Lulie's How To Argue claims that "meta drives arguments into black holes":

Quote1. Meta is off-topic.
2. Meta breeds meta.
• You can't contradict a meta statement without making another meta statement.
3. Meta engages emotions.
• Popper wants our ideas to die in our place. Meta wants to substitute us for our ideas, and less[sic] 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.

What if we looked at this through the lens of "Play requires acceptance"? If we think about "arguing" as a form of play and synecdochally apply Lulie's advice on avoiding meta to the entire realm of playing?

Quote1. Meta is off-topic.

When engaged in play, going 'meta', that is, asking how the playing could be different, we are no longer playing. (I need to dedicate more time to this argument.)

Quote2. Meta breeds meta.
• You can't contradict a meta statement without making another meta statement.

Once engaged in a question beyond the play, the value of the play itself is damaged. Why play anymore, now that the rules are questioned? (Magic circle.)

Quote3. Meta engages emotions.
• Popper wants our ideas to die in our place. Meta wants to substitute us for our ideas, and less[sic] 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.

'Meta engages emotions' is a weird downside: what about arguments about emotion? Arguments about how you feel when doing something, when thinking about something, and what that means. Of course these arguments must necessarily engage emotions! The other points are clearer and easier to discuss, without the loaded implication that engaging emotions is bad.

"Popper wants our ideas to die in our place." (Need to read more about Popper.)

Meta allows us to discredit the limitations which Ian Bogost proposes are necessary for play (need link).

Meta changes the focus from the substance of what's being played (limitations).

This barely hangs together in writing. Anyway, I'm not trying to break things down point-by-point to present an argument yet, this is just initial thoughtbreeding. Where to from here?

References
- Recognizing Play (jack, letterclub.games)
- "How does this want to be played?" (zeigfried, quote)
- Play Anything (bogost)

Zeigfried proposed this lens. I like it. It makes me think of art as something which intentionally challenges you to enjoy it.

Rather than ask how it could be different, the question "How does this want to be played?" provides an inroad to play.

Maybe it's not the best idea to have a place to record and dwell upon my disagreements... I need to focus on arriving at a better place, and then communicating it clearly (for my future self, as well as to be a stronger communicator generally)

Quote from: The Monstre King1) RPS - you make a choice, opponent makes another choice. To make a good game, you have to give different weighs to the choices (and usually have multiple choices at the same time). this only takes into account other players
2) Puzzle - every interaction with an AI is either a puzzle or the next one - figure out what works here, what you have to do, what's the pattern etc. a simulation of 1) in many cases
3) Random - unpredictable by any player. while my quote is very cruel to randomness, i'm generally fine with random-but-balanced SITUATIONS for pvp (a symmetrical procgen level), a bit less difficult with the "-but-balanced" part for PVE

Quote from: droqenso these are the rules of all the ways that someone's relationship to winning/losing exists?

1) RPS - predicting another human to win
2) Puzzle - solving for a systemic solution to win
3) Random - hoping the numbers give you the win

Zara (Guilherme Stutz Töws) linked this tweet in paradise and I immediately latched onto the fact that there's a "Platformer Design" tab (directly linked in big link above). I have designed platformers for like my whole life, and I like getting mad at people's attempts to codify something that I never properly learned, but have developed an intuitive taste for. Fun for everyone!

I browsed through some of the posts prior to having this forum-y outlet. I may never continue this thread but I wanted to have it ready in case I do browse through again & find anything that interests, or more likely incenses, me.

QuoteThis is the main screen. So, you can see I'm just going into speedrun mode: there's no point paying attention to the text because no-one can read videogame text anyway; it's not actually text, it's like a texture. You have to read every sentence in a videogame three times before you're able to parse it as human language.

