Quote from: p137

THE TRAP: RULE BEATING

Rules to govern a system can lead to rule beating--perverse behavior that [obeys the rules, but] distorts the system

THE WAY OUT

Design, or redesign, rules to release creativity not in the direction of beating the rules, but in the direction of achieving the purpose of the rules

I've written up a quote but I think I'll just summarize all of them at the end, and maybe re-summarize where I think they can be lumped together.

Wow, these are some excellent descriptions of 'traps' and 'ways out' of them... This is incredible. I also skipped ahead and saw - this is the book that coined all those 'intervention points in a system' that I've read about so long ago! Holy shit! This is that book! What a damn book

~ Dark and Darker - its gambling-like take on effort

I'm not particularly happy to be writing this but I've got to get it out...

My time with Dark and Darker was short-lived. It was compelling and fascinating - an exciting blend of risk and trepidation and beautiful luck. And -

One misstep and you could lose everything. Do it all just right and you might be able to strike it rich.

- I find it incredibly stressful too, in a quietly, deeply negative way. More than that, I think it makes a statement, in the way that only a game can, through its very play-feeling, on a particular way of engaging with the world around us. I want to write this because I think it is true for a very broad spectrum of games, and I (1.) dislike it, and (2.) want to know where it comes from, what need it satisfies, or in short, which forces inevitably give birth to games like this.

There is a line from Thinking in Systems that I can no longer find. Paraphrased, it said something like, "If you close down or destroy a factory but do not change any of the conditions that cause the factory to arise in the first place, another factory will open in its place."

I don't even want to close down or destroy Dark and Darker - but I do want to understand the human system that gave birth to it, that keeps giving birth to games like it. Is it pure compulsion, as I have experienced a little of, or is it something else? Is this system the root of videogames?

And... why... does it mirror a certain strongly held attitude which I frequently encounter... the attitude that the world is an unpredictable game, that at every step you fight and claw to gain a little more, and sometimes you succeed but mostly you fail...

Dark and Darker encourages hoarding. Spending your hard-won resources is punishing and unrewarding unless you do it just right. Sometimes the real world can feel this way.

The culture of Dark and Darker is one of hopeless murder. I did not encounter a single individual who did not kill me as soon as they had the opportunity to do so. Literally, I tried to connect every time I saw someone -- okay, sometimes I ran away -- and they all ended in a knife fight (which I usually lost). It was depressing, a miserable little corner of a completely anti-social subculture.

The larger question doesn't have anything to do with Dark and Darker at all, or games at all. What gives birth to this attitude? What satisfies it, and why does it need to be satisfied?

Hmm.

Quote from: page 12[One example of a non-system is] a conglomeration without any particular interconnections or function. Sand scattered on a road by happenstance is not, itself, a system. . . .

Quote from: page 12When a living creature dies, it loses its "system-ness." The multiple interactions that held it together no longer function, and it dissipates, although its material remains part of a larger food-web system.

So early in this book! Defining what a system is in a way that I was not a hundred percent on board with.

Meadows says that a system has a "function" or "purpose", which rubs up against my discomfort with the way these sorts of terms lead into a teleological viewpoint, as if a system exists to do something, rather than... merely doing it... I would prefer less intention- or design-coded words like "result" or "outcome" or something of that nature.

~ LINKED FROM All Things Shining, "live in these surface meanings and find a genuine range of joys and comforts there, without wishing they stood for something more"

(It reminds me of Apocalypse World's impulse, i.e. "spawning pool (impulse: to generate badness)" So it is clearly a useful, intuitive, human way of looking at things.)

The compatibility:

"Do without doing." In Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of Tao Te Ching, this phrase or something like it repeats itself a few times. Actually many times. "Act without acting." There is something about "Shape without sawing" or "Shape without cutting"? Something like that.

In The Nature of Order, or actually more in The Timeless Way of Building, there is talk about resolving forces. The idea behind patterns is that a conflict is at play.

Thinking in Systems presents a language for more precisely describing the nature of certain conflicts. I think the language is very intuitive to me, it's no big surprise, it's like filling in the cracks with a slightly more precise shape of what was already there all along, given to me by Nicky Case's "LOOPY" and perhaps some of Dan Cook's design diagrams [todo: find/add link].

The One-Straw Revolution describes systems too -- the boundlessness of systems, the damage of assuming one is understood...

Quote from: page 116

THE TRAP: POLICY RESISTANCE

When various actors try to pull a system stock toward various goals, the result can be policy resistance. Any new policy, especially if it's effective, . . . produces additional resistance, with results no one likes, but that everyone expends considerable effort in maintaining.

THE WAY OUT

Let go. Bring in all the actors and use the energy formerly expended on resistance to seek out mutually satisfactory ways for all goals to be realized--or redefinitions of larger and more important goals that everyone can pull toward together.

I neglected to keep good notes for this book, so I'll have to go back and find the things that leapt out at me. There have been several. Compared to my recent reading I am finding this book dry and obvious.. but great

EDIT: So many connections! I created a whole forum in order to better take the type of notes that were arising from its reading.

~ Discernible macrobehaviours of a system. (Avoiding teleological thinking.) ". . . a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose"
~ Self sufficient subsystems, and evolution. "Why the Universe Is Organized into Hierarchies--a Fable"

P. 250
As [Gertrude] Stein puts it in "Poetry and Grammar,"
. . . Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are.

I said, to some peers, that I had recently acquired the ability to consume "thousand-page nonfiction texts," and either claimed or implied or at least thought that part, a necessary part, of this was a sub-ability to "skim or skip . . . in order to better understand the whole."

I have been reluctant to do so with Ugly Feelings but I am becoming increasingly aware that it is important for me to stick to my guns, to follow my impulses, to not treat authorial linearity as so sacred.

I'm skipping to stuplimity.

Also it's been interesting reading some thoughtful negative internet takes on the writing of Glass Onion, just as it was interesting to hear a friend's thoughtful negative take on the writing of Perdido Street Station! I won't dwell on the negativity in either case, just absorb it into my being :)

I loved this movie as well as the previous one but in particular I want to shout out the glass onion thing. It's a term I found myself using to describe this stupid gameplay trailer for a particular 'self-aware' manipulate time-wasting mobile game which shall not be named here.

It's full of jokes at the expense of the type of thing which it is itself doing and being, and I found myself trying to describe that, that thing it was doing. Subtext. What does it mean for a time-waster to loudly and cheerfully say "WASTE YOUR TIME!" "NEGLECT YOUR LIFE!" ? The subtext is that you shouldn't be doing those things, and yet the game is encouraging you to do them. So is it making a point about how you shouldn't be doing those things but you can be manipulated into doing them? is it making a point about how I'm reading too far into the subtext, and in fact it's just cheerfully and refreshingly owning up to all of the things it's doing?

I felt exactly like Benoit Blanc in the moment he gave his rant, above. I was peeling back "every complex layer". "I expected complexity, I expected intelligence." It was only when I realized "it doesn't hide at all. I was staring right at it." "It hides not behind complexity, but behind mind-numbing obvious clarity."

So stupid.

It's a glass onion!

Quote from: Benoit Blanc, ~1:46:00I keep returning, in my mind, to the glass onion. Something that seems densely layered, mysterious, and inscrutable. But in fact, the center is in plain sight. . . . every complex layer, peeled back has revealed ANOTHER layer, and ANOTHER layer, and come to naught. And that was the problem, right there. You see, I expected complexity. i expected intelligence i expected a puzzle, a game. but that's not what any of this is.

It hides not behind complexity, but behind mind-numbing obvious clarity. Truth is, it doesn't hide at all. I was staring right at it.