I've fallen out of touch with the idea of having an audience. If I was trying to make money from sharing knowledge, I would care about having an audience, but where I'm at now, I have a job I really love (to my great surprise!), and now I want to figure out how to spend some of my remaining spare time on meaningful projects.

I'm not worried about sharing something great with the internet at large. I'm much more interested in having a noticeable impact on a few close friends and peers. So. How do I take steps forward in terms of my game design practice and within my circles?

It may be too much of a gut reaction, having only read twenty-six pages, but there is a certain feeling about the author that I got from reading this book that turned me off.

Senlin Ascends

Quote from: p19Senlin was unprepared for marriage in every way. He possessed neither the imagination nor emotional warmth that intimacy required. [..] Here was the moon and the rocking crib and the far from prying eyes and every romantic thing a man could request, and what did he do with it? He was drowning in opportunity.

Marya lay propped on her elbow watching him appear to sleep with his eyes open. She pressed the flat of her finger against his cheek, lifting up a smile like a fishhook, trying to tease some life from him. She tugged at his earlobe, bit lightly at his shoulder, and blew on his neck. Still he lay, sometimes flinching but not responding.

Quote from: p18What sort of husband loses a wife?

Quote from: p6He imagined she had married him because he was kind, even tempered, and securely employed.

[..]

Of course, Marya had a few unusual habits of her own. She read books while she walked to town[..] She was fearless of heights and would sometimes get on the roof just to watch the sails of inbound ships rise over the horizon. She played the piano beautifully but also brutally. She'd sing like a mad mermaid[..] And even still, her oddness inspired admiration in most.

Quote from: Back of the bookMild-mannered headmaster Thomas Senlin prefers his adventures to be safely contained within the pages of a book. So when he loses his new bride shortly after embarking on the honeymoon of their dreams, he is ill-prepared for the trouble that follows.

To find her, Senlin must[..]

If I were to put it into words, I'd say that this story hinges on a sort of philosophy of gender roles and relationships that I don't subscribe to and don't find interesting. It's possible that the book will subvert them - like I said, maybe this is too much of a gut reaction - but we have Senlin, practical guy who somehow gets married to quirky mermaid girl Marya. He's all stiff and stoic and she's described in this awe-struck way as a lovely creature of beauty, and she's trying to crack through his shell, and in about the first ten pages she's fridged to motivate the hero's journey.

I enjoy writing about feelings, experiences, dreams, goals, fears... not the mechanical minutiae of worldbuilding, but these kinds of human moments used to illuminate relevant, relatable details.

Source: https://www.thefieryvegetarian.com/wp-json/mv-create/v1/creations/10/print

Recipe:

0. If making instant pot chickpeas (for step 4 below), prepare ahead; it will take about an hour!!!

1. Heat
-- 3 tbsp sunflower/canola/peanut oil
in a large pan over a medium-high setting.

1b. Sauté:
-- 1 large onion finely chopped
until golden.

2. Add:
-- 4 cloves garlic, crushed
-- 1 inch ginger, finely grated
and cook for 1-2 minutes, stirring frequently, until the garlic doesn't smell raw anymore.

3. Mix in:
-- 1 tbsp ground coriander (Whole coriander is very noticeable. Don't recommend.)
-- 1/2 tbsp ground turmeric
-- 1/2 tbsp ground cumin (You can use whole cumin, it turns out fine)
-- 1/4 - 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper or chili flakes
and toast for two minutes, stirring often

4. Add
-- 1.5 cups crushed tomatoes (400g)
-- 2.5 cups cooked chickpeas (400g)
-- 1/2 cup vegetable stock (120 ml)
Increase the heat to high and once boiling, lower to medium-low to maintain at a simmer for 10 minutes

5. Add
-- 1/2 tsp salt
-- 1 tsp sugar
-- 1 cup frozen chopped spinach or 100gm fresh/frozen chopped spinach (or if you're like me and have unused frozen kale in the freezer, use up that kale!)
... If the spinach (or kale!!!) is frozen increase the heat until the curry is bubbling away again.
Simmer for an additional five minutes.

