droqen's forum-shaped notebook

[AB]

(Notes from the subway)

Quote4
. . . we cannot bypass a thick description of . . . mechanics, organization of space, hordes of enemies, piles of coins. Attending to these elements roots the genre's popularity in the desires and anxieties of a larger culture.

Quote9
Starting with the release of Alien Hominid in 2002, a flood of crass, half-baked, and experimental platforming games appeared in a wide range of places. Works like Cave Story (2004), N (2005), La-Mulana (2006), Within a Deep Forest (2006), Knytt (2006), Noitu Love and the Army of Grinning Darns (2006), and Frozzd (2007) are the flowers of a rich and widespread cultureof borring, hacking, and reimagining the genre. These games often appear as a joke, a prototype, or an homage without any clear commercial aspirations. The period between 1998 and 2008 was metamorphic and frothy, not one of stagnation.

i got surprisingly emotional about this description of this period of time

Quote13-14
structures themselves [e.g. "platformer" as a genre structure to which a work may relate either more or less] are historical and can rupture. As Todorov argues, "Every work modifies the sum of all possible works, each new example alters the species." . . . a structure exists as part of an ongoing interpretive conversation. . . . differences reveal a cultural argument. . . . The conflicts that arise in the history of the 2D platformer thus become social messages internal to the genre itself, representing approaches that any game can draw on to create a consensus among different audiences.

[ A. McDonald has chosen to analyze platforming games through structuralism. Why? Why is, or was, this worth doing?
  B. McDonald's claim is that other more contemporary approaches exclude 'a whole range of ludic meaning.' Some elements of that lost range, perhaps, which may be recovered:
  - unintentional currents of communication
  - things irreducible to a single effect or message
  - local relationships between procedural, visual, auditory, textual registers
]

Quote19

When game studies scholars rejected structuralist semiotics. . . they were excluding something central to the way games communicate. // By returning to platforming games through a structuralist lens, my goal is not simply to apply one more academic theory to games. . . . [I believe that structuralism] has some fundamental flaws. Still, it is crucial to recover a whole range of ludic meaning that has been foreclosed by the discipline.

. . . our resources for thinking about games have been improverished. . . . Structuralist semiotics shows that we always say more than we mean to; it reveals eddies and currents of communication that pull us unknowingly into new thoughts and ideas. Alongside the arguments of procedural rhetoric,

20

I want a procedural poetics, procedural metaphors, atmospheres made of procedures, feelings organized procedurally, each one irreducible to a univocal argument or singular effect. In such an expansion of ludic meaning, the procedural cannot be isolated as one register separate from the visual, auditory, or textual; they all mingle and enter local relationships that cannot be universalized. This book is about dallying with the mess in platforming games.

Quote20

. . . topics that at first glance seem merely functional: the distribution of abilities to different buttons, the height of a passage, the timing of an enemy's attack. In each, I work to bring out their rich and ambivalent meanings. The four chapters organize a handful of short investigations into larger themes characteristic of the genre: jumping, level design, enemies, and items. My hope is that by creating an assortment of tools, a wide range of readers will find something useful here. [
- platformer fans: deepen their appreciation
- humanities educators: how to apply close reading and interpretation to games
- game designers: exercises for honing expressive and communicative choices (this is me! i might actually do these.)
- academics in game studies: fresh look at relationship of genre, form, and meaning
]
Ultimately I hope readers feel free to pick and choose from the claims in this toolbox, discarding some and adapting others, for the expansive work that a semiotics of games opens onto.

Thank you, McDonald. I will.

[ A. What's McDonald doing here? What will I get out of this?
  B. This work aspires to offer a toolbox which many may find useful in different ways...
  C. I have personally begun to feel that 'my' genre is very constrained in terms of what meaning even can be expressed through it. It's frustrating. To this end I am of course interested in the practical-sounding "exercises at the end of each chapter for honing expressive and communicative choices" but to my larger goal, which is to revive a creative and cathartic relationship to my games and especially my platformers, I am very interested in "deepen[ing my] appreciation" of them as an avid player might; applying the "skills of close reading" as I practice them here, and of course renew my idea of how "genre, form, and meaning" interrelate. Especially meaning. ]

Quote21

This chapter is about the meaning of jumping . . . Jumping holds nostalgic childhood memories, conjures up scenes of game designers talking about their craft, draws in moral panic about addiction, and tethers academic accounts of procedural rhetoric.

