A simple videogame structure to
construct: produce, according to some
algorithm or principle, a large state
space; and add or subtract to this space
by means of altering this algorithm or
principle (usually 'code' or 'rules').

when i play a game like this
the effect is quite intoxicating
and likewise making is thrilling
and surprising and frustrating.
as brlka writes,

QuoteI love avoiders because they're easy to
make, but still meaty and engaging to
design and play. They're the closest I've
found to a gamedev equivalent of
sketches - a piece you can bang out in an
afternoon that might end up being one
of your favorite things you've made,
something I've always loved about
making music.

there is an effect that making and playing games that are composed of
this structure has on me, which is that it takes me further away from
intentionality, and i start to lose touch with something that i love about
making things at all.

do i have control over my mind or what it outputs? this is arguable, and
the question may not even be sensible. however, there is a difference in
kind between a process of creating something and a process of coming
to love and appreciate something.

the structureless object that i discover does not reveal to me anything
about my mind or my thought processes. i do not wonder, when i
lose myself in the vertigo of an algorithmically generated structure such
as these, about the mind of a person.

i perhaps have an experience, but i cannot describe this experience as
empathetic or reflective.

i feel a little bit dizzy, and i will rest now -- convalesce from all the
vertigo of gameplay.

i think this was enough. playing gameplay (forever) for hours on end showed me something more.

playing a way to dance all alone for hours (while tweaking, while making) showed me something else.

i should not say "something less," but what, then?

on July 23, i purchased and began Splatoon Raiders, and i think that gameplay (forever)ing was some kind of extension of that, and although i played Splatoon Raiders together with friends i think that a way to dance all alone shows some fullest-extent of where this structure goes. i am a little sleepy, tired, but i will write one more post about structure before going to bed.

contrasted against gameplay (forever), a way to dance all alone is structurally so simple, so flimsy. playing it doesn't overwrite anything in my mind. there aren't any outside relationships there; the positions that appear in a way to dance all alone are no less poignant, but there's nothing to hold onto. there are no line numbers, level names, bookmarks that help me find my way back to these moments:

twirling three-quarters of the way around to zip away in the right direction

cutting straight through an open channel (it seems like a miracle, but it happens comfortably often)

cutting almost straight through an almost open channel, skimming this way and that

taking a hard right turn, a strict L-shape

all these situations with the white square there nearby, poised to strike, its exact timing not totally knowable to me but it's probably fine, right?

boiling red dots that might become squares

wanting but not quite succeeding at timing my movement to skate right through an active red block at the moment it slides into nothingness

i made a way to dance all alone for jack's avoidance jam which i believe was inspired by an angel dances in the sparks of a bonfire and perhaps brlka's subsequent blog post, designing avoiders.

my participation in this jam followed a personal experience with striving to get a very high score in gameplay (forever), which i could discuss in great detail and yet never enough detail: the way that i passed hours in deep meditation on seemingly infinite and yet deeply finite variations of block placement:

narrow chimneys like those in blood perforated by gaps, climbable by tumbling up alternating left-then-right walls when the gaps are small enough.

wide open spaces only momentarily as free as those in summer, faint aspirations of flight cut short by the reality of obstacles.

awkward trails of fruit like the coins in camp games -- curves i could follow were i only more perfect.

tiny little gaps to struggle to squeeze into like on the first screen of snow or in contribution or in other levels, but never quite in the designed ways of gameplay (killing), there's no time for such difficult impossible elaborate jump sequences, and no need when you can just brute-force your way through.

cleverly wrapping around again like in blood, spotting something impossible and moving through the slip.

endlessly climbing through narrow then open then narrow spaces again like in tower, tower, tower.

and pressure, like in digested.

there are answers to "what does kill gameplay mean?" that i have dismissed solely, perhaps, on the same basis: because they are not beautiful.

and, i have carried confidence "in spite of everything" that it is worth ruminating on.

it has been a couple years, and i don't understand the relationship of The End of Gameplay to "kill gameplay," but i sought a high score in gameplay (forever) (one of the levels in The End of Gameplay) and i am still not satisfied.

when i revisit gameplay (forever) every movement threatens to become perfect and beautiful and for brief shining moments i, as the bunny, glide smoothly through the air, i pick up all the fruits, i slip diagonally past all the poison, all the walls are climbable.

i listened to the recordings i took of the music of each level in the game on a bicycle ride just today (technically yesterday -- it is 1:27 AM at this moment), and i am still not satisfied.

i had a conversation with J yesterday (actual yesterday), and immediately after the conversation i felt a new sense of what The End of Gameplay was "really" about, and what Starseed Pilgrim was """really""" about, and it explained some things to me that i did not understand about why i have been so dissatisfied by Cruel World and my answers about it

there are a number of fluxus games that i don't understand intuitively. (most or all of them, even.)

McDonald's book reveals/revealed to me a number of ways of thinking about all of these confusing and strange games that goes beyond just some surface reaction of mystification.

i finished reading this chapter long ago (some months ago, i think?) and one of the passages that has stuck around in my mind is the quoted one above (p52) about Brecht's experience of his own puzzles: not as something he finishes and releases knowing, but something that he wonders about for a long time and even eventually finds an answer to.

i have also included McDonald's description of considering Ball Puzzle and, particularly, dismissing the viability of a solution due to some internal sense that the real answer must be more beautiful* ("the puzzle seems trivial, so that cannot be the solution").