[A massive block of text appears on-screen.]
Case in point. You see this, and the first thing you say is, "Do I need to read this? Is it just like flavour text or a tooltip or something?"
And then you're like "*sigh* Uh, okay, I guess I gotta read, so I gotta just scan it and see like, Uh, Hotel, Test card, World, Hotels, Hotels, Hotels, Hotels,"

And then, if you can't figure out what it's meant to be saying from that, you have to set your mind down to reconstruct it as actual language.
But that's a worst-case scenario [which] generally, videogame 'best practices' try and avoid.

"Nobody reads the text in videogames!" said thecatamites (find talk/timestamp) link

text as texture.

I want plausible deniability, accidental reading, nonlinear exposure to writing, permission to miss and ignore details. text that goes by too quickly to be caught (enter the void credits sequence).

- garden/tiger
- garden/tiger/mountain
- just garden/mountain?

From the thinky games discord.. risk is important and interesting to me. QoL changes often serve to reduce or eliminate risk wherever possible, but instead I like when the risk is pleasant.

The garden is a nice grind. You grind, and then test your (something) by paying to climb the mountain. You test your theory, your mettle, your skill...

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 of desire for profit, and desire for scale. In a Deadgame, the human game designer a proxy for capitalism's demons to accumulate money.

link

Strangely, the idea that I have of Deadplay is most strongly connected to something I wrote not even in response to the Deadgames/Alivegames piece, but this one in response to Daniel Cook's tweet thread (click the 'Quote from' link for context):

QuoteAll art forms involve mastery and knowledge.

All artists become blind to issues new appreciators will face.

The issue is with the context in which games audiences appreciate games, not inherent to the form of games.

If a game is 'dead' when it has no human designers -- when it was created as a result of no human desires -- then perhaps any activity is 'dead' when it does not refer to other human actors, or their humanity. To call something a Deadgame is a judgement of the drives of its creators and players as inhuman; to accuse something of being a Deadgame is to be a Deadplayer yourself in the game of life.

I think it's an interesting point, but what is a human force? The Deadgames and Alivegames article doesn't really cover the topic of what someone might want to make a game about. I recognize that this covers a great deal of territory, but I want more talk about techniques in context of how to make games about humans. This is the closest it gets, and all it's saying is "don't make these games."

QuoteAn Alivegame is a game whose purpose is something to enrich the lives and humanity of those who play it. It can be as simple as a 1-hour game made for a friend's birthday. It is a game that respects the complex layered history of humanity and refuses to create characters or narratives that boil them down into easily-digestable (and figurine/merch-izable) build-your-own-trauma-chipotle-bowls where a character's complexity neatly and mathematically maps from whatever unfortunate events happened to them.

link

Daniel Cook's Game design patterns for building friendships is interesting.

Is it what I'm looking for?

Though I cannot put forth a logical argument as to why it is helpful for me to have a place to organize my thoughts (especially publicly), I do have a track record of needing such an outlet.

- twitter
- i started some private discord servers (2 active, 1 semi-active)
- letterclub.games📨
- physical notebooks (i've thrown away so many physical notebooks)
- physical zine: 'droqen was here' (for friends and patrons (link removed))
- digital notebook on tablet (Noteshelf 2)
- devlogs on discord servers
- devlogs on forums
- mailing list
- nice long conversational walks with friends and acquaintances
- many blog posts across many blogs over the years

Some of these have been more successful for my brain than others. I think a forum might be an extremely helpful outlet. Why? I answer that question here.

Look, straight up, I just love forums. I grew up on the TIGSource Forums and also there was a secret forum that had a very special place in my heart (though it is now ded). Other forums exist, but a lot of them have tags and a weird new feed-like look. I am not here for that. I just want an old-fashioned forum like I'm used to, with posts and boards and things like that. I'm old.

Some features that forums have that I love

- Adding things after the fact is simple/intuitive/part of the medium

- Hyperlinking, images, other post customization (compare to most social media, where many things are out of your control)

- I can host it on my own server and access it from any device

- Access can be shared with others easily (with powerful controls for customizing the level and detail of control)