a high degree of reliance on qualia
- devastates the foundation of design discourse (todo: link to mcdonald's definition of design)
- is or seems to some degree necessary because of the immense complexity of games (todo: link to conversation with jw)

there is something missing.

when i'm 'playing' gameplay (forever), i am having a complex subjective experience that comes from countless interacting things, both internal and external.

i think that i am writing this thread because i have found that descriptions of aesthetics (in the MDA sense) is not very useful to me as a player, as a designer, as an appreciator, or as an artist.

this is not a new idea.

i believe the philosophical term that is most commonly used to refer to these things that are useless to describe is "qualia".

(end of examination of brlka's post.)

QuoteIn an angel dances in the sparks of a bonfire (aka angel game), a timer spawns two sparks, then resets to a random interval between one and zero. The result is uneven, unpredictable clumps of sparks - sometimes massive, dense waves, sometimes a sparse handful. This feels very different! It isn't fair, but it's fun.

the above contains a textbook-order example of the MDA framework.

MECHANICS : a timer spawns two sparks, then resets to a random interval between one and zero
DYNAMICS : The result is uneven, unpredictable clumps of sparks - sometimes massive, dense waves, sometimes a sparse handful.
AESTHETICS : This feels very different! It isn't fair, but it's fun.

mechanical descriptions interlaced with experiential descriptions:

Quotehazards that move around and threaten the player

- "hazards that move around" describe a thing that can be defined in code.
- "threaten the player" is a feeling ('threat') delivered to the player.

QuoteA player-aware hazard that chases the player is easy to avoid, while player-indifferent hazards can often be ignored if you're standing still; mix the two, and the chasing hazard will force the player to move and engage with the other hazards.

- "A player-aware hazard" and "player-indifferent hazards" are defined earlier in mechanical terms; their movement is or is not influenced by player position (even here, 'indifferent' as a word carries a whiff of intentionality or sentience)
- "easy to avoid" describes the (subjective) difficulty of a player action
- "force the player to move and engage with" describes the player's action as reactive, animated by the game -- player as object, rather than subject (the game forces the player to move, rather than the player moving)

QuoteAvoiders should demand the player's attention

^an even more explicit framing of the game animating the player.

Quoteshort, arcadey mini-games about avoiding obstacles in claustrophobic spaces.

brkla defines "avoiders" as having certain qualities:
- "short", describing a quality of the average player experience
- they are "about avoiding obstacles", describing the purpose of them in terms of the actions which the player undertakes
- "claustrophobic spaces", describing the spaces in terms of how they feel to the player (claustrophobic space can be used loosely as a synonym for tight space, but carries a psychological connotation)

i read brkla's "designing avoiders"

after spending a large amount of time with my own gameplay (forever), in a sibling sort of genre.

brlka's writing belongs to a very common canon of game design writing that focuses on something i will tentatively call 'player experience'.

excerpts from "designing avoiders" will follow, accompanied by commentary.

kill gameplay.

Quote from: droqen on July 30, 2026, 03:43:54 PM

• gameplay (forever) is badly designed
• gameplay (forever) is badly designed on purpose
• there [is] no rhyme or reason to what blocks appear where in gameplay (forever)
• gameplay (forever) generates impossible situations to climb through
• gameplay (forever) is one of a number of "lackluster parodies of better games"
• gameplay (forever) is asking why anyone would bother with it

i linked it somewhere already i think, but in case you missed it, here's my 8490-point high score run:


by doing this and enjoying it (and not in a pretentious way, as in, my enjoyment was not experienced due to any pretense, i just like it -- but the act of doing it could be said to have been done with pretense), i hoped to show:

1,2 - that gameplay (forever) is not badly designed (for some definition of badly designed -- in this case i suppose the entirety of my argument would be 'i enjoy it', but i hope also that the video can be used to understand the interesting situations that can occur)

3 - that by virtue of the interesting situations encountered there must be some rhyme or reason to the tile placement (even if it is random),

4 - that it does not (meaningfully, in practice) generate impossible situations,

5 - that it is not merely a lackluster parody,

and 6 - that even if i do utter the seemingly imperative "kill gameplay" and literally ask "who could want gameplay?" that this is a deeply contextual and ephemeral perspective, and that the answer to the imperative can (and sometimes must) be "no" and that the answer to the question can (and sometimes must) be "me".

why would i attempt to get high score of 10000 points in gameplay (forever), an act that is difficult and time-consuming? (my initial estimate was that this would be an hour-long run, but my best score so far -- 8490 -- took an hour and two minutes (ish), so a bit longer than an hour for the winning run.)

in retrospect, i certainly wanted to show the falsehood of some of dot's claims. i knew that i would enjoy it, for example, which might address the question of whether it is 'badly designed' or not. but i think it's this final unaddressed claim that the process has revealed to me: i knew that it was possible.

