Anyone Could Have Made This

[droqen]

Something common between The Timeless Way of Building & The One-Straw Revolution is that they both exude the feeling that 'anyone can do this.' Of course, so do many self-help resources and scams -- they want to rope you in by making you believe that you too are capable of making $5000 a week from home.

But at the heart of TTWOB is this idea that architecture has made itself artificially inaccessible. The result is that people are alienated from their homes because they no longer feel that "I could have made this."

And TO-SR has a similar message: farmers are making what they do too complicated. This hurts the people alienated from the basically human act of farming, including (especially!) the farmers themselves.

[droqen]

I have been rereading 'Deadgames and Alivegames' because it uses a word, alive, in a way not totally incompatible with the way TTWOB uses it.

A game is "Dead" when it has no human designers. What I mean by this is that the game is, largely, 'designed' by non-human forces [...] In a Deadgame, the human game designer a proxy [...] whether they like it or not, their talents are being used towards particular ends.

In this post Melos Han-Tani makes specific claims about what those non-human ends are, but I believe they are too narrow. The Deadgame is one who is designed in a way which does not serve... and this is hard, it's not correctly worded, yet... its ability to inspire creative equals in other humans.

[droqen]

Zeigfreid said to me last night that pixel art is "democratic and bottomless."

I agreed, and said, so too are words.

These are artforms that can easily say, "anyone could have done this."

[droqen]

[...] an Alivegame is a game where all of its creators are truly creatively engaged in the project and contribute as equals. [...] An Alivegame is a game whose purpose is something to enrich the lives and humanity of those who play it.

I suppose I feel aligned but would like to take this a step further.

An Alivegame is a game whose purpose is to enrich the lives and humanity of those who play it BY making its players deeply inspired to become equals with its creators, but also in a context which empowers them to actually do so.

Life and humanity is enriched when we are all inspired and empowered.

[droqen]

Pixel art is not actually for everyone.
Bitsy games are pretty intimidating to me to make.
But they don't embitter those who are inspired by them to feel as though scale or money are what prevents them from even trying.