6. Add
-- 1 tsp garam masala
-- 1 tbsp lemon juice (rice vinegar seems to work fine)
-- (OPTIONAL) 1/4-1/2 cup full-fat coconut milk (50-100 ml)
and stir.

6b. Sprinkle over:
-- 1 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro leaves
and serve hot.

TIP:
Served with some "enjoy tonight" grocery store naan heated up on the stovetop. Very good.

C. Thi Nguyen's "Games: Agency as Art"

Quote from: p3, footnote 1For simplicity's sake, I will speak as if there is a single game designer, when in actuality, games are often designed in large teams.

Quote from: p3, for example[..] the fact that the game designer specifies goals and abilities [..] is precisely what makes games distinctive as an art form.

I think this is wildly... irresponsible? Something? If there is often no singular "game designer," why talk about it this way?

"Mrs. Iz. Mrs. Iz. You are making a big mistake."

Seen from a first person perspective.

There is a scared character, Mrs. Iz, who is sort of a companion who tries to get you not to investigate certain things in the castle...

There is this weird little grey creature who tries to unsuccessfully do something, who can be picked up and used?

There is an alien who basically seems to ignore you - but if you trigger certain events suddenly becomes a terrifying opponent, who hunts you down mercilessly.

Its behaviours...
- finds the grey thing and resets it
- repairs aspects of the level, using the grey thing?
- in the beginning, the scared character tries to get you away from a CCTV viewer, to reset it or something, "he's coming."
- something announces the alien's voice: "Mrs. Iz. Mrs. Iz. You are making a big mistake." it has a weird buzzy, deliberate voice.
- the CCTV viewer can show weird catacombs under the castle? the alien is doing something bad?
- if you see this and are caught, the alien hunts you down. eliminates you.

Quote from: @droqenbreaking games as a player and as a designer.
breaking them from both sides.

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full quote:

Quotei enjoy doing things that should not be doable
maybe that's the other side of breaking the horizon
as a player you do something that seems unintended...
as a designer i've thought to recapture it i ought to create the illusion of intent, for a player to break through, but it's not quite a perfect symmetry. having just experienced an 'impossible system breakage' experience as a player, i enjoyed knowing that the lack of intent was legitimate, but it's impossible to explicitly design that kind of thing.

with starseed pilgrim i guess there is a similar sort of feeling, but from the designer's standpoint. the player doesn't get to experience "doing the impossible against the designer's expectations" but it makes sense that as a designer i wanted the game to make possible something impossible, against the player's expectations...

i was never designing that part of the game for myself to play, i was just designing to satisfy exactly this same part of me that enjoys breaking games. oh, boy. does this all make sense? it was all very stream-of-consciousness.

breaking games as a player and as a designer.
breaking them from both sides.

QuoteThe book also introduces the term meme for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such "selfish" replication may also model human culture, in a different sense.

The Selfish Gene - Wikipedia

Quote from: @droqenvideogames are not organisms, but videogame genres are.

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https://omnivorescookbook.com/wprm_print/15683

QuoteThe order should be: soak the noodles => marinate the meat => mix the sauce => prep and chop the herbs and veggies while soaking the noodles => stir fry

In a simulation of many sentient beings, each being has an opinion of each other being - not made of numbers, but more of a complicated flowchart/state machine. "You are my best friend." "You are my hero." "You are my crush." These relationships may be symmetrical and/or related, or they may not.

Each relationship is a "perceived role"; I will call the external role that describes "How A sees B" an "icon". Each such icon is a state which contains a set of behaviours including rules for changing into other states.

You have 5 "rolls", and for each roll you can choose to roll a smaller die and know the results, or a larger die with hidden results. Possibly:

- 2d4 visible (min 2, avg 5, max 8)
- 1d10 invisible (min 1, avg 5.5, max 10)

Needs a supporting system where succeeding, and knowing whether you succeeded, are both valuable independently. Maybe a wargame with fog of war (where do you commit additional resources?), or a political/social game where you are trying to sway people to your side (and usually aren't exactly sure where you stand with any individual, and again are deciding where to commit resources based on who you trust).

Possibly a tactics/jrpg "party management" game where you're rolling against characters' confidence levels or relationship levels to see who will do their action well, and who will do it poorly... like you can see if you rolled a miss, hit, or a crit ahead of time, before committing to a plan of action?

