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.

some other thoughts to cover that i forgot to write down

i wanted a definition that is not so player-centric. in a sense this is my first crack at a '''heliocentric''' model of what games are, because so many of them are about the player's action and not about the artistic object. while i think what a player does is very important, as what a person does when reading a book or viewing a painting or watching a film is very important, games culture is unique in the boneheadedness of every definition revolving primarily around the player experience (the player does x, the player feels x, the player thinks x, etc).

extremely common elements:
- a player is actively involved in navigating the nonlinear set of states
- states vary in accessibility (i.e. some states are immediately accessible and other states are less accessible)

i would like to say that the above elements are authored and are sites for meaning, design, etc., but i don't think it's always true, and i don't think it's meaningful, either. that is more the realm of what makes a 'good' game or a 'bad' game. a painting doesn't straightforwardly cease to be a painting if the artist has failed to consider the effect of blobs of paint on canvas. but, there must be some aspect of craft. a painting also isn't a painting if paint is accidentally spilt on a canvas? hmm this is "definition of art" type stuff that i don't want to fuck around with.

the definition is also very intentionally exclusive of what i called "outputs, experiential parts". considering the broad potential space for emotional expression, it seems at best useless and at worst harmfully limiting to try and box in what games are 'for'. to specify that choices must be 'interesting', that action must be 'endogenous', that rewards must be of a certain type, even that participation must be 'voluntary', these are all doomed to slip straight into a great ocean of exceptions. it seems the obvious path is to, then, exclude such things from our definitions and leave that up to taste manifestos which have their own specific non-definitional value!

can i make it pithier?

there is a superset above games, which contains the set of all games. this category is defined as "a nonlinear set of states." this definition is intentionally vague about all of these things that most game definitions tend to include:

- how is the nonlinear structure organized and navigated?
- how is the player limited from moving through the nonlinear structure?
- what is the intended function, outcome, or purpose, of the artifact?
- what does the player do?
- is there even a player?

of course, it is not a complete definition. it includes a very great number of obviously non-game things. for example, we might describe life as being 'a nonlinear set of states' depending on our perspective on free will and the passage of time (although in that case a game would also not be nonlinear... okay, this is not relevant)

well, a good programmer-designer, anyway ;)

i want to get back to games. so, all these different definitions of games -- actually, let's look at "a game is when pixels dance to your baton" and "a game is a type of soft where you move around a critter or creature" -- these are descriptions of the kind of agency-centric illusion produced by games, as though what the player is doing is waving a baton to make pixels dance, or moving a critter or creature. while this is of course one way to look at it, another way to look at it is that the pixels or critter or creature in question has a finite number of states, predetermined by the nature of the program, and this is the agency-metaphor which has been authored and provided to you for navigating the state-space.

other definitions describe choices, chores, rules, agents competing, goals, conflicts obstacles, attempting to overcome obstacles, we can add in attempting to achieve goals and win conflicts. it is true that many games have these. my question is why? if i look at the base material that i've defined, some force has drawn countless artists and players to participate in the creation of these dramas via mechanisms of limiting players' abilities to navigate nonlinear state-spaces. nonlinear state-spaces are inherently very complex to navigate. linearity is easy to navigate, while nonlinear state-space--which may have countless dimensions--gets incredibly complicated very quickly.

computers make it very easy to create a very large and uninteresting state-space (for example, by putting a player on an empty 100x100 grid and allowing them to move around to any space on the grid, you have already created a huge state-space of 10,000 positions, and these states are not very interesting because they are so similar), so the work of a programmer-designer involves limiting the state-space to maximize the average interestingness of all states.