I recently did a mosaic-making workshop for beginners, and as the artist Helen Miles explained the “rules” of classical Roman mosaics, I couldn’t help but compare it to a game.
Firstly, avoid making grids. Straight lines and crosses are thought to be visually distracting and unhelpful when aiming for a visually harmonious effect. I’m guessing this is related to the Hermann grid illusion where ghost-like grey dots appear at intersections.
Offsetting rows of tesserae (tiles) breaks up vertical lines:
The horizontal lines remain, however; tilting some tiles fixes this:
Aim for consistent size of tesserae…
…and consistent spacing:
There are more rules like using keystones for curves, where you’re allowed to place triangles, and outlining the main features when you’re done.
Breaking the rules can produce the most innovative art, but there’s a reason why we’re encouraged to study and copy existing works when we’re starting out as artists. Following the rules isn’t an unthinking devotion to the canon; instead, it can make it easier and more comfortable to learn a craft. Your creativity is bounded, but that’s OK because you can always break the rules later. But the rules were only the first thing that reminded me of a game.
After a five minute tutorial where we practiced cutting glass tiles and gluing them onto a sheet in rows (offset!), we chose between two designs for our main project: a fish and a bird. Since the bird looked a bit like Twitter, I decided to do a spin on the logo, with swoops of darkness along the wings and breast to signify its fall from grace. I grabbed handfuls of blue tiles, then set to work:
As suggested by Helen, I began at the “hard end” of the bird – its beak and head, with the tightest curves and greatest need for keystone-shaped tesserae – and worked my way outwards.
For the next 90 minutes, I cut lots of square glass tiles into four square-ish tesserae, trying to fit them into lines and curves that followed the rules and looked good.
Like the best games, this sounds simple but is deceptively hard. The main challenge is that when you clamp a tile in your wheeled mosaic cutter and squeeze it, the physics of the forces mean tiles rarely break along the exact angle you’re hoping for. We build luck into so many games, but it’s already built into the real world.
The unpredictability is why it took so long for me to cut all keystones making up my bird’s head and neck:
But when I saw everyone else was much further along, I realised I had to change tack. Rather than cutting the perfect tesserae one by one, I began making them en masse and sorting through the pile to assemble entire lines at a time. To avoid accidentally scattering them, I’d glue them onto the sheet every few minutes. It was like having a limited series of undos.
The strategy game designer Sid Meier describes games as “a series of interesting choices”. The limited time and limited materials in mosaic-making creates a constant flow of interesting choices – should I save this long piece for the tail or fit it with these four other pieces, jigsaw-like, to finish the wing? Should I make a more conservative ending to this curve, or hope that someone good turns up in the next batch of tesserae I cut?
Staring at my available pieces and shuffling them around and around reminded of playing Into the Breach, a turn-based strategy puzzle game where you control a small squad of robots against waves of monsters. One of the things that makes Into the Breach unique is you have perfect knowledge of the game’s state and how enemies are going to move and attack – but only for the next couple of turns. In other words, like chess, you can sit back and plan the best possible move, but unlike chess, you can’t get lost in a combinatorial forest of futures.
If you watch me play Into the Breach, you’ll see me stare at the screen for ten minutes, occasionally getting up to walk around and look at it from different angles, then make what I’m convinced is the perfect move. I didn’t have as much time for my mosaic but it was a similarly satisfying yet bounded intellectual problem, and this time, deeply tactile.
I sped up dramatically toward the end, the gentler curves of the tail and wing requiring far fewer keystones. I was in a full flow state, assisted by endlessly mugs of tea and the music on the radio burbling along, to the point where I completely forgot half of the rules about tilting tiles and offsetting rows.
We used a hair dryer to strengthen the glue holding the tesserae to the sheet, then pressed it face-forward against a backing board coated with paste. The glue was water-soluble, so by dampening the brown sheet, we could carefully peel it away to reveal the smooth “reverse” side:
If we had more time, the entire board would’ve been filled with white tesserae, and the gaps between tesserae would be grouted.
My point isn’t that a mosaic-making video game would be a surefire hit; it’d be fun to arrange tesserae on a touchscreen, but it’d be hard to simulate the tactility of cutting them. Nor should we gamify mosaic-making, though sharing them on Instagram (and in the real world) for likes isn’t a million miles off.
It’s more that if you like playing puzzle video games, chances are you’ll find mosaic-making deeply satisfying. It has the same brew of choice and luck and progress, but you get something to keep at the end. Every decision you’ve made is on show: all the clever keystones, all the colours, all the imperfections.
And just like a roguelike, you can look at it and know what you’d do differently next time around, armed with a tiny bit more experience.
mssv + Have You Played 