Game On

One of the main casualties of the Great Backup Drive Disaster of 2015 was the increasingly elaborate set of "rings" I had been constructing under the broad heading "Ring Hoard". Unaccountably, I had both failed to back these up onto CD/DVD media and was also keeping them exclusively on that one backup drive, so pretty much lost the lot. So it goes. With them went my enthusiasm for the whole project.

Yesterday, having reached saturation point with book sequencing – anyone who thinks this is not work has never tried it – I found myself playing around with some familiar old moves, and remembered why I had been enthusiastic in the first place. It's fun. The pure fun of playing a game with a few simple rules and free play of imagination.

Now, despite recently "inventing" the Golden Wasp game, I am not a keen player of games. I don't care enough about winning and, when it comes to anything involving cards or pieces on boards, have the concentration span and strategic imagination of a three-year-old. I make a very good dummy partner at Bridge. Despite the enthusiasm of my children for immersive role-playing games, Nintendo, and the like, I have never played a computer game. I'd rather stare at the ceiling, or watch my own "eyelid movies". And quite often do.

Which is where the rings come in, I suppose. "Straight" photography, obviously, is all about making edited selections from the real, visual world, but this sort of graphic design puts your own imagination up front and centre, and sets you the challenge: OK, punk, make me something worth looking at, make me something rich and strange. And that's one game I can be bothered to learn how to play.