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").

By contrast to malicious game design which is built around... pranks at best and cruel jokes at worst, magical game design is built around magic tricks.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025683/Board-Game-Design-Day-King

Fairness is a new concept. For most of human history, cheating was the norm in love and war and games.

* * *
When presented with a process whose results are important to me (VITAL PROCESS?), it's pleasurable to compute what the results are going to be. If I'm entirely incapable of attempting to compute the result, I'll be frustrated... but if the act of computing is too trivial, the pleasure will go away... and if the act of computing is too expensive, it will become tiresome to compute in its entirety. However, for a suitably vital process, I will still be driven to compute it in its entirety, however tiresome, and burn out afterwards.
* * *

Unlike most of my other games Starseed Pilgrim was quite emotional... resonant poetry for people who still love playing with systems?

I've been moving away from thinking about literal representations of things, but what if I've been thinking about representing the wrong things? For example, in Oath, I've been thinking about how Favour is not just a game mechanic, it represents a facet of the world -- the shifting favour of the inhabitants of the world of Oath, as well as your relationship(s) to them.

But, Starseed Pilgrim was much more about an emotional experience, a state of ruminating. It was about thought and feeling and cognition. See front step to tianjin - it's much more about a state of mind; it doesn't dwell on the literal existence of where I am or where I'm not; it just touches on those things briefly.

I can talk about states of mind.

something i'm fond of is designing levels first by composition (i.e. using a tile editor to draw a bunch of tiles that look good) and then to find a way to make it enjoyable to play. i came to think about this process more clearly after reading bennett foddy's piece on mkapolk's process of designing "[fr0g] clan official server 24/7 zk map (for stranger)":

QuoteMy process for making the levels was to scatter geometry more or less randomly and then try to traverse it. Sometimes when I was going down a map if I thought that an area shouldn't be a dead end I'd add some more stuff to it, but that's about as far as it went.

but maybe i should have realized it earlier when i heard sylvie's description of how she designed JIGGLY ZONE

-- actually i don't know where i heard this. was it from sylvie herself? (researching)

Closed Systems

I've always enjoyed things that feel like this. It's not just generation ships or things that really do go out of their way to feel like 'bottle worlds', it's also the feeling of something being... cleanly, elegantly designed, self-contained, focused. Focus is a good word.

In games, there's a very special feeling I get from full-world simulations. Heat Signature, Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, Crusader Kings 2... these games convey a sense that the entire world is 'one mode,' simulated, in a roguelike way. This isn't the only way to do this, of course...

Mount and Blade simulates a whole world in modes - you move between the world map and combat scenarios. The combat scenarios feel a bit tacked-on to me, though...

Up Close and in Real Time

On the other hand, I hate pausing these games, zooming around the whole world. No -- that's not quite true. I actually really like it, but it takes away from this feeling of wholeness, of living and breathing this world. It's seductive, having a tool so powerful available to me as a player. I love pausing these games, zooming around the whole world, and that's the problem.

I like playing Probability 0 and Dungeon Bounce. Cave Story and Dark Souls and Ynglet. I like getting into a flow, experiencing this "Up Close and in Real Time" effect.

Maybe zooming out to an overworld isn't a problem: it can give much-needed context? The problem is when the "Up Close and in Real Time" mode is unimportant, anything other than primary. Frequent interruptions have that effect on this mode for me. (Also see my above comment on Mount and Blade.)

... is this a Cursed Problem?

I'm going to have to think about this some more tomorrow.
Successful games to consider:
- Uurnog Uurnlimited
- System Shock 2
- Elona
- 31 unmarked games [Oct 25, 'Alien'] (too small though. look into scaling solutions. how do other games do it?)
- Starseed Pilgrim? (not a 'whole world', but still feels like a 'big' simulation. again a scaling thing: it's conceptually small, even if it feels traversable/large)
- Dark Souls? (maybe not a whole simulation)
- Clockwork Calamity in Mushroom World? (maybe not real-time enough)'
- Blessed Surface (I found it too... unpolished?)

Hmm. I didn't get into it. But:
- Noita

It really is terrible not having a pause button! And the way you can lose all your progress by slipping up... oof, that hurts. I boost jumped into the darkness a moment before it would have been the right time, and man, does that suck! hahaha. This game is not particularly kind.

External Context Problems
Answers questions regarding why someone plays games. Examples:
- "I play this game when I'm bored, until I get tired of it"
- "I play this game during my lunch break"
- "I play this game during my spare time before bed, until I've finished it"
- "I coordinate a time to play this game with a large group of friends, then we all get together and play it"

These are all different contexts and require different high-level context design patterns to serve them.
(Note that these are not patterns, they are just descriptions of a way someone would play a game... patterns would be designed to solve these 'problems'. These are more like fake case studies. Seeds.)

Game Structure Pattern
How is the content of the game laid out?
- There are 16 randomly-generated levels. If you run out of HP, you restart at the beginning. If you quit, you restart at the beginning.
- There are 8 dungeons connected by an overworld. (At any given point in the game, how many places can you go next? How many dead ends are there?) (Do you know where you have to go next? Do you have a choice?)

This is hard to describe, in part because it has so many subpatterns. Also, using exact numbers is not really pattern-y ("8 dungeons"), but these are not patterns, they are again... just seeds.

"several dungeons connected by an overworld" could be a pattern. maybe it could solve the context/problem "i want a game to play during my spare time before bed over the course of a month or two, to chip away at until it's finished, and to come away with a sense of mastery and satisfaction."

I'm going to be going over all the little things I made over the past year or two... they're prototypes, I guess? I don't want to call them prototypes rather than games or toys, but through the lens of the commercial games pitch, they're prototypes.

Hi, droqen here!
Today we're going to be designing a videogame pitch to a videogame company!
But first, don't forget to like and subscribe! And hit that notification bell!

Actually first, what's important is for me to figure out some big thematic inspirations- like, am I interested in a game set in space, on Earth, or in your mind? I should probably figure out some motifs that I find myself returning to again and again...

If I'm going to promise to make something, I had really better be sure I can uphold my end of the bargain.

At the bottom end of working for myself, every action became laced with a fear that it's not enough. While I think this was driven by not having enough money, it was very much a mindset thing. If you're rolling dice are you excited about the high end, worried about the low end, or just expecting the average? The mindset I want to get back into is to think about money in this middle space, where I have moderate expectations that I fully expect to meet.

I've experienced this high end -- Starseed Pilgrim -- and now I've experienced the low end. Failing and losing a bunch of money sucks. It happened over the course of a literal decade, though, and I didn't really even notice it happening.

Maybe I should have listened to my mom and gone to business school.

Maybe not, though ;) I'll just work with or for someone else who knows how to deal with this stuff. Save myself for game design.

At the heart of all this: worrying about money is poison. The flipside is that I've finally come to value financial stability over spiky "wow what if this blows up" gambling-on-experimental-game-design dreams. Now that I value it, I just have to learn how to find it :')

not exploitative (indifferent to harm, intentionally beneficial to oneself),
but malicious (intentionally harmful, indifferent to self-benefit).