On January 31, Alex Beachum blote thus:

Quotestumbled across this this thread because i'm rereading Understanding Comics and decided to check if anyone has tried to Scott McCloudify video games...idk if this is that but it's interesting! also i'm curious, would your non-player-centric definition include a game that literally plays itself?

link to bleet

i find the maximalist, voluminous nature of procedural art to be intoxicating. a few lines of code, and the process unfolds almost without effort, on my part. i use this term, "procedural art," to describe a larger category than the one it usually applies to. in particular, procedural art certainly contains almost all videogames.

i'd like to make a game that is experienced in its entirety without great cost to the player, and that  which, when so experienced, provokes a large variety of different reactions

i am not sure yet the scope or limits of this desire - may these "reactions" be planned and designed? what constitutes "great cost"?

but, i do understand "experienced in its entirety". the systemic unfolding of my well known earlier game was a dream of the mysterious la-mulana that did not require exhaustive play to comprehend more or less fully.

i did not go far enough but there was something there.

the quantifiable goal means that i am approaching the ability to employ contemporary testing techniques on a work. i can measure its success on my terms. i can do science.

death.

i have been thinking that i love my bunny game, The End of Gameplay, too much. it is too precious to me. because of its preciousness, i am unwilling to let it go. because i have not let it go, when i have new feelings -- they are tangled up in it.

in 2024 to early 2025 i was seeing an art therapist because i wanted to study psychotherapy, and in particular, art therapy, for reasons i won't get into here. and at the time, i was working on the end of gameplay, and i had decided i was going to release it into the world. she asked me a simple question, why?

i didn't have an answer then. my answer was awful, it was something like, "i showed it to as many people as i could bear which was two people, and then i felt like i could show it to a few more friends," and ultimately i said that it was just something that was going to happen. a natural consequence of things. now on the final day of the year (i mean, it's 4 AM on the final day of the year, so i have plenty of time before the year ends, but it sounds dramatic so bear with me, let's have some fun) -- as i was saying, before i so rudely interrupted, now on the final day of the year i think i understand why i had to release the end of gameplay.

and i also understood that i had failed.

i made a bleet asking people to share definitions of games. i may edit this opening post to be the summary.

[A -> B]

i like to investigate things that add up to a good life. learning new ways of looking at the world which i'll re-use to make some day a little brighter. a friend once suggested to me that art can expose us to new sensations which we might have never known we liked, otherwise. i like to learn things like that, but i can also appreciate the opportunity discover what i don't like the taste of. a sharp flavour can provide a powerful navigating principle.

i like when i can listen, remember, and utilize information.

i stopped being interested in gameplay because of its inability to communicate. lately i've wondered if i was really feeling this way? i'm not sure how to say that.

i became interested in art therapy because i thought my practice of game-making was like that, like self-art-therapy. my art therapist has a little table for doing art: paint, pencils, scissors and glue and magazines..

i finished Brick (2005) last night and it uas got me thinking a lot about story structure. well, i've also been reading and consuming a lot of mystery plots in the past months. they communicate ideas, they are a vessel for communication or conveyance. a number of those ideas have to be constructed in a certain way, to make the plot "go".

last night i wrote a poem straight into bluesky, something about 'thousand trees' and limbs and being an 'entire forest'.

i kept playing Angeline Era, and it continues to be clear to me that videogames are made, proportionally, of way  too many structural ideas, and those structural slots are too inexpressive for my liking, but things are beginning to click.

i hate that this is something i've had to discover, but better late than never.

writing poetry to convey certain ideas is an interesting short-form experiment in conveyance. the "king", the "tree", this idea of green arrows blossoming in pursuit of the star, i haven't captured it. the end of gameplay was an attempt to capture an idea. (an idea that was way too hot, but of similar inexplicableness and size: containing at least two completely exclusive interpretations.)

maybe these massive ideas, these elephant ideas which can only be understood in a small piece at a time, are not to be 'captured', and there is a better word for describing the process of striving over and over and failing.

but i like my artmaking coloured by a goal. how else do the arrow-missile-tree-branches know which way to go?

just to catch the facet of the moon we can see today, i guess.

droqen

i went to starbucks today for my free drink (it's my birthday) and i was surprised to be met by such friendliness.

also i went to the bank to deposit seven dollars in small change and the person at the counter had a cool watch ring and cool nails--honestly i don't know how people deal with having nails but they were silver and black and one was like a little 3d silver sun with rays radiating on black... it was cool. anyway.

then i met someone who was selling an apple trackpad for cheap, we'd made a previous deal before and it went poorly because of some confusion, but we'd resolved it just fine. this time i think it went well, but i'll have to double-check and make sure it works.

anyway, i got this drink and chatted with the employees because i didn't know what to order and it was my birthday etc. and then my mom called me so i answered her, and altogether i just feel like i had this day of intrusive small nice social interactions. i had nothing planned for today.

