droqen's forum-shaped notebook

On January 31, Alex Beachum blote thus:

Quotestumbled across this this thread because i'm rereading Understanding Comics and decided to check if anyone has tried to Scott McCloudify video games...idk if this is that but it's interesting! also i'm curious, would your non-player-centric definition include a game that literally plays itself?

link to bleet (https://bsky.app/profile/alexbeachum.bsky.social/post/3mdrc6dejgs2a)

On February 4, Paul Diaz blote thus:

Quotesorta tangential, but this reminds me of Katherine Neil's article, because of sheet music being this abstract design tool which is something games do not have: https://medium.com/@haikus_by_KN/how-we-design-games-now-and-why-bcbc1deb7559

link to bleet (https://bsky.app/profile/sleepytearyeyed.bsky.social/post/3me26sil2us2j)

I began to read Understanding Comics, not for the first time, on January 31. I finished on February 4. Then I began to read Katherine Neil's How We Design Games Now and Why.

The moment of understanding occurred while perusing a Raph Koster presentation linked in How We Design Games Now and Why as follows:

QuoteDesigner Raph Koster highlighted the imprecision of natural language as a tool for designing gameplay, and proposed we develop a graphical notation system (https://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/atof/grammarofgameplay.pdf) for game design

(This sentence and this link were provided in context among many other designers' statements and proposals. Here I have included only the one that contained what sparked the moment of understanding.)

One of the slides in Koster's presentation began to give me a feeling. It reads as follows:

QuoteClarifying dimensionality

Depth
   Literally, the depth of recursion

Breadth
   Literally, the amount of parallelism

Size
   Literally, the amount of sequentially chained atoms.

(Isn't it nice to finally know what these
   mean?)

It was the last parenthesized rhetorical question. Though I cannot transmit the feeling, it was a kind of dismissive, disgusted, superior feeling I associate with the thought that I have recognized someone has produced a simplifying (but inaccurate and destructive) lens and is presenting it smugly as the truth. I was not having that explicit thought specifically at the time, and I'm not suggesting that Koster is smug - either here or in general - but I was having the feeling that goes with the thought.

It was the immediate next two slides at which I stopped dead. They read as follows:

QuoteCost of failure

Syntactically, atoms must
always have a failure state
link, even if said failure is
only an opportunity cost.

QuoteWhy?

Any atom that involves risk must have
at least a binary result.

   This is why we do not consider
   moving a checker piece without a
   capture or a setup to be an atom.

   I've notated these using red arrows
   rather than blue.

In Koster's proposed notation, movement around a safe screen in a platformer is not an atom. As a result it cannot actually capture what games are. The notation excludes significant detail from consideration.


The map is never the territory, but we must remember to regard it as a map. The "Why?" slide fails to address the simplifying effect and presents this notation as territory.

I believe that I have in mind the abstract concept of the whole territory.