The language which I used for describing Inconsiderate Climbers was very . . . mechanical, as is the way of many videogame genres. I didn't say it was about the feeling of cohabitation, no, I described it in relation to cooperative and competitive games. "You're not allies or enemies," I wrote, in effect saying 'You're not playing a cooperative or competitive game'. You're "individuals with conflicting goals."

How I described it is a reflection of how I felt about it. I thought that was the best way to describe it. Thinking about this now I'd like to look at it through the lens of feeling. How did it feel?

I did dabble with a game which was literally about cohabitation before arriving at Inconsiderate Climbers' present-day design. That is, it tried to simulate cohabitation. By the time I had moved away from the literal simulation I thought I had, also, to give up the feeling of it. I was wrong.

. . . Its original name was "Different Towers." I liked that name. I wonder if it had deeper feeling.

This is a big weird target. Thinking about SCP stories that revolve around knowledge and memory, or SOMA that resolves around identity I suppose? What if everything you know is wrong?

Rather than the elaborate smooth unfolding and structure-preserving transformations of The Nature of Order, what if it was as simple as growth? I was on the lookout for a shorthand and growth seemed to fit exactly what these processes entail . . .

Except, I suppose, for simplification, and the void . . . these two transformations are not well captured by the verb 'to grow'. Yet neither are they particularly well captured by 'unfolding' or 'structure-preserving transformation'. What word could be better?

Originally 'Ideas' was a top-level board, until reading Deep Feeling. It became almost immediately obvious to me that the value of game ideas was not as descriptions of form but as descriptions of feeling. Vessels for feeling. That is, almost nothing about the game idea's form is sacred: not mechanics, not technology, nothing.

I have always been interested in hearing game ideas, and interested in having them. Icebergvanias, Reverse Metroidvanias, all kinds of wonderful high-concept... er, concepts. Slowly over years I came to feel more and more negatively about them because of how easy it is to describe impossible design fictions.

Today I was thinking I'd like to work on something, something, something. Make something new. Start on something, start thinking about something. So I looked at the Ideas forum for inspiration, and I realized I needed a new forum of a larger shape: the now created, but empty, Vessels & Memories & Deep Feelings board. Ideas then belong inside, as a subcategory.

Ideas are vessels for some deeper feeling.

Games are also vessels for some deeper feeling.

They are all vessels.

~ The Nature of Order, Book Two: Chapter Fourteen: Deep Feeling, linked above

listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PLTX9iFOKQ
remember: https://jamschutz.itch.io/land-of-forgotten-souls
consider: "land of forgotten souls"

As I was throwing away years and years of memories ("memories", memorabilia of my life, paraphernalia of the past, nothing I have any attachment to as my present-day self) it occurred to me that that twinge of sadness I had often felt before, when giving up things I thought of as 'part of my self,' was weaker than ever. It was there, but I let go of those things almost effortlessly. Almost.

What does it mean to consider a thing part of your self? When a person drives a car and gets into a collision even if they themselves were not hurt they may say "You hit me." Me. Is it more than just a semantic trick? Do we accept our tools into our sense of self, does it become harder to let go of things once we have let them in? When I play awake I am the eleven-eyed thing. Even when I cannot see myself I am me.

So then what happens to me when I die? When I stop playing awake I let go of that eleven-eyed facet of my self. What happens when I stop owning my body? It is supposed that the brain is the source of consciousness, of sentience, and if that is the case, if I am born locked into my own skull, then it would be foolish to dissociate from my brain. But what if the brain is merely a tool too? My body an avatar?

Writing on a whiteboard, I can even think somewhat differently than I can without it. What if that is all the brain is? An elaborate, beautiful whiteboard. A calculator. A hook into sensory organs. What if without the brain I am still me? What if without the body I am still me?

Think of the self as something other than the body, other than the brain. Think of the body and the brain as a vessel. A powerful, wonderful, beautiful vessel.

What then would a picture of the self look like?

Based on some things I've been exploring lately, I was struck by the oddest urge: to play and analyze Braid.
-Reading Jesper Juul's "Handmade Pixels"
-Reading a few of Jonathan Blow's quotes from a few different places
-Other notes and perhaps more detailed context to come

The questions running through my mind

1. What is Braid about?

2. What did Jonathan Blow want to communicate through Braid? That is . . .
   2a. What kind of "connection" was he looking for?
   2b. What did he think was "special" about it that "not many people understood"?
I hope to come to my own understanding of what ran behind these quotes of his.

3. Why is it a game, and does its nature as a game undermine its message? In particular, does its nature as a game undermine its message in a way that is broadly applicable to games with messages?

Rather than competitive or cooperative games, games where the goal is to come to an agreement about something that is hard to agree on. Everyone has to come to a consensus -- if you can do that, then everybody wins.

