Life Practice · Performance
In every activity, there are forms of action that consistently prove effective. To perform well in an activity, we must become fluent in the appropriate family of forms.
Illustration · 4:3
Same image as this function’s hub panel
Performance · the moving figure in balance and flow
For a person to be fully-functional w.r.t. technique, they need to be comfortable embodying a broad range of forms of action. They’ll only play their most important life games well if they’ve learnt the necessary techniques.
In any game, there are forms of action that can help a player reach success.
The forms for a particular game depend on what it takes to reach a desirable outcome. Every arena of action gets its shape from specifics — from the physics of how a certain kind of object moves, for instance, or from the psychology of the people involved.
Imagine a game of cooking omelettes where the aim is to transform the eggs into a tasty disc. If we’re to achieve this, we have to have the hob turned on. We need to slap the eggs against a hard surface with sufficient velocity to crack them. We need to tip what’s in the eggshells into a bowl and beat it, carefully, till it’s smooth and slightly frothy. If we then pour it into a pan that’s at just the right temperature, it’ll end up soft, moist, and delicious.
We can think of all the ways a person might act to make progress in the game of cooking omelettes as its grammar.
Every game has a grammar. The grammar of the travel-by-bicycle game involves balancing, steering, and pedalling. The cyclist has to work within the givens of gravity, momentum and the road surface to make effective progress along their route.
Email-writing games have the goal of communication. Their grammars take in all the ways of putting words together that would both convey the intended message and comply with social norms.
The grammar of shopping games takes in all the ways a shopper could select an item, all the ways they could pay, and all the ways they could take possession of the goods or the service. Sometimes it would be grammatical to put goods in a bag. It can be grammatical to have goods shipped. Any lines of action that would help the shopper reach the outcome they desire will form part of the grammar.
It’s often possible to make abstract mental maps of game grammars. Sometimes this can be helpful, for it makes it possible to talk about what makes for skilful action. But game grammars are not themselves abstract. They’re not things of logic. They are patterns of possibility and action that exist within the body of the world.
Children are experts at learning new grammars. Think, for instance, about how they learn the grammars of language games.
They start with primitive games, learning to shape the sounds that come out of their mouths by experimenting with wordlike sounds that are easy to pronounce. Over time, their babbles evolve into true words — distinct units of sound that get passed down through the generations, the same units of sound coming out of many mouths.
As children experiment, they build up ever-increasing repertoires of words, and they become able to put the words together to effect an ever-broadening range of outcomes. Eventually, they become fluent performers of a host of language games, communicating so naturally that they seldom give much thought to the words they use.
We can build competence in any activity through active experimentation, just as children do as they build up their competence with language. And when the game’s grammar is mastered, we will act grammatically with barely a thought for the grammar itself.
When the expert omelette chef is cooking, their attention is on the eggs, bowls and pans that they’re using. It’s not on the grammar. It’s on the concrete world.
We learn new techniques through repetition. We recognise what we’ve seen before. Practising actions grooves new pathways. Even complex routines can become automatic.
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