Quote from: @nihilocrat / Kenny Backuswhat is a better way of naming things in a sci-fi videogame?

[48.8%] "laser cannon"

[51.2%] "crepusculant lucifer"

84 votes

link

from this thread

in retrospect one of the most important things i ever learned was that if you floss and your gums bleed, it's not a sign that you're flossing too hard or that you should stop flossing. it's a sign that you waited too long, but it's a good thing you're doing it now.

it was very important because these days i've found myself thinking about a lot of things in life this way.

when i wake up in the morning & want to work on a game but my body aches a little, it's tempting to figure out how to use my body less all day in order to make it not ache but usually it's a sign that i'm using my body too little, that i've waited too long between moments of bodily activity. it's a sign that i waited too long, but it can only be a good thing to do some now.

Oct 21

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/clam-chowder-recipe-1911555

The annoying part: peeling, chopping onions (3 smallish: 1 yellow, 2 red) and potatoes (like 12 lol)
The rest is really easy and satisfying, you just boil milk and dump in the clams n juice n stuff :]
(I don't do the steaming clams, I just used 2 cans of baby clams (and juice), and a whole lil bottle of clam juice.)

Bit potatoey and I didn't blend it enough for Shelley. Could do with less potato maybe? She seemed to think it was fine.

Added quite a bit of salt and some MSG. Served with bread.

Sid Meier is quoted as saying that a game is a "series of interesting choices." But what is an interesting choice, and is interesting good enough?

The best choices are never impersonal. A personal choice is one that different people would make differently, but which you would make the same way next time - unless you've changed personally in the interim.

When a choice is purely strategic, it ceases to be a work of art concerned with exploring its player's humanity. This doesn't mean a choice can't have a right answer and a wrong one; it's more about the attitude of the player, as cultivated by this game as well as their environment.

Making the 'wrong' choice for personal reasons may behighly meaningful, but a player's willingness to engage with choices as personal choices, rather than strategic ones, can be eroded if they learn that choosing personally might cause them harm.

If there is a right choice that rewards the player and a wrong choice that causes the player harm, they are being punished by the game for expressing themselves.

Do some games train players not to make personal choices?

Quote from: The Books of the South, p327Her schemes could kill thousands, could distress millions, and to her it was play.

[He said, ]"I'll never understand you."

[...]She was neither young nor empty-headed. "I don't understand myself. But I gave up trying a long time ago. It's distracting."

Games. From the first she had been involved in tortuous maneuvers and manipulations, to no obvious end. Her great pleasure was to watch a scheme flower and devour its victim.

I want to remember this moment in which the motivations behind a character's machinations are exposed... as nothing, as something explicitly intentionally unexamined by the character herself. It's on a more grand, more evil scale, but these few lines are deeply moving to me about human nature.

Especially "I don't understand myself. But I gave up trying a long time ago. It's distracting." which reminds me distinctly of the interview with Agnes Martin.

The worst thing you can think about is yourself.

In Donnie Darko, the "fear and love" spectrum is presented and held by the protagonist it in great contempt.

Why love and fear? Kitty Farmer, the earnest but irritating target of the protagonist's mockery, explains, "Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions."

In Play Anything, Bogost coins ironoia, a "fear of things." By contrast, his exploration of the titular concept -- Play-- may be understood as a 'love of things.'

The games I'm making for Droqtober are pretty abstract. What  is the subject matter?  I need to analyze.

The "fantasy" of a videogame is simply its content. The "platonic game" is the content.

Adaptable, and about fundamental human truths.

Fairy tales are carried across the world by people.

I guess now here is tech to help us carry our ideas across the world: but it must still be by people until such time a computer system's taste is more interesting than a person's.

Perhaps that day is coming.

Strongly inspired by Ian Bogost's Play Anything

Sometimes it's quite intimidating to play with real materials, but I'd like to do it more rather than shy away due to fear and risk aversion. Here are some things I'd like to play with more, and not just in games, but other interactive and noninteractive media:

• PLAY WITH MONEY
• PLAY WITH TIME
• PLAY WITH STATUS
• PLAY WITH MEANING
• PLAY WITH OWN FEELINGS
  (as opposed to playing with someone else's emotions; i'm not interested in that, but i am interested in inviting others to play with their own feelings in a way that mirrors my own play)

It's easy to look at wasteful expensive games, and wasteful long games, and come to the conclusion that the issue is that they dare to ask for large amounts of money, large amounts of time. But, the end result of that is fear which I suppose is the opposite of play.

