This is how I feel about gameplay! It has such a tangible feeling, the way that it unfolds for the devoted player, that fantasy of... well, it is a power fantasy, isn't it?

Richard Terrell wrote in A Defense of Gameplay back in 2012 about learning, and I think that this is all helping something take form, my conception of what it is that gameplay is:

Learning something bred to be beautiful to learn, rather than useful, or meaningful, or (this term I keep returning to) life-giving, or anything. That's all redundant. You get to make one choice: what is the thing?

If you choose 'beautiful to learn' then all else shall fall by the wayside. It must, if you are to do your best work.

It is an insult, then, when I say that something has been designed to be beautiful to learn. Beautiful to discover.

It is a flaw.

On a Finji stream I watched today, Adam talked about mystery... the pleasure of a thing unfolding, of seeing it reveal itself in a surprising but sensible, perceivable, predictable-but-not-predictable manner...

Baba Is You is such a game that unfolds beautifully. I was in love with its unfolding possibility space.

I don't think I'm a lover of unfolding anymore, not in that same way, anyway. Baba unfolds in a sublimely remarkable way, but what unfolds is not meaningful to me, not life-giving. (See above.)

I think I'm glad I re-visited Baba Is You even if my conclusion is that I like it even less than I did before 😅

I respect it, but it's one of those games about exploring an interactive system concept that just doesn't do it for me anymore? Patrick's Parabox is another game of this sort, but I feel more inclined towards its magic. Maybe I'm not as exhausted by Baba these days because it's really about seeing something that I've been intimately familiar with my whole life, programming rulesets and things like that. But why was I enchanted by it in the first place? Hmm.

what did the last few levels show me? the first level showed me something surprising about myself: you think walls always work this way, but they don't, especially not here, in BABA IS YOU, where the rules are flexible. but then that feeling went away, leaving what? repetitions on the theme; you think that lava works with way, you think that doors work this way, you think that water works this way. behind the mechanical theme (you think X works Y way, and you're right, but also you're wrong! hack the planet!), what is Hempuli the person saying to me?

"i think X works Y way" is an interesting admission, a claim, but to fall back on only icons, saying nothing...

there is a level where the goal is a heart instead of a flag, and this level is called "AFFECTION". the way that i solved this level is i made the heart move, so that it would exit its little prison. but... that isn't... really saying anything. not really. i can't describe how that isn't saying anything. the rules, i think, undercut meaning. what if you can make anything work like anything else? that's the message of BABA IS YOU. so in this case making the heart move, at this point i've already learned... the words are what destroy traditional associations.

i still think that is a powerful message but the puzzle game of it all isn't helping. what the puzzle game gameplay teaches me is that there are still arbitrary restrictions (these words are in the corner and can't be moved around), and i'll be allowed to mess around with certain meanings in certain arbitrary ways. it's a mixture of the potential for meaning, that and utterly abstract non-meaning. you have to push this there to solve that puzzle.

in BABA IS YOU, i am tasked with being the destroyer of meaning, so that i can solve a meaningless puzzle. so that i can get the flag, or so that rock can get the baba, or whatever i have deemed to be me, whatever i have deemed to be winning.

again...

there is a kind of beauty here, i can see how this relates to gameplay and game design, but a hundred levels (how many levels are there?) aren't meaningful variations on the theme, they won't get me closer, they are just labour -- my labour, the developer's labour, following a philosophy. in this case by my interpretation the philosophy might be 'arbitrary goals, where the icons don't mean anything.' there is some pain here, or maybe some love, if i assume that the labour is driven by intentional self-aware love.

and maybe this kind of love is something i can't abide by. love for gameplay. love for meaningless tasks, love for effort with all true value stripped from until there is nothing left but the doing.

The first levels.

the first levels of baba is you show you, show me, a concept. you can push the words around. it's thrilling to change the rules and laws of this tiny baba-world. there is this feeling of wonderful surprise! wow, someone discovered something here, and I get to discover it along with them.

Further levels.

but then what? then what? it isn't as though further levels don't continue to present new ideas -- that's my first realization, playing through some of baba is you. there are new mechanics being added -- variations that lead to thinking about things differently. but...

but what is the purpose of such variations...? they feel less high-octane than the initial punch of "you can change the rules, here's a level where it feels totally mind-blowing that your expectations are wrong"

through my lens of vulnerability, of bleeding, there is this initial gesture - "here's a thing that i think is cool and like to play with, do you think it's cool too?"

i have to reflect on that

but not that easy.

originally i was going to do like a level-by-level review of baba is you. but i'm not that much of an analytical freak, so i'm going to go slow, take it easy, as bib's motto goes

and i started thinking about it and wondering, is the difficulty the issue or are the levels just not that interesting? i mean, it is both, but...

what do i even want out of baba is you?
or what does hempuli want out of it, why is it so good at delivering that, and why don't i care about it??
what's wrong with me, why are we different people, precisely?

i wanted to write about baba is you because i've had this image of it as a game where some of the levels are easy and show me something fundamental and interesting - and some of the levels are hard and show me something kind of rote and boring and puzzle-solvey.

it started today in particular with reading this wombat bleet, "the need for larger quantitaties of mechanical effort to extract meaning from a video game is not related to the caloric density of that meaning"

[AB]

anyway,

oops, let's start (appropriately?) with meta:

i think it's interesting... i just noticed that in my 'On art' section i have Close Reading, and Reviews & reflections, as separate sections but they are perhaps identical - they are the very same thing, but with different levels of openness and engagement.

and different expectations! a 'close reading' as i suppose i imagine it (i don't really have experience with doing 'close readings' of anything, i just used the phrase) is looking closely at the thing and working at every detail to discover, what was meant, or what can i uncover for myself?

on the other hand a 'reflection' or certainly a 'review' of a work involves more judgement, what do i think, and is it any good?

and you can see, or i can see, that most of the r&r threads are about games, while most of the CR threads are about things that aren't.

,
i wanted then to feel cut by
a sharp blade separating
cells next to cells keeping blood
in my body

of no use to anyone but myself
my blood vessel for
[..]
,

.
knife for its scalpel
a weapon for a tool
gameplay's hand
 on gameplay's knife.

let it go i besought
put it down
.

PIPPIN: ". . to that other question. What are the other tricks games have:
- You're the bad guy
- You had no free will all along
But I don't think narrative twists that recontextualize what you've been doing in the game are the only resource games have, although that's powerful . . to share a different light on the repetitive action that games end up demanding"

GAMEPLAY KILL GAMEPLAY KILL GAMEPLAY

". . . another axis . . . feeling that you can do more than you thought you could? Or less than you thought you could or should be able to. Playing with those qualities of agency, and expectation."

"Games can change the level of agency and the type of agency that you have over time. . . . that has nothing much to do with THAT NIGHT, STEEPED BY BLOOD RIVER"

-> Pippin defends rearrangement.

PIPPIN: I think it is a place and we're happy with that . . . the tension that we have as game-players, inevitably grabbing onto game things [ooo title drop] . . . the vibes are strong at the visual level and the musical level, but the world is pretty empty . . . if you present spaces to the player, inevitably the player is trying to get out of the place that they're in. . . . "it's all about not being where you are."

I think I play with this quite a lot actually in TEOG... interesting

PIPPIN: ". . it's creating tension. And the tension is not resolved. Bye!"