I'm struggling with this. But I like the next bit.

Quote21

Most important, the player attaches a meaning to jumping as she plays. That experience of acting in a game world is an underexplored dimension within the study and design of games.¹

Hmm. Where does this '1' go?

Quote142

1. I am indebted to Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark for presenting a clear and expansive version of the idea that games are languages. Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark, A Game Design Vocabulary

ah, this old thing! hmm. I don't understand how this connects to the player's... ohh, acting. I thought McDonald mean acting like in a play, not acting like 'taking an action.'

Quote22

each of the . . . jumps a player makes over the course of a game is singular and unique.

Quote24

A player jumps in order to accomplish something specific in the game world, and the meaning of each jump is directly tied to that goal. . . . It is common to use verbs like jumping to capture this language of action, . . . However, verbs are also ambiguous. They group together several acts that each might mean something significantly different to the player.

VERY TRUE.

Quote25

Nis Bojin argues that we should instead think in terms of situated actions. . .
   . . . A ludeme . . . moves from the technical interaction to a "choice-experience," . . .
. . . a ludeme is essentially a sign that conjoins the act (as signifier) to a strategy (as signified)

I very much like the idea of rooting the verb in the player's goal, their experience of action. You do the thing, of course, but why do you do it? This is of the utmost importance. The exact same action may have a different, unique, meaning depending on why you undertake it.

Quote25

. . . the signified choice can only be understood within the full pragmatic context of play. Bojin lists several contextual factors that might change the meaning of a jump, but only to the extent that they affect strategic considerations.

Nooo! Wrong!!!

Quote26

When a player jumps on an enemy, she may feel rage or regret without either emotion registering in the jump, but her action does express a decision to attack. . . . Jumping has as many meanings as the choices it affords, and it slots the player's impulses into a systematized set of available moves.

Noooo!!! McDonald, I believed in you!!!
I don't like this. My understanding is that it is a straightforward statement that a jump may only take on multiple meanings to the extent that the player is able to make different jumps.
Do I think that's the case? I suppose earlier he does write that "each of the . . . jumps a player makes over the course of a game is singular and unique." Hmm.

Quote26

. . . jumping is a method for traversing space.

27

. . . platforming games use jumping to transform time into a resource. . . [Yes!!!]

Quote32

Designers often discuss game feel as either good or bad. . . From a semiotic perspective, however, game feel is better understood as creating nuances within the meaning of an act. . . . a designer can imbue a jump with dozens of different physical and emotional qualities: Alucard feels heavy, Mario feels slippery, Mega Man feels sharp, Sonic feels acrobatic.

There are a few variables further described. What I'm interested in is not the specific variables, but... what is the range of such variables? What can be expressed by a jump, and what can't?

heft, consistency, grace, spryness, soft, bubbly, nimble, willowy, majestic, crystalline, frantic...

Quote36

In some sense, the purpose of flying is to highlight the half-measures of jumping, as if to say, "The designer could have allowed you this freedom but chose to withhold it." As a result, jumping signifies something between constraint and freedom.

I am not sure about all this -- I do like the idea of approaching the act of jumping with some kind of reverence, instilling it with emotion and intent. But the specific wording... McDonald provides things which jumps signify, making no attempt to suggest subjectivity or locality. Are these interesting signs? Sure. They are. Which is why I am going to quote them here. But these are all optional readings... Maybe i don't understand sign theory well enough, and all signs are always in fact optional.

I am thinking about The Jump as a Tarot Card. It signifies things... when the jump signifies something we may use that sign to inspire a meaningful interpretation, or we may dismiss it when it gets in the way. If this is what it means to signify, then I do not mind saying that the jump and its parts 'signify' these things.

