When I was going to do my driver's test, I told my dad I was nervous. He asked, was I nervous because I might fail, and have to go through all this again? (E.g. driving to the testing facility.)

I said no, I was nervous because I thought I might let the pressure get to me and not enjoy the process.


I have to remind myself to feel this way, to fear only a failure to perceive the beauty of the moment, to fear only lack of presentness.

Regarding What is the 'Fun Criterion'?

I remember the beginning of Strife most -- that strange hub full of promise.

It's the same for many games. The hubs where I return are more memorable than the nooks and crannies, the one-off little arenas.

• What do I want?
• How can I get it?

When I'm playing a game, these are the questions I end up asking myself -- the big, important questions about my experience. If the answer to either question is uninteresting, I don't continue play.

What do I want?

First of all, I must want something. Lately, I've found myself wanting knowledge. I want to know how to do this thing, I want to know what lies behind this door, I want to try something new so that I know what it feels like.

Linear games might expect me to want something, even impress upon me what it is that I ought to want. (I naturally rebel.)

Open-world games often drop the ball, leaving me to wonder what it is that I want and to answer "nothing." (I am nihilistic. RIP)

How can I get it?

Secondly, if I want something, I want to understand how I get there. In some cases the answer being not immediately apparent is interesting -- if the answer is "I don't know, but if I pursue some of my other interests I may find out," that's often compelling enough if I do in fact have other interests as a player.

I've heard games be described as agency fantasies. It's taken me a while to unspool that thought -- a game is a simulation, so nothing that happens in it matters. Why should I care about the suffering of a fictional character, the death of a fictional world, getting one ending over another? I know not to, but I still want agency.

Agency-as-Student is a tenet-in-development. The games I want to play are agency fantasies of exploration and learning. I can read an incredible book and learn something new. The world is full of great writing sharing great perspectives. A book is a guided tour; when we're in tune, I am exploring and learning hand in hand with its author.

Games can respond to what I want to learn. The agency I have is over my own exploration and learning, my own experience. The agency fantasy is not the fantasy that what I do has an effect on a virtual world without meaning, but the fantasy that I can choose what happens to me, and that I can design my own experience around what I care about.

(Let's not get into the topic of multiplayer games today.)

The MDA framework presents eight example Aesthetics, "the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system." They are as follows:

• Sensation (Game as sense-pleasure): Player enjoys memorable audio-visual effects.
• Fantasy (Game as make-believe): Imaginary world.
• Narrative (Game as drama): A story that drives the player to keep coming back
• Challenge (Game as obstacle course): Urge to master something. Boosts a game's replayability.
• Fellowship (Game as social framework): A community where the player is an active part of it. Almost exclusive for multiplayer games.
• Discovery (Game as uncharted territory): Urge to explore game world.
• Expression (Game as self-discovery): Own creativity. For example, creating character resembling player's own avatar.
• Submission (Game as pastime): Connection to the game, as a whole, despite of constraints.

All categorization is arbitrary and imperfect; the concept which I am about to present, Transformation, overlaps to some degree with many of the above, which I will explore. It may also be the case that this idea is not well-bounded by MDA.

I'm going to my cousin's wedding in June and for the first time I've found I can picture what everyone will be wearing and sort of place myself there at the event. What will I be wearing and how will my choice of clothing interact with the social fabric?

I can change my clothes in my mind's eye. What if I have a grey shirt, or a white one? What if I'm wearing a ridiculous hat? What if everyone dresses more casually, or more formally? This is still only a newborn sense. I work on it occasionally when I'm outdoors downtown: I look at what people are wearing, picturing them in different clothes, in each other's clothes, in all the same clothes. It's fun, and makes excellent practice.

I've fallen out of touch with the idea of having an audience. If I was trying to make money from sharing knowledge, I would care about having an audience, but where I'm at now, I have a job I really love (to my great surprise!), and now I want to figure out how to spend some of my remaining spare time on meaningful projects.

I'm not worried about sharing something great with the internet at large. I'm much more interested in having a noticeable impact on a few close friends and peers. So. How do I take steps forward in terms of my game design practice and within my circles?

It may be too much of a gut reaction, having only read twenty-six pages, but there is a certain feeling about the author that I got from reading this book that turned me off.

Senlin Ascends

Quote from: p19Senlin was unprepared for marriage in every way. He possessed neither the imagination nor emotional warmth that intimacy required. [..] Here was the moon and the rocking crib and the far from prying eyes and every romantic thing a man could request, and what did he do with it? He was drowning in opportunity.

Marya lay propped on her elbow watching him appear to sleep with his eyes open. She pressed the flat of her finger against his cheek, lifting up a smile like a fishhook, trying to tease some life from him. She tugged at his earlobe, bit lightly at his shoulder, and blew on his neck. Still he lay, sometimes flinching but not responding.

Quote from: p18What sort of husband loses a wife?

Quote from: p6He imagined she had married him because he was kind, even tempered, and securely employed.

[..]

Of course, Marya had a few unusual habits of her own. She read books while she walked to town[..] She was fearless of heights and would sometimes get on the roof just to watch the sails of inbound ships rise over the horizon. She played the piano beautifully but also brutally. She'd sing like a mad mermaid[..] And even still, her oddness inspired admiration in most.

