i am carried by the wind, i spread my wings and allow my sense of authorship to be taken by chaos. more and more, experimentation and the results of those experiments steal away my life, my very life. i don't want to spend those days in hollow realms that as readily die as they were born, and i reject as i can even those born without life, without aliveness, without smoothly unfolding from the pre-existing life that there is...

i wondered earlier tonight how can i make a work without carving!

the creation of an n-dimensional primitive, raw material, thrills. one gives birth to vibrant new life. what follows is carving, carefully examining this rough stone and wondering what secrets it holds.

without carving...

what follows is a process of whittling, carving, searching for the rich veins in this newly-generated space.

i find the maximalist, voluminous nature of procedural art to be intoxicating. a few lines of code, and the process unfolds almost without effort, on my part. i use this term, "procedural art," to describe a larger category than the one it usually applies to. in particular, procedural art certainly contains almost all videogames.

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.