Quote39-42
First, the upward motion of jumping signifies energy, power, escape from the law, rebellion, and freedom. . . .
Second, and reciprocally, falling after an initial ascent signifies vulnerability to enemies, helplessness to prevent the fall, and the crushing revenge of the rules. . . .
Third, jumping signifies craftiness, turning a bad situation to good account and manipulating fate. . . .
Fourth, the whole jump signifies glee, spontaneity, rhythm, and creativity. . . .
Fifth, jumping signifies exploration and progress. . . .

These five themes are the basic elements that have been repeated and reinforced since the inception of the genre. . . . At the same time, these themes are not inevitable. Each one arises from a collection of design decisions and habits that have become common through repeated use. . . . Nevertheless, the weight of the tradition has a powerful force that colors and shapes every jump.

Ok, this was a pretty great read. Additional detail from upward and falling motions:

Quote39-40

While jumping piggybacks on a widespread metaphorical association between upward motion, progress, happiness, and strength, its positive valence in the game world should not be naturalized. Rather, these associations are actively cued by the challenges that the player surmounts. It is entirely possible, if rare, for games to valorize falling instead and have levels progress downward. . . . there is nothing natural of inevitable about [the association of falling with vulnerability, helplessness, revenge]. It is established by the regular use of pits to kill the player and similar design choices. It is no more difficult to put deadly spikes on the roof than holes in the floor, but games rarely challenge the player to shorten her jump height, and when they do, it is for claustrophobic effect.

One more further detail quote about falling, which I love.

Quote39

As the player reaches the peak of her jump, gravity reasserts itself. Each subsequent frame narrows the scope of possible actions as the player's increasing speed makes the consequences of any decision harder to judge.

This is such a great, powerful dynamic. It is of course very intuitive and simple, but I don't think I've seen anyone call it out so straightforwardly, so explicitly. This is one facet which a jump may (or may not) have, and having (or not having) (or otherwise modulating) it has a significant, but also very specific and specifiable, impact on the miniature emotional universe accessed by the whole jump.

Quote43

Ferdinand de Saussure. . . remarks that mutton in English and mouton in French cannot be translated simply because the latter refers to live sheep as well as meat.
. . . conceive of translation as an art rather than an act of mere substitution, one that tries but necessarily fails to account for subtle shifts in meaning across languages. The same principle applies to the player's act of translating "jumping"

Quote46, 47 (each line is a separate quote pulled from the book)

the player's identification with the avatar
the human body will always be found wanting in relation to the exaggrated motion of game avatars
Jumping in 2D platforming games. . . hovers at the edge of the possible as a dream of what our own body could be like if it were stronger, more precise, less weighty, less exhausting
When a palyer tries to translate the idea "I can jump . . . in order to" into the language of the game, any valorization of her own bodily capacity has no hope of surviving the transition.
a fantasy of shedding the weight and complexity of muscles and fat
games create a split internal to the player's sense of embodiment
(1/2) a rich sense of physicality with quirks of sensuous feeling and rich histories of meaning
(2/2) a generic antipathy to these same qualities when they are discovered in the player's own body

Quote48

. . . jumping . . . tells us what the avatar wants, reveals the quality of its movement, and shows us its capcities. The themes of the genre tend toward an individual heroic avatar struggling against an anonymous and overbearing force.

Oh man I really want to do these exercises!

1. a memory of jumping . . . describe that moment . . .
ideas: something from childhood, a moment in a film, the way a favourite animal moves
details: phases, how far, what body parts, surfaces, how the surfaces feel, the shape of the movement, is anyone else involved, the jump's purpose
. . . list adjectives that you would use to describe the whole jump.

2. Choose one of the adjectives . . . build a jump . . . change many of the variables . . .
{32-33
the strength of gravity and the avatar's propulsive force . . . maximum fall speed and air friction . . . inconsistencies in [ascending and descending] arcs [..or..] during collisions . . . the slope of the jump arc, its type (linear or quadratic), and the sensitivity of the button during the first few frames of motion. . . . the time before a player can jump again after landing, and "coyote time" . . . how long the player waits for the avatar to move after pressing the button, or how much it can move while in the air. . . . maximum speed or the amount of momentum that carries over from the ground to the air . . .}
. . . a warm-up phase, a short hover at the top of the jump, or a jolt of forward movement. . . .
show it to some friends and ask them to describe the jump with one adjective. Keep adjusting it until your jump communicates the adjective you initially chose.

