I don't remember, anymore, where I wrote this -- it was probably handwritten in noteshelf somewhere now buried.
The place I would like to go . . . abstract pixel art appeals to me, I often place a player character on these screens as a center. But what would happen if I were to remove the player? Does the player character avatar draw too much focus?

Creatures, Earthtongue, Dwarf Fortress . . .

In these games the player has agency which is something that I shall call "nonrepresentational" -- it does not represent any force in the world, is not channeled through an avatar, cannot be ascribed. I suppose another way of saying this is "nondiegetic player". I like that.

P. 312
Centers which have life increase our own life because we ourselves are centers too. . . . we, like other centers, are intensified by them.

//

Chapter seven ends with this long piece concluding in the revelation that the fifteen properties apply to us -- that because centers and properties are about life and are applied to nature that we can apply these properties, and this idea of centers, to ourselves. So far . . . I get it, I love it. I am a center. All the things that Alexander says about centers, which I immediately felt applied to a great number of things, as a deeply powerful abstract concept, have intuitively applied to my thinking about the self, about consciousness, about life, about art, about many things.

But I'm glad that he says it here outright.

I really enjoy placing objects freely on a blank canvas. Many games let you do this, but many more do not. The feeling is great. Think about planting a seed in Starseed Pilgrim, placing that first object in Wilmot's Warehouse, or playing a stone in Go somewhere not near the opposing colour, just out in the open. A Center in the Void.

I like level design because I get to do this. The question arises: Do I make a game that allows players to do this, or do I make a game that allows its designer(s) (me?(and who else?)) to do this?

A game that involves two distinct phases - first, spending a player-driven amount of time 'setting up'. Second, spending a roughly equal time 'cashing out'.

Thinking about this as a tool for practicing real-life resource and time management. . .

People wanted a pause button in Starseed Pilgrim, and they wanted one for Dark Souls, too. Should I or Dark Souls have capitulated?

When making 31 unmarked games, I gave each game a base of 3-4 hours of time. At the 2-hour mark I made this pivot: to stop 'setting up' and experimenting, so I'd have enough time to 'cash in' and polish/finish the design and everything else that needed finishing.

Time management.

rules can be helpful as long as you set them yourself is such a vibe for my theories on how I experience and how I want others to experience play.

ch. 5, under Create your own rules: Building a fit and fabric guide

You already know I am not a fan of fashion rules ... But I do believe rules can be helpful--as long as you set them yourself.

ch.5, under ARE YOU UNCOMFORTABLE OR JUST OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE?

... confidence levels vary on a day-to-day basis, and so one way to reduce the chance of low confidence distorting your perception of a new piece is to simply complete your style experiment on days when you are already in a good mood. Don't go faux shopping if you're not feeling well, you're stressed, or you're exhausted. Instead, pick a day when you can relax, after you have gotten a good night's sleep ... Make sure you feel good before you hit the shops. An overall positive attitude is going to make it much easier to not let those nagging ... voices get in the way ...

A second way to distinguish between being out of your comfort zone and simply not liking a piece is to trick your confidence center into shutting down ... "if a fairy godmother gave me total confidence and zapped all my body hang-ups, would I wear this?" Or, "if I moved to a new city and had the chance to completely reinvent myself, would I wear this?"

//

Apply to any new creative endeavour, when breaking new personal ground.

Ngai opens by describing animatedness as similar to being moved, but quickly advances into the main thrust of her argument which is not about animatedness itself, or its sources or purpose, but the highlighting of animatedness as a racialized cliche... In the same way, the chapter 'envy' discusses in depth the highlighting of envy as a genderized cliche, something more capable of being ascribed to femininity than masculinity. In writing this, I realize that of course Ngai must be most interested in the tone of animatedness, the tone of envy.

One of the examples she gives in this chapter (animatedness) is a series of events from The Invisible Man in which the protagonist observes an activist he admires puppeting a doll, realizing only after falling for the illusion of its animation that the activist is the one animating it. Both men (protagonist and activist) are black, and the doll is a racist caricature of a black man. (Based on some quick internet research, the situation is ambiguous as to whether the activist is puppeting the doll to profit off of racial stereotypes or to parody and destroy them in some way. Or, some combination of both.)

While I understand how this plays with the concepts of 'animatedness' and 'the racialized subject being animated', and there are even better examples given (this one was simply the one I felt I could picture best in my mind and thereby describe), I'm not sure I drew any conclusions from this chapter the way I have drawn them from other chapters. I can understand but I cannot build on top of that understanding.

I am avoiding the term 'relate' because I do not expect to 'relate' directly to racism, but I suppose it is the most appropriate word. I will restate that I cannot relate to anything I understood in this chapter, in not the sense that I have no similar experiences, but I have no similar understandings which might be extended or deepened by acquiring this one. It is an understanding on an island all its own in my mind, and I hope that a neighbour comes to live nearby someday.

Okay. I think that's it.

Hold on, I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to get into the previous chapter first.


P. 91
. . . questions of agency will figure . . . as we focus on one of the most basic ways in which affect becomes socially recognizable in the age of mechanical reproducibility: as a kind of "innervation," "agitation," or (the term I prefer) "animatedness." . . . "animated" seems to imply the most basic or minimal of all affective conditions: that of being, in one way or another, "moved."

//

Ngai writes that after this we shall "see how the seemingly neutral state of "being moved" becomes twisted into the image of the overemotional racialized subject, abetting his or her construction as unusually receptive to external control." There is a lot of argumentation and evidence that goes completely over my head, as much as I savoured the attempt to find a deeper relation to it (that is, a personal understanding of the whole more complete than simply comprehending the ideas presented).

Perhaps one day I will come back to this chapter and it will stick with me.

[pingback: Games As Parties]

I've been reading The Nature of Order and it's really getting me in the mindset of places, and I mean to remind myself that games are not places where life happens, but more akin to the life itself.

I had never thought about the power of bad examples in this way, but I can say that I feel deeply about being a bad example. I have identified with various groups, and I have often felt driven to be . . . this, a bad example. Perhaps too much, actually!

Anyway. On to the next chapter, when I get to it.

In the final pages of the chapter envy, in particular in the final pages under the (compelling, if I may say so) subheader Bad Examples, Ngai describes the power of bad examples and how Single White Female is powerful and useful in this way: exactly for being the bad example which it has been criticized for being.

P. 166
. . . bad examples of X might be good for group X, since they compel its members to constantly question, reevaluate, and even redefine what it is they supposedly exemplify.

P. 166-167
Once a group has fought for and attained a certain degree of political recognition, the demand that its members be "good examples" can easily turn repressive, [. . . taking] the following form: "You, . . . must now exemplfy X as a fixed concept which you merely refer back to or reflect." A corollary of this logic would be the following: "In your failure to adequately exemplify X, you threaten the validity and legitimacy of X, as well as any group formation or collective identity based on X."

P. 164
Freud says envy in fact precedes the establishment of identifications that enable group formation, suggesting that ultimately "social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie" . . . Freud's thesis here is that the identifications on which group formations depend are only secondarily established through a reversal of envy. . . . only after the subject, in the face of cultural disapproval, comes to recognize "the impossibility of maintaining his hostile attitude [envy?] without damaging himself" and is subsequently forced (the verb is Freud's) "into identifying himself with [others]." . . . "..esprit de corps.. does not belie its derivation from what was originally envy"

loss aversion in the age of plenty, i repeated
to myself again. how can an artwork be singular
while replicable artifacts become increasingly ubiquitous?
no contrived scarcity. we must note that
which is genuinely scarce now, and appreciate,
play with it.