I was also thinking of "scouting" or espionage... the result determines how accurate the information you get is (from wildly inaccurate to missing details to perfect). But I think this one requires too much overhead.

The basic mechanics to play with:

Choose some proportion of "weaker visible dice" and "stronger unknown dice" in context of a situation where you want to win your rolls, but where you might reasonably not know whether you won or lost until later, at which point it might be crucial.

I don't think Starseed Pilgrim would be as successful today as it was when it came out, and that's not because of technical limitations. It did something that was, you know, new! It responded to the trends of the day, capturing the minds of gamers (that is, anyone who cares about games - maybe I should say "indie gamers") by indicating something close to what was already in the water.

I'm still not entirely sure how to put this into clearer language, it's frustrating, but I'll revisit this.

Game genres shift and slide around, are stolen from niche cultures when they become popular (see how collars came from meaning something specific to a specific subcommunity, to being a relatively mainstream fashion item divorced from that meaning; compare to how roguelikes came from meaning something specific to a specific subcommunity, to being a relatively mainstream videogame genre divorced from that meaning), and along with that lose their specific meanings in favour of something more broadly applicable.

Arguments about what something means are missing the point that everything means something different to everyone, and this is smeared not only across cultures and peoples but also across time. Encountering a first-person game today is different from encountering one ten years ago.

When I think back to Probability 0, I think of the entire game. It has three game-modes, fifteen enemies organized into three tiers (easy, hard, and secret enemies which only appear after 1000km or something), stars, punches, hitboxes, a skill tree (pictured below), four or five boss-type enemies, a menu, and more.

I need a procedure!

there is no wardrobe philosophy or shopping methodology that is ever going to result in an end state whereupon you are done choosing and purchasing clothes forever. -from a ffa reddit post

I was playing Kingdom Death: Monster and noticing how random everything is. As a player I make decisions, of course, but a huge part of the enjoyment I derive from this game is perceiving the algorithm at work, and telling stories about what happened, with my friends.

This isn't new (see Blaseball, for example, and the ages of sports fandoms that inspired it), but it's a really great alternative lens to seeing the pleasure of randomness as the pleasure of gambling. Stakes are merely an optional force that strengthens one's commitment to the magic circle. But the fundamental pleasure is deeper, and exists even without stakes.

When I visited Hong Kong for a few days, we noticed that a horse racing venue - a huge stadium - was on the way to where we were going, so we decided to drop in. Watching the horses race without a stake in the game, without any way to tell who was going to win, all I could do was watch and see these animals and their riders prance about in the pre-show, and then watch as some horses won, and others lost. We had picked some numbers, but didn't bet anything.

I don't remember if my guess was right.

Infinite generators churn out content without stakes.

Wordle and other daily challenges have stakes - there's only one today - it's a stake in time. Generative NFTs have stakes - there will only be however-many of these, they're worth something and have value. (I'm not a fan of NFTs and do not recommend getting into them, just like I don't recommend getting into gambling, which also involves stakes.) Cruel World had stakes - it would only be available for 1 day and would fall apart. (I sort of gave up on those stakes, an action which I now regret.)

Stakes grant meaning to the algorithmic unfolding, but there is an underlying beauty that can be appreciated, and cannot be denied. It's pleasurable to observe a random process. Somehow stakes give that pleasure meaning. I only have an hour, what will I see? This will only unfold once - how will it unfold? If I can generate a hundred thousand outcomes, no singular outcome has much meaning... unless it's meaningfully unique... once-in-a-lifetime.

Rarity.

Last year, and now this year again, I've been thinking about videogames as fashion, not in terms of it being something that you wear and that you can use to express yourself, but in that it is something with trends, not wholly predictable but certainly recognizable, something that can be theorized about, responded to, and seen.

I liked this quote a lot and I'd like to think about it for a while:

QuoteWe might say that "taste" is the abstract, moralized knowledge, while "style" is its visual expression.

Fashion makes taste easily visible as style, in part because its distinctions between color or cut in clothing are so specific and yet so random ("rules which we don't even know").