Learning how a roguelike works is approaching a greater understanding & appreciation of the whole. "Difficulty creates motivation" says a slide around the 10-minute mark of the video, but . . . no, difficulty is what signals that that understanding is valued/necessary.

In the lingo of Christopher Alexander, "Difficulty creates motivation" makes an awful pattern because it doesn't map accurately to the problem space. There are difficult games that aren't motivating, and motivating games that aren't difficult. We need a more precise pattern than this.

QuoteImagine how much worse Factorio would be if you just build blue science [labs?] the moment you research them.

The achievement would barely matter at all and you would lose investment almost immediately.

But by first making you set up an oil outpost, a refinery, a steel mill which is probably gonna need to be supplied by a train, and a bunch of other stuff, simply pressing a button to make an item becomes this awesome culmination of 15 hours' work

The 15 hours mean nothing on their own! This lens is like saying the twist at the end of a movie gets meaning from being "the awesome culmination of 60 minutes of runtime." It's missing the fact that what is contained within that time, the experiences of the appreciator, are what give the thing meaning...

QuotePlayers love delayed gratification.

Eeeehhh this seems like a pretty terrible way of looking at it! He goes on to talk about the value of multiple delayed gratification things paying off all at the same time. This seems like the most backwards way of looking at it... even if it's literally the forwards way of looking at it.

The payoff is a whole thing which must be understood in pieces before it has any meaning. It takes time to receive the pieces of data necessary to appreciate the thing in a way that is gratifying. Spending more time than necessary is not avoidable, but is generally a bad thing,

Sometimes the signal and signified get messed up and delayed gratification is seen as a measure of a good reward.

QuoteAnimal Crossing requires you to collect money, farm for critters, and upgrade your town. [..] Even though most people are playing for the dress up and designy elements. [..] If the game simply gave you all the items right off the bat, you'd lack a sense of personal investment in your creations and most people would just make their dream house and quit the game after an hour.

I need a name for this perspective and to better understand my beef with it. It is intrinsically motivating to work creatively with what is available to you...

I enjoyed the premise of this film but I was sort of dreading this thing that it seems mainline animated Disney movies all do, where they strip away the fantasy for the sake of a well-meaning and even evocative, but painfully artless, statement on the human condition and life and love and so on.

A weird aside:

I received a book of psalms and something-elses from a stranger on the street the other day and I flipped through its pages and I noticed the same sort of rug pull happening in that text: here is a scenario, here is a message, and the scenario no longer matters. It was an empty vessel.

Quote11 "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for[a] a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

link

Encanto followed this basic structure but more beautifully and for 1 1/2 hours rather than three or four lines of simple text:

It sets up a relatable character with a relatable problem, and spins a beautiful fantastic tale. The fantasy-world is built on soft and flexible logic; when the problem is resolved it does not follow from the logic of the world, but from something about the human experience. We return to the soft and flexible logic, to tie up loose ends in a way that seems true to the message.

I'd like to revisit this through the lens of patterns but it's Christmas Eve and I want to get to sleep early and wake up at a good time and hang out with the family :)

(The tone I use above is judgemental because I found the film's fantasy to be a bit flat. But... I think it's interesting to observe patterns like this; I'd like to understand what it accomplishes and how to recreate it. I'd like to understand better what it is that made it not sing for me. And I did like a lot about the movie. There was just... something...)

When I don't feel like what I'm doing is crucial and possible, I quickly disconnect from it.  I'm learning to see things as parts of a whole now, and even value pastimes as a way to keep my mind steady -- to take up time in a pleasant and relaxing way so that when my current blocker moves on (e.g. my mental reserves are depleted, or I'm waiting for water to boil, or whatever else) I can return to the same Most Important Thing In The World.

I need a new word for this, so I'll call it a Monofocus: a venue or target to satisfy my need to be monopresent (as opposed to multipresent). Monopresence is just a state of mind, but it's foolish to think that all that is required is mental willpower; valuable factors create the conditions for states of mind to thrive.

Maybe I'll call it a 'pattern.'

~~~

Monofocus

P: I require a certain amount of monopresence in my life, but my focus is easily shifted to something that seems more important than what I'm focused on right now.

S: Consciously commit to a monofocus, something that is easy to perceive as The Most Important Thing In The World for a certain period of time (not forever).
 - When I don't have an opportunity to focus on it, I should reject new foci to an extent that is reasonable. (What is reasonable?)
 - When I have an opportunity to focus on it, I should be able to focus on it. (i.e. It must be actionable/available to me.)
 - It can't take over my life... (This one is hard)

~~~

To fit the structure of a pattern I would like the monofocus to be more empirically defined, but for now this will do.

Small bowl
Melt 42g butter

Small-medium bowl
300g milk (1 1/4 cups)
1 egg, beat

Large bowl (dry)
180g flour
1/2 tsp salt
1+ tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp white sugar

- Sift dry ingredients TWICE! (I just scoop it out of the bowl into a sieve held above the bowl. Don't need to get every particle.)
- Add milk, eggs, butter.
- Mix thoroughly

Heat/butter cast iron
Cook pancakes. Don't press down: let them fluff.

Heat! On "MAX" until butter is hot, then stick at around "2" the rest of the time, once the pan is hot enough. Cook the first pancake 2 min on one side, 1 min on other side. The rest should be 1 min on each side.

Adding batter! Add butter (it will sizzle and spit -- that's life). Spoon a big lump in. Shake the pan to spread it out as much as it will go.

Cooking navy beans today:
1 lb beans
4 cups water
1 tsp olive oil
30 mins pressure cook, natural release.

Will report back.

I've never finished a Pokemon game before. At the end of the credits there's a little shot of your character going into their house, then title. If you start the game, picking up where you left off (for the new game+ content), you start in your house. I like it, it's a nice closed loop. How cute.

I'm told this is what all these games do, but it's still cute. I'm done with this game.

"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.

She was very patient and reasonable with me through my hemming and hawing.

I would like to remind myself that when I do this I'm not intentionally playing Devil's Advocate (as someone once put it, "the devil doesn't need more advocates") or taking a contraposition for the sake of argument or discussion or exploration... I just don't have a good habit of knowing what to do with myself when I don't have an opinion but feel like I should have one. In these cases I just default to planting myself somewhere that will tease more details out of my conversational partner, maybe as a strategy for pushing myself to figure out where I do stand.

But I don't need to work towards having an opinion about everything. Maybe I can just plainly state when I do not have an opinion, and that I'm not interested in developing one right now, and when that means the topic at hand is not one I can presently engage with as a result.

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.

Mer says it's like a "frame inside which you can be free." I agree.

The goal -
High freedom and impact
Low responsibility