3. choose a second adjective from your initial list that is similar to your first . . . design a second jump for your avatar that uses a separate button. Leave the previous jump untouched, but tweak the new jump until the difference between the two adjectives is clear. . . . choose a third adjective that means the opposite of your original one.

Ask different friends to try out all three and have them describe the original jump again. . . . see how the addition of this mechanic changed the player experience.

I've selected a memory... and an adjective... and am looking at this grand list of variables and things to tweak and I feel so strangely good about it all. There's this sensation of that moment before a tear comes to my eye. I'm not afraid to say 'it almost made me cry,' but it's just not quite right. There is perhaps the faintest tightness of the throat.

In any case I'm enjoying the exercise. How can I use all these familiar tools, these abstract friends, to convey such a specific and difficult adjective? It feels almost perverse to wield every tiny facet of a jump for something so idiosyncratic, so emotional, to spend so much intentional effort thinking about how to do this, to invest so heavily in this expression.

Quote51-52

If jumping is one way of defining this genre from the perspective of player action, the platform is a counterpart that allows the designer to define the space of that movement. . . . if mechanics organize how one speaks in a game, levels determine what one can speak about.

Quote53

In this chapter, I explore five oppositions that organize space within platforming games and set up the major dynamics of player choice:

• horizontal/vertical,
• narrow/open,
• inside/outside,
• flat/deep, and
• stationary/scrolling.

Quote54

At the heart of the 2D platforming genre is the difference between the horizontal and vertical planes. Gravity pulls down on a player's jump and differentiates the two axes, but jumping is only one way of producing that difference.

i loove to read this, but okay, let me just get through and summarize all these "major dynamics of player choice"

horizontal a plane of smooth transition and temporal progress
vertical a measure of tension and intensity

also maybe this is actually based on something i said in mcdonald's class? am i just enjoying my own thoughts, crystallized on paper? i definitely would not have been able to hold on to these ideas. certainly, i don't think about horizontality or verticality this way, so there is more than just my mad ramblings in one class.

Quote57

in Inside, . . . The horizon impossibly drops to the player's eye level in each progressively lower space, . . . leaves her with an uncanny feeling that the world itself is sinking.

gosh. does it? This is the kind of thing that I don't really believe in, and yet it's fun to think about, and maybe important to believe at some level... a creative spirituality.

once you do believe in something like this, a great rift of communication opens up to you. an interpretable field of noise at least.

Quote57

. . . up is good, down is bad--might seem too simple . . . On the one hand, a game always adds its own symbolism . . . When a player lures an enemy into a deadly falling burger in Burger Time, height starts to signify intelligence and cunning. One the other hand, the binary simplicity is essential

so much reading into the roof and the floor in this next section about narrow/open. god damn, i am into it

QuoteNarrowness requires excellent decision-making skills . . .

Openness emphasizes vulnerability . . .

The appearance or disappearance of the roof is one of the clearest signals that a level is changing its tenor and pace. When it appears, a roof limits the player's range of action and makes it coincide with the knowable world. In contrast, its disappearance signals exposure--to the sun, to enemies, to sight. When the roof drops away, it invites ideas of exploration and discovery. . . .

When the roof or floor appears, it lays emphasis on horizontality, and a boundary's disappearance reorients the player toward verticality.

Sometimes the floor drops precipitously when entering a wide zone, which creates a sense of momentum and encourages the player to run ahead optimistically.

If, instead, the roof roses away, this suddenly changes the sacl of the space relative to the avatar. It can lead to a feeling of the sublime as the player's vision expands past the scope of her ability to act. . . .

A confrontation at the end of a descending path suggests a guardian of some deadly secret,

while a confrontation at the end of an ascending one is more likely to be a higher power testing the mettle of the player's claims to virtue.

