No, I don't need a week, I can tell already that even the talking games aren't just there to make us talk! We are obviously imagining people and stories. Talking games are just the medium, like computer games... There is a problem with the language, because we also have tactics games and puzzle games, and these are not the medium but the message / the content. Hmm.

Anyway, I am really into talking games, and I am really into story/storytelling games, but I think I am still really into computer games, but I'm not that into even problem-solving games. I am more into . . . oh no, what was the phrase? It's not expression games. Performance games, maybe. I went to karaoke and it was fun to sing and sing bad and know that I could get better if I felt like it, but also that I didn't have to. If I got better it would be for myself, and if I got any positive feedback it would be . . . I would not be getting better at a performance game because I wanted the praise, but for some other reason. Some mysterious 'unnamed garden game' reason.

Why does it feel so good to set my own goals and achieve them?

Deserves another thread somewhere.

I've been looking for a name for the kind of tabletop roleplaying game that I like to do, that I aspire to play, and I think that name might be "Talking games". The point of these games is to talk. A conversation . . . is a form of talking game, or possibly the output of a talking game, but either way they are deeply related. Going on a walk can be a talking game. But also, a lot of tabletop roleplaying games have components of 'talking game' in them. Those are the parts that I like. I even like talking about the numbers and the rules sometimes, but I lose interest quickly because it's obvious that the play is not about the talking anymore, the talking is instrumental in nature, the talking is about conveying ideas, and the talking is not really the play, the ideas are. The game is about the ideas, and the talking is just ordinary talking.

The point of talking games is not to talk ordinarily, but to play-talk, to play a game where talking is the thing, or something like that. I'll have to come back and see what I think about this in a week or so.

I read a book when I was a kid about how to play all sorts of games with marbles. Most of them involved drawing lines in dirt, even carving troughs or holes which the marbles would physically encounter. Well, I didn't have dirt, I never played the games, I felt disconnected from that ability to change my environment...

I had blocks and things like that. But I never had dirt. I'd love to dig up that book and dig up some dirt and play some marbles games.

First, what is irritation? I think this quote clicked for me:

<<Helga's irritation is both an excess and a deficiency of anger . . . an insistently inadequate reaction, one occurring only in conspicuous surplus or deficit in proportion to its occasion>(UF, p182)

Ngai does not make this connection explicitly (yet), but her current discussion of irritation through (or even as the 'organizing logic'--a phrase she uses in a previous chapter which I liked--of) the novel Quicksand (of which Helga is the protagonist) is in some ways a counterpoint to animatedness, its inverse.

<< . . . irritation's radical inadequacy . . . calls attention to a symbolic violence . . . when there is an underlying assumption that an appropriate emotional response to racist violence exists, and that the burden lies on the racialized subject to produce that appropriate response legibly, unambiguously, and immediately.>>(UF, p188)

In a sense Helga's irritation in Quicksand draws attention to the animatedness which is expected of her (the racialized subject in this instance). Animatedness is that legible, unambiguous, immediate response to some stimulus... while irritation exists somewhere in the negative of that space.

I keep my copy of Ugly Feelings next to my head when I sleep so that I can pick through a page or thirty when the mood strikes. Today the mood struck.

Without opening it, before even touching it, just by thinking of its object, I thought about how I'm part way through irritation, and I don't remember exactly what it was saying about the ugly feeling of irritation. When I pick up the book I notice where the bookmark is: exactly halfway through the book, between the two covers.

I don't get any of this from things I read on computers. I can't keep a pdf on my bedside table, or picture the object, or stick a bookmark in and see the dark cleft where it parts the pages. Books. What a thing.

A few ideas for how that looks in play:

- The Wizard has a totally incompetent and/or evil familiar, who they delight in sending on small errands to see if they can do it successfully. If the being or creature screws it up: great! Lesson learned for next time. Improvements can be made.

- Faced with a completely trivial problem, The Wizard immediately attempts a magical solution rather than a mundane one, not oblivious to the consequences but not at all concerned about them. There are consequences which are obvious and flashy! They are part of the fun, and The Wizard then sets to work on cleaning them up. Or, studying them!

