SNKRX
Nuclear Throne
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Rift Wizard
SERPENTES
31 unmarked games - Dec. 9
Cinco Paus

How can I even describe this?

re: sylvie's
- Circle of the Moon
- and part two


I can relate strongly to the above response after attempting to deeply examine a game's design.

QuoteI couldn't get into Hollow Knight. How much of these feelings come from the map design and combat design and degree of non-linearity and level of guidance?  Probably not a lot. It's all about how your mood intersects with the game's vibes.

It can feel futile to study game design when so much of it only comes alive in its intersection with a player's person-state, something which is impossible to pin down. But there is so much in Sylvie's examination of Circle of the Moon (and Castlevanias at large) which can be distilled into patterns or seeds for patterns, which I have written about before on this forum. I think they're very valuable as ways of looking at problems.

I'll sum up here what a 'pattern' is as "a precisely-defined problem & a precisely-defined description which captures all viable answers to the problem". I guess the word 'pattern' is quite bad, but it is the word that I have associated with this particular relationship.

Part of coming up with patterns is finding little places where 'incomplete' or 'bad' patterns seem to repeat themselves. I need to go cook, but I will come back and analyze Sylvie's analysis to try and make game design feel less futile.

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil
300g celery, sliced, with tough strings removed
1 garlic clove, peeled
200g potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
500ml vegetable stock
100ml milk
crusty bread, to serve
Method
STEP 1
Heat the oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat, tip in the celery, garlic and potatoes and coat in the oil. Add a splash of water and a big pinch of salt and cook, stirring regularly for 15 mins, adding a little more water if the veg begins to stick.
STEP 2
Pour in the vegetable stock and bring to the boil, then turn the heat down and simmer for 20 mins further, until the potatoes are falling apart and the celery is soft. Use a stick blender to purée the soup, then pour in the milk and blitz again. Season to taste. Serve with crusty bread.

QuoteAnimal Crossing requires you to collect money, farm for critters, and upgrade your town. [..] Even though most people are playing for the dress up and designy elements. [..] If the game simply gave you all the items right off the bat, you'd lack a sense of personal investment in your creations and most people would just make their dream house and quit the game after an hour.

I need a name for this perspective and to better understand my beef with it. It is intrinsically motivating to work creatively with what is available to you...

I enjoyed the premise of this film but I was sort of dreading this thing that it seems mainline animated Disney movies all do, where they strip away the fantasy for the sake of a well-meaning and even evocative, but painfully artless, statement on the human condition and life and love and so on.

A weird aside:

I received a book of psalms and something-elses from a stranger on the street the other day and I flipped through its pages and I noticed the same sort of rug pull happening in that text: here is a scenario, here is a message, and the scenario no longer matters. It was an empty vessel.

Quote11 "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for[a] a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

link

Encanto followed this basic structure but more beautifully and for 1 1/2 hours rather than three or four lines of simple text:

It sets up a relatable character with a relatable problem, and spins a beautiful fantastic tale. The fantasy-world is built on soft and flexible logic; when the problem is resolved it does not follow from the logic of the world, but from something about the human experience. We return to the soft and flexible logic, to tie up loose ends in a way that seems true to the message.

I'd like to revisit this through the lens of patterns but it's Christmas Eve and I want to get to sleep early and wake up at a good time and hang out with the family :)

(The tone I use above is judgemental because I found the film's fantasy to be a bit flat. But... I think it's interesting to observe patterns like this; I'd like to understand what it accomplishes and how to recreate it. I'd like to understand better what it is that made it not sing for me. And I did like a lot about the movie. There was just... something...)

When I don't feel like what I'm doing is crucial and possible, I quickly disconnect from it.  I'm learning to see things as parts of a whole now, and even value pastimes as a way to keep my mind steady -- to take up time in a pleasant and relaxing way so that when my current blocker moves on (e.g. my mental reserves are depleted, or I'm waiting for water to boil, or whatever else) I can return to the same Most Important Thing In The World.

I need a new word for this, so I'll call it a Monofocus: a venue or target to satisfy my need to be monopresent (as opposed to multipresent). Monopresence is just a state of mind, but it's foolish to think that all that is required is mental willpower; valuable factors create the conditions for states of mind to thrive.

