those ghosts can remain in the mind, where the mental structures are hazy enough to support ideas that may or may not be true, they can live internal and fuel me.

on the outside i will inscribe memories and realizations. wondrous lenses. things that i can look back on and reconnect with, glowing. the sky is always very beautiful to me.

i wonder if i would be better off not trying so hard to master and practice something like being critical, even knowing it is possible or even useful to do so. do i need to be able to rationally present a justification for changing something? does that even make sense?

rather than becoming a useful serious critic, an analyst the likes of which i see and admire in other people, i could perceive this form of critical expression as beyond me. not my thing.

in so doing i can understand also what other people do, others' criticism, as not the same in kind as the criticism of those i know and love for their ability to form the cutting and insightful arguments, or even simple neutral observations which to me appear, incorrectly, laced with connotation.

this is large part of what makes me a poor critic: i cannot escape reading into things what is not there. to criticize, in the way that i admire, i must see things neutrally, as they are.

i see too many ghosts haunting that flicker in and out of existence.

i appreciate a good critical eye and if i open those floodgates in my mind i can criticize very harshly! recall this ugly heap of me criticizing wombat's gutwhale.

i have criticized many things but i'm not sure analytic criticism is a particularly useful or expressive medium for me. i look even at Steam reviews as an art form.

i know plenty of people who are good at criticism and i admire them, their ability to share relevant critical details. such admiration has always tempted me to share, too, my own criticisms of things. look at my past year of public-facing communications! all criticism and breakdown.

love, droqen.

i still remember that one of the first questions i got on blue sky in response to "kill gameplay" was someone asking the question, does that mean you want to kill games? and at the time my answer was, no, but is that is the natural consequence, then so be it.

can games survive without gameplay?

at times i wonder this, but it's time for my new year's resolution.

there are many reasons to create things, and i've come to recognize that i love the world, i love making things, i love thinking deeply about deeply interesting things. for nearly my entire life i have called myself a game maker, i have made games, i have met hundreds of really genuinely fascinating, loving people through this practice. for a few years now i have continued to describe myself as a game maker, a game designer, and whatnot. sometimes a "lost" game designer. but never, quite, an "ex-" game maker.

my new year's resolution for 2026. i'm going to shed the label, for whatever that's worth. i became an indie game developer, only to have that lose all meaning to me--a quietly painful and confusing experience. then i was just, i don't know, a game maker. a person who made games. a person who thought about games and cared about them. a player, and a maker.

i'm done. i don't have a fun new word for the things that i do. i write and read poetry, i do pixel art, i do other things, i'll keep doing everything i want to do. i'll even make platformer character controllers, when the mood strikes. i'll even put all these things together into one object. it won't,, i hope, hurt if i make something that other people want to call a game. i don't care what it's called, really.

rather than being concerned with whether i am making games or art or not-games or not-art i will make things and forget about all allegiance i might have once had to this world of games that i once loved.

it isn't interesting unless there's something for me to choose, to decide, to figure out, to learn how to do. there is a blocker here inside the medium i loved, everything seen through one lens, that of (as Lantz puts it) "thinking and doing". the game cannot only show that something can be done, it must produce also the environment in which it may be practiced to the point of losing sight that it ever had a real function--it must teach a skill and at the same time capture it so completely.

the skills taught by successful videogames have been pruned over decades of design to be so beautifully capturable that they can never escape the prison into which they are born.

neither can i. that's the whole point.

i don't see a direction for games. at some point, i did. i've never been happier with anything i've made, ever. i quipped a few weeks ago, it's always sort of haunted me that Starseed Pilgrim is the game i've made that other people like the most--i've been trying to unseat it and failing. finally accepting that, i made The End of Gameplay, which will probably end up being the game of mine that i like the most. it's a scary thought.

the game is called the end of gameplay. what did you expect? hell, what did i expect? what i'm amused by most of all is how, i think, insightful the review is, and simultaneously incapable of escaping from exactly the conceptual prison whose escaping is this game. perhaps this is the "vulnerability" that they perceive which is not "interesting", because i failed to convey to them the means of my escape, or the justification, only a set of emotions associated with doing it.

but what a perfect encapsulation of the mindset that i associate with games, and with escaping along with escaping gameplay.