Quote from: Back of the bookMild-mannered headmaster Thomas Senlin prefers his adventures to be safely contained within the pages of a book. So when he loses his new bride shortly after embarking on the honeymoon of their dreams, he is ill-prepared for the trouble that follows.

To find her, Senlin must[..]

If I were to put it into words, I'd say that this story hinges on a sort of philosophy of gender roles and relationships that I don't subscribe to and don't find interesting. It's possible that the book will subvert them - like I said, maybe this is too much of a gut reaction - but we have Senlin, practical guy who somehow gets married to quirky mermaid girl Marya. He's all stiff and stoic and she's described in this awe-struck way as a lovely creature of beauty, and she's trying to crack through his shell, and in about the first ten pages she's fridged to motivate the hero's journey.

I enjoy writing about feelings, experiences, dreams, goals, fears... not the mechanical minutiae of worldbuilding, but these kinds of human moments used to illuminate relevant, relatable details.

Source: https://www.thefieryvegetarian.com/wp-json/mv-create/v1/creations/10/print

Recipe:

0. If making instant pot chickpeas (for step 4 below), prepare ahead; it will take about an hour!!!

1. Heat
-- 3 tbsp sunflower/canola/peanut oil
in a large pan over a medium-high setting.

1b. Sauté:
-- 1 large onion finely chopped
until golden.

2. Add:
-- 4 cloves garlic, crushed
-- 1 inch ginger, finely grated
and cook for 1-2 minutes, stirring frequently, until the garlic doesn't smell raw anymore.

3. Mix in:
-- 1 tbsp ground coriander (Whole coriander is very noticeable. Don't recommend.)
-- 1/2 tbsp ground turmeric
-- 1/2 tbsp ground cumin (You can use whole cumin, it turns out fine)
-- 1/4 - 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper or chili flakes
and toast for two minutes, stirring often

4. Add
-- 1.5 cups crushed tomatoes (400g)
-- 2.5 cups cooked chickpeas (400g)
-- 1/2 cup vegetable stock (120 ml)
Increase the heat to high and once boiling, lower to medium-low to maintain at a simmer for 10 minutes

5. Add
-- 1/2 tsp salt
-- 1 tsp sugar
-- 1 cup frozen chopped spinach or 100gm fresh/frozen chopped spinach (or if you're like me and have unused frozen kale in the freezer, use up that kale!)
... If the spinach (or kale!!!) is frozen increase the heat until the curry is bubbling away again.
Simmer for an additional five minutes.

6. Add
-- 1 tsp garam masala
-- 1 tbsp lemon juice (rice vinegar seems to work fine)
-- (OPTIONAL) 1/4-1/2 cup full-fat coconut milk (50-100 ml)
and stir.

6b. Sprinkle over:
-- 1 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro leaves
and serve hot.

TIP:
Served with some "enjoy tonight" grocery store naan heated up on the stovetop. Very good.

C. Thi Nguyen's "Games: Agency as Art"

Quote from: p3, footnote 1For simplicity's sake, I will speak as if there is a single game designer, when in actuality, games are often designed in large teams.

Quote from: p3, for example[..] the fact that the game designer specifies goals and abilities [..] is precisely what makes games distinctive as an art form.

I think this is wildly... irresponsible? Something? If there is often no singular "game designer," why talk about it this way?

"Mrs. Iz. Mrs. Iz. You are making a big mistake."

Seen from a first person perspective.

There is a scared character, Mrs. Iz, who is sort of a companion who tries to get you not to investigate certain things in the castle...

There is this weird little grey creature who tries to unsuccessfully do something, who can be picked up and used?

There is an alien who basically seems to ignore you - but if you trigger certain events suddenly becomes a terrifying opponent, who hunts you down mercilessly.

Its behaviours...
- finds the grey thing and resets it
- repairs aspects of the level, using the grey thing?
- in the beginning, the scared character tries to get you away from a CCTV viewer, to reset it or something, "he's coming."
- something announces the alien's voice: "Mrs. Iz. Mrs. Iz. You are making a big mistake." it has a weird buzzy, deliberate voice.
- the CCTV viewer can show weird catacombs under the castle? the alien is doing something bad?
- if you see this and are caught, the alien hunts you down. eliminates you.

Quote from: @droqenbreaking games as a player and as a designer.
breaking them from both sides.

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full quote:

Quotei enjoy doing things that should not be doable
maybe that's the other side of breaking the horizon
as a player you do something that seems unintended...
as a designer i've thought to recapture it i ought to create the illusion of intent, for a player to break through, but it's not quite a perfect symmetry. having just experienced an 'impossible system breakage' experience as a player, i enjoyed knowing that the lack of intent was legitimate, but it's impossible to explicitly design that kind of thing.

with starseed pilgrim i guess there is a similar sort of feeling, but from the designer's standpoint. the player doesn't get to experience "doing the impossible against the designer's expectations" but it makes sense that as a designer i wanted the game to make possible something impossible, against the player's expectations...

i was never designing that part of the game for myself to play, i was just designing to satisfy exactly this same part of me that enjoys breaking games. oh, boy. does this all make sense? it was all very stream-of-consciousness.

breaking games as a player and as a designer.
breaking them from both sides.

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.

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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.