dot's claim (#4): gameplay (forever) generates impossible situations to climb through

because of the deeply random nature of the level generator, it is of course possible that gameplay (forever) will generate a situation that cannot be climbed through. but i wanted to show that there was no way dot could know that, and i wanted to understand the precise shape of this possibility, and rather than solve this from afar -- mathematically -- i already had within me the (positive) sense that 'gameplay is volunteer work', and the desire to play around with the bunny's controls, and to climb!

why not see how high i can climb?

then, once i had reached almost three thousand points, i thought:

why not get to ten?

dot's claim (#6): gameplay (forever) is asking why anyone would bother with it

strictly speaking, Dot's full quote here is:

QuoteThe End of Gameplay gives the audience lackluster parodies of better games and asks why anyone would bother with them.

at the time he says this, he is not showing gameplay (forever), but instead the last screen of open field (another level in the end of gameplay), which visually mirrors the beginning of Mario 1-1 but without enemies, without the ability to bump your head into blocks, in which going to the right gives you points and loops around to the left side again, in which the player is contained within physical boundaries that are not present in the original level, and a line of text that reads, "who could want gameplay?"

(as an aside, i think the claim that this level is a 'parody' of a game because it visually recreates mario 1-1 (and quite poorly) doesn't have any legs to stand on, it's... obviously a different thing and not asking "who could want to play mario 1-1?" while presenting the player with a completely different experience. anyway, that's not relevant.)

while open field is definitely asking this question explicitly, gameplay (forever) does not explicitly ask why anyone would bother with it. open field is clearly a different beast -- it asks the question at the conclusion of a series of levels that move from chaos toward design, and only asks the question when we've gone from the wilderness to a fully designed world, while gameplay (forever) starts and ends in pure chaos. as dot puts it, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to how its tiles are placed.

dot's claim (#5): gameplay (forever) is one of a number of "lackluster parodies of better games"

i mentioned Probability 0 above because i think gameplay (forever) is better than it in a number of meaningful ways. my very first prototype of Probability 0 was a minimal infinite platformer in a gameplay (forever)-esque way.

there is a purity to the basic foundational action of quickly enough descending down an infinite field of randomly placed blocks while avoiding fall damage that is lost along the way -- Probability has a skill tree, 20-ish types of enemies, boss fights, biomes, etc. does Tetris need a skill tree?

(would like to note that i collaborated on Probability 0 with an awesome musician (jazz mickle, queen jazz) who created this shifting dynamic soundscape that breathes wonderful life into the world of that game, there is an album on bandcamp and also a remix album and they all rock, and none of this talk of minimalism is at all touching upon the collaborative multimedia component)

when held against the core repetition (positive) of Probability 0, gameplay (forever) is a triumph, not a parody. it does what Probability 0 was too afraid to do.

(although when gameplay (forever) did it, it was in another kind of ironic context ("kill gameplay"), but taken on its own... well, i'll get to that.)

the literal space that one navigates in gameplay (forever) -- the material of the 'level' -- is randomly generated, with very minimal designer intervention.

an example of the 'designer intervention' i speak of can be seen in these four lines of code:

if rows > 10:
    if randf() < 0.02: randomtile = 35 # poison
if rows > 50:
    if randf() < 0.08: randomtile = 35 # poison

the 'poison' tiles (which have various 'negative' effects -- the player loses control briefly, the music glitches out, and the player's score number goes down) do not appear uniformly across the entire level, but do not appear in the first 10 rows, then only appear in 2% of tiles in rows 10-50, then in 8% of tiles in all rows 51 and onward. all these particular numbers have been designed, and it could be imagined that a 'more designed' version of gameplay (forever) would contain more such interventions.

as a design process, this relatively undesigned level is a test for the quality of the bunny controller: if gameplay (forever) contains all possible level spaces with no design whatsoever, and the bunny controller can be used to enjoyably navigate this undesigned space, then the bunny controller is well-designed.

in theory, if gameplay (forever) was not fun, this process would lead to changing the bunny, rather than changing the level: thus the level will remain permanently 'badly designed' by design.

on the other hand, it may make no sense to even speak of the design of gameplay (forever) without speaking of the design of the bunny controller.

dot does comment on the player controls -- mostly negatively or neutrally -- so in that sense it may make sense to extend his judgement to the bunny controller: claim #1 would follow in this case ("gameplay (forever) is badly designed [because i don't like the controls]"), but not claim #2 ("gameplay forever is badly designed on purpose [because i'm not supposed to like the controls]").

but this is getting too speculative and i still have three claims to talk about!

however, if gameplay (forever) is undesigned on purpose (see #3 above), then if what dot means by "badly designed" is "undesigned", then the following claims do follow:

dot's claim (#1): gameplay (forever) is badly designed
dot's claim (#2): gameplay (forever) is badly designed on purpose