Link to list of game elements in Genshin Impact survey in ~ re: Deadgames and Alivegames

Oh, here's a thought on lists found in my reading of ~ The Nature of Order Book One that pre-echoes my already forming thoughts

And another abstract look at the nature of lists - but let's not get lost in theory. ~ from 'The Curated Closet'

edit:: Okay, just one more. From ~ The Timeless Way of Building [..], of course.

Let's look at some other lists as well...

The Berlin Interpretation
- compare with my no berlin reinterpretation

I made a list of all the books I read in 2022: ~ 2022 books

There was a list that stood out to me in ~ Stand Out of Our Light

I first noticed this clearly in ~ Across Worlds and Bodies (also here). I hated these lists. I am not going to analyze them yet.

Gathering and ranking lists. I have a bone to pick with lists. Some lists are good, and some lists are bad.

I should say "It's lists again!"
I have been thinking about lists quite a bit lately. I haven't been able to describe what I don't like about lists until now. Of course it would be Alexander who gets me through this weird bump. I don't like lists when the elements are discrete.

Elements in lists should overlap. That's something I should study a bit more. I need to gather lists I love vs lists I hate.

He gives nine examples of cases of city planning which are fundamentally tree-like. Here is one such, but they are all worth reading for the same thing that they all are: trees.

P. 8, line breaks added

QuoteCommunitas is explicitly organized as a tree: it is first divided into four concentric major zones, . . . Each of them is further subdivided:
the commercial centre is represented as a great cylindrical skyscraper, containing five layers. . .
The university is divided into eight sectors. . .
The third concentric ring is divided into neighbourhoods of 4000 people each. . . apartment blocks, each of these containing individual dwelling units.
. . . the open country is divided into three segments: forest preserves, agriculture, and vacation lands.
The overall organization is a tree.

Semilattice (left)

Oh, cool. Christopher Alexander is describing some early concept of the relationship between patterns. Patterns do not nest neatly within one another as in a tree (right), but overlapping messily as in a semilattice (left).

"Have a story," they said. But you can't pursue having a story for story's sake, or your story isn't whyproof--something unnatural was introduced along the way. Thinking about this in my upcoming letterclub, too lazy to link

I was playing and thinking about Tears of the Kingdom (the sequel to Breath of the Wild) and it occurred to me that I wanted to do this with REDACTED so that we could discuss the nature of not the end result but so that we could seek what they tried to seek but not just seek as in strive to achieve the same thing using our own methods but seek in the way that they tried to seek.

I've been thinking about this since being exposed to the concept by Billy Dent's cohost post about open world games:

"open world games are made using certain tools, techniques and conventions, and I believe that these production-side characteristics are the main reason why they keep being made . . . [they make] open world games incredibly economical, if your goal is to create something BIG."

What are these tools, techniques, and conventions? I think that this is what every game designer on earth should be talking about: not for open world games, but for every genre, every game of note, everything that is out there.

What are the tools, techniques, and conventions that produced a game?

What were the goals for creating a game?

How did all these factors come together to produce this game, at this point in time? How is that beautiful, or how is it horrible? What can we appreciate, take away, swear off of forever, or build on top of as a foundation?

The conversations are happening, just more slowly than I'd like. People talk about crunch and say how bad it is. But beyond those spiky awful "Well that was a mistake let's never do that again" points that stick out, where are the eternal wisdoms that we learn and hold onto and never let go of, that we work with again and again for years, for generations, for millennia or at least until the last human being dies?

"If we want a flower, we do not build it cell by cell. We grow it from a seed." (Paraphrased from my memory of The Process of Creating Life)

A flower that is built cell by cell will be dead.

In 2013, nearly one decade ago, I wrote that "Nothing created can answer why forever."

This was one line in Whyproof to 5,000 feet, a blog post which I see now as my early attempts to understand wholeness -- and my assignment of failure in that respect to the nature of things, rather than to my limited perspective.

As melancholy as the nihilist beauty is in that statement, it is no longer something that I believe in, but that depends on your relationship to one word in particular: "created."

In a sense, I think that any dead thing is created. But as I've had many conversations on the topic of the awkwardness of using a so-loaded term since writing some of my other letters, I'd like to perform a little terminological surgery.

Let's say, from this point on, that we are talking about the nature of wholeness.