Last year, and now this year again, I've been thinking about videogames as fashion, not in terms of it being something that you wear and that you can use to express yourself, but in that it is something with trends, not wholly predictable but certainly recognizable, something that can be theorized about, responded to, and seen.

I liked this quote a lot and I'd like to think about it for a while:

QuoteWe might say that "taste" is the abstract, moralized knowledge, while "style" is its visual expression.

Fashion makes taste easily visible as style, in part because its distinctions between color or cut in clothing are so specific and yet so random ("rules which we don't even know").

Unknowns, and unknown unknowns, are quite beautiful to behold and consider. But, in order to begin engaging with unknowns, they must first be visible. The result of a six-sided die roll is "unknown", while the next card to be drawn from a deck of 100 unknown cards is an "unknown unknown". In both cases, however, it's known that we are contending with the unknown.

By contrast, if I am playing an action game where my gun can jam randomly 5% of the time but it hasn't jammed yet, then when I press the fire button I'm not grappling with the unknown... my mindset is prepared for what is known, and at some point in the future I may be unpleasantly surprised.

agency surprises.

break the horizon.

By contrast to malicious game design which is built around... pranks at best and cruel jokes at worst, magical game design is built around magic tricks.

superceded by: MAGIC TRICKS, HORIZON BREAKS, ASTONISHMENT

"Designs that feature high player interaction[..]" have big storytelling and strategic value!

"They have amazing storytelling capacity."

"Digital games have a hard time with the free-for-all game with the exception of [the Battle Royale genre]. I think these are the most important games that have been developed since Minecraft [..] they are truly multi-lateral conflict games."

VIDEOGAMES

Alternate win cons are great if victory is the only thing keeping players in your game but if players are playing for other things, if those things are keeping them in the game, victory starts to become a little less important

Paths to victory

Liberte
High Frontier
^ "I once spent about an hour planning a mission to one of Jupiter's Moons and about halfway through I hit a radiation belt wrong and one of my spaceship components blew up and I spent the next hour, like hour of game-time, attempting to rescue my poor astronauts [..] and it was GREAT! The story that the game is telling is so bracing/powerful, you don't want to unplug" [even if you're not in the running for victory]

"Victory conditions"

"[they] bind the players together"

you can't tamper with them, you want to lay them out first. but what do you do when someone has no chance of winning?

"Diplomatic flexibility"

"There are no villains in real life. There are adversaries, and there are partners, and sometimes our partners become our adversaries. and sometimes we need to find partners in those who oppose us. No diplomacy system you're going to design is going to be as clever as your players."