Sid Meier is quoted as saying that a game is a "series of interesting choices." But what is an interesting choice, and is interesting good enough?

The best choices are never impersonal. A personal choice is one that different people would make differently, but which you would make the same way next time - unless you've changed personally in the interim.

When a choice is purely strategic, it ceases to be a work of art concerned with exploring its player's humanity. This doesn't mean a choice can't have a right answer and a wrong one; it's more about the attitude of the player, as cultivated by this game as well as their environment.

Making the 'wrong' choice for personal reasons may behighly meaningful, but a player's willingness to engage with choices as personal choices, rather than strategic ones, can be eroded if they learn that choosing personally might cause them harm.

If there is a right choice that rewards the player and a wrong choice that causes the player harm, they are being punished by the game for expressing themselves.

Do some games train players not to make personal choices?

Quote from: The Books of the South, p327Her schemes could kill thousands, could distress millions, and to her it was play.

[He said, ]"I'll never understand you."

[...]She was neither young nor empty-headed. "I don't understand myself. But I gave up trying a long time ago. It's distracting."

Games. From the first she had been involved in tortuous maneuvers and manipulations, to no obvious end. Her great pleasure was to watch a scheme flower and devour its victim.

I want to remember this moment in which the motivations behind a character's machinations are exposed... as nothing, as something explicitly intentionally unexamined by the character herself. It's on a more grand, more evil scale, but these few lines are deeply moving to me about human nature.

Especially "I don't understand myself. But I gave up trying a long time ago. It's distracting." which reminds me distinctly of the interview with Agnes Martin.

The worst thing you can think about is yourself.

In Donnie Darko, the "fear and love" spectrum is presented and held by the protagonist it in great contempt.

Why love and fear? Kitty Farmer, the earnest but irritating target of the protagonist's mockery, explains, "Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions."

In Play Anything, Bogost coins ironoia, a "fear of things." By contrast, his exploration of the titular concept -- Play-- may be understood as a 'love of things.'

The games I'm making for Droqtober are pretty abstract. What  is the subject matter?  I need to analyze.

The "fantasy" of a videogame is simply its content. The "platonic game" is the content.

Adaptable, and about fundamental human truths.

Fairy tales are carried across the world by people.

I guess now here is tech to help us carry our ideas across the world: but it must still be by people until such time a computer system's taste is more interesting than a person's.

Perhaps that day is coming.

Strongly inspired by Ian Bogost's Play Anything

Sometimes it's quite intimidating to play with real materials, but I'd like to do it more rather than shy away due to fear and risk aversion. Here are some things I'd like to play with more, and not just in games, but other interactive and noninteractive media:

• PLAY WITH MONEY
• PLAY WITH TIME
• PLAY WITH STATUS
• PLAY WITH MEANING
• PLAY WITH OWN FEELINGS
  (as opposed to playing with someone else's emotions; i'm not interested in that, but i am interested in inviting others to play with their own feelings in a way that mirrors my own play)

It's easy to look at wasteful expensive games, and wasteful long games, and come to the conclusion that the issue is that they dare to ask for large amounts of money, large amounts of time. But, the end result of that is fear which I suppose is the opposite of play.

QuoteWe still want to skip over the proverbial sidewalk.
We still want to fashion the playgrounds that would lead us to novel experience.
But we've convinced ourselves that we can't or shouldn't.

In Play Anything, Bogost discusses Irony as a concept tightly bound to Meta in a way that mirrors Lulie's discussion of Meta in HOW TO ARGUE (pdf handout, workshop video).

QuoteEventually, the ironic actor doesn't even know whether she is earnest or contemptuous. Irony becomes unstoppable, devouring everything it touches[..] Once ironized, things can safely disappear into the background[..] Irony has become ubiquitous party because it [..] spreads so rapidly, infecting everything.

QuoteHow meta drives arguments into black holes:

• Meta is off-topic.
• Meta breeds meta.
      • You can't contradict a meta statement without making another meta statement.
• Meta engages emotions.
      • Popper wants our ideas to die in our place. Meta wants to substitute us for our ideas, and less 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.
  

When expressing a fear of a thing, outside of the bounds of play, the attitude spreads: it's hard to engage playfully with real fear of a real thing, because play is a tool for celebrating a lack of fear, not a tool for defeating it.

What if I saw money through the lens of Bogost's play? As something to be accepted, to draw my own boundaries around it, to see it for what it is.

Money is not a lifeblood to be wrung and feared; money is just a number. It's not a plea for cash, but an invitation to play with money between us.

These facets of the real world exist to be played with, too.

Well, I started out by writing The days of pilgrimage are over in the primordial soup forum but this video is so fucking good and full of shit, it deserves a close reading thread too... right?

Honestly I'm not sure I need the 'close reading' forum at all. What's its purpose? To take notes?

Well, anyway, the video.


I'm more about watching things and drawing my own conclusions, which is less good reading and more consuming great stuff.

Maybe i just need to link out to primordial soups as appropriate.

The days of pilgrimage are over.

Quote from: ShelleyIt looks dark and full of terrors... but with cheebs

I'm really bad at trusting other people. I ... oh, okay, this is gonna be a poem.

