droqen's forum-shaped notebook

i started to play gameplay (forever) to get a high score.
sometimes when i play an arcade game, i think, i could get a high score.
this happened some months ago with adamatomic's KOLYDR (https://adamatomic.itch.io/kolydr)
where i scored 90900 points (https://bsky.app/profile/droqen.bsky.social/post/3mdiro3yhrc27) and satisfied myself with "dethroning adam".
he had said (see above linked bleet) "100K was in reach"
and to me that felt like an impossibility made possible.
having previously played KOLYDR i thought, there's some upper bound, and i don't feel like getting there.
but suddenly when that upper bound was brought into focus i felt drawn to get there. it was within reach.

there are now significantly higher scores. even at the time that i posted my 90900 score (though i did not know it at the time of posting), derek yu had already scored 100200 (https://bsky.app/profile/mossmouth.bsky.social/post/3mdizdsshcc2f), and now the high score sits at an impossible 236800 (https://bsky.app/profile/pancelor.bsky.social/post/3megzq2ngdc2s), by none other than my good friend pancelor (link to itch page, with many various games to play including make ten deluxe) (https://pancelor.itch.io).

at some point with a game like this i start to feel an internal sense that either, or both, the peak is unreachable, or i'm not willing to put in the effort to reach it. in the case of adam's prophecied 100K, i felt that it was possible for me to achieve. in the case of pancelor's 200K+, i felt, and feel now, that it is unreachable, at least given the techniques that i have and know now.

sometimes i don't like these sensations. other times i like them. sometimes i am inspired to knock over one or the other or both. in that last bleet pancelor writes, "learned a couple bizarre new techniques for this one, it's wild how much depth this game has :)" -- if i was so motivated, i am sure i could ask pancelor to teach me of these techniques, seek to master them, and then submit myself to the process necessary to extract a high score from skillful application of these techniques.

the event that happened to motivate me recently was reflecting upon certain obviously (to me) incorrect assumptions/conclusions in this youtube video by "i am a dot." about my game the end of gameplay: "I Played the Game That Hates Gameplay and I Have Thoughts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qmt9LX8pTI)"

Quote from: i am a dot.[22:32-]In the case of "gameplay (forever)", this endless tower is badly designed. It's bad on purpose, but it's still bad. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to what blocks appear where, which leads to impossible situations to climb through. Also, the controls are weird, and floaty.[-22:47]

this claim of dot's is part of a larger theme in his video -- he observes that many of the levels are, or appear, impossible, and concludes all these seemingly impossible levels comprise a kind of rhetorical expression of futility: why would you play, if there is no reward?

this particular level or sub-game or poem within the end of gameplay ("gameplay (forever)") seemed, to me, to be a particularly interesting site for making a counter-claim.

dot summarizes his observations about a series of levels, including "gameplay (forever)", as follows:

Quote from: i am a dot.[23:06-]The End of Gameplay gives the audience lackluster parodies of better games and asks why anyone would bother with them.[-23:12]

in the above quotes, dot is making a large number of claims directly about gameplay (forever), and i thought: maybe i have something to say to all of this? here are six separate claims that i feel can be addressed in some interesting way:

• gameplay (forever) is badly designed
• gameplay (forever) is badly designed on purpose
• there [is] no rhyme or reason to what blocks appear where in gameplay (forever)
• gameplay (forever) generates impossible situations to climb through
• gameplay (forever) is one of a number of "lackluster parodies of better games"
• gameplay (forever) is asking why anyone would bother with it

before i get to actually addressing those questions, though, how did i get here from kill gameplay? last thing i knew i was still holding the knife. well... dot's video was full of comments, and a lot of them (like a lot of them) were about sudoku. in a clip from dot's video, a couple people from the audience are cited as saying these two things:

Quote from: Audience member 1[25:57-]. . . we've always had things like sudoku or crosswords; stuff to keep your brain active. So I think when you're designing games, you kind of have to decide: am I making a game to express or relate . . . [Sudoku] is just to keep you active.[-26:15]

Quote from: Audience member 2[26:31-][Sudoku] makes you feel smarter[-26:32]

if you watch the video, i'm interrupting and reacting to these comments!
there are a number of comments on dot's video that talk about sudoku:

Quote. . . the mere mention of sudoku derails the talk - because it's existence and the fact that millions play it daily indicates that this just isn't an issue. (comment) (https://www.youtube.com/@megaing1322)

