I have been thinking about business cards recently, and my website. Who am i? What is it that i do, or aspire to do? Rather than a title, i think it is a verb or an aspiration that I'm more comfortable standing by, and this is the pseudopoetic phrase i have in mind:


Now, I'd like each line to stand on its own- the second line is beautiful, but the first is obviously a hanging fragment in want of a conclusion...

Maybe that's ok? Anyway I'm much happier with the second line, and i hope to find a whole i like as much.

"Making all the world
Systems playable"

Hmm...

"All systems playable"...

Quote from: 4:25. . . you'd like to have your hands on it.
So you start out building a trap to catch this thing. I don't care what kind of artist you are, painter, sculptor, speaker. Hopefully that'll happen to me today.

Quote from: 4:43Yesterday, I felt like I said all the things I'd normally say. What's really fun, when I speak, is when all of a sudden I hear myself saying things I've never said before, and understanding things that I never understood before, as I'm telling you, like I know what I'm talking about.

SYNAPSE ~ Process for intensifying the feeling. "What is the feeling?"

OTHER GAMES-
* Frogger
* Probability 0
* DYAD?
* Counterclockwise (originally found on 16x16 dot org but site is defunct, archive.org link here)
* N, N+, N++
* many bullet hell games (not a genre i love personally, perhaps because the pattern is too interested in the player and not interested enough in itself? not sure)

DESIGN NOTE-
Some games (Superflight is one of them) give a reward for close calls, encouraging a risk-reward style of gameplay. I think this explicit extrinsic reward of close calls is a very bad thing to do; close calls are inherently exciting but as with everything it's better when that feel-reward is allowed to remain intrinsic rather than being overridden by the extrinsic. (I enjoy Superflight, and close calls in Superflight, significantly more with the score display toggled off/hidden.)

I've made a secret gameplay demo that really excites me along these lines, but I won't go into great detail yet.

The common version of this feeling is given by bullet hell games and games like... Geometry Wars, Vampire Survivor, things like that. There is a shifting mass of things which you are trying to avoid, and so you move to try and avoid them.

See also games with interesting movement mechanics and momentum, e.g. Superflight, where the obstacles are static but your movement produces a living, shifting relationship to that static obstacle-space.

P.P.P.S. A great low-key example that I didn't fit into the above description is the iconic dilemma between a bunch of people deciding what to get together for lunch. It's best when exactly one person takes initiative and proposes an idea, and everyone else agrees to it.

Also I need to test my math at some point, is the best success rate for 10 disorganized players really 10%?
Is there a better individual strategy for such a group than 'choose to lead 10% of the time, choose to agree 90% of the time'?

P.S. Any kind of hierarchy/leadership/whatever solution to this game only works if the group maintains a good strategic consensus - and I'm not advocating for any kind of dictatorship here, you can have a 100% success rate in a group where the 'shot-caller' is constantly changing as long as everyone agrees who it is for any given decision!

It's as important for that one person to propose an idea every time as it is for everyone else to agree every time; this is something that I didn't quite get, I found it easier to assume that agreeing was a net good. It is only a net good to be 100% agreeable if there is someone else who is proposing an idea (i.e. "taking responsibility/initiative").

P.P.S. Some factors noticeably not covered in this simple game:
 * In a group of 10 people you definitely prefer the best of 10 ideas rather than 1 random idea from 1 random person. For simplicity's sake I am not considering idea quality, only group consensus.
 * I am only considering group utility - I think this is a good way to think about things, but there is a Prisoner's Dilemma-like factor to take into account when individuals value having their idea chosen rather than someone else's.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a well-known game theory 'game':

Two prisoners (players) are each given the option to stay silent, or snitch on the other.
If they both stay silent, they both get 1 year in prison.
If they both snitch, they both get 5 years.
In one snitches and the other stays silent, the snitch gets off scot-free and the loyal silent one gets all 10 years.

