how can i make a cozy space just for people who have played the game--
a forum only for bunnies?

some of the strongest feedback i got about the end of gameplay is private. this is not a bad thing, it's kind of cozy... people wanted to talk about the game with me, or with the small number of people who were already interested in the work. i wonder if there's something i can do with that.

realized -- i want to make a frontpage for my games that has a place for discussion. i mean, a place that i can sell games that centers discourse. i made hidden.droqen.com, and (separately!) i link people to the steam page for TEOG... this is wrong. this is all wrong. the act of choosing to buy the game should come from a place of wanting to understand and engage with other people. i want to be at the very center of that, not peripheral. i mean, i want the game to be positioned correctly.

I forgot what it was like to undertake actions made crushed under a certain emotional haze until I experienced the haze once again one beautiful early May.

Now that I once more have access to the emotional memory, I can track the red scent back to those actions: foolhardy but personal.

then, revisiting the paper, this quote leapt out at me screaming 'kill gameplay', an echo of what i have been feeling lately:

Quote from: p4Consider narrative discovery games, which position the player as investigator ferreting out a narrative truth, "carrying out in reverse the work of falsification" perpetrated by the game object and its designers, using an interactive toolkit supplied by those same perpetrators. . . . All the narrative energy is tied up in answering these questions; all the ergodic friction comes from grinding against the systems that makes answering them a challenge.

what does "ergodic" mean?

Quote from: WikipediaIn mathematics, ergodicity expresses the idea that a point of a moving system. . . will eventually visit all parts of the space that the system moves in, in a uniform and random sense.

oh, i see, this makes sense of this section:

Quote from: p4 againDiscovering pieces of the narrative in different orders changes the texture of the protostory but in relatively undramatic ways.

i returned to this paper because my cool friend and sometimes-collaborator kelly described her experience with my recently-released game The End of Gameplay. kelly said "i found myself coming up with my own narrative??" and i realized that she would be interested in this paper, considering we've explored similar dynamics in our collaborative works, for example Q1: VOID is a fictional videogame manual; the player must participate in "reparative play" to experience the game, since they can't 'interact' with the inaccessible object (in this case because it does not exist--but nonexistence is not the only circumstance in which we find that a playable game-object is inaccessible to us).

past: therapist, tarot reader—an identity that kicked this off, am i leaving it behind? am i ready?

present: three of coins—no duh, ok, i have something to learn

future: seven of coins—what is the tastiest fruit? im planning to pursue the real thing and doing it slowly, maybe my plans coming to fruition? investment...

an inconclusive reading, i want to read my bias into it, why can't i get over my gut feeling that this is all wrong, why am i not listening to it???

I feel like I'm drawn in two directions. Am I an elder? Am I passing on the knowledge that I want to be passing on?

My instinct is to clean up properly. Make a finished project and draw lines. My next project will do something with my notebooks.

Can I spend this time documenting?

The game is done! I'm not sure what comes next, I'd like to keep it visible, but important to celebrate my completions: Yes, it's actually finished.