QuoteWhen the audience member brings up sudoku and how it doesn't express anything, Droqen is upset by that. Based on this, it seems as if he believes a game is not meaningful unless it expresses something, and therefore a game must be less meaningful if it spends less time expressing things and more time with mechanics. (comment) (https://www.youtube.com/@gavinyeet5821)

Quotelosing one's mind over the concept of someone playing sudoku is ridiculously funny to me. every day after lunch, my dad plays sudoku. he sometimes replays old ones from months ago to see if his time got better. part of the goal is to retain mental acuity, sure, but he also just enjoys it. (comment) (https://www.youtube.com/@plushdragonteddy)

etc.

something i've never done is make a sudoku puzzle myself, so i thought i would give it a try.

in part, my motive was to kind of show through demonstration that i don't have a lack of understanding of what sudoku is and how it can be fun and expressive - and through doing so i realized that i hadn't bumped up against a lot of these problems in practice in a while. i'll talk more about this at a later date, but i wanted to make sudoku according to both the constraints of 'good puzzle design' and certain idiosyncratic creative whims, and i re-discovered this:

making something the way you want to make it, while also following additional constraints, is harder.

doing one thing for no reason is sort of easy for me, but doing two things at the same time for no reason is harder, and the temptation to fold on one or the other is pretty strong, knowing that i could easily be done if only i had not defined the challenge so stringently.

i also did a few sudoku puzzles, copying them out of books i found at the bookstore. one i even completed on my first try! i don't think i need to do more, though.

then i read golumbia's essay, games without play (on JSTOR) (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20533140)

here are a few of the passages that i found most impactful:

Quote[..] we have simply and in some cases uncritically accepted the views that all video and computer games are games and that what we do when we use them is to play. [..] The commonplace view that either narratology or ludology will be the right method for analyzing computer games turns out to be based on the unexamined assumption that the phenomena in question are stories or games to begin with. [..] To understand whether one can play video games, we need to consider [..]

questioning "whether one can play video games" was huge to me -- the question asks not only what if 'play' is not "what we do" with videogames, but what if it is actually not even possible to do? what if it is categorically not possible to 'play' video games?

QuoteThe path of use of an FPS has virtually no play in Derrida's sense; rather, the player submits to the issuance of orders and then follows them as precisely and efficiently as possible. The player only controls variables like the rate at which he or she fires a weapon or the choice of weapon itself.

then golumbia goes on to describe some details, i liked this one^

QuoteWhat separates WoW or Half Life from the worker's business world is thus not variability or "give" but rational certainty, the discreteness of goals, the general sense that such goals are well-bounded, easily attainable, and satisfying to achieve, even if the only true outcome of such attainment is the deferred pursuit of additional goals of a similar kind. [..] It seems hard on any account to call this sort of activity "play" and even less to understand why it is proper to see it as a "game."

and finally points out similarities between these things and work. he goes on and makes a number of comparisons like this, likening computer games to work and/or training. i wasn't completely satisfied but i had something to chew on. then i returned to my favourite book in recent times...

in very rough terms, the impossible reversal explores four "types of play" and concludes by arguing that videogames are often moving in between all of these types of play (or moving the player, or enabling/inviting the player to move, between all these types of play -- whatever, i'm not concerned at the moment about the provenance or ownership of play), blending them together in such a way that it's difficult to see this complex interplay of modalities. modalities! that's a good word, too; modalities of play. anyway, it's quite a moment. as a collection of these concepts and a peek into the past the book is incredible, but in retrospect the conclusion is a very rare harmonious moment in these kinds of conceptual non-fictions; while there's no clean conclusion that wraps everything up, to see mcdonald show in the space of only a couple pages Inscryption dancing between all of these vast concepts is quite a moment, reminiscent of the lovely remix levels in the Rhythm Tengoku (Rhythm Heaven) games.

so i was partway through the impossible reversal and, quite serendipitously, the fourth modality -- Oblique Repetition -- came to me at the exact moment that i was already dwelling on golumbia's proposal that "what we do when we use [computer and video games]" is work.

there were other things going on in my life, of course, but i'll stop my digressions there.

what if concern over 'games' and 'play' and 'gameplay' as words was no longer useful? i considered the idea of doing pleasant tasks via a computer game. a volunteer job. when it gets right down to it, i like to do things. it's nice to happen upon an occasion in my life when i get to solve a small math problem.

it was at this point in the timeline (of reality) that i really began thinking about what dot had said about gameplay (forever). this level's presence in the end of gameplay reflects a common element of my platformer character controller design practice --

in order to properly know whether a character controller is 'good', i.e. satisfying to me, one of the first things i will often do is place the character in a single screen where blocks are placed randomly at runtime. usually the ratio is something like 25% blocks to 75% empty tiles. if i'm feeling fancy, i'll add a floor so that i don't fall out of the bottom of the world.

