Quote from: p154-155Unable to know the whole of nature, people can do no better than to construct an incomplete model of it and then delude themselves into thinking that they have created something natural. [...] There is no other way than through the destruction of the ego [...] words [...] could never match the wisdom of remaining silent.

Look at me, 50 pages later! Lately I've been encountering this feeling a lot, that "destruction of ego" and of, as it is put in the translation, an abandonment of "discriminating" knowledge is necessary in order to really get anything done at all. And yet here I am trying to put my thoughts to words, self-aware that the very thoughts I wish to put to words revolve around how the very act is futile. Words cannot convey thoughts; thoughts and words merely inspire one another. Back and forth.

Quote from: p. xxix (Notes on the Translation)It is a common teaching device among Oriental philosophers to use paradox, illogic, and apparent contradiction to help break habitual patterns of thought. Such passages are not to be taken either literally or figuratively, but rather as exercises to open the consciousness to perception beyond the reach of the intellect.

turns out maybe i have nothing to say about this!!! i just think this is an incredible bunch of observations by zach.

here's something i sent to the letterclub though:

Quote from: mei wonder if what's SO appealing to me about tiny (haiku(-ish?)) games is that... tiny, constrained spaces more easily produce these kinds of self-directed problem solving experiences. in awake you instantly learn about the constraints, and there are really only two or three things you could possibly try to do. it's highly linear, but it feels linear in a way that does not feel authored; it feels discovered

Quoteas game designers, when we think about how we would solve the problem of a frustrated and stuck user, It's unlikely that we would say: well, they're just a bad problem-solver, and leave it at that. Instead, we'd probably try to build a tutorial to teach that user a series of skills to turn the non-routine problem they're facing, into a routine one. But interestingly, this approach isn't one of trying to improve their problem-solving skills, it's one of trying to get around their problem-solving skills.

Quoteit turns out there actually is one weird trick to enable non-expert problem-solvers to solve problems that are out of their league. It's an incredibly powerful technique when you're able to wield it because it allows you to make entirely new games appreciable to everyone, as well as build tutorials and difficulty curves, even in more typically routine games that are tuned across the board for expert and novice problem-solvers alike

QuoteIf you provide novice problem-solvers with a problem, they'll attempt to solve it using superficial strategies
[..]
But if you provide novice problem-solvers with — instead of a problem — a set of constraints, and then ask them to form and solve their own complex problems, something amazing happens — they solve these problems with expert-level strategies.

Quote from: Slide 37

teach someone to fish
vs.
have someone invent things to do around a pond with a hook, line, and stick

QuotePeople really identify with not only what they consume but how they consume it. For some people in the gaming community, it's really important to say that they've beaten a game according to a certain set of standards, especially a difficult one like Sekiro. So they see cheating as devaluing their own achievement, as stolen valor, as a personal failing.

I don't think this is new, but it is an interesting point. Jenna continues:

QuoteAnd that's fine, as long as they don't have the power to enforce those values on other people.

I feel this loops around to what she said at the 15:44 mark.

QuoteWhat's changed is that so much of our media consumption is now public.

Existing in public.

What stopped cheating in video games from being fun?

Sharing with too many strangers all at once and caring what they think. In particular, caring what the noisiest, most willing to engage strangers think.

I know this is the bizarre post-but-not-post-internet hermit in me speaking: I'm writing to myself on a forum with exactly one user, but which is visible to all! Of course I realize it doesn't get much more asymmetrically publicly solipsistic than this. But, it satisfies my need to broadcast in public without any of the negatives (to me) of doing so. The only voices I hear are my own and those of the interesting people I know who already know how to contact me.

I admit that watching this video at this moment, about to embark on the creation of a tiny haiku game for Zeigfreid, I rushed through it.

Haha, I guess in a way I "cheated" my way through the video? Is skimming a book cheating? Anyway, thanks to those little section titles, I skipped past What is cheating, anyway? and Cheating at pinball and Cheating for credit and Cheating for POWER and The golden age of cheats and Cheat hardware for bad boyz and The ethics of cheating online and Prevention and punishment so that I could finally arrive at Modern cheat culture where I supposed I would find the message I was looking for -- the point of the video, not the fifteen minutes of history and buildup. I'm sure those were a well-crafted fifteen minutes, but they were not what I came here to consume. I knew what I wanted and I found it there at the 15:44 mark.

QuoteWhat's changed is that so much of our media consumption is now public.

Pixel art is not actually for everyone.
Bitsy games are pretty intimidating to me to make.
But they don't embitter those who are inspired by them to feel as though scale or money are what prevents them from even trying.

Quote from: Deadgames and Alivegames[...] an Alivegame is a game where all of its creators are truly creatively engaged in the project and contribute as equals. [...] An Alivegame is a game whose purpose is something to enrich the lives and humanity of those who play it.

I suppose I feel aligned but would like to take this a step further.

An Alivegame is a game whose purpose is to enrich the lives and humanity of those who play it BY making its players deeply inspired to become equals with its creators, but also in a context which empowers them to actually do so.

Life and humanity is enriched when we are all inspired and empowered.

Zeigfreid said to me last night that pixel art is "democratic and bottomless."

I agreed, and said, so too are words.

These are artforms that can easily say, "anyone could have done this."

I have been rereading 'Deadgames and Alivegames' because it uses a word, alive, in a way not totally incompatible with the way TTWOB uses it.

QuoteA game is "Dead" when it has no human designers. What I mean by this is that the game is, largely, 'designed' by non-human forces [...] In a Deadgame, the human game designer a proxy [...] whether they like it or not, their talents are being used towards particular ends.

In this post Melos Han-Tani makes specific claims about what those non-human ends are, but I believe they are too narrow. The Deadgame is one who is designed in a way which does not serve... and this is hard, it's not correctly worded, yet... its ability to inspire creative equals in other humans.

Something common between The Timeless Way of Building & The One-Straw Revolution is that they both exude the feeling that 'anyone can do this.' Of course, so do many self-help resources and scams -- they want to rope you in by making you believe that you too are capable of making $5000 a week from home.

But at the heart of TTWOB is this idea that architecture has made itself artificially inaccessible. The result is that people are alienated from their homes because they no longer feel that "I could have made this."

And TO-SR has a similar message: farmers are making what they do too complicated. This hurts the people alienated from the basically human act of farming, including (especially!) the farmers themselves.

QuoteQuestioning "Scaling"

Imagine a novel written by 10, 100, or 1,000 people. It would be bad. Novels aren't written by 10+ people, and they would never benefit from being written so!

My very first line of questioning, which I believe I can begin to answer: Why would a novel written by 10, 100, or 1,000 people be bad?

I previously left some notes about Deadgames and Alivegames here: http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=2.0

Our conversations at letterclub.games have started to gravitate towards The Timeless Way of Building, which uses the adjective alive, which dug this up out of memory...

How does Christopher Alexander use the word alive, and how does Melos Han-Tani use the word alive?