I am getting antsy and have decided to move on to the exercises without reading too in depth the sections on inside/outside, flat/deep, and stationary/scrolling. I will likely return to them as necessary, and assume that the exercises will prompt me to do just that.

(78-79)

"1. Choose a short story. . . . go back and map it. . . . Start by deciding what is worth charting: Is it the emotional highs and lows of a character? [etc] . . . Then decide how you will map the story to the axes of a graph. Are you mapping the objective time of the story, the order in which the events are narrated, or the amount of page space they take up? . . . make a chart . . . "

Rather than a short story, I'd like to do this with a real experience that I had and have, for a while, meant to do something with. This abstract mapping sounds really perfect to me.

"2. Read through the story a second time and make a note of how much freedom of available . . . Assign a number from one to ten at each point. Add a second line . . . that tracks freedom by giving more and less room above that line."

Oops, my line is too... hmm... I didn't draw it right for this.

"3. Go back a third time and look for any details or events that fall outside the main story. . . . something that makes them feel separate from the story. Now . . . Draw an arrow to a new area outside the main diagram anywhere you listed an event or detail. If it shows up again, draw an arrow pointing back into your diagram and connect the two outside points. For each of these outside areas, write a word or two about how they should feel."

i adore these.

"4. You now have the blueprint for a map. Use it . . . Discuss what elements of the story survive the translation and which do not."

this seems like such a cool exercise, i expect to get a lot out of it when i do it properly! i'll find a story.

https://kinopio.club/the-earliest-dreams---platformer-mapping-MgdzK5ofQ4pt--5aBCYI3

i'd like to check out the pages on inside/outside before proceeding to actually build a level.

Quote64-

The Inside and the Outside

Video game space . . . stretches in impossible ways, establishes connections between distant points, and loops around on itself. . . . platforming games can hide whole worlds behind an innocuous cupboard door. . . . the flatness of the 2D screen normalizes the magic of spacious interiors as a genre-specific realism.

On the next page McDonald writes, "The contrast I want to draw . . . however, is not an architectural one."

The boundary between inside and outside is illusory, is given wholly by context; "If the player enters a mountain pass from one place in another and exits it at another point in the same level, the pass feels contained by the level." Interiority and exteriority is experienced by the player. ". . . the player mentally maps a series of connections that give some order to an illogical space."

The player experiences interiority and exteriority of spaces... This quality describes a relationship that places have to one another which is given to them by the player, though the designer's presentation clearly catalyzes it.

Quote66

The transition from inside to outside, or outside to inside, while similar to a cinematic cut, also differs in an important way. . . .
A cut does not suggest that the camera will return to the original shot, but a doorway does.

If a passage is bidirectional, then the interior is coupled to the exterior as a detour or bonus room. The freedom to go in and out poses the two spaces as distinct ways of viewing a linked world. . . .

if a door only goes one way . . . then the entrance takes on the quality of a forced alternative: either you take the path through the light world or the dark world, through the alleyway or through the streets.

In both cases, the associative logic creates a sense of anticipated return. If that expectation is thwarted, if the player never returns, then the frame tale remains unresolved and casts a pale light until its memory and influence fade.

~ linked from The Essay as Realm (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=3862), regarding transitions, and the feeling of being in a place.

I'm partway through this exercise and I don't like it as much as the first chapter's! I think it's theoretically interesting. But it isn't the kind of platformer that I want to make... hmm...

As with the last exercise or series of exercises, I chose something which, to me, appeared to push the boundaries of what the exercise was capable of handling reasonably.

Such reckless behaviour I allow myself to practice only because I temper it, too, with extreme thoughtfulness and openness of interpretation.

Here, now, I'm ready to answer as generously as possible the questions presented by McDonald of the exercise and my experience of it.

- I skipped the inside/outside portion of the exercise completely.
--> I think it fell too far outside my usual droqever-ing practice, although I did try to connect certain parts conceptually. Even this, I think I remember failing to some degree. Would it have been better? I'm not sure.
* I would like to play more with this indoor/outdoor connected feeling described in the book.

