when i think about works of art i often seek a name for the one who perceives, who regards, who is not one with the art and yet opens themselves up to it. for a time i would use the word "appreciator." now when i think about a poem or a story or a television show or a film i wonder if it would be so bad to call this person the "player." we have that delicious shorthand. the player, the player, the player. what do you call the one who looks at a painting? does it mean something that there is no word for this person? does a painter not have that haloine outline of an individual always hovering there, eyes on the canvas, looking over their shoulder, asking if they can remap the keys?

in "All Systems Brough - Introduction" the speakers were discussing Michael Brough's games; somewhere between 1:26:10 and 1:27:32, Frank Lantz said this about Brough's 868-HACK:

Quote from: LantzWhat if our relationship to software was crucial . . . and every input mattered and every choice and every decision. And it's almost exhausting. I think one of the reasons [Brough's] games are not super popular . . . has to do with . . . most people don't want that from games. What most people want from games is a kind of self-soothing--what I want from games is usually a kind of self-soothing, a kind of distraction, a kind of pleasant, rhythmic activity.

i've read Lantz's recent book, The Beauty of Games, as well as an interview, and some articles, and i think i understand what it is that interests him, and at the moment when i heard this i thought, ah, this man--if for the moment i allow myself to reduce an entire individual with a gregarious presence and myriad other insights and interests down to nothing but a singular iceberg-tip-like position--can only imagine one axis for games, either players are thinking about what they're doing a whole lot, or they're not thinking about what they're doing very much or at all, and everything lies in the middle.

and this echoes a lot of how i feel videogame literature speaks about videogames and games and so on. so prizing the decisions of players as though it rises above all else.

in that same episode Zach Gage says, somewhere between 1:24:30 and 1:25:35,

Quote from: GageThe fantasy that you have when you play a Michael Brough game is, "I'm smart, and I'm going to figure this game out."

there's all this videogamesphere language that i understand and i don't want to understand. i want to kill gameplay! i want to be free from this way of thinking about games--no, not games, about art, about any art at all--i want to cease thinking about the works that i and my peers produce through the lens of how much energy, how beautifully energy, is expended by players upon figuring it out, making decisions, mastering it.

it is surely a craft but it isn't what interests me and it's hard to share space with people whom i respect and have love for yet who still live and breathe this language. worse, i know that i am complicit. i think that all of these people who speak Game Design also speak other languages but because we have this one secret language, this one wonderful secret language, in common, it's all too easy to slip into it out of habit, and i can't say no.

earlier this year, on May 12, the day of the full moon, i released what i called "my masterpiece": The End of Gameplay. i can't, won't try to, capture everything about it here. it's a short game but it's deeply connected to many things.

the first negative review that was posted on Steam was deleted, probably in part because of the video i made breaking down (and, sort of attacking) the review's contents, the nature of the review, and so forth. but as a result of that video i actually had a really fruitful conversation with the reviewer, which was what i wanted. i wanted to have this conversation.

recently, another negative Steam review has been posted--and a comment on a youtube video by the same person--and a negative backloggd review, too, the most negative to date. looking backwards at it the purpose of making that first video, which is not to say that i'm proud of it (i have intentionally not even linked it), was to experimentally deal as completely as possible with the negative emotions that i had experienced and get through to the other side, to understand: what can i use a negative steam review for?

my conclusion is that i could use it to grow. an outside perspective by someone who has given themselves permission to be brutally honest: "i didn't like it, and here's my best attempt to describe what i didn't like." it shouldn't be as rare as it is to get that kind of honesty, but it is. (edit:: that's not to say every negative review has such honesty or specificity. sometimes a negative review is useless. luckily i have not received any yet. they've all been really interesting.)

i was listening to the first episode of The Secret Lives of Games' series, "All Systems Brough - Introduction," and in the middle of listening to this episode, i went to a workshop to learn how to make a paper flower. it was beautiful, i loved it, i took one photo, and then i lost it -- it flew away. i was really distraught by the loss of this paper flower, but i think i was also getting emotional about this look into the past, a much larger and more important thing that has been flying away from me lately: gameplay.