Maybe I'll call it a 'pattern.'

~~~

Monofocus

P: I require a certain amount of monopresence in my life, but my focus is easily shifted to something that seems more important than what I'm focused on right now.

S: Consciously commit to a monofocus, something that is easy to perceive as The Most Important Thing In The World for a certain period of time (not forever).
 - When I don't have an opportunity to focus on it, I should reject new foci to an extent that is reasonable. (What is reasonable?)
 - When I have an opportunity to focus on it, I should be able to focus on it. (i.e. It must be actionable/available to me.)
 - It can't take over my life... (This one is hard)

~~~

To fit the structure of a pattern I would like the monofocus to be more empirically defined, but for now this will do.

Small bowl
Melt 42g butter

Small-medium bowl
300g milk (1 1/4 cups)
1 egg, beat

Large bowl (dry)
180g flour
1/2 tsp salt
1+ tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp white sugar

- Sift dry ingredients TWICE! (I just scoop it out of the bowl into a sieve held above the bowl. Don't need to get every particle.)
- Add milk, eggs, butter.
- Mix thoroughly

Heat/butter cast iron
Cook pancakes. Don't press down: let them fluff.

Heat! On "MAX" until butter is hot, then stick at around "2" the rest of the time, once the pan is hot enough. Cook the first pancake 2 min on one side, 1 min on other side. The rest should be 1 min on each side.

Adding batter! Add butter (it will sizzle and spit -- that's life). Spoon a big lump in. Shake the pan to spread it out as much as it will go.

Cooking navy beans today:
1 lb beans
4 cups water
1 tsp olive oil
30 mins pressure cook, natural release.

Will report back.

I've never finished a Pokemon game before. At the end of the credits there's a little shot of your character going into their house, then title. If you start the game, picking up where you left off (for the new game+ content), you start in your house. I like it, it's a nice closed loop. How cute.

I'm told this is what all these games do, but it's still cute. I'm done with this game.

"Make games that stream well" is the eternal refrain of indie dev business advice. "Make games that make good GIFs."

And so on, and so on.

But this is just the internet-centric advice from people immersed in internet social spaces. What if I don't want to be one of those people?

It comes and goes, but lately I've been trying to spend less time believing that the internet is this all-encompassing universe. Not everyone is 'on the internet,' and neither do I have to be. It was cool, and big, and popular. But isn't it still possible to live a life detached from this one virtual world?

I like fiction and fantasy, and false imagined worlds given the breath of life. I've dabbled with thinking about what NFTs are and I think I've ultimately rejected them, but in the process I think I've exposed part of what the internet is for me and others - like NFTs, the internet is fake.

What I mean is that the internet only has the relevance we give it. It has its benefits, of course, but it's not all-encompassing. NFTs are worth killing now so their false-labour fantasy of value doesn't get bigger. Why is the internet's false-permanence fantasy any better? The dream of connection comes at a cost -- we can reach anyone, but in an ever-shallower way. Multipresence demands it, and the internet is increasingly all about multipresence, where the biggest voice gets the most attention, to no upper limit.

We're playing the lottery.

I was having a conversation with my sister about J.K. Rowling's recent transphobic poem and ended up talking with her for an hour about this while out on a walk. And... well, I realized afterwards that I was having a conversation that felt frustrating because I thought I had to take a stance one way or another. So I wasn't really saying anything except dancing around the fact that I didn't have any passion to engage with the topic, pushing responsibility onto her to say something that would inspire me to get more engaged.

The solution, I think, is for me to recognize and acknowledge when I'm not passionate about a topic and to say so. It doesn't even have to come quickly--there's no rush to get there in the course of a conversation, but I need the practice with feeling and saying:

"This isn't something I have enough passion about... for me to engage with it meaningfully."

Reading a tabletop roleplaying game document, there might be tables and charts of possibilities -- anchors that give you space to imagine a world between them. Maybe writing is not so different from this after all, just less explicit about it.

If I write the simple sentence, Don't breathe that stuff, it leaves open so many little questions which might be inconsequential to the plot but beautifully consequential to the experience of inhabiting the world...

