This is the chapter “Timeless and Universal” from Kris Burm’s (creator of the project GIPF games) book The Right Move. The original and other extracts were published at http://krisburm.be/en/extracts

“The Right Move” is a manifesto on abstract games as a form of art. For the moment its full version is only published in Dutch.

Timeless and Universal

Though every year an increasing number of museum visitors is recorded, I must confess that more often that before, sometimes I simply don’t know anymore what to think about what I’m looking at, and am more apprehensive of being hoodwinked, more frighten of charlatanism.

Not that these developments — if they are indeed true — make art less interesting. On the contrary, art is more exciting, more complex and more eccentric than ever, but at the same also more insidious and therefore, for the observer, a bigger, be it not always equally fair challenge. When trying to sort out my conflicting musings about this, I always praise myself happy to still have a safe haven: abstract games.

An abstract game doesn’t shame anyone. It won’t, it can’t — at least not without you noticing it. An abstract game won’t fool you. Play it and you’ll find out if there is something to it or if it’s nothing but packaged air. It is perfectly possible to find out, because it doesn’t have to be absurdly innovative. In the first place a game should work, and whether or not something works is verifiable. If it doesn’t work, if it gets stuck or falls apart, then it is worthless, and if it’s worthless you should threat it as something worthless: make life easy and discard it. On the other hand, if it does work, than at the very least you have a playable game. Whether it is a good, a very good or an exceptionally good game will become apparent when in playing you notice that the tangible object becomes less material and more ethereal, comparable to – I can’t think of anything better – a crystal ball in which more and more vague images become visible. You don’t really look at the pieces on the board but rather stare at what is not known to you yet. It triggers the desire to understand more and even to become aware of it. Therein lays the novelty a really good abstract game has to offer. It is not novel by itself but becomes it, generates it. By playing it, the game will reveal itself as innovative. With the right mentality and the necessary patience, it will confront you bit by bit with its newness, at your own pace, not as an absurd wave that crashes all around you and washes away any ability to evaluate it judiciously.

For me this process is the action of timelessness. At the present one should not step forward with a David of Michelangelo anymore, while an abstract game must still meet the same and unchanged requirements. Every new game must also undergo a comparative test with the classics of all times, while contemporary paintings and sculptures are not measured against masterpieces from any other period – or incidentally as a reference, but not as a test. The innovativeness of today’s art lies in the relocation of beacons, while a game designer must deepen the same, still universally applicable criteria, in the hope of bumping into a new implementation. I’m not talking about old hat here, not about rusty traditions or crackled folklore, nor of digging up an old unknown coin on which the vague profile of a Roman emperor can barely be made out, but of principles that are so genuine and pure that no one could improve upon them in any way, let alone replace them. A circle is round and, no matter what someone might come up with, it can’t be made any rounder. However, it is still possible to think up new applications of a circle without changing the criteria that define a circle as a circle. That is what makes a circle timeless. The same applies for a square or a triangle. In The “Genesis of the Form” (1987) artist Mark Verstockt writes that these three primal shapes have confronted the creative man since time immemorial ‘with the limitations of the geometric themes, yet [these shapes] are so inspiring that one can endlessly variate upon them.’

The same timelessness, the same appeal to ones imagination, the same tension between mathematical exactness and inconceivability is present in abstract games. It is not just the essence, but the absolute core of the phenomenon of abstract games. It can be argued that all the styles, movements and tendencies in classic, modern and subsequent postmodern art followed each other, that each step was an outgrowth of or a reaction to the foregoing and that the time was always ripe for what was about to come. Art history is one long chain of shifts and changes that couldn’t have followed one another in any other chronological order, not even hypothetically. Had someone attached a carriage wheel to a chaise Louis seize in the end of the 18th century, he would’ve been locked up in the Bastille with the Marquis de Sade. Duchamp went public with his ideas at the right time, just when they were about to become permissible – as it turned out, in an avant-garde scene that was ready to be shaken up again. And in doing so he added another link to the chain.

There is no such chronological timeline for abstract strategy games. The historical facts are what they are and can be listed in fixed order, true, but the chronology is purely coincidential; hypothetically it is perfectly possible to mix them all up. For abstract games there is no such thing as a climate that is ready for change or innovation, no time that is ripe for a particular abstract game. Although I should add that we find ourselves at a tipping point: through digitalisation we now have – for the first time! – possibilities we never had before. But in this contention I limit myself to abstract games as simple board games.

Every recently designed abstract game could have been thought up at any point in the past – also games that do not yet exist and could pop into someone’s mind in the near or far future, could already have been there. I have no reason to assume that I could only have designed my games now, at this point in time. Of each one I can wonder why it didn’t yet exist, why no one else had come up with the idea sooner. All have a simple concept and are easy to make, in no way products of industrial or technological advancement, or of societal or cultural developments. There was no special knowledge required. They are a composition of shreds of knowledge that have always been available – the knowledge which Plato claimed shimmers through the universal but of which hardly any reflections can be found in reality. I refer again to Go: to me that game is a rare reflection of that knowledge. It is inimitably correct.

(c) Kris Burm, 2014, “The Right Move”

Original