"Make games that stream well" is the eternal refrain of indie dev business advice. "Make games that make good GIFs."

And so on, and so on.

But this is just the internet-centric advice from people immersed in internet social spaces. What if I don't want to be one of those people?

It comes and goes, but lately I've been trying to spend less time believing that the internet is this all-encompassing universe. Not everyone is 'on the internet,' and neither do I have to be. It was cool, and big, and popular. But isn't it still possible to live a life detached from this one virtual world?

I like fiction and fantasy, and false imagined worlds given the breath of life. I've dabbled with thinking about what NFTs are and I think I've ultimately rejected them, but in the process I think I've exposed part of what the internet is for me and others - like NFTs, the internet is fake.

What I mean is that the internet only has the relevance we give it. It has its benefits, of course, but it's not all-encompassing. NFTs are worth killing now so their false-labour fantasy of value doesn't get bigger. Why is the internet's false-permanence fantasy any better? The dream of connection comes at a cost -- we can reach anyone, but in an ever-shallower way. Multipresence demands it, and the internet is increasingly all about multipresence, where the biggest voice gets the most attention, to no upper limit.

We're playing the lottery.

I was having a conversation with my sister about J.K. Rowling's recent transphobic poem and ended up talking with her for an hour about this while out on a walk. And... well, I realized afterwards that I was having a conversation that felt frustrating because I thought I had to take a stance one way or another. So I wasn't really saying anything except dancing around the fact that I didn't have any passion to engage with the topic, pushing responsibility onto her to say something that would inspire me to get more engaged.

The solution, I think, is for me to recognize and acknowledge when I'm not passionate about a topic and to say so. It doesn't even have to come quickly--there's no rush to get there in the course of a conversation, but I need the practice with feeling and saying:

"This isn't something I have enough passion about... for me to engage with it meaningfully."

Reading a tabletop roleplaying game document, there might be tables and charts of possibilities -- anchors that give you space to imagine a world between them. Maybe writing is not so different from this after all, just less explicit about it.

If I write the simple sentence, Don't breathe that stuff, it leaves open so many little questions which might be inconsequential to the plot but beautifully consequential to the experience of inhabiting the world...

Every statement has negative space, but so as to be able to tie it better to A Pattern Language, I'll call it space 'outside' the explicit, instead. 'Outdoor' space.

If I'm watching a show that never describes a certain aspect of a relationship (for example), it creates a blank space that is never resolved. But done well, done in a way that I like, the blank space feels at once concrete and yet also infinite. Does that make sense? Fuck, I sure hope it makes sense.

Leaving an unanswered question for me to imagine the answer to...

It's not valuable because I answer it, but it's also not valuable because I never answer it. It's valuable because I can answer it anytime I like, and then any other time I can answer it differently or not at all. I'm free, but inspired. My brain can flicker and flutter in a cavern of just the right size.

In A Pattern Language, Pattern 106 is Positive Outdoor Space.

QuoteIf you look at the plan of an environment where outdoor spaces are negative, you see the buildings as figure, and the outdoor space as ground. There is no reversal. It is impossible to see the outdoor space as figure, and the buildings as ground.

If you look at the plan of an environment where outdoor spaces are positive, you may see the buildings as figure, and outdoor spaces as ground -- and, you may also see the ourdoor spaces as figure against the ground of the buildings. The plans have figure-ground reversal.

The imaginary space should feel the same way. The imagination reacts to empty non-concrete space in the exact same way to 'outdoor space' as it does to the conceptual 'outdoor space' of a narrative, the space outside the explicit. It should feel like positive outdoor space.

I played a clutch of chickens in the post-apocalypse, one thousand strong and it reminded me about the value of fiction. I can't really explain it except to say that I like a game that has fiction, and characters that i can sort of relate to? This could be a pattern, perhaps -- I think I have been approaching game patterns in too cold a way. Stories are part of game design. How can I write a pattern about "caring about" characters without explicitly acknowledging the image that is placed in the mind of those characters by their art and writing?

This is going to hurt my brain.

Regarding "Art is Life-Changing"

We are constantly interacting with the world. Falling into habits, old patterns. Art is life-changing, but what stops us from changing back?

Ideas that stick with you for a long period of time may be necessary for turning that momentary experience into a genuinely life-changing impact. This doesn't mean that games have to be long to be impactful... they don't have to rub your face in it. But I think they can have value that way.

Quote from: Mokesmoemy main criteria for liking a game is "did this game change my life" (but the bar for changing my life is low)

|| | || ||||| ||| is a game I played recently where I enjoyed playing it in the moment, and I believe that it objectively is a good game, but when I had finished it (100% even) it left me feeling underwhelmed because it did not change my life

it did not present me with a single new idea to think about

don't take that as a condemnation. it had a number of very neat ideas that blew my mind the first time I saw them, just not this time.

Mokesmoe said this two days ago in Paradise and I woke up thinking about it for some reason. "Did this game change my life?" "Did it present me with a new idea to think about?" As I get older and am exposed to more things, I suppose it's a mathematical inevitability that finding works that do this for me will become harder and harder. Maybe at some point I'll have to give up on expecting the feeling from anything at all, and find something else to like about stuff.

