make me compatible

derive from belonging
principles a track to follow,
rails to align my thought
and feeling, show me
the cozy organism iCould be,
if only.

touched and dragged under
your fingers

if i was a mouse,
and you were my hand,
slide my optical sensor
and double click me
to open a folder
i don't know
but never let me go.

p.s. for a further execution of this thought, please see 359P.

kill gameplay.

and if that part of me isn't feeling very itchy, there are a lot of games that are very irritating. so there it is: one of the facets of kill gameplay is that games very commonly serve to scratch that particular itch. in so doing, a huge number of games are also full of stuff that feels bad unless what you want is to settle into a groove -- to enjoy a drone of action and thought, whatever quality and nuance that droning may have.

there are a number of reasons that this may be the case, and i'm also curious if, now that i've identified it, i can make peace with it.

love, droqen

i haven't talked that much about Peter McDonald's oblique repetition after all. i meant to, but its relationship to this (dead simple) idea is kind of complicated. i owe a lot to McDonald's style of approaching ideas; rather than describing what oblique repetition is doing either positively or negatively, he simply makes observations about it. i find it difficult to write and certainly think in this way, but it is a useful foil to set certain preconceptions aside in order to just describe something.

i have many opinions about whether this is 'good' or 'bad'. i am setting them aside because i want to understand games and gameplay.

what i think i see in michael's roguelikes is the facilitation of this form of 'play' that might be called 'work.'. (it doesn't matter one way or the other; we can call it anything.) it is ironic and strange to arrive at this thought, because michael's games are incredibly deep, full of strange twists and turns, oddball mechanics that couldn't possibly play well together, and suddenly -- ah! they do!

but this isn't unique to michael's roguelikes! it's deeply true also of his games that don't facilitate repetitive and infinite play. what i suggest is unique to michael's roguelikes, as compared to his 'abstract art games', is their ability to satisfy the desire to do something comfortably knowable forever.

when i played gameplay (forever) for hours, it was an experience of giving myself over to this desire.

i do love climbing the damn tower with the bunny.

i know the ins and outs of that system, and i love knowing them.

i love that i made a tiny game in a small amount of time that contains so many variations and can be played forever.

i love many things about the pixel art, i love the way the sound works, i love it all.

but setting aside that love, in addition to that love, it was still an exercise in scratching that itch:
the singular desire to repeat the same thing over,
and over,
and over,
and over,
and over,
and over,

first i want to make it absolutely clear that i don't suggest that this is the only motivation that underlies all games or all play, and also that no negative connotation is intended; it is a neutral description of a psychological dynamic humans may experience during playtime to which we may assign any meaning, or no meaning at all, freely.

the idea is very simply that people really enjoy predictable patterns.

this is a very stupid and simple idea and i am certain that it has occurred to the vast majority of people, including whoever you are, reading this right now. it's pleasurable and easy to do the same thing over and over again. perhaps there are motivations for breaking free of loops, but in order for those motivations to have any purpose -- that is, why would our psychic kingdoms give birth to pattern breakers? -- there must also exist the motivation to continue patterns forever with no end.

when Golumbia seeks to explain the "utility" which is lost by a game's completion, he misses the obvious and straightforward possibility of a desire to simply experience the same thing forever, and leaps to these higher-order complex functions.

what of Meier's "series of interesting decisions"? why these techniques? loosely and without an excessive amount of thought, i propose that we can look at them as techniques for satisfying the parts that generally get in the way of the straightforward desire to do the same thing forever.

consider Sid Meier's famous description of games as "a series of interesting decisions" (GDC, 1989 - supposedly, though i wish i had a direct citation from even close to that date) against David Golumbia's observation that "we have simply and in some cases uncritically accepted . . . that what we do when we use [video and computer games] is to play" and "many of the programs we call video games today much more nearly resemble something like work." (Games Without Play, 2008)

what makes Meier's "series of interesting decisions" tick is not at all incompatible with Golumbia's idea of computer game 'play' as something other than play or playful; in his GDC 2012 talk "Interesting Decisions" he describes ways of making the player interested, meeting their expectations, making them comfortable, and encouraging them to continue 'playing', but Meier describes all these instrumental strategies for serving the goal of continuing 'play' without any discussion of the purpose of that goal's pursuit.
(note to self and future readers :: let me know if you find anything to the contrary -- i haven't thoroughly examined the entirety of Interesting Decisions, and would even be very interested to hear anything Meier has said about this outside of that context)

in Games Without Play, Golumbia claims...

Quote. . . there is no real "winning" a game like Halo or Half-Life, indeed, to "win" the game in the sense of finishing the entire set of prescribed scripts is, paradoxically, to lose, since for many players it strips the game of future utility.

