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RE: A review of "The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia" (1978) by Bernard Suits.
It sounds like your argument against efficiency is that it's not sufficient. But that doesn't disprove that it isn't necessary.
Maybe? It feels to me like the "efficiency" idea is in the ballpark of a useful concept, just not exactly right. If you can zip directly to an endpoint a game generally sort of collapses on itself (maybe because once the end goal is reached you're out of the magic circle). Some sort of "crooked line" between the beginning and end rather than a straight line seems like the kind of thing Suits means by efficiency, but I'm not sure how to translate that conceptual image into something that could actually be useful in guiding game design.
Do you have a problem with "artificial constraints (at least sometimes) make a non-game activity into a game"?
No, I think that's right. Just drawing on paper isn't a game, but it doesn't take much to transform it into a game. One of the ideas that led me to my current thoughts on "meaningfulness" and "fun" is that rich people sometimes open hobby businesses for fun -- it's gamelike to them because they have comparatively low stakes, even though someone else could be doing the exact same task as their livelihood and experience it as work. (That's also edging into a potentially weird zone where it can get unclear if you're talking about "fun" or "games" and if that's an important distinction or not).
I guess I think Grasshopper's example of running a race inefficiently doesn't make any sense to me, while the tight coupling that I perceive between notional inefficiency and artificial constraint, and that being an important attribute of games, does.
Sort of relatedly, what would it take to make knitting a game? People have knit-alongs in which they all knit the same pattern, maybe with different yarns, colors, sizes, and variations, and then share their output at the end of the month or whatever. Is that a game? It seems more gamelike than just knitting a hat.
After I started adapting hyperbolic crochet patterns to knitting, for the creation of plush reef organisms, I created a procedural coral pattern generator that spits out simple repeats that usually generate interesting forms. If I knit several of those and compare them, am I playing a video game? Or something? It's definitely playful and I think it's at least game-adjacent.
I'm not sure I follow what you're saying about the inefficiency. I think the point is meant to be something like "getting your opponent in checkmate via actually moving your pieces according to the rules of chess is 'less efficient' than simply putting the pieces directly into a winning arrangement" or "getting to the finish line of the race by following the course is 'less efficient' than taking a shortcut". That seems like it's similar to what you're saying, so I'm not sure if I'm misreading you.
Well, the trivial approach would be something like a race, so you're pitting your skill/technique/speed against someone else. I think the more interesting challenge would be how to make knitting part of the "core loop" of making meaningful contributions to play (analogous to the role that drawing plays in the drawing games I've been posting about). Some element of personal contribution probably matters -- when I think of knitting I think of the process of actually moving the needles on the yarn rather than creating or improvising patterns, if that process is "machinelike" in that it's hard to connect to a personal contribution then it may be tough to make it part of a "game move".
I think your example of "knit, then show off what you knitted" is maybe getting close to being a minimal game but it feels to me like there's no mechanism that makes sure that your "move" matters to the game state -- if people can just ooh and ah and then promptly forget about what you did it might be indistinguishable from you not doing anything in the first place. If there's some sort of handoff and "build on top of what you got" it looks more gamelike to me, a la Exquisite Corpse. I guess what I'd be looking for is an answer to the question "how does what you knit impact what happens in the next cycle"? If there's that's an answerable question then it's looking a lot more like a game to me.
Your example of knitting multiple patterns also feels like it's getting close to a minimal game to me, but (assuming I understand what you're saying correctly) I also think it's not quite there. My feeling is that for something to be a game you need some sort of human decision-making or ability-testing as part of "the machine" that is the game, where your example seems like an open loop where the deciding just sort of happens at the end.