you don't want to get to the end and perceive the boundaries of a work of art but you must. art is finite. insufficient. it is very important that art remains insufficient.

experienced in its entirety

the player must come to hold the entire state space in their head through accurate abstractions. this, as an end goal, is not well-defined, or if it is then it is impossible. that's alright. i have long since redefined my understanding of many end goals as their direction rather than a terminal point.

to say "a game that is experienced in its entirety without great cost to the player" and to define such as i have above is to describe a desirable process of developing better and better abstractions of a state space, in particular in a way that has the sensation of getting more and more complete. rather than the universe which expands and gets further and further away from us, these universes stay the same size, and shrink as we take these bites of knowledge from them. they get smaller and smaller like a cookie until even if a few crumbs remain we are not so wrong to summarize that experience as "i ate the cookie."

games are cookies

i'd like to make a game that is experienced in its entirety without great cost to the player, and that  which, when so experienced, provokes a large variety of different reactions

i am not sure yet the scope or limits of this desire - may these "reactions" be planned and designed? what constitutes "great cost"?

but, i do understand "experienced in its entirety". the systemic unfolding of my well known earlier game was a dream of the mysterious la-mulana that did not require exhaustive play to comprehend more or less fully.

i did not go far enough but there was something there.

the quantifiable goal means that i am approaching the ability to employ contemporary testing techniques on a work. i can measure its success on my terms. i can do science.

i'd like to do the things that scare me. i released the elegies quite late. i wonder if i still have anything to learn, or if the moment has passed. the idea that i will move on from the end of gameplay scares me now. a day will come that i look back on the bunny game with quiet pity.

when that day comes i will know i've moved on from something that was very important. something large that receded long into the distance.

obsessively creating and then releasing art. what could be better?

the end of gameplay is an incredibly precious thing. i cannot describe to you how precious it is. and yet, i have swaddled it in so many protective layers that it has remained precious and safe for the majority of the year. it came out on may 12th (on the night of the full moon, of course), and it is now december. it didn't even take me this long to make it.

i used to think that making games and releasing them and falling out of love with them was undesirable. i wonder now if it is the natural way of things. it is what happens. i have an overwhelming emotion--an obsession. i allow it to build up inside, in safety. then i expose it to oxygen and it withers away and suddenly it is as though i am a new person, who could never be so consumed by something so insignificant and foolish.

i think this is how i become a new person.

based on an excess of very weird feelings about games i felt the sudden urge to put my "elegies" online after four or so years of them sitting around on my computer. i thought i didn't want to release them out of a sort of kindness. that is, i felt that they were going to do something negative to someone. but, i think it was something else. i was still holding on.

so i posted them. this was an hour or so ago. the elegies, after four years, out. i felt a kind of lightness about the place where the elegies had come from. and i worried, maybe someone will say something stupid about them. they will make me feel like these three precious little 'games' are not important.

well, the truth is, they are not important. they were important to me, four years ago. and four years ago, rather than unburdening myself of these objects, i carried them with me. this was important: to hold on to them.

when i set the price for the end of gameplay to $20 USD i did so out of fear. this i am certain of.

death.

i have been thinking that i love my bunny game, The End of Gameplay, too much. it is too precious to me. because of its preciousness, i am unwilling to let it go. because i have not let it go, when i have new feelings -- they are tangled up in it.

in 2024 to early 2025 i was seeing an art therapist because i wanted to study psychotherapy, and in particular, art therapy, for reasons i won't get into here. and at the time, i was working on the end of gameplay, and i had decided i was going to release it into the world. she asked me a simple question, why?

i didn't have an answer then. my answer was awful, it was something like, "i showed it to as many people as i could bear which was two people, and then i felt like i could show it to a few more friends," and ultimately i said that it was just something that was going to happen. a natural consequence of things. now on the final day of the year (i mean, it's 4 AM on the final day of the year, so i have plenty of time before the year ends, but it sounds dramatic so bear with me, let's have some fun) -- as i was saying, before i so rudely interrupted, now on the final day of the year i think i understand why i had to release the end of gameplay.

and i also understood that i had failed.

i said 'however' without really explaining what i meant. let me update the pondering i'm doing:

games are not necessarily nonlinear, or, it's just not a very interesting constraint. sylvie writes, it makes sense to include linear ones, "must have at least one branch" is kind of an odd defining condition to me. like how deterministic finite automata are just a special case of nondeterministic finite automata. but tegiminis also writes what was on my mind: the more nonlinear the state machine, the more "game like" something feels

how to capture that in a definition? do definitions allow for that sort of thing? maybe i could say, 'set of states, especially nonlinear'? (not that i'm specifically still pursuing this, it's just an interesting line of thought--words just aren't clear binary things.)

i made another bleet and got some fresh n tasty thoughts that baked my noodle.  i think, however, i have attuned myself better to the  'imaginary state'-having  aspect of games.  what interests me particularly about this is that the idea of  'imaginary state'  implies a player, i.e. one-who-imagines.  the word imaginary could be replaced by, uh, 'non-real' state?  whether it exists in the mind of a human or a computer or no-one at all doesn't invalidate the theoretical concept of 'having state'.

actually i should probably change it to 'every game describes a nonlinear set of states'. i certainly don't want to say "contains" because a game may be made up of states which do not exactly belong 'within' the game. 'describes' is a nice, vague word.