Every statement has negative space, but so as to be able to tie it better to A Pattern Language, I'll call it space 'outside' the explicit, instead. 'Outdoor' space.

If I'm watching a show that never describes a certain aspect of a relationship (for example), it creates a blank space that is never resolved. But done well, done in a way that I like, the blank space feels at once concrete and yet also infinite. Does that make sense? Fuck, I sure hope it makes sense.

Leaving an unanswered question for me to imagine the answer to...

It's not valuable because I answer it, but it's also not valuable because I never answer it. It's valuable because I can answer it anytime I like, and then any other time I can answer it differently or not at all. I'm free, but inspired. My brain can flicker and flutter in a cavern of just the right size.

In A Pattern Language, Pattern 106 is Positive Outdoor Space.

QuoteIf you look at the plan of an environment where outdoor spaces are negative, you see the buildings as figure, and the outdoor space as ground. There is no reversal. It is impossible to see the outdoor space as figure, and the buildings as ground.

If you look at the plan of an environment where outdoor spaces are positive, you may see the buildings as figure, and outdoor spaces as ground -- and, you may also see the ourdoor spaces as figure against the ground of the buildings. The plans have figure-ground reversal.

The imaginary space should feel the same way. The imagination reacts to empty non-concrete space in the exact same way to 'outdoor space' as it does to the conceptual 'outdoor space' of a narrative, the space outside the explicit. It should feel like positive outdoor space.

I played a clutch of chickens in the post-apocalypse, one thousand strong and it reminded me about the value of fiction. I can't really explain it except to say that I like a game that has fiction, and characters that i can sort of relate to? This could be a pattern, perhaps -- I think I have been approaching game patterns in too cold a way. Stories are part of game design. How can I write a pattern about "caring about" characters without explicitly acknowledging the image that is placed in the mind of those characters by their art and writing?

This is going to hurt my brain.

Regarding "Art is Life-Changing"

We are constantly interacting with the world. Falling into habits, old patterns. Art is life-changing, but what stops us from changing back?

Ideas that stick with you for a long period of time may be necessary for turning that momentary experience into a genuinely life-changing impact. This doesn't mean that games have to be long to be impactful... they don't have to rub your face in it. But I think they can have value that way.

Quote from: Mokesmoemy main criteria for liking a game is "did this game change my life" (but the bar for changing my life is low)

|| | || ||||| ||| is a game I played recently where I enjoyed playing it in the moment, and I believe that it objectively is a good game, but when I had finished it (100% even) it left me feeling underwhelmed because it did not change my life

it did not present me with a single new idea to think about

don't take that as a condemnation. it had a number of very neat ideas that blew my mind the first time I saw them, just not this time.

Mokesmoe said this two days ago in Paradise and I woke up thinking about it for some reason. "Did this game change my life?" "Did it present me with a new idea to think about?" As I get older and am exposed to more things, I suppose it's a mathematical inevitability that finding works that do this for me will become harder and harder. Maybe at some point I'll have to give up on expecting the feeling from anything at all, and find something else to like about stuff.

It is still the goal I aspire to with my own work -- art.

I want to present someone with a new idea to think about, one that's sticky and relevant and novel enough to change their life in a positive way. Not in a concrete way, perhaps. I don't expect to make an educational or self-help piece. Maybe a more modest way to put it would be to say I want to make art that helps a person grow.

CARING FOR NPCS - You need the ILLUSION OF LIFE, and then it's just a matter of giving opportunities for caring...
ILLUSION OF LIFE - This is "Internal Logic" + "Internal Chaos" arranged just so.
INTERNAL LOGIC - How do you create this?
INTERNAL CHAOS - I think I really need to define this one

Yes, I need some more patterns for relying on NPCs - there's illusion of life but also "RELYING ON SYSTEMS" or something like that? Hmm

Regarding Vsauce's "Do Chairs Exist?"

I wrote a basic description of my relationship to Patterns in the Tenets forum. Click on the link above to go to that thread and read about it.

The funny thing about patterns is that I haven't even read A Pattern Language, the book which seems most often cited in regard to this, yet. But I have read The Timeless Way of Building, which introduces the conceptual framework which surrounds patterns.