Seen through this lens it's perhaps more understandable to me why I see addictive, compelling, and engaging in a worse light than beautiful... They place the focus on the reader, viewer, or player, as someone driven, by the work, to be addicted, compelled, engaged.

To say that a game is "compelling" feels like a statement devoid of useful meaning about the game - it's simply a statistical statement that "a reasonable proportion of people who played this game felt compelled by it."

I'll briefly explore a different term which has less negative connotations:


I think it's commonly understood that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that as humans we also have a broadly shared sense of beauty - not at the individual level... but at the group level, the statistical level.

(A quick lesson in statistics: supposing it's true that 33% of people find the Mona Lisa beautiful, the claim that "there is a 33% chance that if you look at the Mona Lisa you will find it beautiful" is basically nonsensical. This is, imo, a huge error that I see made all the time with regard to statistics. That is not how this sort of data works.)

Beautiful things tend to be those we enjoy being in the presence of, enjoy engaging with, in an enduring way; it places the onus off of us as observers. Generally one does not stop "finding something to be beautiful." Rather, it ceases to be beautiful. The beauty is a transient feature of the thing being admired, not a feature of the admirer.

I can read the plot summary of a book or film easier than I can read a book, or watch a film. The difference is that consuming the entire piece of media takes a lot more time. What keeps me spending time?

It isn't "fun" for books or films and likewise it isn't "fun" for games - though of course fun is a small piece of the puzzle, it is as simple as "anything that makes me not stop consuming it." Addictive, compelling, engaging... I don't like any of these words; our emotional landscape includes fun, suspense, even that strange cocktail of emotion that compels people to slow down and stare at car accidents on the side of the road... I guess that's morbid curiosity, which is a subcategory of curiosity.

QuoteThe book also introduces the term meme for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such "selfish" replication may also model human culture, in a different sense.

The Selfish Gene - Wikipedia

Quote from: @droqenvideogames are not organisms, but videogame genres are.

tweet

https://omnivorescookbook.com/wprm_print/15683

QuoteThe order should be: soak the noodles => marinate the meat => mix the sauce => prep and chop the herbs and veggies while soaking the noodles => stir fry

In a simulation of many sentient beings, each being has an opinion of each other being - not made of numbers, but more of a complicated flowchart/state machine. "You are my best friend." "You are my hero." "You are my crush." These relationships may be symmetrical and/or related, or they may not.

Each relationship is a "perceived role"; I will call the external role that describes "How A sees B" an "icon". Each such icon is a state which contains a set of behaviours including rules for changing into other states.

You have 5 "rolls", and for each roll you can choose to roll a smaller die and know the results, or a larger die with hidden results. Possibly:

- 2d4 visible (min 2, avg 5, max 8)
- 1d10 invisible (min 1, avg 5.5, max 10)

Needs a supporting system where succeeding, and knowing whether you succeeded, are both valuable independently. Maybe a wargame with fog of war (where do you commit additional resources?), or a political/social game where you are trying to sway people to your side (and usually aren't exactly sure where you stand with any individual, and again are deciding where to commit resources based on who you trust).

Possibly a tactics/jrpg "party management" game where you're rolling against characters' confidence levels or relationship levels to see who will do their action well, and who will do it poorly... like you can see if you rolled a miss, hit, or a crit ahead of time, before committing to a plan of action?

I was also thinking of "scouting" or espionage... the result determines how accurate the information you get is (from wildly inaccurate to missing details to perfect). But I think this one requires too much overhead.

The basic mechanics to play with:

Choose some proportion of "weaker visible dice" and "stronger unknown dice" in context of a situation where you want to win your rolls, but where you might reasonably not know whether you won or lost until later, at which point it might be crucial.

Quote from: The Many Deaths of the Black Company, p241..if you can't think logically and argue logically, then there isn't much hope that you'll have any success with the sorcery, no matter how talented you are. I know, I know. From everything you've seen, the bigger the wizards are, the crazier they are. But within the boundaries of their insanity, every one of them is rigorously, mathematically rational. The entire power of their minds serves their insanity. When they stumble it's because they let emotions or wishful thinking get in the way.

I don't think Starseed Pilgrim would be as successful today as it was when it came out, and that's not because of technical limitations. It did something that was, you know, new! It responded to the trends of the day, capturing the minds of gamers (that is, anyone who cares about games - maybe I should say "indie gamers") by indicating something close to what was already in the water.

I'm still not entirely sure how to put this into clearer language, it's frustrating, but I'll revisit this.

Game genres shift and slide around, are stolen from niche cultures when they become popular (see how collars came from meaning something specific to a specific subcommunity, to being a relatively mainstream fashion item divorced from that meaning; compare to how roguelikes came from meaning something specific to a specific subcommunity, to being a relatively mainstream videogame genre divorced from that meaning), and along with that lose their specific meanings in favour of something more broadly applicable.

Arguments about what something means are missing the point that everything means something different to everyone, and this is smeared not only across cultures and peoples but also across time. Encountering a first-person game today is different from encountering one ten years ago.

Quote from: The Return of the Black Company, p 650"Only a very great evil could remain so single of purpose, so uncaring of cost, as to create something so ultimately useless."

P.S. I realized this while watching a little video about alchemy in Noita, basically a super subtle subsystem that seems almost irrelevant to playing the actual game: certain liquids interact to turn into other liquids. It looks exactly like 'powder game' did way back in the day, that ancient simulated-pixels toy. It made me realize that even though in the final game it seems very unimportant, you can still see the tracks of the design inspiration. Noita wasn't made in a day... it was a powder game clone that slowly grew in natural ways, day after day, month after month, until arriving at where it is now. It evolved.

A prototype, a playable, a sim... whatever you call it, it's a compelling little seed from which a million games might flourish. This is what I mean when I say it's more. It's not a game; it's the birthplace of an infinite number of them.

This is a thing I could play forever. I'm not sure what to call one of these "somethings I could play forever", but the word prototype comes to mind. Dungeon Bounce is another one of these things: an infinite, eternal playable. It stands on its own and I'm loathe to call it a prototype as in not-a-whole-game but it's true that it's not a whole game.

It's more.

I started to build a little minimal Probability 0 clone in Godot, and though I always describe Probability 0 as a game about navigating and not taking fall damage -- I will insist to anyone that the fall damage is central, essential, crucial to its design -- still it's taken me this much time to realize what that really means.

Probability 0 started as this prototype which you can see recreated below in Godot: it is a platformer with a floaty jump, a down-scrolling camera that applies pressure, an utterly random field of tiles either solid or not. Nothing more.