cuteness

plundercore : take a screenshot of a game, and the player avatar from the game, and manually put the player avatar in the screenshot of the game that they're from. recontextualize without new pieces

moochi pointed out a similarity between gamified play's "gamification" and kill gameplay's "gameplay", and i think the lineage is pretty clear to me... although lately i have been divesting myself even of an authorial relationship to play, 'kill gameplay' had less to do with that than just forcing the conversation to go to a place where game devs could not disavow themselves of the thing.

moochi wrote:

Quotei got in some arguments because of [the gamified play post/topic] cause people wanted to distinguish this general gamification from the specific one tha duolingo &c does and i was like its the same thing!!

... i remember getting into these kinds of disagreements, and i suppose that using the word 'gameplay' rather than 'gamification' was a (messy, rough, blunt,) way to avoid this particular conversational branch. in general, the response to my 'playables' and 'kill gameplay' were pretty similar -- a little bit of curiousity and a large amount of 'well i wouldn't go that far but you do you' -- but i do think that the kill gameplay conversations cut a lot deeper into the right places, allowed me to access a better understanding of the topic. i'm not sure if it had a beneficial effect for others.

full text, in case the archive goes down:

Quotegamified play

What feels like an eternity ago, gamification was the hot buzzword of the day, and it was mostly met with vague confusion and disgust to my recollection? Some people disagree and remember it fondly. OK. But in my memories of my circles, gamification was shiny and cool for like a week and then spiralled downwards: how crass, that someone would use our tools of joy for tricking people into any number of things. (Tricking kids into learning what we want them to learn? Tricking adults into exercising? Tricking people with money into parting with their money? TBH at the time I wasn't paying attention, really, to what people were doing with gamification, only the gamification itself.)

I like figuring words out for myself and teasing out the hidden meanings that I unintentionally ascribe to them. In this case, I've been attached for so long to the idea of being a person who makes (mostly video-) games, and as the discourse around what games are shifts, so does my sense of self as a creator or, if I dare, an artist.

Today I realized my idea of what games are is gamified play. That is, games (as I see them, or saw them) are suffering from gamification, but the thing they are (and have been) gamifying is the act of play. So if games are gamified play, what if I'm a... I don't know, a play artist? Someone who makes playable art?

Today's big conclusion is "I want to make games without gamification," and if I've got to attach a word to that I've been thinking of just calling them playables.

effective art is kind of evil, but ineffective art is powerless. maybe this is more about the nature of power than it is anything about art

it makes more sense to think of money as mana, cashflow as the movement of magic, products-for-purchase as spells. no action occurs in a vacuum.

there are good and evil wizards.

app idea
- perform ______
- take photograph (common request)
- upload and create reference page
- page contains chat and ________ for when ______ comes to fruition

it's just a series of things that happen, you want the things that happen to be interesting and interestingly presented. invent a plot and convey it well enough and then make it beautiful and oblique, simple.

i still like the moral angle of kill gameplay... i don't think my judgement is correct, but it's nice to look at games and art and ask not only 'what do i want' and 'what sells', but also, 'what is right?'

sometimes a thought appears, and a person has a choice about whether to keep it for further reflection or destroy it. even when the choice is not made, the choice is made for the thinker through inaction or the mysterious inner workings of memory. the purpose of a thought world is to take control in some sense, moving the needle toward 'keep it for further reflection' and away from destruction. a thought world is as good or as bad as any other archival process. this is thought world.

see some other thought worlds: gurn group. ty.

removed

make me compatible

derive from belonging
principles a track to follow,
rails to align my thought
and feeling, show me
the cozy organism iCould be,
if only.

touched and dragged under
your fingers

if i was a mouse,
and you were my hand,
slide my optical sensor
and double click me
to open a folder
i don't know
but never let me go.

p.s. for a further execution of this thought, please see 359P.

kill gameplay.

and if that part of me isn't feeling very itchy, there are a lot of games that are very irritating. so there it is: one of the facets of kill gameplay is that games very commonly serve to scratch that particular itch. in so doing, a huge number of games are also full of stuff that feels bad unless what you want is to settle into a groove -- to enjoy a drone of action and thought, whatever quality and nuance that droning may have.

there are a number of reasons that this may be the case, and i'm also curious if, now that i've identified it, i can make peace with it.

love, droqen