Hi there. I am RM. I read on someone else's blog it's always good to set the scene for what these notes are about, because most readers haven't read what came before. So here we are.

I have this long-term goal to start a practice focused solely on play. Not games, not contests, but unsupervised, free play. Not "free to play." Free from stigmas.

My early thesis is that we somehow either lost or are not confident enough anymore to embrace play wholeheartedly. So this blog—or better, these notes—are simply me capturing thoughts and observations as I develop my theory. If this sparks ideas and pushes you down a rabbit hole, leave a comment, follow along or reach out, that's what I hope for.

Find out more ⇒ www.welostplay.wtf or reach out to hey (at) ramonmarc (dot) com .

Ideas Should Flow Freely

You know, a pet peeve I’ve got with AI? It’s that I often feel it makes me lazy. Seriously. What I mean is, most of the tools I use, day in and day out, they’re really just about getting me from Point A to Point B. Dead straight. I tell it what I want, some AI chews on my prompt, and voila– there’s my outcome. And yeah, that’s amazing, truly. But it’s like always taking the highway, never the scenic route. Super practical, sure, like a highway is. But just like a highway, I can’t shake this feeling I’m missing out on… well, something.

I’m already using AI to a pretty wild extent, in all sorts of everyday stuff. I’m a creative and early-adopter, and that’s mainly how I see it – a tool to help me create. It’s definitely made me faster, helped me pick up new skills I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Like with code; I can actually get my ideas out there now, which used to be a real struggle. So, in that way, AI’s been this incredible door-opener, making things way more accessible.

But then I look around at the AI tools popping up, and it feels like they’re all built for convergence. You type in what you think you want, and you get it. But what if there’s more than what you think you want? Design, as a whole process, kinda beat that into my head. Design’s this constant dance, this Yin and Yang between converging on an idea and then blowing it wide open again – diverging. You mess with ideas, let ‘em collapse, then smash ‘em apart and let ‘em collapse again. For me, the whole creative thing is about playing fast and loose, letting things get a bit messy so something genuinely new can bubble up. It’s not about sticking to the damn rules all the time; it’s about that glorious, messy exploration.

And the way AI is right now, mostly through chat windows, it feels so… linear. Like it’s the AI’s way or the highway, literally. But come on, there’s gotta be more to it than that, right? My gut just screams that the ways we’re used to figuring things out are kinda creaking under the strain of all this new complexity. We need different kinds of filters, different ways of seeing.

A lot of my projects these days are this jumble of research and concepts that I try to waveform collapse into some form of a vision, strategy, roadmap or product. And yeah, AI can spit out a bunch of answers if you poke it right. But still, the form factor, the way we interact with it, feels like it boxes you in. My thing, if I have any kind of "thing," is trying to connect the dots that don’t look like they connect, and then asking those "what if?" questions.

So, part of what I’m up to right now is trying to pull together a zine about Play. I call it a serious non-serious zine. The big idea is that as AI takes over more and more of the routine stuff in our lives, real, honest-to-goodness play should have a comeback. But I’m not talking about those gamified mechanics, all the points and badges that are everywhere today. I mean proper, unsupervised free play. Because if you want to cook up genuinely new ideas, you can’t just play by the rules someone else made up. You’ve got to cast a much wider net, maybe even embrace a bit of what I call Creative Ignorance. For me, free play is like… it’s like an idea in a quantum superposition. Everything’s possible at once, and then through play, it collapses into something new.

For this zine, I don’t just want to write about it. I want the way I make it to be part of the exploration too. Challenge myself. Besides, with all these new tools bubbling up, you’d be daft not to mess around with them, right? That’s how you get ready for whatever’s next. I’ve always had this thing for using tools in ways they weren’t meant to be used. As a kid, a stick wasn’t just a stick – it was a sword, a wand, a piece of much larger thing. As a grown-up, it’s the same with tools. Sure, it might do one thing really well, but that doesn’t mean you can’t twist it into doing something else entirely. Sometimes that kind of "productive misunderstanding," that so-called ignorance, is exactly where the brilliant, unexpected ideas come from. That’s pretty much my philosophy in a nutshell. It’s how I believe fresh perspectives get cooked up.