dot's claim (#3): there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what blocks appear where in gameplay (forever)

here is the code that generates block placement in gameplay (forever); lines 113-123 from file stages/13GameplayForever/^sliding_maze.gd:

var randomtile : int = 11
if randf() < 0.02: randomtile = 25 # frut
if abs(x-xhole) > 1:
    if randf() < 0.30:
        randomtile = 90 # WALL
    else:
        if rows > 10:
            if randf() < 0.02: randomtile = 35 # poison
        if rows > 50:
            if randf() < 0.08: randomtile = 35 # poison
maze.set_cell_tid(Vector2i(x,0),randomtile)

so, there is a definite process by which blocks are placed, and this process has a very long history, but each individual block has not been placed manually by a person, nor by any sophisticated algorithm with any human-like intention (for example, there is no code that noticeably emphasizes some particular shape over another -- say, flat wide platforms). to dot, this may be a negative and he expresses a potential consequence of such rhymelessness and reasonlessness.

i have already made and released a game that uses a similar generator, and though i'm not sure if i've written about it, my absolute favourite part of "playing" Probability 0 (https://store.steampowered.com/app/258070/Probability_0/) (or in other words "starting a run and attempting to survive and descend") is interacting with a very similar (but slightly more sophisticated) "blocks placed randomly" space, via the platformer mechanical constraints: velocity, acceleration, collision, and fall damage.

weaving the avatar through such a landscape involves recognizing and navigating countless patterns to no end: forever.

in designing the end of gameplay, the role of gameplay (forever) cannot be understated: if i can enjoy its gameplay (forever) given endless undesigned variation, then as a level designer i have freedom to "design" any shape that i desire, and know its gameplay will be enjoyable.

however, if gameplay (forever) is undesigned on purpose (see #3 above), then if what dot means by "badly designed" is "undesigned", then the following claims do follow:

dot's claim (#1): gameplay (forever) is badly designed
dot's claim (#2): gameplay (forever) is badly designed on purpose

the literal space that one navigates in gameplay (forever) -- the material of the 'level' -- is randomly generated, with very minimal designer intervention.

an example of the 'designer intervention' i speak of can be seen in these four lines of code:

if rows > 10:
    if randf() < 0.02: randomtile = 35 # poison
if rows > 50:
    if randf() < 0.08: randomtile = 35 # poison

the 'poison' tiles (which have various 'negative' effects -- the player loses control briefly, the music glitches out, and the player's score number goes down) do not appear uniformly across the entire level, but do not appear in the first 10 rows, then only appear in 2% of tiles in rows 10-50, then in 8% of tiles in all rows 51 and onward. all these particular numbers have been designed, and it could be imagined that a 'more designed' version of gameplay (forever) would contain more such interventions.

as a design process, this relatively undesigned level is a test for the quality of the bunny controller: if gameplay (forever) contains all possible level spaces with no design whatsoever, and the bunny controller can be used to enjoyably navigate this undesigned space, then the bunny controller is well-designed.

in theory, if gameplay (forever) was not fun, this process would lead to changing the bunny, rather than changing the level: thus the level will remain permanently 'badly designed' by design.

on the other hand, it may make no sense to even speak of the design of gameplay (forever) without speaking of the design of the bunny controller.

dot does comment on the player controls -- mostly negatively or neutrally -- so in that sense it may make sense to extend his judgement to the bunny controller: claim #1 would follow in this case ("gameplay (forever) is badly designed [because i don't like the controls]"), but not claim #2 ("gameplay forever is badly designed on purpose [because i'm not supposed to like the controls]").

but this is getting too speculative and i still have three claims to talk about!

dot's claim (#5): gameplay (forever) is one of a number of "lackluster parodies of better games"

i mentioned Probability 0 above because i think gameplay (forever) is better than it in a number of meaningful ways. my very first prototype of Probability 0 was a minimal infinite platformer in a gameplay (forever)-esque way.

there is a purity to the basic foundational action of quickly enough descending down an infinite field of randomly placed blocks while avoiding fall damage that is lost along the way -- Probability has a skill tree, 20-ish types of enemies, boss fights, biomes, etc. does Tetris need a skill tree?

