i stopped being interested in gameplay because of its inability to communicate. lately i've wondered if i was really feeling this way? i'm not sure how to say that.

i became interested in art therapy because i thought my practice of game-making was like that, like self-art-therapy. my art therapist has a little table for doing art: paint, pencils, scissors and glue and magazines..

i finished Brick (2005) last night and it uas got me thinking a lot about story structure. well, i've also been reading and consuming a lot of mystery plots in the past months. they communicate ideas, they are a vessel for communication or conveyance. a number of those ideas have to be constructed in a certain way, to make the plot "go".

last night i wrote a poem straight into bluesky, something about 'thousand trees' and limbs and being an 'entire forest'.

i kept playing Angeline Era, and it continues to be clear to me that videogames are made, proportionally, of way  too many structural ideas, and those structural slots are too inexpressive for my liking, but things are beginning to click.

i hate that this is something i've had to discover, but better late than never.

writing poetry to convey certain ideas is an interesting short-form experiment in conveyance. the "king", the "tree", this idea of green arrows blossoming in pursuit of the star, i haven't captured it. the end of gameplay was an attempt to capture an idea. (an idea that was way too hot, but of similar inexplicableness and size: containing at least two completely exclusive interpretations.)

maybe these massive ideas, these elephant ideas which can only be understood in a small piece at a time, are not to be 'captured', and there is a better word for describing the process of striving over and over and failing.

but i like my artmaking coloured by a goal. how else do the arrow-missile-tree-branches know which way to go?

just to catch the facet of the moon we can see today, i guess.

droqen

happy birthday, droqen!

i went to starbucks today for my free drink (it's my birthday) and i was surprised to be met by such friendliness.

also i went to the bank to deposit seven dollars in small change and the person at the counter had a cool watch ring and cool nails--honestly i don't know how people deal with having nails but they were silver and black and one was like a little 3d silver sun with rays radiating on black... it was cool. anyway.

then i met someone who was selling an apple trackpad for cheap, we'd made a previous deal before and it went poorly because of some confusion, but we'd resolved it just fine. this time i think it went well, but i'll have to double-check and make sure it works.

anyway, i got this drink and chatted with the employees because i didn't know what to order and it was my birthday etc. and then my mom called me so i answered her, and altogether i just feel like i had this day of intrusive small nice social interactions. i had nothing planned for today.

yesterday i thought about creating small opportunities for people to do things that they want to do. agency. empowerment. not inside of a game-world, but real things for real people using real materials. time is a real material.

i just don't want to waste people's kindness for one another.

it remains saddening to me that game-making is so indirect. that i can't be like those starbucks employees as a game-maker, just being nice to people in the course of my work.

;from your king's eye issues forth a green chevron-tipped vector, an arrow, a direction. it points toward that beautiful star that only you can see.

The function of this meta-activity is to act as practice. You are droqen, and you need to hone the focusing lens that resides within your own brain. How can you do that? The focus ritual.

the path branches and branches, multiplying. in the real world these paths are not pruned, but go on and on into the darkness forever without limit. endless endless roads sprawl (through a yellow wood or a white void or a grey e

what is necessary is a pruning device.

such a device is, becomes, terribly bespoke and overfitted. but the key is to achieve an understanding of these devices: to learn the skills of pruning device deployment, and development.

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