Regarding "Empathy as play, and vice versa", in particular "I seek out a game designed by its player - by someone who is enthusiastic about the idea of playing the game"... I want to relate to a game by its players, and in the case of an indie game, I want to relate to a game by its designer-as-player. If a game isn't replayable, it means the designer has long since ceased being its player...

QuoteI act on impulse most of the time, and otherwise do what I can to design a life that rewards my impulses with beautiful outcomes. I think designing games is like that: designing little spaces that reward my avatar's impulses with beautiful outcomes. Only, when I make a game I can share the experience with you; you can inhabit the same space, embody the same avatar, perhaps act on the same impulses, and – if serendipity allows – behold the same beautiful outcomes.

Through making and playing with games and other art, I hope to come to some deeper understanding of not the science of my brain, but the experience and meaning of being some specific person.

link

I want to design games that I like to play, because that's the way I like to connect with games -- for the most part I like to imagine "how was this meant to be played?" like an archaeologist unearthing a mysterious artifact and pondering its purpose.

Why make games? Make games because you love to play them, first and foremost.

To play is to empathize with other players. This is what I like about the art form, and about indies, and perhaps what I once loved about roguelikes and roguelites: they felt like mysterious "entertainment engines for one". And sometimes, I could make that two.

Quote[..] all our overlapping definitions of a game – a challenging or competitive passtime, a voluntary system of rules, win states, fail states, edge cases, learning curves, agon, ludus, product [..]

[The videogame is] not always ludic; it's not always narrative; it's often neither. It means something close to "digital entertainment product for one or more people that may or may not contain some interative systems".

link

Quote from: Electron Dance newsletter, 2021 Sep 24I'm genuinely interested in how Electron Dance readers personally understand the word "game" and how they classify what they consider "non-game". So let's agree to a short amnesty. Nobody gets to call out anybody for spilling their private definitions of game in the comments. Let there be no shame in the comments today, provided no one uses the word "roguelike".

QuoteI want to be placed into seemingly impossible situations and feel the spirit of the dev cheekily suggesting "what, you can't do this?"

Lulie's How To Argue claims that "meta drives arguments into black holes":

Quote1. Meta is off-topic.
2. Meta breeds meta.
• You can't contradict a meta statement without making another meta statement.
3. Meta engages emotions.
• Popper wants our ideas to die in our place. Meta wants to substitute us for our ideas, and less[sic] us die instead of them.
• Meta changes the focus from the substance of what's being argued to attributes of the speaker or the nature of the discussion.

What if we looked at this through the lens of "Play requires acceptance"? If we think about "arguing" as a form of play and synecdochally apply Lulie's advice on avoiding meta to the entire realm of playing?

Quote1. Meta is off-topic.

When engaged in play, going 'meta', that is, asking how the playing could be different, we are no longer playing. (I need to dedicate more time to this argument.)

Quote2. Meta breeds meta.
• You can't contradict a meta statement without making another meta statement.

Once engaged in a question beyond the play, the value of the play itself is damaged. Why play anymore, now that the rules are questioned? (Magic circle.)

Quote3. Meta engages emotions.
• Popper wants our ideas to die in our place. Meta wants to substitute us for our ideas, and less[sic] us die instead of them.
• Meta changes the focus from the substance of what's being argued to attributes of the speaker or the nature of the discussion.

'Meta engages emotions' is a weird downside: what about arguments about emotion? Arguments about how you feel when doing something, when thinking about something, and what that means. Of course these arguments must necessarily engage emotions! The other points are clearer and easier to discuss, without the loaded implication that engaging emotions is bad.

"Popper wants our ideas to die in our place." (Need to read more about Popper.)

Meta allows us to discredit the limitations which Ian Bogost proposes are necessary for play (need link).

Meta changes the focus from the substance of what's being played (limitations).

This barely hangs together in writing. Anyway, I'm not trying to break things down point-by-point to present an argument yet, this is just initial thoughtbreeding. Where to from here?

References
- Recognizing Play (jack, letterclub.games)
- "How does this want to be played?" (zeigfried, quote)
- Play Anything (bogost)

Zeigfried proposed this lens. I like it. It makes me think of art as something which intentionally challenges you to enjoy it.

Rather than ask how it could be different, the question "How does this want to be played?" provides an inroad to play.

Maybe it's not the best idea to have a place to record and dwell upon my disagreements... I need to focus on arriving at a better place, and then communicating it clearly (for my future self, as well as to be a stronger communicator generally)

Quote from: The Monstre King1) RPS - you make a choice, opponent makes another choice. To make a good game, you have to give different weighs to the choices (and usually have multiple choices at the same time). this only takes into account other players
2) Puzzle - every interaction with an AI is either a puzzle or the next one - figure out what works here, what you have to do, what's the pattern etc. a simulation of 1) in many cases
3) Random - unpredictable by any player. while my quote is very cruel to randomness, i'm generally fine with random-but-balanced SITUATIONS for pvp (a symmetrical procgen level), a bit less difficult with the "-but-balanced" part for PVE

Quote from: droqenso these are the rules of all the ways that someone's relationship to winning/losing exists?

1) RPS - predicting another human to win
2) Puzzle - solving for a systemic solution to win
3) Random - hoping the numbers give you the win

Zara (Guilherme Stutz Töws) linked this tweet in paradise and I immediately latched onto the fact that there's a "Platformer Design" tab (directly linked in big link above). I have designed platformers for like my whole life, and I like getting mad at people's attempts to codify something that I never properly learned, but have developed an intuitive taste for. Fun for everyone!

I browsed through some of the posts prior to having this forum-y outlet. I may never continue this thread but I wanted to have it ready in case I do browse through again & find anything that interests, or more likely incenses, me.

QuoteThis is the main screen. So, you can see I'm just going into speedrun mode: there's no point paying attention to the text because no-one can read videogame text anyway; it's not actually text, it's like a texture. You have to read every sentence in a videogame three times before you're able to parse it as human language.

[A massive block of text appears on-screen.]
Case in point. You see this, and the first thing you say is, "Do I need to read this? Is it just like flavour text or a tooltip or something?"
And then you're like "*sigh* Uh, okay, I guess I gotta read, so I gotta just scan it and see like, Uh, Hotel, Test card, World, Hotels, Hotels, Hotels, Hotels,"

And then, if you can't figure out what it's meant to be saying from that, you have to set your mind down to reconstruct it as actual language.
But that's a worst-case scenario [which] generally, videogame 'best practices' try and avoid.

"Nobody reads the text in videogames!" said thecatamites (find talk/timestamp) link

text as texture.

I want plausible deniability, accidental reading, nonlinear exposure to writing, permission to miss and ignore details. text that goes by too quickly to be caught (enter the void credits sequence).