I was playing Beast Breaker and I was having some trouble. The game itself was interesting. Flawed, but interesting. And yet, I found myself playing it and hating it. I was dragging myself across hot coals for something, but for what?


In Beast Breaker, you play the game awhile and the game provides you with new items: a new cloak with better stats, a new sword with weird new abilities, a brand new weapon type. That's all well and good, and I wanted to check out these new items! I wanted to see what it was like to play with them. So I kept playing. Yeah, there's some randomness in the game, but the real randomness that got me was this discrete, staid randomess: each freshly-unlocked item could theoretically make me love the game even more.

I kept playing because I had to play to unlock new stuff, but I couldn't know ahead of time whether the new stuff was going to be good; when I had stopped enjoying the game, I still compelled myself to keep playing because unlocking new stuff, as based on my past experience, could make the game suddenly better! It depends on whether the new stuff was really cool, whether it aligned with my tastes.

HOW TO PLAY: Determine whether I love the game as it is, now. If I don't, I can safely stop playing?

Maybe this isn't even a skinner box thing. the idea falls apart. well, it's not the primordial soup for nothin'.

HOW TO DESIGN: I dunno! I don't think this is a designer problem. Is it? IS IT???A arggghhh

I won't do separate posts for all 'close readings' relevant to this topic. Maybe I need a new forum category? For now, this will do - I'll put this topic in 'primordial soup' and hopefully revisit it a few times.

ingredients:
1 cup rice
5-6 cups broth/stock (i use water + some kinda bouillon, often watered down)
1-2 dry chilies
1-2 garlic cloves (whole)
a chunk of ginger
chicken bones (w scraps of raw meat)
msg (optional, but it makes things taste good) (to taste. try <1tsp)

put it all in instant pot on "porridge". should take like 30 mins. eat it immediately or later or whenever.

always serve with yo tiao (chinese donut) if you got it! (you can buy these frozen.)

P.S. If you're reading this and you worked on Beast Breaker, please don't take it personally. This is my personal notebook for gushing about things that bugged me while I was playing the game, which means this is me unburdening myself of VIDEOGAME PROBLEMS IN GENERAL, not indicative of qualities problematic about BB specifically



Beast Breaker (played on Epic, Mac; it didn't work right with my tablet; i submitted a bug report. kinda hoping it gets fixed.)

The basic gameplay is kinda neat. You bounce off stuff and deal damage. I liked unlocking the bow - it's a very different weapon! I'm excited to see if there are other types of weapons. (I'm also not a very patient person; I prefer Monster Hunter's approach even though it's TOTALLY OVERWHELMING.)

I don't like the world or its characters at all, really. Part of that is: I don't like the experience of plodding my way through the UI, and part of that is: I wish the game supported my tablet. :/

Okay, concrete conclusions?

Beast Breaker has a wholesome-cutesy story. There is a bit of darkness going on at the edges, hinting at a darker backstory, but on the whole the vibe is very cartoony, sweet, nice. Nothing wrong with that, but I'm not really enjoying any of the story elements.

Another feather in the hat of me not enjoying prose in games, though I will say I don't think the issue is just my hangup with text, it's also just tonally not what I'm looking for, and it so far is only dancing delicately around the idea of there being deeper themes. I dunno. I don't know what I'm expecting, but it is not for me.

It has a grind and unlock treadmill, and I'm not about that. The things I'm unlocking seem like they could be cool, but so far they really aren't. I had a similar issue with Card of Darkness... the stuff that I'm getting dealt up front is just too tame to grab me. Maybe later there will be cool stuff for 'expert players,' but I don't have the patience to get through the tame stuff to get there.

The gameplay is pretty low-key, minimal, undemanding and unrewarding. Related to the above, but while I do feel like my actions make a difference, I do feel like there's a heavy heaping of luck and just... hmm... I dunno, inevitability? Like, there's a strict ceiling on how much I can accomplish.

'Breaking The Horizon' is closely related to the concept of problems described in David Deutsch's 'The Beginning of Infinity':

Quote from: p.16-17 of The Beginning of Infinity[..]if we are simply curious about something, it means that we believe that our existing ideas do not adequately capture or explain it. So, we have some criterion that our best existing explanation fails to meet. The criterion and the existing explanation are conflicting ideas. I shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem.

[..]a conjuring trick is a trick only if it makes us think that something happened that cannot happen.

[Members of the audience] can detect that it is a trick only because of the explanatory theories that they brought with them into the auditorium. Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have the conflict.

I'm reading The Beginning of Infinity in a close reading thread, and am reminded of this thought i had about randomness.

If i program a "shuffled deck" object for the purpose of drawing cards off its top, one at a time, then it does not matter if I really shuffle the deck or simply pick a card from the remaining pool at random. That is, there may in truth be an order to the cards in the deck or not, but someone may draw either conclusion about the "reality" of such a system.

For a long time my conclusion was that you might as well perform the cheapest and laziest approach, if they're all the same in the end.

However, consider the new lens: if a subtle detail of a consistent world cannot be understood and discovered, the solution is to surface it, rather than to resign oneself to see it as vestigial.

Make those beautiful unnoticeable edges of the system visible, rather than erase or discredit their existence.