As I have this super early draft of the zine, I started to think, how do I break out of my own damn box, game loops, linear thinking here? How do I see what else is lurking? To do that, and to stay true to the whole spirit of the play zine itself, I need ways to spark emergence, to get things diverging instead of just neatly converging. The zine’s nowhere near done, so I need to keep prompting or better playing myself into new zones, find ways to actually generate new thoughts, not just refine old ones.

There’s this core design idea that’s always buzzing in my head: so much creativity just springs from interpretation, from getting things a bit wonderfully wrong – productive misunderstanding. Seriously, sometimes you mishear something, or see it sideways, or just plain creatively misinterpret it, and boom, you’ve got a whole new angle on it. Reading between the lines, twisting an idea just enough to make it generative – that’s my feature, not a bug! It’s why I reckon the most vital part of research isn’t often just staring at your own filter bubble, or your own field. It’s about looking out there, seeing how the world works in totally different places, or in similar ways you never expected. Then you take those learnings, pull ‘em apart, and mash ‘em up with what you already know. It’s like playing with LEGO bricks, all the time. We think the world is built from instruction manuals, but it’s really just a massive pile of bricks, buzzing with possibilities, waiting for someone to snap them together differently, without too much reverence for the original instructions.

So, that got me thinking: how can I use AI… differently? I am a PlayStation fan, and I remember this game, Flow, from the early PS3 days. Just this rather simple but truly stunning, abstract, deep-sea world where you swam around with these other weird, floaty creatures. And it hit me: what if thoughts had their own life? What if they could drift and move through some kind of space, searching, hunting, maybe even… mating with other thoughts? What if I could build an "idea aquarium" and just watch these ideas emerge, more organically?

And the wild thing is, nowadays, you can just builds tuff like that. So, I hacked together a first version. It took my notes, broke them down using this elaborate prompt I cooked up to mimic how my brain usually wanders, and then mapped it all out as a graph. And what was so cool was, out of nowhere, this map just appeared, showing all these new connections AI had found between my ideas. Is it scientifically rigorous? Hell no. Perfect? Not a chance. But it let me see my zine content from a completely new angle. And while I was looking at it, I realized how damn playful it was, how fun it was just to nudge these ideas around because I’d accidentally coded in some movement. And I thought, "Right, that’s it. Let’s build that idea aquarium for real."

So, I did. I built this more ambient kind of space for ideas. I can chuck thoughts in, AI dices them up, and they become these little independent entities swimming around in my aquarium. They just cruise around freely. It’s a bit like Dumbledore in Harry Potter, siphoning off his memories into the Pensieve, right? Only my "memories," these ideas, they’re not just sitting there passively waiting to be looked at. They move. And as they bump into each other, they start forming these little bonds, these connections. They spark new insights just by colliding. Sometimes they even cook up whole new thoughts if they reckon they’re onto something. Occasionally, a bond gets strong enough that it throws out what I call a "design provocation." And sometimes, after a while, they just decide to break apart again, go back to their basic bits, and start fresh.

It’s super early days, just a prototype. But there’s a part of me that really thinks there’s something huge in making innovation, making progress itself, much more playful. Just messing with the look and feel of this thing, it’s already shunted my brain into totally new territories. And seeing ideas actually formin front of you, more organically, it’s kind of magic. Though, I did quickly realize that if you’re not paying attention, you can accidentally create some kind of thought-virus, where things just grow exponentially. There’s probably a deep metaphor in there somewhere. Maybe "wrong" is just "different" waiting for its proper moment, its context.

Look, all I’m really trying to say is, this whole experiment might make me rethink my entire zine. There’s way more to "play," even when you’re just writing, than I ever thought at the start. And maybe, just maybe, a bit of that intentional dreaming, that playful rebellion against the way things are, is exactly the kick in the pants I all need right now. Also as always if you try to make something beautiful and fun, cool things will always happen.

I generally use AI to co-write my notes. I do this because I feel that AI is a wonderful tool more to explore your thoughts and ideas further rather than just fixing your grammar. It's easy to generate AI slop. But I think we underestimate the aspect of how our tools are tools for expansion rather than just getting something out fast based on your first impression.