yesterday i thought about creating small opportunities for people to do things that they want to do. agency. empowerment. not inside of a game-world, but real things for real people using real materials. time is a real material.

i just don't want to waste people's kindness for one another.

it remains saddening to me that game-making is so indirect. that i can't be like those starbucks employees as a game-maker, just being nice to people in the course of my work.

x

it's well past midnight, but anyway, this is about a memory of something that happened today (the 17th) and not today (the 18th). i have the strangest feeling that i want to remember. i was reading a couple of subreddits -- r/enfp and r/infp -- and i was getting kind of annoyed at both of them! when i read the subreddit that correponds to my partner i feel a lot of love and familiarity. but at both of these i felt an overwhelming sense of irritation. contempt, even.

who am i if i can't accept myself? what, after all, is "kill gameplay"? i have been playing angeline era and while i feel that ancient contempt i also think it's kind of nice to settle in to a screen and shoot some bugs. there is some room for one thing -- what is it, that noisy self-expression -- and that other, mindless thing. i don't have names for any of this, of course.

i forget the word that goes with "ludonarrative" at the moment but i'll say ludonarrative juxtaposition. it isn't that the people on these subreddits being themselves and sharing their thoughts are expressing a "narrative", but i became a little irate at something about this overwhelming flood of what i can only call expression. expression of emotions. expression of opinions. expression of desires. it all became too much and i thought what would i like to fill this void?

there must be some beauty in this world.

i have been engaged in a few conversations with Diego Cath and while i don't think our interests are aligned, in breaking down Cath's two medium posts i am beginning to understand something that is inaccessible to me: why others do things. and maybe why i do things. but before i get to that... the posts.

oh no

how do i want to structure my next project? i need a loose principle within which to begin creating, assembling pieces. this is the beginning of a research and analysis project:

what structures have facilitated a desirable return to good works?

what structures interest me or, better yet, fail to turn away my interest?

i first encountered zaratustra's inclusion of The End of Gameplay in a 50 indie game recommendation that had something to do with the game awards:

Quote from: zaratustraMashina. The Art of Reflection. Endlight. Lingo 2. Pudding: Lyre Knight. Puzzle Depot. FISH FEAR ME. Pocket Boss. HORSES. Blippo+. Mars First Logistics. Starstruck: Hands Of Time. The Trolley Solution. Rise of the Golden Idol. Kaizen: A Factory Story. Depersonalization. Öoo. Isles of Sea And Sky. // Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo. Sol Cesto. Bombe. Strange Jigsaws. Seeking the Guardian. Loophole. Ark's Wonder Dungeon. 4D Golf. PETS. Court of Wanderers. Babushka's Glitch Dungeon. Skin Deep. The End Of Gameplay. Yogurt Commercial 3. The Void Rains Upon Her Heart. The Button Effect. Lab Rat. // Every Draknek & Friends game. ENA: Dream BBQ. Gentoo Rescue. Leap Year. NO-SKIN. Gravity Circuit. Birdigo. Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip. Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity. Prodigal. Cobalt Core. PROXIMATE. Cape Hideous. Grunn. Judero. Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers. Arco. Tactical Breach Wizards. // Play more indie games.

Quote from: the bleet zara quotedNew rule this year: If you post "Play more indie games" during the game awards, you are required to make a thread recommending 50 of them.

"We are gonna ask you to listen to this song, and tell me your honest opinion of what you think about it while you're listening."

when i was asked what i meant by kill gameplay i eventually defaulted to moral arguments.

i now think that i was wrong to do so. discussions of morality do have a place but in my notebook i can see that i have written, "can a murder be a work of art? // of course it can." the idea of defining and understanding art and what makes it--or anything--have a place in my heart has nothing to do with its morality.

but, it was easier to defend my position that way, than to say what i was really feeling at a deeper level. setting aside the weapon of moral judgement, what's my beef with, as i call it, "gameplay"? i think that answering this question will be very important to me, and the key word will be "interesting."

i appreciate a good critical eye and if i open those floodgates in my mind i can criticize very harshly! recall this ugly heap of me criticizing wombat's gutwhale.

i have criticized many things but i'm not sure analytic criticism is a particularly useful or expressive medium for me. i look even at Steam reviews as an art form.

i know plenty of people who are good at criticism and i admire them, their ability to share relevant critical details. such admiration has always tempted me to share, too, my own criticisms of things. look at my past year of public-facing communications! all criticism and breakdown.

i was listening to the first episode of The Secret Lives of Games' series, "All Systems Brough - Introduction," and in the middle of listening to this episode, i went to a workshop to learn how to make a paper flower. it was beautiful, i loved it, i took one photo, and then i lost it -- it flew away. i was really distraught by the loss of this paper flower, but i think i was also getting emotional about this look into the past, a much larger and more important thing that has been flying away from me lately: gameplay.