In her book Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows writes:

QuoteWe can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
I already knew that, in a way. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback.
. . . Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity---our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.

~ Thinking in Systems quote

I was having a conversation with paulby in Paradise about this and noticed that the particular word Meadows uses, "require," is not (necessarily?) the method by which one should go about designing a game for this type of play. Rather than "requiring" awakeness --

here I will define awakeness as the state of "staying wide awake, paying close attention, participating flat out, responding to feedback, using our full humanity (our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, out compassion, our vision, and our morality)" --

Rather than "requiring" awakeness, the dream ideal goal is INSPIRING awakeness, which one may also perhaps understand as aliveness, or even to some degree 'the flow state' (or even 'mastery'?). If a game does not acknowledge awakeness in some way, I am very rarely inspired to achieve or maintain awakeness, but "requirement" is not the best or only way to inspire me to get there.

Inspiring awakeness.

Hello! It's time for Lemon Square. I use this recipe but with adjustments from the comments, so here is the full adjusted version:

Crust:
2 cups (~240g) all-purpose flour
1 cup (227g) butter, softened
½ cup (50g) white sugar
¼ tsp salt

Filling:
1 ½ cups (300g) white sugar
¼ cup (~30g) all-purpose flour
4 eggs
½ - ⅔ lemon juice (3-4 lemons, juiced)
optional: lemon zest from 2 lemons

Instructions:

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
• To make the crust: Blend 2 cups flour, softened butter, and 1/2 cup sugar in a medium bowl until well combined; press into the bottom of an ungreased 9x13-inch pan. (If using an 8x11-inch pan, increase cooking time of crust and filling by 5-10 mins each!)
• Bake in the preheated oven until firm and golden, about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, make the filling: Whisk remaining 1 1/2 cups sugar and 1/4 cup flour in a medium bowl. Whisk in eggs, then lemon juice until smooth; pour filling over the baked crust.
• Bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes. Set the pan aside to cool completely; the bars will firm up as they cool. When cooled, cut into uniform squares.

Regarding Adam Hammond's
"The Far Shore"

I'm trying out Ambient.

I forgot to start a devlog for this, but I feel like it might be interesting to document my thought process. Here's a rough overview of my journey:

DAY 1

Naively gave Ambient a try thinking it was something I could knock out in a few hours--embarrassingly presumptuous of me. I got stuck on some basic stuff and it actually sent me into a small existential spiral, like, I guess I can't do programming anymore, I'm just a helpless designer! Bad feeling, but got through it. Had a conversation with a small games community that refreshed and rejuvenated my energy and confidence.

DAY 2

Asked Tanner what he thought of Ambient, he shared with me the list of Rust engines that exist out there, and some opinions. I won't share them here, but it all had the effect of reminding me that Ambient is just one little fish in a big pond, it has weaknesses and strengths like the rest, and if I'm having trouble, it's not my fault.

So I got back into trying it, I spent about 3 hours squirming around trying to learn Ambient using a bunch of tutorials written by users in the Discord -- switch to a Rust tutorial to learn the basics of the language which I realized I actually didn't know at all in the first place -- then came back to Ambient, Owen Palmer helped me out in the #beginners-corner, and I... got exactly nowhere in terms of building a game.

Wrapped up the window of time I'd set aside for trying to learn Ambient.

I've been thinking the whole time, "How does Ambient want to be used?" I was really tempted to just figure out how to hack in a 2D rendering scheme and make a platformer, but it felt wrong. I felt like I was going in the wrong direction. I thought about some recent thoughts about nonresistance and realized that I shouldn't just be learning from the examples, I should literally be using them to find fun things to do.

Next time I'll build off one of the examples rather than starting from scratch. There is already a tiny bit of fun to be found in these folders, and I can do a little work to bring it out. That has the nice added bonus of also being basically the easiest way I could possibly do things.

It struck me while reading a perhaps lesser book that the structure of Christopher Alexander's writings have always had a beautiful transparency to them; he says what he is getting at and how and why before he gets to it. It's filling me with a deep frustration about the nature of other writings, books I must read and read and read in order to get at what their author is, finally, trying to say.

Giving a 30-min talk on small games communities. Notes here

What could bring me more joy than clicking around a computer, and typing things into it with precision?
These too are feelings of play.

From https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1652548739876409344

I've been playing Splatoon for years without writing about it. How dare I?

I've been sick for over a week, and it's terrible. I haven't been able to gather my focus or recover my energy enough to do the things I tell myself I ought to do, so I've spent a considerable amount of time doing everything I suppose I ought not do, but want to do anyway. And, specifically, I've found myself thinking about why I do anything -- why do I make games, for instance?

Some part of it is certainly for 'getting' some reward. Not points, because points are made-up reward-substitutes into which we opt for the sake of a game, but say, attention, or money, or something like that.

But even stripped of all these things, making games is one of these things that I "want to get points for". Oh, I should quickly give some context for that quote before I continue:

~ The Well-Played Game, "What do we want to get points for?" (P69)

Bernie DeKoven here explores the purpose of points, of keeping score, in the context of the well-played game. The arbitrary and designable nature of points allows us to reward the right things, to control the direction(s) in which we are steered, in contexts where points are usable, and used.

Dofus/Wakfu
That precious tension of allocation

The real meaning.
Strip away interpretation and we are left with truth?
The shirt is cotton because of its price, because the designer liked the way it felt, or because it happened to be the default option.

There is always a reality to notice. Symbols and images distract from that.

I've had this thought before.

Wearing clothing (as well as accessories, etc) is a deeply contextual act, clothing being always worn on a particular body, almost always part of an outfit (i.e., worn with other things), generally worn in a physical location.

if i think about every human activity as a conversation
perhaps a one-sided conversation, not always a dialogue but sometimes a monologue
a speaker speaks, someone or something listens

then every conversation begins because someone wants to say something
the conversation continues because of continued desires to speak
fueled perhaps by enough desire to listen but that desire to listen can only be perceived as a desire to speak back
perhaps not in the tongue of words
but body language, warmth, art, movement

a conversation of everything
not just words

then we picture
long-lasting conversations

there are rules to a conversation
each conversation is a context
for speaking and listening
listeners infer the rules and learn to speak in the language of the conversation
how to speak safely

a conversation that outlives its original speakers
a conversation that outlives its original speakers' desires to speak
a conversation that lasts too long

everyone follows its rules
nobody wants to have the conversation
but out of the desire to have some conversation, any conversation
the institution survives

sustained only by fear of a silent world.

I must admit that years ago I laughed at the absurdity and coldness of this piece. Now I think I'm going to really see what it has to offer -- it was a particular social environment, a particular mindset, a particular place in my life and in time, in which I laughed at it. I think I'm past that and may today actually learn something, and have some useful criticism to offer.

I hope to have a useful conversation.