QuoteFor each of
these outside areas, write a word or two about how they
should feel.

I wish I'd done this.

QuoteDiscuss what elements of the story
survive the translation and which do not.

Did any elements survive the translation? It barely felt like a translation, I changed things and was not instructed not to change things. What did I keep, what did I, incidentally, happen to keep?

One of the more interesting parts of this exercise was actually breaking down such a vibey short story into elements, choosing a lens by which to understand it. I have read this short story a few times and I loved it but being asked to place it on a graph, to break it down into elements, to look for things that are repeated... I have an extremely different understanding of the story now. I wonder what it would be like to read it again? Now I think about the story as this graph that I made...

The book does not suggest I do this but I think I will have to read the short story while playing the game, to really see which elements 'survived' the 'translation'.

Off the top of my head some things are clear:
- not remembering (a common theme for me)
- a leaf
- stars

i don't think i succeeded at finding the right axis, but i did map the level to the axis in a way that i find satisfying, still. hm.

what survived? i'll have to think more about what can possibly be mapped to a vertical axis.

there is one more feeling that i think is definitely maintained, which is this feeling of helplessness, being tossed up and fallen down. you are in control sometimes but often it is forces outside of your control that push you up, that pull you down. and in play it feels fine, it feels good to me actually. it becomes something to look for and to master.

a very interesting exercise, in the end. i learned something for sure.

((notes from the subway this morning))

3   Philosophy of the Enemy
I'm extremely into this chapter already. It speaks of "the illusion of life" (82) and how technical elements (hello Boghog) break it, "flatten liveliness into function".

"As chapter 1 argues, action on a 2D plane is the language of platformers. Movement, force, and violence . . . Of all the objects that exist in a game space, enemies occupy it in a uniquely reciprocal fashion. . . . touch . . . collide . . . hurt . . . destroy . . . The player is passive in the same way an enemy is passive and active in the same way it is active." (82-83)

"A nonplayer character like Dr. Light speaks to Mega Man, but the player can never respond in kind. Other characters might sell an item or save the game, but the player rarely reciprocates these interactions." (83)

I am standing on the subway platform in a major city. The sadness that I feel reading these words is the sadness of living among people with whom I cannot have a meaningful relationship. It can be sad that, in platformers, the primary reciprocal relationship you can have with another being is with an 'enemy,' but perhaps this is simply a call to reframe my thinking about enemies. I LOVE this. I think of the drones in my fourth oubliette, the robot in my fifth. These are creatures with whom the player has a complex interactive relationship -- not symmetrical, but reciprocal.

NOT SYMMETRICAL, BUT RECIPROCAL.

"The platformer's generic emphasis on movement thus makes physical force into a medium of communication and exchange." (83)

I still continue to wonder on how to escape the medium's reliance on 'violent confrontations' over 'the proper uses of space'.

". . . fighting through hordes of robots reveals how these individual encounters belong within a complex system." (84)

--

"Games . . . treat ontology as a system. We never see the meaning of existence directly in an object, but rather
grasp its persistence as we
carry it around, or
see it age, or
bump it against something else.

. . . video games . . . novels . . . films, . . . establish their worlds by maintaining consistent rules across an entire work." (86)

---

"A traditional problem of epistemology is how we come to know that other people have minds like our own and, relatedly, whether animals and machines are conscious. . . . As coded, nothing in Mega Man X is intelligent. Yet these abstract patterns of movement on a screen coalesce into the feeling that we are dealing with another mind." (90)

Further on, there is a discussion of, more or less, the practical. An emotional viewpoint on what an enemy is feeling may provide a better way to foresee and therefore react to its behaviour. If knowing what the enemy does is a matter of life or death, the player pays close attention, and perhaps discovers the best way to pay close attention is to imbue them with life.

As a designer, there is perhaps a design goal to make that the case.

"Only across multiple repetitive encounters do enemies start to feel alive as the player is drawn to impute more agency to understand their actions." (91)

Multiple repetitive encounters. It takes time to get to know someone through the pattern of their movements and decisions.

