I read this a long time ago and it's stuck with me since - a simple method for immersing yourself in your own paracosm (or "mental wonderland").

The way it's written feels a little bit like a poetry guide... The instructions themselves are slightly poetic, but plain text notes accompany.

I thought I'd lost the link but I luckily had the URL living in a text file in my little file cloud, and I found it using Sublime Text's most sublime capacity to let me search all the text files in a large folder for a particular term. (In this case, I searched for paracosm and found the note from 2020. Hooray!)

i keep making small tweaks - each miniature character/player stanza can be honed, to the point where some of them feel like they could each be small standalone poems

i'm a big fan of hyert
   who dreams of bathing
   naked in the ocean that lies
   forever trapped behind glass

and i think faval really needs some changes

ameri was gendered at first but felt out of place among the others, so i've degendered that stanza

first imagine the players
not in a mass but face by face:

eleax,
   who kills for sport
   and ignores every conversation,
   every human word

ameri,
   who keeps a notebook on hand
   to remember those friends
   that feel alive

avrin,
   who arrowlike dashes
   straight toward the finish line
   cut and bled by spurned roses

hyert,
   who dreams of bathing
   naked in the ocean that lies
   forever trapped behind glass

faval,
   who watches like a hawk
   and feels pain
   at every missed opportunity

these players are their own protagonists, all

   the player is your protagonist
   how do you expect them to act?
   how do you want them to?

the changes that occur in their heart
are the lifeblood of this art form
a story told by its own audience.

first imagine the player.

second imagine the game.

one can make a perfectly lovely tune with one instrument that plays exactly one note at a time... shouldn't that be enough? long silences, single notes, smooth transitions - or sharp, hard ones. who even needs chords in order to express something powerful?

i got into the habit of layering sounds on top of sounds on top of sounds in Musagi and, lately, Bitwig Studio. kicks on top of leads on top of a bass on top of snares on top of a hi-hat etc. but . . . then i started playing the Great Fairy's Fountain theme from memory (read: poorly) and it was beautifully simple.

when i think about my favourite music, it's often the work of Kashiwa Daisuke that comes to mind, but i think my real answer would be Geothermal from Cave Story - but played on piano, which is a total impossibility according to the sheet music i tried using. it needed three hands. but there was a beautiful, resonant depth to the parts that i could play.

(here is a bad version of it - bad as in missing some of the lower notes, an unforgivable redaction)

i thought about the iconic 'Zelda's Secret Sound', and how that could be played and recognized with one instrument.

why was i adding a drum beat?

(sometimes i read an article and i think, this could make a great poem. i thought this about "AI has always been a toy" https://www.microethology.net/ai-has-always-been-a-toy/ which is an article i didn't even read, i just read the title and skimmed it.)

Quote from: p105-106To steer children into becoming players who don't use games to escape real life but instead become more confident, focused, social, and creative problem solvers, there is one thing no parent should ever do. "Do not shame your children about the games they play," [McGonigal] said.

That means never saying things such as "Stop wasting your time and do something real." Trivializing a kid's favorite video game will not get him or her to stop playing. It will only serve to "develop that escapist mind-set" by reinforcing the idea that their interests don't matter and that games don't have a connection with the real world. Instead, engage with children by asking questions about the game. How you play it. What's hard. What's cool. How they've gotten better at the game. [..] "That conversation along can really transform a young person in terms of their ability to bring all of these gameful strengths to school, to spots, to their personal relationships, and to themselves."
[..]
"If you love [first-person shooter or other violent] games, you need to spend at least half of your time or more playing with people you know."

Quote from: ch132At my age you start thinking
that putting roadblocks in the young people's way
is very much like sowing seeds.

Regarding Yuku Suetsugu's
"Chihayafuru"

p.s. here's the quote, from page 139: " 'To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.' [..] "

(I finished the book a while ago. Maybe i need to make a habit of writing a little post-mortem of each thing I finish reading?)

I'll never forget this book. I read it along with Mutual Aid while I was trying to figure out my "structures are inherently amoral" and anti-systems perspectives.

Anyway i came back to this thread because there was this phrase rolling around in my head, 'LOSS AVERSION IN THE AGE OF PLENTY', and in The Dispossessed, Odo (the inciting personality of the anarchists who annexed the moon, the Odonians who became the Annaresti) described excess as 'excrement'.

'LOSS AVERSION IN THE AGE OF EXCREMENT'

There's also a quote from Odo... 'to make a thief, make an owner'. There was another I can't remember at the moment. But, in light of this, the phrase that I always thought ironic -- I have so much yet I am so loss-averse -- seems to be an Odonian tautology. If you have nothing, you can lose nothing. If you have no excess, rather, you can have no foolish sense of loss. It is the excrement which itself creates the sense of losing excrement.

There's no word for this type of loss, but what I mean is the feeling of being attached to something valueless yet not wanting to let go of it. Perhaps it's greed. It isn't greed if you actually need it.

Basically, I'm pondering this:
What if easy rewards aren't inherently worse -- hard-earned rewards aren't inherently more rewarding -- but easy rewards are too easy to binge on and that dynamic creates negative emotions (for some) towards easy games and easy rewards?

Quote from: p84-86Substance abused used to be scarce--a luxury for most of us--and dopamine was at a low ebb. [..] Alcoholism became a major societal problem throughout Europe in the 1700s once it became available and cheap. [..] But despite our affinity for alcohol, the dopamine rush still remained a luxury, out of the reach of most people, either due to religion, morality, reputation, or expense. [~] Slowly but surely, advance in technology, commodity crop farming, and globalization have made various rewarding substances readily available, and the ability to engage in rewarding behaviours not just possible but almost constant.

An interesting thought -- what if the virtue of the 'difficulty' of difficult games is that they allow us to hold dopamine addiction at arm's length? The ineffable value of difficulty, of rare reward, is that I am drawn to it because it is an organic way to avoid the decline of psychic reward due to dopamine tolerance? On an earlier page the author describes the phenomenon:

Quote from: p72-73As an illustration, let's choose a peanut butter cup, the cheapest of all thrills (but it just as easily could be a shot of espresso or vodka [or a win in a videogame]). In terms of the reward neuron[..]: Get a desire (dopamine). Get a fix. Get a temporary rush (EOPs). Yum. But, man, that peanut butter cup was so delicious. [..] Go ahead, eat the second one--they come two to a package, after all. Get another rush; this one won't last as long as the first one because there are fewer receptors. Tomorrow, you go get another package [..] but you just can't recapitulate that gustatory nirvana again. More should be able to do it: the next day, you buy the six-pack. And now that extra fix means your receptors are down-regulated even more. So you decide to put the pedal to the metal: the economy-size bag how now become your standard, and it's just giving you way less response than you ever had.

I can feel this sharp decline keenly when I play a game that bombards me with excess reward.

I wonder if it was never about the difficulty, but about the enforced pacing -- a game's scarcity of reward prevents those rewards from coming too close and quick for me to feel how reduced they are as a result of my satisfied dopamine receptors.

That's what's nice about walls around a reward; they're a substitute for self-control, and so without thinking, the experience is richer and less fragile. Until I've mastered the ability to break down the walls! Hahaha. So you need harder games.