design. I am a part of this group, the 2015 batch. I have to submit my grad project report, face a jury and complete the process of becoming part of TGD junta officially. As I have been writing my graduation project report for the past few months, I have been thinking a lot about what’s so special about TGD and TGD junta? These questions were also triggered by a few people who reached out to me on various social media platforms asking about what they can learn in TGD, what are the job opportunities like, do they get to make digital games, should they know programming and so on?
With the context now set, let’s get back to the epiphany and elaborate on the rush of thoughts and the clarity that followed.
It’s not even about toys or games
After the moment of epiphany, my thoughts went back to my interview for the admission. I had no toys in my portfolio, I had one board game which was horrible and I had a pretty loud argument with one of the panel members during the interview.
I got in though and I always thought the reason was that I was the top scorer in the entrance exam(I knew that I was the top scorer cause in my paranoia before the studio test, I had checked out the scores of all the applicants on the NID portal by patiently entering the hall ticket numbers sequentially and captcha for every number. I know, its bad). After getting in I heard a lot about the rock solid NID interview process and how only the right candidates get picked year after year. The interview decides your fate irrespective of the entrance exam scores. I was skeptical — I thought at least some of my TGD batch mates(2015 batch) were not serious about toys or games or design for that matter and they got through. But now everything suddenly makes sense. Because, it’s not even about toys or games, it’s about being fearless.
I realized everyone in the batch was fearless and that fearlessness manifested in different contexts during our time together — from interaction fights to court cases to the most mind boggling jury responses. I also realized that their behavior was in resonance with the absolutely fearless faculty who held on to their unique own world views and approach to education, design, materials, play and life. I plan to write more on my batch mates and faculty later in another article with their permission. They are the craziest, incredibly awesome and simultaneously weird bunch of people I have had the privilege of spending time with.
To play is to be without fear
Getting back to the crux, its about being fearless. Because to play one has to be fearless. So, one could just say that TGD junta are trained to play but that wouldn’t tell us a lot. “Trained to play” — it even sounds stupid. Sounds like a bunch of high designers faffing about all philosophical. Everyone plays, its a natural thing, people have written about it as far back as 1938 in a book called “HomoLudens” by Johan Huizinga. So what’s the big deal, why do we even need to be trained to play?
Let’s elaborate. Most designers fail to play because they are afraid. In fact not just designers, everyone stops playing once they “grow up” because they are afraid. This fear is conditioned into all our minds systematically. It’s influence extends from behavior of individuals to the behavior of entire nations — referring to the recent rise in populist tendencies. So what’s this fear that’s stopping people from playing? One of the basic tenets of play is a basic disregard to rules. As people grow up they adhere to the status quo, respect the rules too much and fail to question the rules, even when necessary. This is beautifully captured in this brilliant ad by Surf Excel.
The role of play in society and culture is another essay altogether. Coming back to designers, I have been watching this amazing series about design on Netflix called “Abstract : The Art of Design”. There are eight episodes about different streams of design and the one recurring theme is that each designer questioned the rules of their discipline and broke those rules and created masterpieces. The one instance in the series which really appealed to me was in episode 4, about Bjarke Ingels and architecture. In one of the interviews, Per Hopfner, the developer who worked with Bjarke says “He never follows the rules”
And in the next sentence, he tells us the reaction of the community of developers to Bjarke
But Hopfner supported Bjarke and the rest is history. If we were to draw parallels from this example, the Toy and Game Design department is Per Hopfner who would support the students to break the rules. The only thing and the most important thing that the department does to the students is allow them to break the rules.
Or in the case of students provide an environment where they can make stuff without fear. I attribute my present career in AR/VR to the absolutely open environment provided by the department to make whatever I felt was interesting and explore any idea or medium without fear. This is a double edged sword, if a student knows what he/she wants they thrive, if they don’t they will feel that there is a lack of guidance and go as far as question the existence of the department. But the grace and finesse with which this situation is handled by the faculty is exemplary.
How do you train to play?
The push to the students to be fearless and play is very clear in retrospect. Every single module was about identifying the rules of the subject at hand and then letting the students go nuts and break every single one of them. Like I said, this is clear in retrospect, it was torturous at times when we actually were in the middle of these modules. One module which I still fondly remember was “Material Exploration” in the first semester. There were exercises and discussions around plastics, metals, magnetism, cloth and paper.
In a regular course on exploring paper as a material, one would think of things like Origami and how do you make toys out of paper. But the discussion going on in the above picture was about the question “What is Paper?”. What’s the discussion even about one might ask, Wikipedia says “Paper is a thin material produced by pressing together moist fibres of cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets. It is a versatile material with many uses, including writing, printing, packaging, cleaning, and a number of industrial and construction processes.”
Now to break the rules, if I have a thin material produced by pressing together moist fibres of cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets but I cannot write on it, can we still call it paper?. Which leads to another question — Do the constituent materials and manufacturing process define the “paperness”, or the function of writing or carrying information defines “paperness”?. Going into the definition of something as trivial as paper, identifying the parts of that definition and going full Ship of Theseus on it leads to a more refined understanding and identification of opportunities to create new things. Functionally, rocks with inscriptions were paper in the middle ages and screens with text are paper today. So, what can be paper tomorrow?
Exercises like this encourage the students to ask questions that lead to opportunities to break the rules and create something new, to be fearless and play. I spent a semester at Sheridan College, Canada as an exchange student studying game design. It was an amazing place with courses focused on game design like Level Design, Prototyping, Sound design and Game Economies. I got to learn game design skills from faculty who were working on AAA games while teaching, had their own indie game studios and were actively contributing to the games industry. However, there is a stark contrast between the environment at Sheridan and at TGD. TGD changed me on a very fundamental level. My conversations with the faculty and the students broke down large parts of my personality and rebuilt it in ways I am incapable of expressing in text. Maybe I’ll have to make a few illustrations for that.
In conclusion
Right, so, instead of completing my actual graduation project document which I have to submit to NID, I wrote this, because in my head this is my graduation document.
TGD junta are not people who completed the 2 year M.Des course at NID and can make games and toys, they are the people who have learnt to play.
