A line from Bo Burnham's "Can't Handle This":

QuoteCome and watch the skinny kid with a
Steadily declining mental health, and laugh as he attempts
To give you what he cannot give himself

I have designed games that feel a little bit like the random walk of exploring design space:

cloud exile and simple tour are a couple of examples.

In some ways I like this random walk -- the balancing act of 'compelling' vs 'pure in intent' vs 'accomplishable within my human and technological constraints'. But it's also very frustrating, and I enjoy making games that are equally frustrating. I wonder how much of it is out of jealousy: that my players should not be allowed to enjoy this more than I did.

QuoteAll art, nay, all signals have this kind of compulsive engine.

I absolutely agree. I think... mainly, I have resisted the idea for too long. I am embracing it now, even if I'd like to judge it as evil, or at best amoral and restrictive.

Quotehe writes and publishes books, but I never get the sense that he has much stock in those books being read. I think he's mainly interested in writing them, but then why does he publish them?

Why did we send that golden record out into space?

I don't know! I'm very interested in the answer to this question, Zeigfreid. If not to be heard, to affect something or someone, why publish? Why release? Why hit send at all? It seems a strange fantasy to do a thing with your life, only appreciating the imagined outcome. But I guess one day we will all die, so everything past the window of our lives is imagined in the same way.

Principles. Tenets. Cores.

I think there is a tangential feeling here - the principle which defines principles themselves is that we do them even when we don't know what's going on. My principle has for much of my life been something like "make art." I don't necessarily know whether that's a good principle, but it has been a constant for many years and, honestly, it's hard to stop at this point. It's just a part of who I am; it's a part of my life.

If at the #1 spot I had a more obviously good principle like Waymond's "be kind," what might be different about me as a person? about my life? I don't have regrets, just curiousity. This is something that's really interesting to me about people. This is a person's "core."

Quote from: Waymond, from Everything Everywhere All At OnceThe only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don't know what's going on.

This quote had strong relevance to an earlier draft of the first post, and I don't want to lose that relevance. If we don't know what's going on, please be kind. But even if we think we know what's going on and it's saying all is pointless, still, still be kind. Even if we don't know why we're being kind, be kind.

Staying committed to something is hard. When encountering the bad parts of something large, it's tempting to throw out the baby with the bathwater -- to trash it and get a clean slate. I do this all the time with individual game designs that fall short, and lately I've been feeling a bit burnt out on trying to make games do what I want. The medium is insufficient.

We were talking about gun violence in videogames and I reflected on my encounters with people stating that the work they are doing, or the event they are hosting, etc., takes place on "unceded land". That is, in Canada, we have entirely displaced and in many cases ruined the traditional territories of the First Nations people who lived here. I wrote,

Quote from: droqenFor a long time I thought it was a little silly that people in Canada acknowledge that they are doing things on unceded land [..]
but it's this weird unavoidable thing. Like, if you live in Canada, what are you gonna do, leave Canada??
If you recognize you're working/existing in a problematic medium/context, you might not be able to change some bad stuff, but you can at least... uh... acknowledge it, if it really matters to you.

I can acknowledge an issue, even if I don't know the solution or whether a solution exists at all, as long as I truly care about it. In the case of unceded land, it's not something I give much thought to or have much familiarity with. Although it isn't something I'm passionate about, I can at least recognize that it's not hollow for someone to acknowledge that they know, they know, that the thing they're doing is problematic to them and yet they carry on anyway. The medium is insufficient. As we grow and learn more about the world I think it is inevitable that we will learn more and more ways in which all mediums are insufficient.

Life is insufficient, but it's all we have. If it's all we have then it is necessarily the most beautiful thing, and if the most beautiful thing is not beautiful then what meaning does beauty have?

Then there is the analysis of met with a terrible fate:

QuoteI argued in the examination of Mikau that Termina is brought into reality by Link encountering it [1].  Using this argument, we can gloss the meaning of 'meeting' as 'creating through encountering'.

The conclusion is that the Happy Mask Salesman is saying

Quote[Link] has brought a morally negative set of softly determined timelines into being by encountering it.

Meeting the Happy Mask Salesman is non-optional to the player once the game is started. The only thing that "encountering it" can possibly refer to, as a message to the player, is "encountering the game" and choosing to start it up. As player-Link superposition, you-Link have brought a morally negative set of softly determined timelines into being by bringing yourself into existence, by playing this game.

Quote[..]who, exactly, is the audience of the Salesman's words? The obvious answer is 'Link', but I think that what I just said above should give us pause:  as we have discussed before, Link is less of a substantive character and more of an avatar that directly links the player to the universe of the game.  Combine this with the Salesman's position adjacent to the general domain of Termina, and I think we can plausibly interpret him as speaking both to Link and the player

Quote[The Happy Mask Salesman is] fallibly claiming to the link between player and game universe ('Link')

I don't know how intentional it is or who else has talked about this before or since, but wow, 'Link' as a name is exactly the thing I was talking about... Wowzers.

Lately I have been recognizing that the 'ludonarrative' of games is very important to me. To start by quoting some shit I was saying in Paradise:

Quote from: droqenif a person is choosing to play a shooting game because it's fun (it is) and the game-world is trying to paint an image of the shooting game as shooting & killing people with a gun, then a part of that world -- the part that is the most in focus -- is that the player-character is choosing to shoot & kill people with a gun because it's fun.

[..] imagine if nobody could ever write a book where the protagonist enacts violence and disliked it

if it was just functionally impossible or extremely difficult to produce a book like that which people could engage with. what long-spanning effects would that have on culture?

I recognized later that my thoughts were based on a presumption of a certain perspective:

Quote from: droqena big part of my thing is the presumption that we have a story,
and in this story we regard the player as the protagonist

Okay. The stage is set.

p177 "" Does it makes sense to think that we can drill for oil a mile below the surface of the sea and control that? [..] The more and more desperate we become in trying to dominate the planet, the more dangerous these things become." [..] Accepting human beings' lack of control [..] does not equate to surrender or imply that we should not use technology, stop our activism[..] It means we should do all these things with both eyes open

See The One-Straw Revolution

chapter 8, "the world has already ended"

p180 "the ancient Greek philosopher Plato[..] said that humans are the only beings capable of reason and intellect. This made them superior to all other beings in his mind. Superiority breeds disconnection, by setting one apart. This is where our loneliness[..] may have got off the ground.

p181 "[Descartes'] famous line "cogito ergo sum" permeated Western culture, and as it did, it gave people permission to rank agency on the world in terms of rationality, everywhere they looked.

p181 "[Francis Bacon] understood humans to be better than all other earthly creatures. He also believed that empiricism is the only way to get at true knowledge, and popularized the idea that if something can't be measured, then it must not exist. [..] The reign of empiricism led to the belief that aspects of the world we could not feel with our five senses or scrutinize with our science had no value.

p182 "" Scientific methods " were also used to uphold racist ideology as empirical truth.

regarding this book i found in the bookstore