and i started thinking about it and wondering, is the difficulty the issue or are the levels just not that interesting? i mean, it is both, but...

what do i even want out of baba is you?
or what does hempuli want out of it, why is it so good at delivering that, and why don't i care about it??
what's wrong with me, why are we different people, precisely?

i wanted to write about baba is you because i've had this image of it as a game where some of the levels are easy and show me something fundamental and interesting - and some of the levels are hard and show me something kind of rote and boring and puzzle-solvey.

it started today in particular with reading this wombat bleet, "the need for larger quantitaties of mechanical effort to extract meaning from a video game is not related to the caloric density of that meaning"

[AB]

anyway,

oops, let's start (appropriately?) with meta:

i think it's interesting... i just noticed that in my 'On art' section i have Close Reading, and Reviews & reflections, as separate sections but they are perhaps identical - they are the very same thing, but with different levels of openness and engagement.

and different expectations! a 'close reading' as i suppose i imagine it (i don't really have experience with doing 'close readings' of anything, i just used the phrase) is looking closely at the thing and working at every detail to discover, what was meant, or what can i uncover for myself?

on the other hand a 'reflection' or certainly a 'review' of a work involves more judgement, what do i think, and is it any good?

and you can see, or i can see, that most of the r&r threads are about games, while most of the CR threads are about things that aren't.

,
i wanted then to feel cut by
a sharp blade separating
cells next to cells keeping blood
in my body

of no use to anyone but myself
my blood vessel for
[..]
,

.
knife for its scalpel
a weapon for a tool
gameplay's hand
 on gameplay's knife.

let it go i besought
put it down
.

PIPPIN: ". . to that other question. What are the other tricks games have:
- You're the bad guy
- You had no free will all along
But I don't think narrative twists that recontextualize what you've been doing in the game are the only resource games have, although that's powerful . . to share a different light on the repetitive action that games end up demanding"

GAMEPLAY KILL GAMEPLAY KILL GAMEPLAY

". . . another axis . . . feeling that you can do more than you thought you could? Or less than you thought you could or should be able to. Playing with those qualities of agency, and expectation."

"Games can change the level of agency and the type of agency that you have over time. . . . that has nothing much to do with THAT NIGHT, STEEPED BY BLOOD RIVER"

-> Pippin defends rearrangement.

PIPPIN: I think it is a place and we're happy with that . . . the tension that we have as game-players, inevitably grabbing onto game things [ooo title drop] . . . the vibes are strong at the visual level and the musical level, but the world is pretty empty . . . if you present spaces to the player, inevitably the player is trying to get out of the place that they're in. . . . "it's all about not being where you are."

I think I play with this quite a lot actually in TEOG... interesting

PIPPIN: ". . it's creating tension. And the tension is not resolved. Bye!"

What can games do? David has a list of one:
"You're the bad guy." - games (David)
". . . games are just rearranging familiar pieces . . . *laughing* I sound like I'm such a hardass, but rearranging isn't innovation" "things we didn't even know could exist"
David - frustrated - sees what the game wants to be or do, but keeps bumping on what it actually is.

mm. He's talking about wanting innovation but then talking, too, about something else?
'what it actually is'
oh, wait, here we go

"If [..] blood river wants to be a place, why do we feel the need still to evaluate it as a game? I don't think the problem is games . . [but] the way we're trying to talk about them. In other words, I was the bad guy. Whoops"

LOL he comes full circle here

Intro - TN,SbBR - Made by Taylor Swietanski, who thereafter retired from games (not financially or creatively worth it)

David - There's nothing experimental about collecting pac-man pellets
Pippin - Is the sign-in an opportunity? How much space do we need to make for the game, to play along with it
Pippin talks about the strangeness of the place, its details. "I like strange places. They're very nuovo."
David - "I'm just trying to figure it out, is all. . . . maybe it's time to . . . consult other heavenly bodies?" ". . . the way that the spaces echo . . . the zig-zag of the opening hallways . . . the roads seem to echo the same sequence of turns . . . this makes me reflect on dreams . . . it's the stuff that's happening to me that sticks with me more."

David's Bernie Sanders dream
"Is this game dream-like because of what happens or because of what you remember? When you're playing do you think about your actions . . . or more the sensations and the images which include watching the sun die."
". . . if the mechanics come last and the emotions come first then should the mechanics matter at all? because I feel like they drag you back into this place where you're playing it as a game, rather than experiencing it, um, as a dream."
"The game really wants to be ambient . . . you wind up having to run through everything you did before . . . it forces this repetition and progression in a really rigid way but I really just want to look at stuff, and vibe. . . . like right now the game has me stuck in a field with a giant green ampitheatre and I can't figure out what to do next. . . . But right now i just want to look at this wall that looks like a TV dying."

kill gameplay