after reading All Our Hidden Gifts, i have a kind of contact with the idea of magic. not the 'real' thing, just how it feels to believe.

anarchy... i know that i am not politically-minded. i am not interested, so much, in the reality of an anarchist society (although i have done and will continue to do my best to learn some things). what i am interested in is the value structure, the feeling.

The Dispossessed painted the most distinct picture of life on its anarchist moon world, Anarres. i was sad for a time after, in its absence--not the absence of its fantasy-world, but the absence of its value structure, the absence of something born of belief.

of magic.

i just finished watching The Fall (2006/2024), and there's a scene where Roy says to Alexandria,

"The story was just a trick to get you to do something for me."

and she (a 5-year old ESL Romanian girl whom he has been tricking and for whom his tricking has lead to actual serious bodily harm) replies,

"But I need the story."
"I still want to know."

the feelings bound up in this scene are insane.

dear takunomi,

first i'll note that a clearer definition of noise, for me, is "things that are not related to artistic intent." there is another definition that i think you are using in some cases, which is more like "the appearance of not being related to artistic intent." it's been pointed out to me in the past that i'm interested in "the aesthetic of intentionality." ultimately, i don't think that that's true (i.e. it's not the aesthetic that i'm interested in -- rather, it is the truth of it), but such an aesthetic is a good entry-level way to indicate that such intent exists.

i believe that you might still be conflating the two. in your first proposed path, you suggest that making the game "prettier" with "more interesting" and "more clever" mechanics and narrative might be a way to remove "noise". for the first definition ("unintentional elements"), this is not at all a viable solution. but for the second ("lacking the aesthetic of intentionality"), it might appear to be. as already mentioned, i personally think the second definition is ultimately not important, although it may be a useful stepping stone towards removing "unintentional elements", whether or not they appear intentional.

your idea of "otherplay" is interesting; to me what is important is not designing with it in mind. this may seem kind of counterintuitive, and it might not even be truthful. it's hard for me to say. this is very much at the heart of kill gameplay for me. especially when you say "not delightfully surprising the designer with the toys they gave you," i feel a strong resonance. but then, my proposed solution is: don't give the player toys at all. computers and people are capable of a great many things. what if we lean on all those things, and think about how to allow these pre-existing abilities to shine through our interactive works?

i'm not sure if that makes sense. i'm still figuring it out.

rough notes below. you may find those more interesting than this summary/letter, but read whatever piques your interest.

love, droqen.

when i close my eyes i see what you see
an orb, an orb, an orb.
red and shining with blood that drips
down my neck and stains my shirts
gets in my eyes and soddens my black hair
sticky against my scalp.

when i open my eyes
it's trees and concrete, mayors and dogs,
television shows on projectors and music from computers,
dirt in the sink and dirt in the dishwasher,
rotten fruit, laundry, dust.

you touched me
YOU TOUCHED ME
i didn't know the rules of the game
you're playing with me

Classical to Romantic -> the audience's expectations, Beethoven(?) caused a big stir

i think the premise should be really simple. you make something with its interactiveness in mind, without using coins or walls, with an eye on enshrining the player's natural capacity to act upon the world as sacred.

I'D LIKE TO HIDE
 WOULDDN'T IT BE SWELL LIKE WAVES DO
  LIKE PHYSICS AND WATER_TENSION AND THE MOON
   AND THE SUN, AND THE SUN, AND THE SUN, AND THE SUN, AND THE SUN
YOU CAN'T LOOK AT ME DIRECTLY I'm BRIGHT TOO

EASY TO BE HONEST
 WHEN YOUR OUTLINE BLINDS
  AND GIVING DIRECT LOOKS
   KILLS.

i'm after the end of gameplay
i'm singing the praises of death
   as though when it goes
   as if everyone knows
that love is that all we'll have left.

Planning a Godot workshop for later this summer. It will be online.

I decided yesterday that I was going to make & release a video for the full moon... so... here I am. I'm not sure on what, but I think I've got a lot of thoughts bottled up that I've been letting leak out into bluesky in a way I'm not happy with.

I'm writing the guide to a single card every day. I will be finished sometime in late September, although I'll still need to write supporting text (spreads, intro, etc).

Jul 5 - Sept 23-ish

i believe i encountered this book simply in this Austin Kleon blog post about a parable that someone (jack? ziggy?) told me about sometime.

1. i started re-reading  Emergent Narrative and Reparative Play
2. i looked up the phrase 'ludonarrative hermeneutics' and found this paper, Ludonarrative Hermeneutics: A Way Out and the Narrative Paradox
3. i bleeted about it a bit
4. Jason Grinblat, one of the authors on Reparative Play, replied with something i could barely understand at my current level of slippery comprehension and invited me to correct him if wrong
5. now i need to understand the hermeneutic strip so that i can understand jason's response so that i can understand ludonarrative hermeneutics so that i can understand, at last, emergent narrative and reparative play.

join me, on this journey to understanding! let us hope the rabbit hole does not go even deeper.

realized -- i want to make a frontpage for my games that has a place for discussion. i mean, a place that i can sell games that centers discourse. i made hidden.droqen.com, and (separately!) i link people to the steam page for TEOG... this is wrong. this is all wrong. the act of choosing to buy the game should come from a place of wanting to understand and engage with other people. i want to be at the very center of that, not peripheral. i mean, i want the game to be positioned correctly.

I forgot what it was like to undertake actions made crushed under a certain emotional haze until I experienced the haze once again one beautiful early May.

Now that I once more have access to the emotional memory, I can track the red scent back to those actions: foolhardy but personal.

I feel like I'm drawn in two directions. Am I an elder? Am I passing on the knowledge that I want to be passing on?

My instinct is to clean up properly. Make a finished project and draw lines. My next project will do something with my notebooks.

Can I spend this time documenting?

i was rolling a review over in my mind,in vestigating,
and i stumbled bodily straight into a corner of the internet straight out of Hypnospace Outlaw--
voices, strange voices calling, strange familiar names cast in new roles.
it made me want something different.