Story behind Super!Block

 

Years ago, I had been conducting some ‘research’ on sociopolitics that in all likelihood was something by Chuck Palahniuk. I live in the foothills of Sydney’s Blue Mountain’s region; there are roads that wind up the mountain, and sometimes there is roadkill where wildlife has attempted to cross. The road cut the wilderness neatly in two  Somewhere between that experience, Chuck and a book on the fall of Rome, I was taken, by hand and heart, to the knowledge that what connects also blocks.

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Rivers that block the land access between worlds create passages for ships of slaves, settlers or goods. Language helps me connect to you now; codified and structured this way, it enhances what I can say, but deprives the non-English speaker. Humour helps us know who we can bond safely with, ‘this person gets me’, and it also defines who does not get you.

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This pattern we see in many places, and in ways are how we navigate life. This is the story about how we complicate to enhance, and sometimes by enhancing we deprive each other. I thought it might make for an interesting educational game, where a road may get rotated to become a wall. I haphazardly mentioned this ramble of thoughts to my good friend Simon, who was kind to listen. For a brief time of our lives, Simon and I grew up together. Some years later, we were catching up over food and he pulls out a preliminary sketch of our conversation; He had not only listened, but enhanced it.

Thrilled with possibility, I went back home and began to put meat on the bones of the sketch. My niece lived with us at the time, so I invited her to be part of the creative exercise. Her's are the characters and the name of the game, the chompsaur, the dolphin, bull, eagle, the fox. I had wrestled with the name, wanting to call it something evocative and forgettable like ‘city streams’, but to go with the bobopunk philosophy of soapbox, ‘Super!Block’ stayed.

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The project found life in many iterations, the final being one tiles of wood that I had cut and sanded, packaged in a box with icons. I showed it off to play at a party I’d organized, listing me and Lilliana as the creators. Simon was there; I’d somehow forgotten about our conversation and the sketch that started this entire adventure. In the excitement, the work, the refinement, I failed to recognize the power of the game started in a very human relationship, a conversation, and the act of listening, of being seen and heard.

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I realized my error, we spoke. I gifted him the wood tile version, as it was as much his creation as mine. The wall rotated and became a road: he enjoyed how the game had progressed, and, as a final step of Super!Block’s journey, he added a final enhancement, the city. One tile that is impermeable, that grows, and provides the entire context for superBlock’s urgency. If we don’t change our world and our relationships for the better, we won’t have a world at all.

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