i have been engaged in a few conversations with Diego Cath and while i don't think our interests are aligned, in breaking down Cath's two medium posts i am beginning to understand something that is inaccessible to me: why others do things. and maybe why i do things. but before i get to that... the posts.

how does the simple introduction of 'interactivity' or play derail the basic idea of existing in a world where things of importance occur? every videogame is trapped within that 'magic circle'. i keep returning to this 'navigable structure'... when the experience is nonlinear, and its shape changes in response to player action, then the experience is less "designed", less authored. this introduces a lower skill ceiling to the artist's capacity to affect the experience. for some this is not antithetical to a role that games play in their lives.

they are of course wrong but also legitimate

a navigable structure. how to construct a work such that it can contain all of

• free navigation (like a painting, book, or gallery)
• a sensation of events having weight, and
• the player's personal involvement?

if choices are positioned in space and the player can step away from a choice to make it later. there are some choices that don't work that way. but i don't (personally) feel the need for narrative or plot-based pressure in the thematic structures i want to weave. that's a device that i can take or leave.

when i open up a book to read it -- on my phone or in my hands -- there is often the choice to linger, or go backwards. taking a step forward is an action, and it feels purposeful. am i in the right mindset to proceed? i like the feeling of a book's volume, its bulk in my hands, past and present and future.

it takes some doing to recognize that truth of reading a book. it did for me, anyway--so used to travelling one from beginning to end in an uninterrupted stream.

oh no

i do not like the word 'conclusion', i don't have a better way to describe it, though. it isn't the moment of conclusion which matters specifically, but rather the quality of a work's coverage over some domain. 'replayability', as in, unboundedness regarding the nature of experiencing the work (in games 'replayability' as a positive: positive unboundedness), has some negative impact on the quality of such coverage.

whether the coverage is desirable or undesirable will not be addressed here.

it's really frightening, closing a window for good! i speak of endings.

specifically it would be the thing to say that "endings are hard", as in, hard to write, hard to design, whatever it is. but an ending is really just closing a window. most of the time, you must have an ending. i enjoy a narratively open-ended conclusion like three billboards outside ebbing, missouri or the claymore anime: but these still have endings. structurally, the work is over.

my experience with many games is that they do not present endings, or they do not do so with confidence? or maybe i haven't historically paid them enough serious attention? when i played fallout 3 i thought i would come back to it, but i tried and it did not happen. what i mean to indicate is nothing about fallout 3, but it is more about the experience of holding in one's mind the potential for replay, or replayability.

i can summarize this into some sort of concrete claim.

the concept of 'replayability' acts in opposition to the sensation of 'conclusion', both to the player and to the artist. as a result... it undermines both the supply and the demand of well-made conclusions.

replayability is quite a vague concept, but i would like to allow it to remain vague and broad, for now.

the window closed.

i'm writing this because these tiny windows are at once giving me a sense of dissatisfaction. i'm not a completionist but i am a perfectionist. i know very intimately a completionist so i have seen what that is like, and i think i've started to see the echoes of each in the other one. i closed the back cover on magic for liars, catching a glimpse, just a glimpse, of the author's life, a photograph, inside thank-yous meant for other people and not for me, inaccessible. "hologram love behind glass."

there are works that do not feel this way. maximalist works that paint vast, ugly worlds, in so much detail that by the time i am done with them i am done with them, exhausted. oversaturated. jason shiga's demon was this way for me. i am already over-oversaturated with one piece and it is not even complete. one of my favourite games, FJORDS, was so voluminous. i can scarcely imagine returning to its vast body as i did the first time. when i have tried, there are too many little levels, too many permutations. it's noisier than i remember and not in a way that enriches my memories.

there are the rare strange perfect works that deliver a perfectly sized thing.
corrypt.

i wonder, does this really matter? surely this is just serendipity, that leaves me without wanting more. i don't know.

i just finished reading magic for liars. this is the day after i played spikes & kitten, the evening after i listened to the 'secret lives of games' episode on the annual ghost town pumpkin festival. magic for liars is a novel that tells a story. it paints a world, a vast world, through a too-tiny window, through the perspective of a person. but the person themselves is also not whole: ivy gamble's life is painted through a yet-tinier window of plot.

does that make sense? there's something that feels, not incomplete, but also not whole, about magic for liars. spikes & kitten feels not-whole because i know i haven't completed it--it's too hard, i see how it's theoretically possible but i don't want to spend the time, the effort, to see into those last few corners. i can imagine what's in them. white paint. then there are the corners literally unseen but which i've felt, physically, enough to know their contours.

the annual ghost town pumpkin festival is out of reach. a digital festival, an event planned and held and gone. i heard a description of it, a hazy memory.

tiny windows.