droqen's forum-shaped notebook

i've been thinking about The End of Gameplay a bit over the past few days, navigating some dusty thoughts. it doesn't feel like a game i finished and put down nine months ago: it's a game that still resides within me, burning. what does that mean?

the most recent Steam review has this phrase that i can't quiite resolve my feelings about: "I'm looking for my art to not just be a communication of vulnerability, but to say something interesting. (https://steamcommunity.com/id/mistrom/recommended/3120040/)" the implication then is that The End of Gameplay is either (or both) 'just . . a communication of vulnerability' and/or what it is saying is that games should be 'just . . a communication of vulnerability'.

blood.

what i return to time & again is that the vulnerability should not matter. but it does. people's unwillingness to be or appear vulnerable meets with people's unwillingness to engage with seeming or apparent vulnerability. a character's vulnerability is acceptable to engage with in a way that a real person's vulnerability is not. as i see it the importance of The End of Gameplay, the importance of blood, is not to be vulnerable, but to wield vulnerability without hesitation.

so, this came to a head because of this series of bleets (https://bsky.app/profile/sorryitsandy.bsky.social/post/3md4dgoms7222) about Lupe Fiasco's The Cool, an album that contains a song i really liked, Dumb it Down:

QuoteLupe Fiasco's The Cool is always impressive, chained back entirely by the context it exists in. Every instrumental is incredible, the flow versatility is impressive, and the hook game is bananas.

The lyrical content is the deep cornball shit that plagued 2000's concious hip-hop.


If not for this one aspect of the record aging poorly, I would be giving my full-throated approval of the record.

The corniness of it all could be forgiven, novel even, if it wasn't littered with Lupe's insecurities over his "not being taken seriously" in the game.


Though don't mistake me: This is not every single bar on the record. There is still a lot of principled introspection about the world and Lupe has always stood on business. Dude criticized Obama's warmongering when that was unpopular to do.

Just this is the difference between a 9/10 and 10/10 here.

i don't suppose to know what sorryitsandy is talking about exactly, since i only know a couple of Lupe Fiasco's songs, and i never knew about conscious hip-hop. but it catalyzed something within me, and i found it important to record the catalyst and its effect.

adam saltsman blote at the end of 2025,
"every time you add a thing to a thing, you risk having to explain what that thing is, and literally nobody wants to hear an explanation, of anything, ever (https://bsky.app/profile/adamatomic.bsky.social/post/3mbckmfkm2c2f)"

regarding vertex dispenser michael brough said in the TSLOG discord (2026 jan 25),
"I didn't think it would scare everyone off to see how deep it could potentially go! I got better at hiding the depths after that."

what i am enjoying about TSLOG and what i enjoyed about Lupe Fiasco's Dumb it Down are this glimpse into the nasty human process of making anything, risking anything, doing anything.

lately, i have been thinking about games as 'possibility spaces'. adam said 'super-positions', as in, super-positions of all possible states and paths. the idea of game as hyper-hyper-hypersculpture, containing every state, is appealing to me as someone who likes to make games. i am not so interested in walking through the forest; i want to contain the forest, i want to be the forest.

not everyone is. and those who are, aren't necessarily interested in examining that process for its own sake. maybe i'm not even interested in it. maybe i'm more interested in doing it than discussing or thinking about doing it. well, now i'm getting caught in a self-referential trap.

with The End of Gameplay, i wanted to create something pure. i did that. i think that everyone who experiences TEOG for better or for worse receives some portion of that specific emotion. i now must contend with the idea that, if i accept that i did successfully express the most important thing to me at that time in 2025, people don't necessarily care about what i care about.

you can't make people care. that isn't our purpose anyway. that isn't the purpose of The End of Gameplay, either.

i just cared. TEOG was an expression of that.

we now move on.

to move on is not to forget.

existing is an experiment. to think of the end of experimentation is only to think of death. after the dream of death comes the dream of the mountain... i have learned many things i can't put into words! my purpose is not to convey what i have learned, but to use it all.