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Sembl thinking

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We don’t really know how to think, yet. Or to put that in a more positive light: our characteristic ways of thinking are not yet as subtle and sophisticated as the problems that face us – as a global population, in our communities, in our business lives, our family situations, our own individual tangled and constantly shifting minds and emotions.

We have plenty of people who know how to do black and white, either-or thinking – which turns into highly emotional and often inappropriately judgmental knee-jerk thinking when the going gets tough. There’s a lot of heart in that, but not always a whole lot of clarity.

And we have a fair number of people who can do deliberative thinking, who understand critical thinking, apply some measure of doubt to their own assumptions and certainties, make careful, slow, analyses and do close readings, and in general try to avoid a headlong rush to judgment… There’s a lot of clarity there, as well as heart – but words and logic tend to dominate, and feelings are often relegated to second place.

And we have assorted artists, creative types and eccentric thinkers who see sideways, think laterally, connect dots, listen with care, appreciate silences, hear multiple voices and hold them together in their minds like a symphony… These are the folks who have the best grasp of complex problems, the bridge-builders between parties and factions – and the peace-makers. They live, balancing, at the intersection of love and clarity, with mind clarifying heart and heart giving courage to thought.

Sembl thinking is a whole spectrum of ways of thinking drawn from the best of that third group, brought together under one roof. And Sembl itself is a game and family of games, designed to explore and enjoy these ways of thinking.

The game’s motto is simple, profound, and insanely ambitious:

Tapping human knowledge and imagination, link by link

Display case containing fine silverware and slave shackles

Identify sameness, explore difference

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As part of his Mining the museum installation at Maryland Historical Society in 1992–93, artist Fred Wilson placed a set of shackles in a display case with fine silverware and titled it ‘Metalwork’.

Display case containing fine silverware and slave shackles

'Metalwork' by Fred Wilson, 1992

Pow. United by the metal of their fabrication, the racially-divided, hierarchical histories of these objects dramatically distances them:

Who served the silver? And who could have made the silver objects in apprenticeship situations? And […] whose labour could produce the wealth that produced the silver?

A general principle can be distilled from this. Perhaps: In the very moment we identify a similarity between two objects, we recognise their difference. In other words, the process of drawing two things together creates an equal opposite force that draws attention to their natural distance. So the act of seeking resemblance – consistency, or patterns – simultaneously renders visible the inconsistencies, the structures and textures of our social world. And the greater the conceptual distance between the two likened objects, the more interesting the likening – and the greater the understanding to be found.

This simultaneous pulling together and springing apart of the sociophysical world interests me, and I’ve been thinking about it in relation to Sembl, where the challenge of the game is to identify a way in which a given object is related – surprisingly or humorously or otherwise interestingly – to another object.

What constitutes ‘interesting’ is of course difficult to define and depends to a large degree on the particular players playing. But if the natural conceptual distance between the two related objects is great, the relationship is more likely to be interesting – perhaps because it enables you to think about something in a new way. That’s what made Wilson’s juxtaposition of shackles with silver tableware interesting, and powerful.

Juxtaposition: branding iron / Aboriginal breastplate

Labelling bodies

In the same vein, the Sembl players who linked the above branding iron to the breastplate – because both are tools for labeling bodies – cast new light on the colonial practice of giving metal breastplates to Aboriginal people.

My (big!) point here is: Hipbone games and Sembl alike can create a safe space for people to explore differences. When identified, similarities form bridges across and clarify difference. Attending to relatedness in this way inspires understanding; and opens a channel toward reconciliation.