... so, what i have been looking for is the underlying "utility" as Golumbia calls it. he does proceed to propose some specific things that computer game 'play' embodies or operates as, but i find them all too narrow, and too laden with baggage:
1. "a means of enacting a Nietzschean lust for power"
2. "a desire to constrain play"
3. "training"

i believe that McDonald's oblique repetition comes closest to a concept i can actually get behind, and i hope to be able to describe how in the following posts.

k, so what?

last month i made a way to dance all alone for jack's avoidance jam, and prior that played gameplay (forever) (one specific level in the end of gameplay) for something like ten hours trying to get a high score. i wrote about that a bit here and posted a video of my highest-scoring run, just over an hour of non-stop platforming, here.

i'll kill (the word) "gameplay", and instead i'll use McDonald's "oblique repetition" to highlight one specific dynamic of play at play -- from the avoiders submitted to the jam (for example, Jack Turps' Heaven Rains, on whose leaderboard i'm in 6th place with 249 points... for now...) to michael's roguelikes -- which is being invited by gameplay (forever) and which i explore in my long high score attempt.

specifically, michael identifies a few things about his experience developing "roguelikes" as opposed to "abstract art games":

abstract art games : a "shallower" "pond"; "I felt like I was onto something interesting - but I didn't keep finding more to make there that I hadn't already covered"

roguelikes : a "deeper" "pond", these "kept revealing more and more"

i've above professed my personal interest in the former category, rather than the latter; from my perspective, michael's "I felt like I was onto something interesting - but I didn't keep finding more" reads as admission of accepting a lossy defeat, abandoning "interesting" directions in favour of "more." i don't begrudge michael for choosing any particular direction, and if pressed perhaps he would say that neither direction was specifically more 'interesting' than the other, or maybe even that the roguelike direction was the more 'interesting' one.

michael makes some statements about "gameplay" (ostensibly in response to my 'kill gameplay' position) that i don't think can be really defended. the word itself may be accursed nonsense, of course, but:

QuoteTry to take out all the "gameplay" to just have it somehow be pure art, and you've just dug down to whatever your default assumptions of gameplay are. Platformer jumping or first person 3d wandering isn't any less "game mechanics" than grid puzzling or tech trees, it's just that person's comfortable default.

without any qualifying factor, there's nothing that isn't gameplay. if it's a category which has no boundaries, then each statement regarding gameplay is meaningless. one cannot sensibly proclaim that every form of interaction is gameplay and also respond in any meaningful way to kill gameplay.

QuoteCreative expression needs a frame to support it. Droqen [is] still making platformers. [..] These gameplay models provide the structure for the art to happen in. [..] more structure gives more space for expression. Gameplay and "art" aren't in conflict: with more of both they can each support the other.

i could interpret michael's "gameplay" to be essentially synonymous with all the tangible material of all artforms. but if that is the interpretation of gameplay, then this detailed rejection of my so-called death of gameplay is strictly unnecessary; it is wholly subsidiary to a generic rejection of the idea that art can be made without any material whatsoever "to just have it somehow be pure art," and "kill gameplay" must be understood as simultaneously killing inks and paint, canvas, the written word, paper, plastic, steel, clay, papyrus, all forms of fiber, and so on.

i don't think anyone actually thinks this is what i mean, but the apparent contradiction that the end of gameplay "has gameplay" continues to be pointed out.

it's not a contradiction! "gameplay" in "kill gameplay" plainly does not refer to "all forms of material interaction in any game." it never could have, and it never did. i am certain the work contains some number of very serious contradictions, but this is not one of them.

i found myself reading a blog post of michael's for a class i'm attending because i read a quote from it that felt really relevant to me:

QuoteLooking back, I could say that I was trying to fish in two ponds, and one turned out to be much shallower and one much deeper than I was expecting. Having made several abstract art games, I felt like I was onto something interesting - but I didn't keep finding more to make there that I hadn't already covered. Meanwhile the roguelikes kept revealing more and more.

looking back at michael's oeuvre, i've tried to put my finger on exactly what it is that endears me to specifically some of his works (especially corrypt, the sense of connectedness, and specifically the basic language-learning phase of cinco paus -- the absolute least roguelike part of it) over others, and i'm so intrigued here by his direct addressing of the point -- in describing his pursuit of "roguelikes" over "abstract art games," he highlights a dichotomy that helps me to clearly delineate where i've found my preference to be exactly the opposite to what he has lately pursued more of, lately.

at the time, i thought i was reading a quote from a strangely prescient thought from the past -- michael has so many of those -- but then he mentioned me and links to the end of gameplay and i was like, oh! this is a contemporary, post-kill gameplay take! what a pleasant surprise that michael has not ahead-of-the-curve'd me on this one:

QuoteCreative expression needs a frame to support it. Droqen can declare "death of gameplay" but he's still making platformers. Tale of Tales were doing the same ten years earlier. Try to take out all the "gameplay" to just have it somehow be pure art, and you've just dug down to whatever your default assumptions of gameplay are. Platformer jumping or first person 3d wandering isn't any less "game mechanics" than grid puzzling or tech trees, it's just that person's comfortable default. Which is fine! These gameplay models provide the structure for the art to happen in. It's just very not dead. And what I've found for my own work is that more structure gives more space for expression. Gameplay and "art" aren't in conflict: with more of both they can each support the other. If - as always - it's done with taste and sensitivity. Feels like a good direction for me. Other people have to find their own directions sorry.

so, i wanted to think a little bit about my response to what michael has to say about these ponds, and about gameplay, and about some recent thoughts flowering from the fourth type of playfulness tracked in Peter McDonald's The Impossible Reversal, "oblique repetition."

the earth
invisible pathways and demons
circle, you're good with your hands

right,
click and open the frog
forever its organs
adjacent the funk of formaldehyde
living for a few decades longer
in the dying library

in the palace