Like The One-Straw Revolution, The Art of War functions as a handbook containing a significant amount of practical and specific information regarding a particular discipline and its scenarios and features.

It is very easy to read them as poetic or metaphorical according to the vagueness of their wording. I make no claim about how they ought to be received, but see how this may be read either as precise advice applicable to a narrow domain, or generically interpretable advice applicable to a broad one:

QuoteIf desirous of attacking an army; of besieging a fortress; or of killing a certain person; first of all, learn the names of the general in charge; of his right-hand men; of those who introduce visitors to the Presence; of the gate keeper and the entries. Then set the spies to watch them.

(The Employment of Spies, p99)

QuoteOpen ground is that where either side has liberty of movement: be quick to occupy any high ground in the neighbourhood and consider well the line of supplies.

(Ground, p68)

~ linked from my close reading of The Art of War

in general, there are a few things i've taken away from this book... that are not specifically about the thought that sparked my desire to read it in the first place. i'll have to return to that thought and examine it through the lens of the art of war. this stuff, though, is good to hold onto.

QuoteNow the object of war is victory; not lengthy operations, even skilfully[sic] conducted.

The good general is the lord of the people's lives, the guardian of the country's welfare.

I quoted this to jack today when speaking of my (personal) response to Snow Game, in particular I think I thought of the idea of victory, as well as thinking of "people's lives" and "the country's welfare." Silly things, maybe, for a game designer to be concerned with.

Here, though, I wish to focus somewhat on "victory; not lengthy operations" -- of course, part of this is my ADHD speaking, but this appeals to me a great deal, and it is a theme returned to time & again throughout the book. To have a goal, to pursue it without wasting time. And in particular to have a '''real''' goal.

Sun Tzu speaks earlier of "The virtue of the prince" and here (already quoted) of "people's lives" and "the country's welfare." They are not given an explicit link, but I believe they both speak to having a legitimate purpose behind one's actions. Victory is not a simple matter of stating and achieving goals, victory involves achieving something meaningful. Virtuous.

Of course, we are speaking of war, here. I'll get more into that later.

i've read through the whole book (the main actual book, The Art of War, not the bonus post-book, Sayings by Wu) and am now reflecting back.

first of all, i skipped the introduction by tom butler-bowdon. who needs a preface these days. not me!

Oh, yes. Back to Snow Game. I apologize to the artist. My judgement of Snow Game has very little to do with the contents or the medium, and much more to do with my interpretation of your relationship to our art form, my projection of my own recent years of dissatisfaction upon you and yours.

I cannot look at Snow Game outside of its context. I can only understand Snow Game as someone who has played a hundred, a thousand, simple games wherein you control an avatar in a world of tiles with the arrow keys on your keyboard. In the past such games were almost always about solving simple puzzles. Then players of these games felt a longing to move on, players as much as makers. Rather than move on, some of them, some of us, moved deeper and struggled to claw what we could into our little hole.

I suppose that my feeling is that this is a niche within a niche. A very low local maxima.

Returns diminish.

Jack sent Snow Game to the letterclub crew, and so I played it.

Some weeks ago I happened to check out increpare's... twitter? cohost? I'm not sure, it was on some feed-based medium. I saw that increpare was making a lot of puzzle games, to a similar or greater degree of prolificiency (prolificness?) as me. And, playing them, I noted: This is a lot of puzzle games.

Something I noted about myself is that after about, I don't know, five or ten daily platformers, I get tired of making platformers, and I want to do something else with it. But then, I do something else with it, and I think: Ah, this isn't really as good as making a platformer the right way. Whatever that means.

So, when I played Snow Game, I thought... this is that type of creative work. A quivering. A vibration along a straight line to nowhere.

A certain idea from game poems comes to mind. My summary of one thing that the book identifies as interesting to the author -- and to be clear about my own position, I do not like it -- is that the game poet plays with the extant language of videogames in order to do something with it. Magnuson writes "Videogames have established visual and auditory vernaculars that are ripe for poetic intervention" and I think I can see increpare here at that same sort of "play."

To me, it is not play. It is struggle, it is pain, it is disappointment.

I wish now that I could say I have lost interest in the language of videogames and therefore lost interest in such intervention, such struggle, such play. But I am in too deep. I have spent decades playing and making games. I know too much to leave it all behind. At the same time, I do not think I am interested in playing with games. To play requires a mutual respect, a willingness to cooperate on some level, a certain collaborative spirit.

No, my relationship to games is becoming something altogether different. So I am not a good collaborator. There are other relationships one can productively have with a thing.

See: The Art of War

It is not enough to refuse to make or consume boring art. We must go to war with it.

i could not explain the direct link but i came to the conclusion immediately after reading sylviefluff's "Because My Heart Is Illegible"

reading announced here i guess: https://x.com/droqen/status/1792965930001002595

QuoteWhat would happen if we, collectively, refused to make or consume any more "boring art"? If we agreed to escape the ouroboros together by opening our eyes to all the things we've refused to see until now — the stories we've been robbed of, the player types we refuse to look for, the range of non-violent experiences and mechanics games could be exploring, all the new people and perspectives we could have in the hobby if we didn't put up barriers to their entry, the critical voices that could light up the landscape if we dared to stray from the predictable and the expected?

There's a whole world of possibility out there for us. What if we've only just scratched the surface?

Kat's proposed solution is collective action against boring art. It's not easy. It's not easy to call for something like that. It's not easy to have the faith to go for it, either. I am slowly understanding that my own solution, the only one that makes sense, is just to do what makes sense to me, and to in. But it can be painful, inviting others down a blind alley. What lies at the end? If I get hurt, it's just me. If you get hurt because you followed me down here, how responsible am I? What if I didn't even ask you to come along, I just said I was going to do it and you happened to come too?

I want to go beneath the surface, and I will keep going beneath the surface, and I don't want to put you at risk. But I see no other option, I guess, than to do something wrong, and to try my best not to hide it.

If I go under and never come back up, I want someone to be there at least to note my disappearance.

QuoteGamers, developers, critics, fans, creators — we're all just stuck on repeat, trapped in a rut we can't even see.

Oh no, I hope this has a good ending. But thank you for reminding me.

QuoteIn the games video essayist scene, one of the most common complaints you'll hear is creators saying they feel pressured to only create the same type of content lest they deviate from their channel's brand and alienate the part of their audience that wants to be fed the same type of content over and over.

Quote from: SocraTetrisI tried very hard to achieve peak relatability, to pass as just another white guy on the internet talking about games. And it worked.

QuotePart 5: This Is Not Game Maker's Toolkit

I did not expect to get emotional from reading this but here I am.

It's funny that this was said earlier, I thought it was like, a pithy poke-fun. I quoted it. But now to see it repeated as an actual title of an entire section.

QuoteI'm not interested in telling anyone to shut up and go away, but I do think that it's on all of us to ask ourselves why the games video essay Youtube scene is so overwhelmingly white and male.

There is a part of this quote that makes me feel as though I should shut up and go away. I am white-ish and male, the only demographic, uh, targeted here. Although I have no real attachment to that identity, it is attached to me. That's not what I got emotional about though. Actually, I got emotional about this recognition that I've been feeling for years like I should shut up and go away, for one reason or another. On one hand, I am white(-ish) and male. But on the other, I also feel like I make bullshit games. I'd rather make a little pixel art scene that you look at than I would a little arcade game, but somehow the arcade game always wins out in the arena of my mind of what I ought to make.

The other day I told a friend of mine that I wanted to write a story, and that friend said, yeah, but the thing people actually liked and bought of yours was Starseed Pilgrim.

The ouroboros strikes again.