I do get so drawn in to these grand simulation games, but I find it so frustrating to recognize how slow this process of mastery is -- and exacerbated by the somewhat artificial pacing of grinding out resources. Does that make sense? When my fellas die, it means I have to get new fellas, I have to gather more gold to get more done, and this allocation of resources and time is just not that enjoyable.

It's compelling to gain control over a system that has control over my time. OTOH it's more empowering to reject the system into which I've opted; I take control of my time back by quitting rather than by learning how to earn my time back from the clutches of the game.

When faced with any body of data, I...

1. decompose it into a 'good' ~SEMI-LATTICED ~LIST that captures the whole
-> and note further thoughts & elaborations as necessary

2. write a second list of second-order thoughts, compositions of the decomposed ideas into a collection of connections, new and old

3. write a third list of smaller versions of the above thoughts, reducing both the first and second list into a new minimized list which might be seen as 'concluding'

4. from this newly processed raw data, note how to move forward as a practical creature, as a finite being; these notes are about truth but truth, being inaccessible, does not help us move forward; if these notes are about a conversation, what might we talk about next? if these notes are about an idea, what might i think about next? if these notes are about a project which i am actively working on, what might i work on next? this step is absolutely key and critical.

-Eggs Benedict
-Tomato
-Fruit

Regarding James Clear's
"Atomic Habits"

I was developing a simple buoyancy algorithm and it all just made sense, at some point; it was such a simple set of forces capable of producing such lifelike floating and bobbing.

In the foreword of Positive Disintegration, its author, Dabrowski, began describing the trajectory of the human psyche as affected by various factors: "This constellation of genetic features determines the type and extent of development possible. . . . genetic traits . . . a strong sense of needing to be oneself, . . . over-excitability. . ."

It was during this foreword that I began to loosely perceive a person's psyche, their state of mind, their life, their whole self, as a buoyant object.

Buoyancy seems like it should be complex, because it is so seemingly unpredictable, and yet this complex self-balancing system can also be so easily understood and thus simulated as two simple forces acting in opposition.

And even then these two forces can be made... not simpler, exactly, but more elemental? The metaphor of forces is easier for us to hold in mind, but is not easier for the universe, is unnatural. What is natural is every particle acting upon every particle all of the time in an infinite smooth field, the infinite complete graph...

the third book in a four book essay

~ i read ugly feelings before
i want to read it again, now

Sianne Ngai's "Ugly Feelings"

Quote from: Ezra[re:] using platformer controller as a test case for building a video game sequence. @droqen what would your first stab at that look like, if you had to specify a sequence that would result in a platformer controller in, say, 7 steps

I'd like to give a talk at BITBANG
-Animators are cool
-A lot of animation is 3d, which is quite technical, it's a world I'm getting into
-I have a friend in Argentina (a few!)
-Practice giving talks
-I've been invited haha

To figure out:
-Does it make sense for me to do this?
-What should I talk about?

A post-mortem about my time spent working @ a beautiful little indie studio of 10-12 people.

What did I learn?

[transcribed from handwritten notes]

words fail.

any medium fails.

to love is to know and accept knowing.

to love any medium is to notice its flaws
 and not coddle its failures or to sweep
 them under the proverbial rug but to
 celebrate such ugly little things, to point
 them out & explore them in such love that
 only a true lover can do.

to love is to accept failure to the point
 of celebration.

to love is to try the impossible together,
 knowing the outcome, wanting it.

to love it[sic] to fail together.

as words fail us, so too do we fail them.

words fail;

we fail.

  games fail;

  players fail.

via ezra s
keywords - immersion, immersive, immersiveness, immersive sim, escapism?, engrossing, engrossed

I recently stopped reading Playing Software (Sicart) because of this statement:

QuoteWhat toys and video games do for software agency is eliminate or contain ambiguity. In a well-designed video game, we know what we have to do, and we are given tools to learn to see what the software will do to and with us.

It's important, however, for me to reflect on my strong negative reaction. What does Sicart's picture miss, or grossly misrepresent, that I care about in video games? He's not saying "video games are only about reducing ambiguity," but it is a straightforward claim that video games do reduce ambiguity. So it's not a question of whether video games are being too narrowly defined in terms of purpose, but that I am having a strong negative reaction to the idea that 'eliminating or containing ambiguity', in particular of our relationships to software, or in general of the thing with which we are playing, is part of the design of a video game, or in general of play-spaces or play-tools.

I'm here to ask myself: What's up with that?

A generative sequence is a linearly ordered series of patterns. Examples are given in The Timeless Way of Building, though that book does not yet name them 'generative sequences'. For a while I had called these 'pattern sentences' for lack of a better term. Generative sequence is better, or maybe just sequence, or pattern sequence... Well, in any case, the pivotal word is sequence.

I downloaded Genshin Impact and played it for a while, and its clone-like nature, its composition out of so many familiar parts - design patterns - is almost inspirational. But it's not inspirational, rather, it's more useful, functioning for my purposes.

Repetition reveals patterns.

Answers to various formulations of the question:

- Yes, might be the only reason I play games, mostly because I don't have time
- Second priority after just enjoying the game.
-- In some instances to get a feel for {the movement/level design possibilities in FPS genre}
- Played a lot of RTS games [in theme x and other themes] to understand how other games do similar concepts
- Deus Ex to understand how it structures everything, it holds up
- Systems, not mechanics
- Experiences, not mechanics
- I like small choices made by the dev, things that weren't necessary to construct it and make it function, but nice things that feel like something. charm; personal touch.
- absolutely yes
- medium includes interactivity, annoying when interactivity is not being used to express (x2 or more)
- learning a new system is fun (x2 or more)
- how someone might use mechanics in an interesting way [does this mean a new way?]
- "a fan of new mechanics and also old mechanics with other things going on to make them interesting" [does this mean old mechanics paired with new mechanics?]
- (sometimes) seeking out new experiences/mechanics/etc.

- searching for comfort, not novelty
- learning new systems/mechanics is hard and i enjoy doing the same thing over and over again
- 75% of my playing games is familiarity based - looking to relax, play with friends, have fun

- when choosing what to make, it's got to have an interesting new mechanic or hook
- "i don't find a game worth making unless it tries to do SOMETHING different"
- when i am making games i am trying to make things i haven't seen before [did not specify mechanics but in context i think it is mechanics]

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains how Overwatch uses the Entity Component System (ECS) architecture to create a rich variety of layered gameplay.