(would like to note that i collaborated on Probability 0 with an awesome musician (jazz mickle, queen jazz) (https://queenjazz.bandcamp.com/) who created this shifting dynamic soundscape that breathes wonderful life into the world of that game, there is an album on bandcamp (https://queenjazz.bandcamp.com/album/probability-zero-2) and also a remix album (https://queenjazz.bandcamp.com/album/probability-zero-remixed) and they all rock, and none of this talk of minimalism is at all touching upon the collaborative multimedia component)

when held against the core repetition (positive) of Probability 0, gameplay (forever) is a triumph, not a parody. it does what Probability 0 was too afraid to do.

(although when gameplay (forever) did it, it was in another kind of ironic context ("kill gameplay"), but taken on its own... well, i'll get to that.)

dot's claim (#6): gameplay (forever) is asking why anyone would bother with it

strictly speaking, Dot's full quote here is:

QuoteThe End of Gameplay gives the audience lackluster parodies of better games and asks why anyone would bother with them.

at the time he says this, he is not showing gameplay (forever), but instead the last screen of open field (another level in the end of gameplay), which visually mirrors the beginning of Mario 1-1 but without enemies, without the ability to bump your head into blocks, in which going to the right gives you points and loops around to the left side again, in which the player is contained within physical boundaries that are not present in the original level, and a line of text that reads, "who could want gameplay?"

(as an aside, i think the claim that this level is a 'parody' of a game because it visually recreates mario 1-1 (and quite poorly) doesn't have any legs to stand on, it's... obviously a different thing and not asking "who could want to play mario 1-1?" while presenting the player with a completely different experience. anyway, that's not relevant.)

while open field is definitely asking this question explicitly, gameplay (forever) does not explicitly ask why anyone would bother with it. open field is clearly a different beast -- it asks the question at the conclusion of a series of levels that move from chaos toward design, and only asks the question when we've gone from the wilderness to a fully designed world, while gameplay (forever) starts and ends in pure chaos. as dot puts it, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to how its tiles are placed.

why would i attempt to get high score of 10000 points in gameplay (forever), an act that is difficult and time-consuming? (my initial estimate was that this would be an hour-long run, but my best score so far -- 8490 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEDgp5w_NuE) -- took an hour and two minutes (ish), so a bit longer than an hour for the winning run.)

in retrospect, i certainly wanted to show the falsehood of some of dot's claims. i knew that i would enjoy it, for example, which might address the question of whether it is 'badly designed' or not. but i think it's this final unaddressed claim that the process has revealed to me: i knew that it was possible.

dot's claim (#4): gameplay (forever) generates impossible situations to climb through

because of the deeply random nature of the level generator, it is of course possible that gameplay (forever) will generate a situation that cannot be climbed through. but i wanted to show that there was no way dot could know that, and i wanted to understand the precise shape of this possibility, and rather than solve this from afar -- mathematically -- i already had within me the (positive) sense that 'gameplay is volunteer work', and the desire to play around with the bunny's controls, and to climb!

why not see how high i can climb?

then, once i had reached almost three thousand points (https://bsky.app/profile/droqen.bsky.social/post/3mrsmhinyw22q), i thought:

why not get to ten?

Quote from: droqen on July 30, 2026, 03:43:54 PM

• gameplay (forever) is badly designed
• gameplay (forever) is badly designed on purpose
• there [is] no rhyme or reason to what blocks appear where in gameplay (forever)
• gameplay (forever) generates impossible situations to climb through
• gameplay (forever) is one of a number of "lackluster parodies of better games"
• gameplay (forever) is asking why anyone would bother with it

i linked it somewhere already i think, but in case you missed it, here's my 8490-point high score run:


by doing this and enjoying it (and not in a pretentious way, as in, my enjoyment was not experienced due to any pretense, i just like it -- but the act of doing it could be said to have been done with pretense), i hoped to show:

1,2 - that gameplay (forever) is not badly designed (for some definition of badly designed -- in this case i suppose the entirety of my argument would be 'i enjoy it', but i hope also that the video can be used to understand the interesting situations that can occur)

3 - that by virtue of the interesting situations encountered there must be some rhyme or reason to the tile placement (even if it is random),

4 - that it does not (meaningfully, in practice) generate impossible situations,

5 - that it is not merely a lackluster parody,

and 6 - that even if i do utter the seemingly imperative "kill gameplay (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFPQCtkvyZI)" and literally ask "who could want gameplay?" that this is a deeply contextual and ephemeral perspective, and that the answer to the imperative can (and sometimes must) be "no" and that the answer to the question can (and sometimes must) be "me".

kill gameplay.