"Failure requires the possibility of success"

In the past I've tried to avoid the pain of failure by creating intentional failures, intentional glitches. This is doomed to fail. (Fail at failing... hmm)

Some rough notes from an unsent email:

-Appreciating glitches is about seeing something work the way it's not supposed to work; the key is that it does suggest a way it was "supposed" to work. Glitches don't exist in a vacuum, they are failures, which means they tell you what success was supposed to look like, and there's a lot of room there to suggest not just how normal things might glitch, but also how fantastical things might glitch.

-Rather than fabricate glitches out of nothing, make a genuine attempt to be successful, but embrace glitches and failure in your own processes, your own tools. Game jams are the perfect opportunity to do this -- to let go of perfection (since you have very limited time) and share your risky attempts and beautiful failures with others.

-To release something with a real glitch takes a bit of courage, a willingness to be vulnerable. Something about how when engaging with people's work that contains glitches and failures, be kind and generous. Choosing to appreciate a glitch, rather than exploit it for gain or make fun of it, is an act of empathy. (which does not need to be extended to all glitches in all contexts! but it's nice to be empathetic to each other's glitches here)

-I have a few images of real-world glitches I've loved (some are glitchy screen displays, but one is like a malformed button - like a malformed clothes button) and I'll go on about what I think they expose about the underlying systems & processes that formed them.

-A lot of the game mechanics that exist in my games are the result of prototyping which feels a lot like discovering things that were... mistakes, errors. Intentionally sowing a little chaos in order to produce interesting failures. I could get into "Failing Upward" sort of at the end to show how I've personally folded glitches/failures into functional pieces in my body of work? I could talk about this for probably too long but I don't want to overdo it.

I've been invited to give a keynote for the Vector Festival Game & Hardware Jam! This year's theme is really exciting to me:

A line from Bo Burnham's "Can't Handle This":

QuoteCome and watch the skinny kid with a
Steadily declining mental health, and laugh as he attempts
To give you what he cannot give himself

I have designed games that feel a little bit like the random walk of exploring design space:

cloud exile and simple tour are a couple of examples.

In some ways I like this random walk -- the balancing act of 'compelling' vs 'pure in intent' vs 'accomplishable within my human and technological constraints'. But it's also very frustrating, and I enjoy making games that are equally frustrating. I wonder how much of it is out of jealousy: that my players should not be allowed to enjoy this more than I did.

QuoteAll art, nay, all signals have this kind of compulsive engine.

I absolutely agree. I think... mainly, I have resisted the idea for too long. I am embracing it now, even if I'd like to judge it as evil, or at best amoral and restrictive.

Quotehe writes and publishes books, but I never get the sense that he has much stock in those books being read. I think he's mainly interested in writing them, but then why does he publish them?

Why did we send that golden record out into space?

I don't know! I'm very interested in the answer to this question, Zeigfreid. If not to be heard, to affect something or someone, why publish? Why release? Why hit send at all? It seems a strange fantasy to do a thing with your life, only appreciating the imagined outcome. But I guess one day we will all die, so everything past the window of our lives is imagined in the same way.

Principles. Tenets. Cores.

I think there is a tangential feeling here - the principle which defines principles themselves is that we do them even when we don't know what's going on. My principle has for much of my life been something like "make art." I don't necessarily know whether that's a good principle, but it has been a constant for many years and, honestly, it's hard to stop at this point. It's just a part of who I am; it's a part of my life.

If at the #1 spot I had a more obviously good principle like Waymond's "be kind," what might be different about me as a person? about my life? I don't have regrets, just curiousity. This is something that's really interesting to me about people. This is a person's "core."

Quote from: Waymond, from Everything Everywhere All At OnceThe only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don't know what's going on.

This quote had strong relevance to an earlier draft of the first post, and I don't want to lose that relevance. If we don't know what's going on, please be kind. But even if we think we know what's going on and it's saying all is pointless, still, still be kind. Even if we don't know why we're being kind, be kind.

Staying committed to something is hard. When encountering the bad parts of something large, it's tempting to throw out the baby with the bathwater -- to trash it and get a clean slate. I do this all the time with individual game designs that fall short, and lately I've been feeling a bit burnt out on trying to make games do what I want. The medium is insufficient.

We were talking about gun violence in videogames and I reflected on my encounters with people stating that the work they are doing, or the event they are hosting, etc., takes place on "unceded land". That is, in Canada, we have entirely displaced and in many cases ruined the traditional territories of the First Nations people who lived here. I wrote,

Quote from: droqenFor a long time I thought it was a little silly that people in Canada acknowledge that they are doing things on unceded land [..]
but it's this weird unavoidable thing. Like, if you live in Canada, what are you gonna do, leave Canada??
If you recognize you're working/existing in a problematic medium/context, you might not be able to change some bad stuff, but you can at least... uh... acknowledge it, if it really matters to you.

I can acknowledge an issue, even if I don't know the solution or whether a solution exists at all, as long as I truly care about it. In the case of unceded land, it's not something I give much thought to or have much familiarity with. Although it isn't something I'm passionate about, I can at least recognize that it's not hollow for someone to acknowledge that they know, they know, that the thing they're doing is problematic to them and yet they carry on anyway. The medium is insufficient. As we grow and learn more about the world I think it is inevitable that we will learn more and more ways in which all mediums are insufficient.

Life is insufficient, but it's all we have. If it's all we have then it is necessarily the most beautiful thing, and if the most beautiful thing is not beautiful then what meaning does beauty have?

Then there is the analysis of met with a terrible fate:

QuoteI argued in the examination of Mikau that Termina is brought into reality by Link encountering it [1].  Using this argument, we can gloss the meaning of 'meeting' as 'creating through encountering'.

The conclusion is that the Happy Mask Salesman is saying

Quote[Link] has brought a morally negative set of softly determined timelines into being by encountering it.

Meeting the Happy Mask Salesman is non-optional to the player once the game is started. The only thing that "encountering it" can possibly refer to, as a message to the player, is "encountering the game" and choosing to start it up. As player-Link superposition, you-Link have brought a morally negative set of softly determined timelines into being by bringing yourself into existence, by playing this game.

Quote[..]who, exactly, is the audience of the Salesman's words? The obvious answer is 'Link', but I think that what I just said above should give us pause:  as we have discussed before, Link is less of a substantive character and more of an avatar that directly links the player to the universe of the game.  Combine this with the Salesman's position adjacent to the general domain of Termina, and I think we can plausibly interpret him as speaking both to Link and the player

Quote[The Happy Mask Salesman is] fallibly claiming to the link between player and game universe ('Link')

I don't know how intentional it is or who else has talked about this before or since, but wow, 'Link' as a name is exactly the thing I was talking about... Wowzers.

Lately I have been recognizing that the 'ludonarrative' of games is very important to me. To start by quoting some shit I was saying in Paradise:

Quote from: droqenif a person is choosing to play a shooting game because it's fun (it is) and the game-world is trying to paint an image of the shooting game as shooting & killing people with a gun, then a part of that world -- the part that is the most in focus -- is that the player-character is choosing to shoot & kill people with a gun because it's fun.

[..] imagine if nobody could ever write a book where the protagonist enacts violence and disliked it

if it was just functionally impossible or extremely difficult to produce a book like that which people could engage with. what long-spanning effects would that have on culture?

I recognized later that my thoughts were based on a presumption of a certain perspective:

Quote from: droqena big part of my thing is the presumption that we have a story,
and in this story we regard the player as the protagonist

Okay. The stage is set.