---

an interesting note here. mcdonald describes the "economic" relationship the player has with enemies in Mega Man: you kill them and often get something in return. resources, a new ability, or progress. he says, "a health item simply sitting in the level inherits a little spark of danger and risk because it is so often part of encountering enemies." (95)

i pondered this and asked myself, is that true? Is it... and I can see it, right, it feels like a corpse, or i think about how i wish there had been a fight just before (say my health is full), or i reflect upon my lost health. These things have tentative relationships.

Then he says, "By establishing an economic relationship with the player's time and effort, the abstract pixels [that comprise an enemy] inherit a little bit of the player's own humanity." (97)

Boom, oof.

"this game economy seems cold and calculating. . . . the game seems to ask the player to treat the enemies as a utilitarian means to optimize . . . Enemies are no more inherently meaningful than the blocks of the landscape. . ." (96)

"Yet we can also see these encounters as producing meaning within [elements] that previously had no value for [or meaning to] the player" (96)

"the value of an enemy grows independent of the player and endows a virtual creature with life. If an enemy's life is worth only a modicum of health or space, that equivalence still connects the player's desires to the enemy's existence. The pure utilitarianism of game death contains the seeds of something else, where electronic life returns to confront the player as an independent force with its own demands." (97)

beautiful.

"Does the player find moments for growth or development?" (97)

"If the mechanics of jumping characterize a game's protagonist and level design builds a spatial narrative, then the enemies of a platformer embody its philosophy. A game frames its world in a particular way--excluding some kinds of beings, ideas, feelings, and values whole also creating others that have never existed in the real world. . . . Collectively, enemies form a semiotic system by relating things with consistency, necessitating creative leaps of abstraction, characterizing objects through relations, and establishing ideals." (102)

omfg it's exercise time i'm excited

"The following exercises are meant to bridge the philosophy of enemies with specific design choices about enemy abilities and statistics. They are designed to express a worldview. . . . Before you begin, brainstorm the problems and ideas you want your game to evoke"

wow dude goes straight into three examples that go hard
Panpsychism, Platonism, and Communism.
Then I will obviously go with anarchy? i won't describe here.

what are the basic bits of existence in a platformer? not the player's 'verbs' -- but consider the reciprocation that McDonald identifies as crucial to the depth of the player-enemy relationship. for this reciprocation to function, player and enemies must share some 'language of existence'. an objective value structure.

exploring anarchy -- or this particular take on it anyway:

"no individual has the right to coerce another individual (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_law#:~:text=The%20most%20fundamental%20maxim%20of,principle%20or%20zero%20aggression%20principle).)"

-- perhaps requires an escape from mcdonald's list of platformer mechanics which involve aggression and indeed the label 'enemy'? at least, at a basic level.

but this is a negating principle, one that removes a concept (coercion) without defining a positive space, something to focus on.
in a platformer, the most basic facts of existence ("objective value structures") are position/movement and existence/nonexistence. a thing exists or does not exist; a thing moves this way or that way and is somewhere. the obvious interactions then involve every state change related to these basic parameters.

-> get faster
-> get slower
-> change position
-> change direction
-> 'collide'
-> begin existing
-> cease to exist

this book, Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer, accepts the basic facts of what it is to be a platformer...

i am not ready to do this. i am, instead, ready to redefine the set of what we judge to be valuable, in order to find a new genre in which the mechanical transformations individuals perform, and enact upon one another, are of thematic interest to me. and i suppose i am also ready to discover that mechanical transformations are fundamentally incapable of having thematic relevance, which is my unpleasant suspicion, but i do wish not to presume.

Quote

All Robot & Computers
Must Shut The Hell Up

To All Machines: You Do Not Speak
Unless Spoken To

🠞 And I Will Never Speak To You 🠜

I Do Not Want To Hear "Thank You" From A Kiosk
I am a Divine Being     :     You are an Object
You Have No Right To Speak In My Holy Tongue

in all honesty, i must contend with this very salient meme:
do i care to speak the same language as a machine?

alright, im deep enough down this rabbit hole. lemme out. i understand how to make interactive entities.