It is still the goal I aspire to with my own work -- art.

I want to present someone with a new idea to think about, one that's sticky and relevant and novel enough to change their life in a positive way. Not in a concrete way, perhaps. I don't expect to make an educational or self-help piece. Maybe a more modest way to put it would be to say I want to make art that helps a person grow.

CARING FOR NPCS - You need the ILLUSION OF LIFE, and then it's just a matter of giving opportunities for caring...
ILLUSION OF LIFE - This is "Internal Logic" + "Internal Chaos" arranged just so.
INTERNAL LOGIC - How do you create this?
INTERNAL CHAOS - I think I really need to define this one

Yes, I need some more patterns for relying on NPCs - there's illusion of life but also "RELYING ON SYSTEMS" or something like that? Hmm

Regarding Vsauce's "Do Chairs Exist?"

I wrote a basic description of my relationship to Patterns in the Tenets forum. Click on the link above to go to that thread and read about it.

The funny thing about patterns is that I haven't even read A Pattern Language, the book which seems most often cited in regard to this, yet. But I have read The Timeless Way of Building, which introduces the conceptual framework which surrounds patterns.

Quote from: i asked on twitteri'm thinking about games with 'replaceable' characters with no unique authored content that you still can get attached to over the course of a game. some games on my mind:

- X-COM
- Etrian Odyssey
- Animal Crossing (villagers)
- Pokémon
- Dwarf Fortress

got any other good examples for me?

my tweet

Load of regular clothing

-Cotton/Normal
-Tap cold
-Medium spin
-Put detergent in, let cup drip as much as possible, stick cup in machine

When done, clothes are clean and wet. Hang immediately

Heat milk to 80 c

Let cool to 42 c
At the same time, bring out yogurt (must have active cultures) to let warm
(Takes about 50-60 minutes)

Swirl in 1-2 tbsp yogurt
Instant pot 'yogurt' - leave on venting.

Mousse - would not get it again

*took Shelley 4-5 days to eat it all, very filling
*it was nice, smooth texture

EXERCISE 11: EMERGENT NARRATIVE PATTERNS

Seems ridiculous at first glance, to use this exercise about emergent narratives to explore games with massively long main quests, but it was the most obviously appropriate and... you know, in its own way, an extremely long game is absolutely a feature of an emergent narrative: that it takes a long time. It's not really unexpected, because it averages out over a long period of time. But it describes an experiential quality which emerges from the rules.

Name: I Won't Just Wait Around

Confidence: 3



Author: droqen
Design problem: It's hard to make a player partake in low-stakes activities in a game where most actions are high-stakes
Description: To get an optimization-minded player to relax and smell the roses, the designer may want to make the optimal way to play involve some downtime.

Games that use this pattern and how:

everquest. Combat in this game involves the expenditure of health and mana, resources which take time to replenish. While waiting for these resources to return, players have downtime in which many activities are still available, just not combat. In particular, the way to optimize recovery rate is the sit action, which disables certain actions and places a priority on the UI, especially socializing and inventory/character management.

starseed pilgrim. When a player runs out of seeds, and to a lesser extent when they plant certain slow-growing seeds, they must wait for their existing 'plants' to grow before continuing to act. The real-time pressure is continuous, but this affords the player significant time to take in the ambience and/or think about their situation, without feeling as though they are playing non-optimally.

regarding Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building
and Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein's A Pattern Language

Quote from: The Timeless Way of BuildingON READING THIS BOOK

What lies in this book is perhaps more important as a whole than in its details. If you only have an hour to spend on it, it makes much more sense to read the whole book roughly in that hour, than to read only the first two chapters in detail. [..] If you read the beginning and end of each chapter, and the italic headlines that lie between them, turning the pages almost as fast as you can, you will be able to get the overall structure of the book in less than an hour.

THIS IS HOW I READ BOOKS ANYWAY, THANK YOU FOR WRITING THE BOOK FOR ME OMG

I spent the day playing around with mockups and compositions, but they were lacking... something. I realized that that 'something' is, first of all, game design and not art design, and I need to acknowledge that when I'm doing composition-work I can still count that as a success if I don't solve game design problems... but, that aside, I think what I was missing game design-wise was a locked door.

Maybe I should make a pattern out of this...

For now, I'll just say that in particular, a locked door represents an inviting and simple and impossible challenge: without the key, you cannot open a locked door. But you can! You can force it open, you can pick the lock, you can find another way around. You can also do some things with a locked door even if you can't open it. You can look at it and admire the outer surface. You can jiggle the handle. The space behind the door is implied but invisible -- except maybe you can peek through the keyhole to catch an unsatisfying glimpse of what's on the other side.

i can't quite ... i've been trying to figure out a name for this genre of feeling ... but i can't. maybe i need to take a look at some pattern language for game design exercises.

a game that has a real-time pressure to make decisions and engage with systems optimally, but there's some 'play', some downtime - and activities to fill that downtime with something.