SPOILERS

Quote from: The Many Deaths.. p676He felt no particular elation. What he felt, in fact, was sorrow. All their lives, his and theirs, had come to no more than this. For a moment there was even the temptation to shout a warning. To cry out that that prideful fool who had made such a stupid choice in Dejagore so long ago had not meant any of them to come to this. But, no. It was too late. Fortune's die was cast. The cruel game had to be played to its end, no matter what anyone wanted.

The impact of this piece of writing doesn't reach its full significance until later in the war (battle?), when Mogaba's trap is sprung on a huge number of main characters. The title of the volume, The Many Deaths of the Black Company is really pushed here... and yet it's also strangely distant? I love the way it's written, the deaths are both deeply impactful as well as very removed. As it often is in the series.

Looking back on Mogaba's sorrow is the bitterest part of this and the most interesting to me. There are other moments leading up to the conflict, moments of hesitation and regret and inevitability... somehow I wasn't expecting such tragedies to befall the Black Company.

I suppose the horror of the trap is not especially visceral. The trap's mechanisms are described but the details of suffering and loss are left entirely unprovoked, between the lines. (Actually there are two traps. And in both cases, the annalist doesn't dwell on much. It's not even clear when a major character dies... Is that what it would be like, in a chaotic wartime situation? This occurs many times throughout the series; there is a discovery, afterwards, of exactly who is lost and who is still alive.)

Worked well. But the macarons were very hollow.

+ 1 tray on top rack (no bottom protection)
+ 325 for 8 mins
+ release steam
+ 315 for 2 mins
+ release steam
+ 310 for 2 mins

CONCERN: 2nd and 3rd batches are left out too long and develop too much of a skin

C. Thi Nguyen's "Games: Agency as Art"

Quote from: p3, footnote 1For simplicity's sake, I will speak as if there is a single game designer, when in actuality, games are often designed in large teams.

Quote from: p3, for example[..] the fact that the game designer specifies goals and abilities [..] is precisely what makes games distinctive as an art form.

I think this is wildly... irresponsible? Something? If there is often no singular "game designer," why talk about it this way?

Foie Gras - this is the one

feb 10, 2022
12:15 - started chopping onions
12:58 - done chopping and sweating bacon; bacon removed; all chopped stuff and 2c milk in pot
1:33 - potatoes boiled, soup blended, seasoning complete. i've been snacking on lychees & we're waiting for the bread bowls to bake :)

Lots of stairs inside the castle.
 The outside can be ascended, also.

if you have not seen the actual footage, the alien does something different, less drastic. it doesn't want to make trouble for itself, recognizes you are somewhat of a force to be reckoned with.

post-waking ideas!

the alien has gear in the castle that you can sabotage, and a schedule you can learn or influence in order to get things done.

"Mrs. Iz. Mrs. Iz. You are making a big mistake."

Seen from a first person perspective.

There is a scared character, Mrs. Iz, who is sort of a companion who tries to get you not to investigate certain things in the castle...

There is this weird little grey creature who tries to unsuccessfully do something, who can be picked up and used?

There is an alien who basically seems to ignore you - but if you trigger certain events suddenly becomes a terrifying opponent, who hunts you down mercilessly.

Its behaviours...
- finds the grey thing and resets it
- repairs aspects of the level, using the grey thing?
- in the beginning, the scared character tries to get you away from a CCTV viewer, to reset it or something, "he's coming."
- something announces the alien's voice: "Mrs. Iz. Mrs. Iz. You are making a big mistake." it has a weird buzzy, deliberate voice.
- the CCTV viewer can show weird catacombs under the castle? the alien is doing something bad?
- if you see this and are caught, the alien hunts you down. eliminates you.

I don't get the joy of Millstone out of testing my heuristics in Rift Wizard.

Rift Wizard has shit gamefeel.

I've played some more Rift Wizard.

Theme aside, the system is compelling... but it doesn't cash out as easily as I wish it did; maybe what I want is a power fantasy, and it's putting up too much resistance! The many little pieces allow me to form combos, they're very tantalizing that way, but then the enemies are designed to throw wrenches into not only my ability to win, but my ability to use my abilities! It feels bad, and requires me to take the time to run through the details every time I step through a rift, every time I take a move...

I think that there's only so much time I'm willing to dedicate to each move, and it starts to feel bad that my own impatience* is a major factor in why I can't make progress.

*but it's not so much impatience as it is the feeling that I'm wasting my time, that if every turn is going to be significantly longer I'd rather waste my time doing something else. I'm losing patience.

Raw search and heuristics.

I'm hitting my raw search limit, and so I need better heuristics. How do I develop better heuristics? The game (Rift Wizard) allows me to develop new heuristics through... ha ha, more raw search! Now that's interesting. A game may be deep, but since depth is raw search + heuristics, is the sub-game of developing heuristics ... deep, too?

How deep does learning go?

Quote from: The Many Deaths of the Black Company, p382No world lacks its villains so self-confident that they don't believe they can get the best end of a bargain with the darkness. I married one of those. I am not sure she has learned her lesson yet.

and not making broken games, or breakable games. i want to do the breaking. i'm selfish that way.

(i'm sure the game will be fragile in its own beautiful ways all on its own.)

Quote from: @droqenbreaking games as a player and as a designer.
breaking them from both sides.

tweet

full quote:

Quotei enjoy doing things that should not be doable
maybe that's the other side of breaking the horizon
as a player you do something that seems unintended...
as a designer i've thought to recapture it i ought to create the illusion of intent, for a player to break through, but it's not quite a perfect symmetry. having just experienced an 'impossible system breakage' experience as a player, i enjoyed knowing that the lack of intent was legitimate, but it's impossible to explicitly design that kind of thing.

with starseed pilgrim i guess there is a similar sort of feeling, but from the designer's standpoint. the player doesn't get to experience "doing the impossible against the designer's expectations" but it makes sense that as a designer i wanted the game to make possible something impossible, against the player's expectations...

i was never designing that part of the game for myself to play, i was just designing to satisfy exactly this same part of me that enjoys breaking games. oh, boy. does this all make sense? it was all very stream-of-consciousness.

breaking games as a player and as a designer.
breaking them from both sides.

brr what am i writing? ? ?
i'd like to compress this all into a nice little tiny thing
anyway the point i want to remind myself of!

compelling aspects are fine!! if a game is not compelling, it is not played. it must be compelling to survive asking people to play it. that's what i think? sliding rocks across the ice is fun for a while but gets boring... even if it's still a fun activity. how do we make it more compelling? add a goal, add obstacles, add rules. not just any goals, any obstacles, any rules -- no, we add these things that make the activity more compelling.

the activity of sliding rocks across the ice is itself a prototype, not doing the above work of making a compelling act more compelling, but of taking individual elements (slidey ice, a rock) and creating an activity out of those elements

But, all these words are highly useful at a high level, as a goal, as a means by which to understand what makes a videogame or any other work of art spread.

Ideas are creatures that live in the psychosocial medium of our minds, passed from person to person as well as from memory to memory, from thought to thought. Reading about a videogame is one sort of idea delivered via the written medium; playing that same videogame is often more ideas by several orders of magnitude, delivered via the played medium.

Hearing about someone's videogame idea is another set of ideas delivered via the oral medium.

Thinking about your own videogame idea is another set of ideas, too.