*beautiful, above, used as a stand-in for some ever-shifting quality which will remain undefined, but in the specific context -- if the answer makes the puzzle trivial, then the answer must not be correct, because we have decided or determined that the puzzle must not be trivial. then, due to that internal determination, any answer that makes the puzzle trivial must by definition not have the certain quality (of beauty, which has no fixed meaning).

backlink: 3587(B) regarding "beauty" among "meaning", "pleasure", "play", and other self-effacing ends

Quotep51
[..] Ball Puzzle (1965)[..] comes in a box that contains a marble and the
instruction "Find ball under bare foot / Without moving, transfer ball to
hand." This task leaves us wondering about its rules. Are we allowed to
ask for help? If so, then the puzzle seems trivial, so that cannot be the
solution. How should we understand the verb find? Must we first scatter
the ball in our house and forget about it before trying to solve the puzzle?
An answer must exist, if only we could make the correct mental leap to
discover it.

Quotep52
     In [George] Brecht's puzzles, that moment of hesitation and nonknowledge is
extended indefinitely. He layers minor paradoxes one atop the next to
keep the obvious impossibility at bay. Indeed, Brecht experiences his
own puzzles as temporal extensions. They are difficult, he writes, "for me
too. For one of them it took me several years to figure it out. . . . I have
enough experience to know that when an idea like that comes to me it
has to have a solution. I have confidence in myself. In spite of every-
thing."⁵²
[Note 52 for the chapter reads: Leeber, "Interview," 88.]

but the reason i even took notice of this kind of language is that it was a shift away from another type. prior to descending into this use of language jack describes a number of mechanics in great detail, and i felt as though it was going somewhere else -- somewhere clearer where i'd like to identify and be able to go myself:

Quote[14:19-] In Ghosts 'n Goblins you have walking and jumping, and your jump has a total of three arcs. It has the full right, the full left, and the straight up.

[In LURRUNA] you can adjust your jumps in mid-air . . . you have this low, fast, long jump, . . . you have this super crazy high backflip . . . you have a different backflip that [goes] pretty high up and pretty far backwards. . . and that gives you a lot of dodging options.

Then compared to any single weapon in G&G [Ghosts 'n Goblins], you get a lot of coverage with . . . the different arcs that you can throw these bombs [in LURRUNA]. I feel like any potential angle that an enemy can come at you from, you're not going to have to wait that long, or do that much positioning work, or thinking about your positioning and all that kind of stuff to get into a place where you can hit something. [-15:33]

UPDATE: it was the next day (still august 2) and i was cleaning the kitchen while listening to jack crawford's video, '10 Games to Play If You Have No Idea What I'm Talking About'.

jack is describing the mechanical differences between Ghosts 'n Goblins and LURRUNA, and at timestamp 15:49, says, of LURRUNA:

Quote from: Jack Crawford[15:49-] You're just a little bit too powerful.

prior this statement (and after it), the things that he's saying are a lot more factual, mechanical, what have you.

Quote from: Jack Crawford[15:54-] The two action games in my mind that are great examples of limiting your movement, limiting what you can do, slowing you down, things like that, so that you're forced to play more predictively, rather than reactively. You're forced to think ahead, right, you're forced to anticipate things, and understand how the enemies work, more than just, like, react to them. [-16:16]

this felt related to the brlka breakdown above. there's a whirlwind of terms along the MDA spectrum being thrown around here, and i think a few of these terms, lost in the whirlwind, cause certain design discourses to become difficult to have in a way that is not necessary.

"too powerful", "play more predictively, rather than reactively"

something about these words is very slippery...

my interest is not in pointless criticism of semantics, but to explore different ways of communicating and thinking about playable systems in ways that might yield valuable results. earlier in the stream jack is also describing having trouble with perfectionism and seeing how small projects turn out and being dissatisfied with them and starting over... perhaps part of this (common) problem is that the creative field of 'game' design is not well constructed on any foundation?

(no conclusion.)

i would really like to think about "the entire possibility space throughout the entire game at once".

i theorize that part of the enjoyment of computer games is dancing with the impossibility of such complexity, and the moments in which one feels that a total understanding is even remotely within reach.

in The Impossible Reversal (mcdonald), the titular concept is related: there is a kind of play or pleasure that requires reversal of a seeming impossibility. first, something must seem impossible, and then one discovers its possibility. such a sensation cannot ever be realized without, first, the sensation of impossibility.

it is common for game designers to rely on qualia-based shorthands when referring to player experience, which is devastating to many of the concrete features that mcdonald proposes as key to what design is

(that is, if we agree that design is, or benefits from, or involves "A shared set of practices or techniques", then qualia-based shorthands like "X threatens the player" weakens design by weakening the sharedness of these practices or techniques because what it means for "X to threaten" varies from individual to individual in a way that categorically cannot be bridged in certain ways)

and, it is common for game designers to rely on player experience (either real experiences - i.e. from playtesting - or imagined/constructed experiences - from intuition) to navigate "the entire possibility space" of a game system. as jw puts it, "that's 4d/5d brain shit I can't do".

despite my response on bluesky in which i said "that's how i think about it yeah"... i relate.

QuoteI guess the way you can look at gameplay objectively is like the entire possibility space throughout the entire game at once or something? to me that's 4d/5d brain shit I can't do

from Jan Willem Nijman's bleet

QuoteDesign includes:

• A shared set of practices and techniques
• A public discourse about its values, goals, innovations, and limits
• A canon of existing examples and counterexamples
• A worldview that differentiates design from other kinds of activities
• A pedagogy that brings new practitioners into the community.

from ROMchip Presents: Peter McDonald on The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play (timestamp 44:59)