- Faced with a complex and difficult problem, The Wizard immediately describes the requirements for implementing their magical solution, whose mechanisms will remain wholly undescribed* at least for now. These requirements are confusing or troublesome, but The Wizard is already at work on their part of solving the problem...

*Maybe they're not interested in discussing the finer points of how magic works because nobody seems to understand it when they do. Have some extremely confusing and terrible explanations of The Wizard's understanding of magic. They are not a sorcerer, just an actual wizard who has a very intuitive mode of both comprehending and using magic. "But it's so obvious!"

This might be a generally good way to justify a character who acts without talking about it first. Rather than being impulsive, they do not think that they will be understood if they do talk. You should be ready to produce some very rambling, incoherent rants.

(see: Benoit Blanc, Knives Out? sometimes he plays at being mysterious, or intentionally withholds information, but he does a good weird incoherent-poetic rant, too)

Because really, it's not about solving the problems, it's about exercising the magic.

Here are my notes for a new possible full wizard player character, or at least facets of them.

This wizard is just a huge magic nerd. They DO want to solve problems with magic, AND IT IS A BAD IDEA. They apply magic to situations for which magic is grossly excessive or wholly unsuited.

There is inherent badness to magic, of course, but this character is perhaps a savant or perhaps a total nincompoop; they are confident that the downsides of magic can be handled, but this can only be discovered through experience! There ARE solutions, and the only way we find answers to our questions is by asking them. (ref: Edgelord)

With impulsive fascination, this wizard says "I can solve this with magic!" and then the player is free to describe how magic could possibly be used to solve this problem. It is a fount for creativity! We have a full wizard who is fully engaged with solving even relatively mundane problems using magic!

One possible wizard discussed was someone who escaped from a wizard cult-slash-family and who is hunted down by one or more characters (family member(s), demon(s), others?), but has escaped from the wizard culture because they recognized its inherent badness. So they have access to magic but they don't use it.

HOWEVER, this is not the "full wizard" we dream of!

Some problems we've identified

- Other players without the ability to sense magic won't be able to be 'in' on the feedback that a person really in tune with the magical world is. So if the GM has to describe something in any detail, it sucks a little bit for other players whose characters have nothing to react to.

- There is, in general, an issue with players having access to a power that allows them to circumvent problems in a way that overrides other more interesting problem-solving instincts. Magic is such a power, especially in the hands of a full wizard.

In the world magic is scary and a bad idea. How can a player run a full wizard in a way that doesn't cause terrible problems for the story? That is, how can a full wizard player character not ruin the game? We do want them to cause terrible problems for their friends and for the setting, because as established, that is what magic does.

reserved for intro

I was talking to Chris and realized another thing: I had the same experience as Jonathan Blow but reacted differently — I felt positive about it, but because I accepted that perception (that incomplete "surface understanding" of my work and my self) as my identity.

That obviously was bad and caused a lot of problems, though it took a long time for me to actually be capable of perceiving it.

[pingback: CONSENSUS games]

P. 225, 'NECESSARY FEATURES OF ALL LIVING PROCESS'

     I would like the reader to consider my discussion of living process in the next ten chapters as applying to every conceivable process in society, and to every architecture-creating process, at any scale, in which the reader is herself/himself involved.

// Way ahead of you. Already doing it. These next ten chapters are going to be awesome. I thought we were done the core of the book at the fifteen transformations, but I can tell the next ten chapters are full of promise.

In Paradise I was briefly enamoured by the idea of perfection. What does it mean for something to be perfect? I thought that it was, perhaps, out of reach. But that passion has been rekindled by this section on mistakes; a perfect thing is simply something made without mistakes. And mistakes . . . mistakes are countable.

I like that Alexander's approach is not to repair mistakes that were made, but to not make them in the first place, through structure-preserving transformations. The mistakes are measured by what mistakes are made in the process of each of the transformations performed to produce the work. Did these transformations strengthen the whole, or did they weaken it? Did they respect the relationships, or did they damage or destroy them? These mistakes, these wounds, are not bugs in code. They scar, they cannot be fixed. Scars heal over, but they do not vanish. I think there can be beauty in damage which has been allowed to grow over. A structure-preserving transformation does not destroy even 'bad' structure. It grows over and around it. The damage remains, but does not remain a fresh wound.