It's all about Plato, really. Plato. Play-doh. Playdonics. I don't even know.
...sometimes I wonder if the reason I'm so bad at playing with others is that people don't comprehend the games I sometimes want to play. Not in the sense that I'm too intelligent or complex, but in the sense that my expectations are different from those of others. I pay attention to a different set of assumptions.
It's the quirk that means some people don't get that linguists don't go out and learn how to speak a bunch of languages, but rather study language; it's the same way that I had to spend some time wrapping my brain around double-variables in PHP, where the variable name is itself a variable.
I want to be able to say "Hey, I have this idea. Let's play with it. Let's turn it on its head and stick it in ten different contexts and see how it and its context responds. Let's change one tiny thing about it and see how that tiny change resonates through everything implied about it."
Making something out of the idea is fun, yes; seeing the idea given physical form is fun, yes. But it's cookie dough and cookies. It's composition and recitation. It's architecture and construction. Sometimes I just want to play and I don't know that I have anyone who works right to play with me.
ETA: Or they comprehend the games fine and find them ether tedious or boring. can't discount that. It's like how Linguistics is a wonderful heaven for me, even as I'm acutely aware that spending that much time deconstructing grammar would be hell for most normal people.
It's the quirk that means some people don't get that linguists don't go out and learn how to speak a bunch of languages, but rather study language; it's the same way that I had to spend some time wrapping my brain around double-variables in PHP, where the variable name is itself a variable.
I want to be able to say "Hey, I have this idea. Let's play with it. Let's turn it on its head and stick it in ten different contexts and see how it and its context responds. Let's change one tiny thing about it and see how that tiny change resonates through everything implied about it."
Making something out of the idea is fun, yes; seeing the idea given physical form is fun, yes. But it's cookie dough and cookies. It's composition and recitation. It's architecture and construction. Sometimes I just want to play and I don't know that I have anyone who works right to play with me.
ETA: Or they comprehend the games fine and find them ether tedious or boring. can't discount that. It's like how Linguistics is a wonderful heaven for me, even as I'm acutely aware that spending that much time deconstructing grammar would be hell for most normal people.