the idea of winning an art award or grant, competing against others before a panel of judges, speaks to me. it feels like a form of competition i could actually get into; that is, it actually aligns with my values.

i don't want to take money and attention from other artists, there's nothing virtuous about that.

but it is a battle that i actually care to win.

games like Hawk Cliff Today, but especially like a polaroid of space, games full of specific memories, specific emotions.

remember his belligerence, remember miscommunication, remember stealing your party's loot, your friend's dessert, away from the assembly in the evening.


remember your moments of being human before they are gone, before you are gone.

the festival! it comes a few times a year like flowers

such festivals! they die a few times a year like flowers

but most of all, most of all, i believe the nail in the coffin is that i believe i truly understand the nature of the goal in "The good general is the lord of the people's lives, the guardian of the country's welfare." as well as "I imagine a new role for the architect, in which we take more seriously our responsibility for all form and space in the world . . . Just as doctors, as members of their profession, take the responsibility for the care of illness and disease --- and take this responsibility , in principle, for all the people on the Earth . . ."

. . . I think there is a real positive value that I see in enabling people to create a story together with the assistance of a system without reliance upon it

among us. mafia/werewolf variants played on tbt.

"actually good online roleplaying experiences" . . . discord?

pixel art's interpretability

dwarf fortress' stories, EVE stories, Haven & Hearth stories, blaseball's stories . . . it is not the system that is in common here

i suppose that roleplaying games are not a 'weak point,' but surely a weak point is available, somewhere.

the playground of the mind.

it seems so obvious. i'm looking for a material that emerses the player back into their selves, into their life experiences, their imaginations . . . i've been reading a big fantasy novel series and many comics . . . i like setting . . . i like players taking responsibility for their own experience . . . i've been thinking about doing something on the web, although that doesn't directly connect people to each other there is definitely an aspect of it which involves connecting people to each other, the web being the great connector, and i've often thought about multiplayerness . . . and my last three favourite games were Grandline (not googlable), Roadwarden, and Slay the Princess . . .

it's obvious.

the waking knot is a videogame for broughlike fans at the bottom of a little hole. i believe that michael brough dug a tunnel for himself and maybe it caved in a little and that's fine, he was trying to get somewhere, the tunnel served its purpose, but in the wake he left a hole with a caved-in tunnel there and i don't know what people are doing there in that little hole.

i am sure that it brings a great deal of joy.

being a child, now, i enjoyed being a child, to some extent, but i also was frustrated. i wanted to understand everything. i wanted things to make sense. imagine if i were to bring to life a wish fulfilment fantasy as a child: i would make a videogame. i would make a videogame out of rules. i would make a videogame that shows you, look, look, look at all these silly little pieces. aren't you interested in them? aren't you interested in how they work?

and then i would figure out how they all work and i would smile, i would smile and clap and make the little toy engine go and i would be pleased at having figured out a toy system not understanding that the value of a toy system is to help me understand a real system, and not the fuegorika of having learned something meaningless.

not that.

when i played the waking knot, i felt like a stupid child being lead through my first math class. solving problems. one plus one equals two. three plus eight equals? yes that's right, carry the one, it's eleven! so good! only, cryptic, and while as a child i did not understand that math might someday be useful, here i think there are overtones of that desire for childhood's simplicity. you don't understand why this Higher Being is teaching and guiding you, so you follow along, having faith.

only, in this case, the Higher Being is a fictive creature. text on a screen. at the end of the day learning to play Yet Another Broughlike does not bring you to any truth, it drags you deeper into a hole. there i was, at the bottom of the hole, wondering.

i have had this experience enough. i did not like school very much.

The Waking Knot (demo) on Steam

My advance apologies to Stan and Bill.

More than ever this reflects on my own distance from games rather than being any judgement upon this game's creators.