QuoteWe still want to skip over the proverbial sidewalk.
We still want to fashion the playgrounds that would lead us to novel experience.
But we've convinced ourselves that we can't or shouldn't.

In Play Anything, Bogost discusses Irony as a concept tightly bound to Meta in a way that mirrors Lulie's discussion of Meta in HOW TO ARGUE (pdf handout, workshop video).

QuoteEventually, the ironic actor doesn't even know whether she is earnest or contemptuous. Irony becomes unstoppable, devouring everything it touches[..] Once ironized, things can safely disappear into the background[..] Irony has become ubiquitous party because it [..] spreads so rapidly, infecting everything.

QuoteHow meta drives arguments into black holes:

• Meta is off-topic.
• Meta breeds meta.
      • You can't contradict a meta statement without making another meta statement.
• Meta engages emotions.
      • Popper wants our ideas to die in our place. Meta wants to substitute us for our ideas, and less us die instead of them.
      • Meta changes the focus from the substance of what's being argued to attributes of the speaker or the nature of the discussion.
  

When expressing a fear of a thing, outside of the bounds of play, the attitude spreads: it's hard to engage playfully with real fear of a real thing, because play is a tool for celebrating a lack of fear, not a tool for defeating it.

What if I saw money through the lens of Bogost's play? As something to be accepted, to draw my own boundaries around it, to see it for what it is.

Money is not a lifeblood to be wrung and feared; money is just a number. It's not a plea for cash, but an invitation to play with money between us.

These facets of the real world exist to be played with, too.

Well, I started out by writing The days of pilgrimage are over in the primordial soup forum but this video is so fucking good and full of shit, it deserves a close reading thread too... right?

Honestly I'm not sure I need the 'close reading' forum at all. What's its purpose? To take notes?

Well, anyway, the video.


I'm more about watching things and drawing my own conclusions, which is less good reading and more consuming great stuff.

Maybe i just need to link out to primordial soups as appropriate.

The days of pilgrimage are over.

Quote from: ShelleyIt looks dark and full of terrors... but with cheebs

I'm really bad at trusting other people. I ... oh, okay, this is gonna be a poem.

I was playing Beast Breaker and I was having some trouble. The game itself was interesting. Flawed, but interesting. And yet, I found myself playing it and hating it. I was dragging myself across hot coals for something, but for what?


In Beast Breaker, you play the game awhile and the game provides you with new items: a new cloak with better stats, a new sword with weird new abilities, a brand new weapon type. That's all well and good, and I wanted to check out these new items! I wanted to see what it was like to play with them. So I kept playing. Yeah, there's some randomness in the game, but the real randomness that got me was this discrete, staid randomess: each freshly-unlocked item could theoretically make me love the game even more.

I kept playing because I had to play to unlock new stuff, but I couldn't know ahead of time whether the new stuff was going to be good; when I had stopped enjoying the game, I still compelled myself to keep playing because unlocking new stuff, as based on my past experience, could make the game suddenly better! It depends on whether the new stuff was really cool, whether it aligned with my tastes.

HOW TO PLAY: Determine whether I love the game as it is, now. If I don't, I can safely stop playing?

Maybe this isn't even a skinner box thing. the idea falls apart. well, it's not the primordial soup for nothin'.

HOW TO DESIGN: I dunno! I don't think this is a designer problem. Is it? IS IT???A arggghhh

I won't do separate posts for all 'close readings' relevant to this topic. Maybe I need a new forum category? For now, this will do - I'll put this topic in 'primordial soup' and hopefully revisit it a few times.

ingredients:
1 cup rice
5-6 cups broth/stock (i use water + some kinda bouillon, often watered down)
1-2 dry chilies
1-2 garlic cloves (whole)
a chunk of ginger
chicken bones (w scraps of raw meat)
msg (optional, but it makes things taste good) (to taste. try <1tsp)

put it all in instant pot on "porridge". should take like 30 mins. eat it immediately or later or whenever.

always serve with yo tiao (chinese donut) if you got it! (you can buy these frozen.)