I've been thinking of simple alternative 'payoff square'; it started while observing cars at an intersection:

Two cars (players) are each given the option to accelerate through the intersection, or slow down and wait for the other.
If they both wait, they both lose a few seconds of time. (and then they have to play another round.)
If they both accelerate, they crash and both lose hours of time to insurance, repairs, costs, and whatnot.
If one accelerates and the other slows, the fast car loses nothing, and the slower car loses a few seconds of time.

What does this look like in an environment where two (or more) collaborators have to come to an agreement together?

Two collaborators (players) are each given the option to agree with the other and support their idea, or commit to proposing their own idea.
If they both agree, they both lose some time because no idea was proposed for them to agree with. (And play again.)
If they both propose their own idea, they both lose some time because there was no consensus. (And play again.)
If one proposes an idea and the other agrees, they have come to a decision.

Obviously this is a really stripped down and silly version of how agreements are formed, but so are the prisoner's dilemma and the cars-at-an-intersection dilemma stripped down and silly versions of those real-world examples. The interesting thing here is that it describes a dynamic which gives rise to hierarchies: I've understood on an intuitive level for some time that it's useful for someone to take responsibility for a thing, to take charge, but this game makes it more clear to me exactly why that is.

~

Aside: It's easier for smaller groups with no explicit leader (or, let us say, shot-caller) because the probability shakes out better: playing this game with two players, there's a 50% chance in every randomly played round that we will come to a consensus. With three players, a 33% chance. (Or: 2 players have a 1/2 chance, 3 players have a 1/3 chance, etc.)
Also, with smaller groups, the rounds go faster, but that's not an interesting new observation: everybody knows that already.

There's no winning strategy for this game at the level of individual players. If everyone does the same thing as everyone else, the winning chance cannot get any better than those probabilities given above. The only way to develop a better winning strategy (and one is clearly available) is through communication -- and asymmetry.

~ SYNAPSE I don't make art to make people happy, I make it to provoke epiphanies.

~ Art is Life-Changing, and that's not an obsession with the end result, there's something in there that is what I like about design at all. My favourite thing to design, to think about designing, is how to help someone (finally) understand something huge and overwhelming. Although I prefer when it's about a 'real' thing that's the feeling I'm targeting, because it's the thing I think about most myself -- those moments in life when I look back at an experience and think, "This changed me."

Now that is the design puzzle I want to tackle.

In Get Over Yourself, McWilliams says: ~ "If you do it right, everybody likes the same stuff in games. They want an immersive experience that makes them feel like they did something special and they're unique and special and they develop skill while doing it."

-an immersive experience
-do something special
-feel that you're unique and special
-you develop skill while doing it

I felt a dissatisfaction with this short list, though I recognize it certainly has an appeal. The important thing is that when I think about processes that bring me joy in design, an 'immersive you're-so-special you're-improving' feeling isn't what I like to think about.

...

There are no normal people.

There are only people.

And we are of them.

I'll end by saying I watched this talk because it was linked to me by Momin Khan -- not via Twitter, but I've linked his enthusiastic retweet here since the original recommendation was done in a private work Slack, and this one is more enthusiastic and has more commentary about how he feels about it :)

I love that his takeaway is that it's about loving the craft of gamedev. Maybe the tone wasn't for me, I didn't need McWilliams to counter all these awful internet and workplace arguments I never wanted unearthed in the first place, but I expect somewhat that the talk is for an audience other than me. That is, it's a talk written for someone else, and for these people, the talk correctly addresses many familiar prejudices and frustrations.

I'm not at an objective place when it comes to designing or giving talks, but I like to think I'm getting there with game design.

Even still, I think the more important thing is the common feeling. Not marketing, not audiences... I don't know, I can't get over the feeling, not the one she's talking about, but a different feeling. I suppose the feeling could merely be a more deeply crenellated version of the position she's attacking; I think it is more worthwhile to develop one's sense of the universal craft of games, rather than to practice a divided craft, for limited audiences. But in many ways this 'universal' sense is simply aligned with what I want to... play, or see, in the world.

Is this something I will ever get over? I guess time will tell.

But I'll remind myself, here at the end, that the first splinter in my brain was McWilliams' insistence that we are not normal people. I hate that idea, the idea of identifying myself as separate.