Stepping back, we have On life, games, and everything else (42), but this responds to multiple other posts... well, we've already covered two of them, but it looks like we'll have to rewind a bit...

or a lot...

goodness, this is a tangled web

Creativity in social games

Quote from: MerAll games ask you to intervene, that's kinda what makes them games, and you could say that all interaction is a form of creativity, in the way you have to come up with solutions to problems. But I'd argue that finding a solution within the tools that the game provide is not the kind of creativity I want to talk about here, but the one where you have to bring up your own ideas into the system.

Here, Mer sets us on a different path. Where GAMEPLAY and GAMEFEEL are the domain of the tools given to you by the game, she starts talking about player creativity and freedom.

Quote from: MerIn roleplaying games, you could argue that you can do whatever you like, but you're actually restricted to the situation the GameMaster just described, and you have a Character Sheet that puts you back in the box.

Quote from: MerGames like Dixit give you absolute freedom [..] you can say a single word or even just a sound and it's a perfectly valid entry.

This is actually something I'd like to bring up to Mer... she neeeeds to play a roleplaying game with some more wild storytellers.

Quote from: MerIn Among Us, that shared setting provides a safe space to create in. First of all, it creates a lot of real interactions: you need to take care of the ship, you encounter other players, you have to actually kill/being murdered. So when you discuss about who the suspect is, you don't have to imagine you were doing something, you were actually doing something when the crime took place.

Actually, I just noticed we have no 'Next post' button, which means the natural way to browse is only by following these links... What happens if I do just that?

non-gamefeel content

Quote from: droqLearning to dance

Quote from: droqWhether or not it cares about it, every game has gamefeel.

gamefeel | meaning

Quote from: JackFor a long time I, like you, have felt a dissatisfaction once the GAMEFEEL CONTENT of a game is done, and there is nothing more to chew on besides repeating the ROUTINES I have established for myself – often over and over and over again.

Quote from: JackDiscovering the game's systems through GAMFEEL is a very similar process to discovering meaning in a poetic presentation!

During the GAMEFEEL CONTENT of a game, there should be enough clues for the player to piece together a model of a system that EXPLAINS the way that the simulated system works (or at least mostly). [..] In HAIKU games, I imagine that the game ends at this point, the moment of mastery, at the peak of the player's engagement and understanding.

Oh, there are comments! So this is where all that good Zeigfreid content lives :)

Quote from: ZeigfreidBy "reading" do you mean after you play the game and it ends, you reflect on the game you just played? [..] gamefeel and reading are both (I think, and I think Swink thinks) results of being "jacked in" to the cybernetic circuit of game/player. They happen continuously, so I'd say that the player is reading while they are gamefeeling. The reading can continue after the player has put down the controller, but arguably so can gamefeel (nausea, the Tetris effect, etc...)

And this is where this particular thread ends. I feel like it goes like this...

The experience of playing a game and engaging with its GAMEFEEL is part of the content. Additionally, one must not necessarily be playing the game to be engaging with this content; as with imagining the world of a book beyond its pages, and as evidenced by the Tetris effect, GAMEPLAY merely facilitates the cybernetic "jacking in" to GAMEFEEL content. We can do it all on our own, too.

It's particularly exciting to see all the Responses to this first post, though I'm not sure it's especially useful... Click and scroll down close to the bottom, just above 'Leave a comment'. P.S. Hey, wait, we have comments enabled?

Hopefully I'll get to these in their own time, but such enticing titles:

• non-gamefeel content
• What's actually happening? Videogames are REAL.
• Creativity in social games
• Telling our stories inside and outside the games
• Brevity is the dark souls of wit
• On life, games, and everything else (42)
• play is form
• Slime Logic

HAIKU games

QuoteI want to describe to you a kind of game that I like to play, and a kind of game that I want to play.

The one that started it all. Haiku games!

QuoteI am very interested in the design of these games, the way they facilitate learning through play. I like learning things this way, and I like doing their dances.
[..]
What is the minimal form of games that can do this?

Jack sets out this beautiful abstract question: what is this nameless quality and can we use the lens of haiku, of this minimalist and traditionally-rigid-but-not-rigid-anymore form of poetry, to help us understand it better?

See also Why is Gen Z Humor So Weird? [external youtube link, not an internal link to a Close Reading thread], especially 6:55 onward

- oversaturation
- depression
- existential dread

I disagree with other parts of this manifesto, between these lines, where these common perversions (a term I love, by the way) are described as "endless" and "generic" in a way that I can only read as derogatory.

Quote[..] when writers are afraid to be perverts [..they indulge] only the safest and most unoffensive fetishes to render on the screen.

[..] when art displays the common fetishes of heterosexual matrimony, fast cars and big guns and big-but-not-gargantuan breasts [etc.] - these absolutely are fetishes.

every day you are smothered in the common perversions of so much of society [..]

Quote from: 17:22We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

Quote from: 12:50.. the unsolved problems facing the world today are gargantuan, including the risks of climate change and nuclear war, but we must see them as problems to be solved, not apocalypses-in-waiting, and aggressively pursue solutions like deep decarbonization for climate change, and global zero for nuclear war.

Quoteif you combine our cognitive biases with the nature of news, you can see why [people have been perceiving that] the world has been coming to end for a very long time

Quick conclusion: Is the problem with the nature of news? Should we, and can we, move on from valuing 'news' at all? First of all, what is news? Is it what it sounds like?

QuoteNews (nūz), n [From New; cf. F. nounelles. News is plural in form, but is commonly used with a singular verb.]

1. A report of recent occurrences; information of something that has lately taken place, or of something before unknown; fresh tidings; recent intelligence.
Evil news rides post, while good news baits.
— Milton.

2. Something strange or newly happened.
It is no news for the weak and poor to be a prey to the strong and rich.
— L'Estrange.

3. A bearer of news; a courier; a newspaper. [Obs.]
There cometh a news thither with his horse.
— Pepys.

Back to Steven Pinker:

Quote from: 10:12bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day. The papers could have run the headline, 137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day for the last 20 years. That's 1.25 billion people leaving poverty behind, but you never read about it.

Is there too much of a focus on the "strange and newly happened", on discovering reports of "recent occurrences"?

I suppose that 'press' and journalism in general is distinct from news. I like receiving "information about something before unknown," but some days it feels as though we are enter a post-unknown world, where everything and everything is becoming further and further documented because of how driven we are by the news, by discoveries, by changes in the world...

What could replace it? What could be as compelling, once we are omniscient?

Sometimes I open up a bag of fuzzy peach and eat the whole thing and it's like 80% sugar. It's wild to see a 65g bag contain 49g of sugar, but it's also totally believable.

Browsing the hyperoptimized internet for anything feels like that sometimes; it feels like what I'm looking for is out there if I just keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

https://paradise-collab.itch.io/letterclub/devlog/363470/whole-grain-decisions

from borges' "a survey of the works of herbert quain"

Quote from: Herbert QuainI have reclaimed for this novel the essential features of every game: the symmetry, the arbitrary laws, the tedium.