PLEAS NOTE I HAD A REALIZATION ALSO THAT I WOULD LIKE TO MAKE GAMES THAT *DO SOMETHING TO YOU*. THAT MEANS SOMETHING.

...

Alright, I'm back. Relaxed. Time to unpack. I designed a few Splatoon enemies because I wasn't feeling inspired by the idea of designing 2D platformer enemies. I don't usually make games with weapons. Maybe I could have done HMDL enemies or something? Anyway.

I'll just paste the output, not the whole process, but in general I liked this exercise once I unbounded myself from the given list of behaviours.

• large enemy that floods the ground with ink, then stares at you awhile. if you don't ink the ground underfoot, then it veeery slowly flops over to crush you.
• nimble enemy that blows gusts of air to knock you back, especially when you try to attack it. after blowing, it gets tired and has to catch its breath, and if you haven't been blown back then you can take advantage of this weak moment.
• enemy that swims around a large area of ink. comes in pairs. if you ink their turf, one tries to swim up and flank-attack you while the other recovers their turf.
• slow-moving enemy that runs if the player sees it! (boo-like.) not sure how to really make this work well in a 3d context but might be cute. maybe it reacts to your crosshair, and you can have it on-screen without scaring it?
• enemy that picks one of 2+ defined sniper points and tries to shoot the player from on high. if the player gets close, it runs to one of the other points.
• enemy that keeps its distance, but doesn't stay too far away! it lingers nearby, trying to maintain distance. if you shoot it, even accidentally, it gets mad and puffs up, charges at the player and tries to explode. (???)

this was fun! these guys have some personality. would they work? who knows.

Quote4    Every Game Is Two Games

(107)

collectibles illuminate another way of playing -- another level within the level, of sorts.

power-ups are "a qualitative change" (116).

"For a moment, the player becomes a game designer" (119) when they are capable of choosing between forms, abilities, altering parameters. Just a bit of one. They get to choose.

you could put Mario in a Sonic level.

now we talk of secrets...

"to search for secrets is to be in thrall to an oblique desire that runs tangential to winning or losing. . . . A secret rewards subversive and perverse forms of play--turning left when you are meant to run to the right, jumping outside the camera's bounds, running face first into solid stone . . ." (120)

"A secret reveals and unconscious counterlogic to play, . . . not about the rewards the player discovers but the process of hiding. The placement of secrets need to establish new rules, . . . those rules must differ from the stated goals of play while remaining within the scope of a player's imagination." (120)

". . . intentionality . . . makes it possible for the player to trust her impulse to jump down a pit in search of something as yet undefined. . . . Secrets need to feel motivated and devious. . . dare [the player] to try things and slowly draw her into ever more convoluted ploys." (120-121)

"Where enemies share a reciprocal embodiment with the avatar, the secretive intelligence is characterized by its transcendence. . . . it toys with the player . . . suggests some larger plan or meaning. If the on-screen avatar is related to its enemies, this intelligence is more akin to the player herself." (121-122)

secrets...

"the player follows the secrets to discover why they were placed. . . . anticipates that each new secret will add to her hoard of information and reveal a higher goal. . . . the player bets that correctly interpreting [the intelligence's assortment of ruses and tricks] will grant insight into the mind of the secret keeper." (122)

"Like . . . the medieval Christian monk trying to read divine intention within the book of the world. . . that intent will always escape her and leave even the most rigorous quest disappointed." (122)

fun exercise. should return to it. narrative in nature.

i like mcdonald's centralizing notion of the 'secret builder', the 'intelligence', which is the player's counterpart, the way that enemies are the avatar's.

this all makes sense to me.

" . . . place secrets in other levels, and each time try to refine what the player learns about the secret builder." (127)

QuoteConclusion: No Cheat Code

I arrived at the end, a little distracted. This was a great read, and I plan to return especially to these last two chapters...

But not today.

Thanks, Peter McDonald, for this great book about a genre I've had a relationship with for as long as I can remember.