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.

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 ;)