I felt strangely exhausted by Salmon Run : it seemed like a futile effort, struggling to fight bosses, collect eggs, and whatnot. The end goal was not in sight. Then there was a shift. One wave on Gone Fission Hydroplant it struck my once-tired brain that if we just killed each boss before they had a chance to pile on more, the usual chaos of Salmon Run would be reduced to a simple boss rush... kill one after the other.

This tweaked my mental model.

my attempts at answers

1. Errands and collectibles are useful when developing a game in order to draw the player's attention to things!

2. It's a double-edged sword: The effect of using a specific signpost to draw the player's attention to things means that they see the rest of the world as negative space by default.

3. There are many strategies! A few ways to draw the player's attention to things:
- Visual tricks like they employ in Half-Life 2
- Moving entities that you want to chase (e.g. frogs in Proteus)
- Moving entities that you want to run away from?
- Unpleasant, costly, or dangerous gameplay features that drive the player *away* from the negative space, rather than towards a positive space

4. This is a tricky question! What is design and what isn't? If we're considering a scenario where we do not solve the "design problems," what does that mean? Is it a game where the player's attention is never directed intentionally? Or is it a game where the player's attention is never directed by 'gameplay elements' or 'gameplay'? What is the difference between 'compelling text' and 'compulsory instructions'? I'm not sure this question has an answer in the abstract.

Quote from: 8:03As a tourist in Venice, I don't have to go to the Bridge of Sighs, or St. Mark's Basilica, I can wander the backstreets and alleyways without fear of collectibles rewarding me. Are there brave games that do the same? Let me wander, and find my own meaning?

I'm so tempted to give in to this. I think I must have watched this video. It's a compelling mindset, a beautiful question: Why have pointless busywork gameplay when a place is in itself enough?

When I explore the backstreets and alleyways of a real place I know I am exploring a real place, a place that belongs to people, a place that has or once had a purpose. I've lost that sense in videogame places. Maybe it's gameplay that poisoned me, the resulting gameplay-sense what keeps me from enjoying exploration. Maybe I perceive a videogame place without gameplay to be pointless primarily because my experiences have conditioned me to look for gameplay in videogames.

But without gameplay what am I exploring? Exploration, exploration, relies on movement through space. Exploration is gameplay. Turning pages is gameplay. Seen this way the quote from the last post may read, "Why replace one form of gameplay with another?"

Through that lens, we can ask: what is the purpose of exploration, and what is the purpose of errands?

Exploration is something that the player does. Running errands is also something that the player does. What mechanics enable each of them?

Collectibles are a simple game mechanic that fuels a simple player activity. Exploration is much more ephemeral: What drives a player to explore? Given a task, a player will likely perform that task. Errands are a way to push the player through the world, to give an implicit promise to them that they are doing the right thing by exploring. Errands, collectibles, are exploration gamified.

Rephrasing the original question, "Why replace genuine exploration with a bunch of errands?", I get this:

"Why do game developers use {errands [and collectibles]} to encourage non-genuine exploration, rather than {other methods} to encourage genuine exploration?"

I am intentionally framing this question in a way that draws attention to the leading and incomplete nature of the original: it implies errands and genuine exploration are necessarily opposing and also, I think, that the method for achieving genuine exploration is relatively trivial: don't give the player errands. But the true nature of the beast is much more complicated. We need a new question, or several.

- What design problems do errands and collectibles solve, in the game design context of a player moving through a space?
- What impact do errands and collectibles have on the feeling of moving through a space?
- What other methods could be used to solve the same design problems?
- Must those design problems be solved? What happens if they are left unsolved? (i.e., What makes them problems in the first place?)

Quote from: 7:40Why replace genuine exploration with a bunch of errands?

Quote from: 4:43Technology empowers us to visit places that do not exist. Places that cannot exist. But we do not celebrate this enough. Critics and players often denigrate virtual environments with demands for purpose, the developer god must corrupt places with mechanics, poison them with meaning, proof of intelligent design must be demonstrated through challenges or collectibles. The journey itself is never enough.

Quote from: Curt Jaimungal, 48:21[..] somehow, what we perceive is also what is encoded.

Jaimungal is asking about, say, Michael Levin's eyebrows: we perceive eyebrows, but there is also some concept of 'eyebrows' in the electrical pattern that binds his cells together into the service of producing, of maintaining, of being an eyebrow.

In effect I feel as though he is asking, is there in fact some objective truth to the object eyebrows and not just our phenomenal-cultural-speciesal[?] perception of the object eyebrows because they are produced by an electric pattern which encodes the object eyebrows? I think he's making the same mistake he's trying to avoid but on a different level: it's still our human-level perception of a piece of a pattern which we call eyebrows.

Pages 30 and 31 are blowing my mind a bit... I want to quote every single word of it. I will refrain. I couldn't even summarize.

I am still in the first chapter - not yet "tone" (the second chapter which I am excited to get to) but still "introduction" but here Ngai is, already, discussing in precise detail what tone is.

Quote from: p28a literary or cultural artifact's feeling tone: its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world. [...] the formal aspect of a literary work that makes it possible for critics to describe a text as, say, "euphoric" or "melancholic," [...] the category that makes these affective values meaningful with regard to how one understands the text as a totality within an equally holistic matrix of social relations.

Have I written about this on newforum? This "holistic matrix of social relations" reminds me of this feeling I've had that it is defined by the full spectrum of interpretations that have been, can be, or will be made of it. No interpretation is correct or incorrect, but instead form a singular... well, since Ngai presents a term here I shall accept it, "holistic matrix."

A game that requires a password to access it. The password changes if it is ever found on the internet.

(This is difficult because the password should be something that is easy to transmit verbally.)
(It also requires a thing which a person would want to access.)

P.S. aside from the fiddle I also thought about using
- actual index cards (too wasteful, too much physical space, too easy to lose)
- a Godot project (stuck on desktop, can't access 'from anywhere' like a web app)
- this app called DoNext (stuck in an ios app and can't access 'from anywhere')
- Trello (too much fucking UI)

I had an idea an hour ago to make something like a todo list of ideas . . . some kind of 'shuffled index card' simulator, so I could write ideas and shuttle them off into the void and maybe check back on them in the future sometime. Well, here I am, and I realized (foolishly, after 55 minutes of puttering around in jsfiddle) that I should absolutely just use the tools already at my disposal, use my comfort zone, use my newforum. So I made this subforum under DevLogs, and I hope it doesn't derail me. If I start to feel weird about it I might make it private, but for the most part I really believe art should be free. I'm quite used to being very public with my ideas (see my history of posts on TIGSource!), and it's not like an overwhelming number of people keep track of my forum anyway ;)

pingback: i want art to be free

Quote from: p23,24[..] what Genette calls "aesthetic predicates," affective-aesthetic values like "precious," "stilted," "monotonous," or "imperious," created from, or based upon, this feeling of pleasure or displeasure that accompanies our initial perception of the aesthetic object (The Aesthetic Relation,90). Genette in fact describes these objectifying predicates, which bear a close resemblance to what I. A. Richards called "aesthetic or 'projectile' adjectives," as descriptive terms that "sneak in" evaluations of the object based on feelings about the object. There is thus a sense in which the "aesthetic relation," which for Genette is more or less synonymous with "objectification," can be understood as an oblique effort to justify the presence of feeling in every aesthetic encounter.