* And, having these ideas and chasing them down is some of the most pleasurable and productive and satisfying stuff there is. I say "there is a chance that this idea, or one like it", but what I mean is that any individual such idea has a chance. In aggregate, it is almost guaranteed that when I do get to a good place, the road was paved entirely with chance successes.

I'm playing with tiles (the idea of 'underwater magic', as a result of a yet earlier train of thought not worth recording) and placed these purple ones down and just looked at it for a moment and thought, "hey, maybe moving through a diagonal passageway with a sharp turn like that (indicated by the black arrow) could be fun."

Playing around with making games is absolutely full of moments like this, and documenting every one of them makes the process significantly less free. It's why I can't really stream game development, and why sometimes timers are harmful - it feels like there's a weird sort of pressure to 'only have good ideas' that I don't feel in other contexts.

This is by no means a good idea, but there is a chance that this idea, or one like it, will lead me to a good place. Who knows?

I spent the last few sessions timing myself! I'm going to go back to my day 1-3 casualness and not record so much.

Expressing values through 'systems' --- and NOT about the choices the player makes within the system, but just... presenting a system which draws attention to the concepts relevant to the values. Not prescriptive. Leave room.

Day 8. Value

Today I'm thinking about subjective value structures - what if you're playing an arcade game with multiple scoring systems, connected to individual characters with their own 'Value Systems'?
I have two related problems: 1. Conveyance, and 2. Content.

Problem 1. Conveyance

How do I make it clear why a certain character is giving you points while another is taking them away? The world needs choices subtle enough to make this kind of thing interesting, but... the individuals and elements that make up the world need to be a little trope-y in order for them to be readable at all.

Problem 2. Content

This is a highly abstract idea in my head; it's exploring the high-level concept of "value structures" without actually approaching what those value structures are. This is an idea lacking in content. I'm theoretically fine with creating abstract value structures which do not map to real-world value structures but...

a) It's harder, and

b) it may be less meaningful than referring to such existing structures? This is about having value structures, not what the values are themselves; can non-specificity really be that useful? Thinking about Anna Anthropy's criticism of Gris:

Quotegames whose narratives are metaphors often feel trite and insubstantial [..] using the limited and awkward vocabulary of (especially digital) games to tell a story about Depression or Grief or Mourning, it could feel safer and more appealing to abstract that story. but i think abstraction weakens these themes. [..] Grief is such a Specific experience, and there are so many different kinds. when you abstract (Grief as a whole, not This Specific Grief) you are universalizing the experience, and arriving at something that feels vague and intangible. i want to see Specificity in our stories.

Quote from: p32, end of chapter 1The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism.

[..]

The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories, not to be the source of new ones.

realizing my take will have to be on thecatamites' text as texture, of course. wish me luck :x

As always, I kick it off with Webster's 1913 and a quick internet search for 'art element texture'. Also this one is gonna have to be fast.

Day 7. Texture

DAY 6: SPACE

Wrote these notes when thinking about what to do. Didn't really come to any great conclusions!

"SPACE." and mayybe "spirit"
"To arrange or adjust the spaces in or between"
Space, as one of the classic seven elements of art, refers to the distances or areas around, between, and within components of a piece.
positive/negative. open/closed. a very abstract concept!
A small, insignificant player-character watches the night sky. I want you to be grounded as an individual! but... giving that sense of SPACE...

how do you win?
look at space. dead in space. space space space... lost in space...... cloud exile


-Thought about making a walking-sim scene with a big SPACE background but realized there was not much system/skin there, just presentation, so I knew I'd get stuck if I did.
-Played around with long jump lengths and acceleration. Got a neat bike platformer game out of it.

GAME 6.

pingback: Breaking the Horizon

I like games where you live with an explanation of the game-world as if it is the truth, and then one or more times discover-- perhaps even prove to yourself-- that your explanation, your idea of what is true, was wrong, and then live with a new one.

I described these moments as 'horizon breaks'. They are the peakiest moments emotionally and at a glance it's easy to mistake these moments as the goal in-and-of-themselves.

Quote from: Breaking the Horizonthese are absolutely moments that players REMEMBER. There may be other moments, of course, but anyone who's paying attention to what a game is as they're playing it will remember these moments when suddenly you punch out the floor from beneath them.

Here in the blog post I make the claim that they are the most memorable moments. Maybe so. But they are just turning points, from one coherent world-view to another. Supporting each world-view along the way is hugely important; the emotions of experiencing a Horizon Break are simply a release, a reflection upon the connections one built up in developing the old model that is put in conflict by the horizon break (the "problem").

The thing that is enjoyable about a 'Horizon Break' is identical to the pleasure of resolving a problem in the above sense.

Quote from: Breaking the HorizonBreaking the Horizon is when a player's comprehension of a game is expanded so much that his or her previous understanding has been SHATTERED.

A horizon break is this process:

1. A person holds an existing idea of how the world works.

2. Something (we can call it a 'trick') is presented that conflicts with that existing idea.

A game might do this in order to propel this very important desirable outcome:

3. The person seeks (and finds?) a new explanation that does not have the conflict.

This is what Horizon Break is. I think it is possible to simplify and say that a horizon break is 'subversion!' or a 'surprise!' but I think, even inexpertly imagined and conveyed as it was nine years ago, that the heart of breaking the horizon comes from a strong belief in understanding reality. There is a domain which represents your total understanding of the game, your best fallible explanation -- with the information you are given, you nonetheless develop a model and forge ahead. Then, something comes which 'breaks' the horizon, i.e. which conflicts with your explanation. Defining the horizon ahead of time was a mistake. The horizon does not really have any meaning until it is broken. After this breakage occurs, this problem, you must still believe in understanding reality enough to try and develop a new theory despite the conflict.

There are many games which do not attempt to simulate or present a coherent sort of reality that is worth believing in in the first place, let alone through the beautiful horizon break process.

'Breaking The Horizon' is closely related to the concept of problems described in David Deutsch's 'The Beginning of Infinity':

Quote from: p.16-17 of The Beginning of Infinity[..]if we are simply curious about something, it means that we believe that our existing ideas do not adequately capture or explain it. So, we have some criterion that our best existing explanation fails to meet. The criterion and the existing explanation are conflicting ideas. I shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem.

[..]a conjuring trick is a trick only if it makes us think that something happened that cannot happen.

[Members of the audience] can detect that it is a trick only because of the explanatory theories that they brought with them into the auditorium. Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have the conflict.

Quote from: @GameDevDylanWI want to know that there's a simulation going on, the more complex the better, and I want to participate in that simulation as deeply as possible.
//
Generally spellcasting sims are what interest me the most, but city/village simulators can be pretty interesting too

tweet thread

spellcasting sims are like 'studying science in a fictional magic-themed world'. explaining reality... and then in the case of most games, using good explanations in order to triumph.

game goals/challenges aren't Deutsch's "problems", but may motivate them.