P.S. Consensus decision-making is at the heart of consensus games, but the form described by Mutual Aid.

'We do not get to consent to the conditions we live under. . . . We are told we live in a system of "majority rule," yet . . . the decisions [our] leaders make do not benefit the majority of people. The opposite of this approach is to make decisions together, caring about every person's consent.' (Mutual Aid, p75-76)

<<. . . absent of any problems to be solved, players are forced to invent their own problems. [Some examples from spelltower are] "Can I spell a 6 letter word?" or "Can I spell a word with a Q in it?" . . . answering any of these questions will teach you things that make you better at SpellTower. . . . they're a self-guided tour into the exact areas of the system that matter.>> --Zach Gage's "Designing for Problem-Solvers" http://stfj.net/DesigningForProblem-Solvers/, emphasis in original text

I don't have a quote for this, but in The Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander defines centers and in particular latent centers (Book 1) and describes 'living process' (Book 2), a process by which a thing is created by looking at a space and noticing latent centers (in games, in Gage's language, the problems which players invent when forced to invent their own problems, are latent centers) and strengthening them.

This is actually, legitimately, the heart of the process of finding a game design of this form. I remember watching Zach give this talk (just a recording, alas I did not see him perform it in person) and thinking 1. awesome, and 2. wait but how?

Gage does not say how to get there, but Alexander does.

I've been looking for a name for the kind of tabletop roleplaying game that I like to do, that I aspire to play, and I think that name might be "Talking games". The point of these games is to talk. A conversation . . . is a form of talking game, or possibly the output of a talking game, but either way they are deeply related. Going on a walk can be a talking game. But also, a lot of tabletop roleplaying games have components of 'talking game' in them. Those are the parts that I like. I even like talking about the numbers and the rules sometimes, but I lose interest quickly because it's obvious that the play is not about the talking anymore, the talking is instrumental in nature, the talking is about conveying ideas, and the talking is not really the play, the ideas are. The game is about the ideas, and the talking is just ordinary talking.

The point of talking games is not to talk ordinarily, but to play-talk, to play a game where talking is the thing, or something like that. I'll have to come back and see what I think about this in a week or so.

I read a book when I was a kid about how to play all sorts of games with marbles. Most of them involved drawing lines in dirt, even carving troughs or holes which the marbles would physically encounter. Well, I didn't have dirt, I never played the games, I felt disconnected from that ability to change my environment...

I had blocks and things like that. But I never had dirt. I'd love to dig up that book and dig up some dirt and play some marbles games.

reserved for intro

A game where you play as a generic NPC or enemy without the power to leave your screen: you're trapped in a loop, waiting for the player to arrive. However, in this world your powers come from what you carry, and you can steal what others carry... When the player arrives, you can steal the power to move between screens. Once you have this power you become, to some degree, "the player," where you were not before.

Something like that.

Had this idea a very very long time ago. I'm not sure what it's all about, but it's still appealing to me.

First you choose a race and then a starting point in some kind of seedy citylike place, where your equipment is wholly insufficient... Combat at first attempt seems to unfold in a linear, predictable fashion, with frustratingly little wiggle room. You do a flat 7 damage, the enemy gets you back for their flat 5 damage. It seems inevitable and unavoidable but surely there is a trick to it? Otherwise the game is impossible.

I did not dream of a solution, but saw others' experiences as other races (something more mushroom-forest-spirit-like) as runaway adjective collecting things; they were glowing, small or giant, etc. They must have gotten further than I had, or perhaps that was just the starting complexity of their characters?

New connections:
the starkness of Cholo (1986/1987)
the linearly unfolding depth of Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, etc

A comic that you view one page at a time, and each page is somewhat interactive. Changing details on one page will carry over to future pages. (Especially small details, like the butterfly art should have carried over in Florence.)

Turn forward and back, changing little details, to uncover branches.

Regarding Blinkworks'
"Indie Game: The Movie"

I used to post on social media and write blog posts a lot, and I've almost completely stopped now. I use this newforum often, though. A few internet-friends wrote up their 'games of the year 2022' and more than once I started writing a 'books of the year 2022' post, and even my own 'games of the year 2022' (I had a few genuinely wonderful experiences last year, as much as I have been down on 'games' and it was nice to realize that), but it never seemed like something worth finishing, or maybe not worth finishing in that format.

These events and experiences, all the things that occur in life, I want to relive them, remember them. They are etched in there. But I know that it's possible to fail to express an idea. I want to be able to tell not a story but the perfect story, express something in the perfect way, in a way that respects the importance of everything that is being told. Maybe this is my perfectionist agenda in action. I don't mind if it is. I'll embrace it.