2025, dec 21 - the goal of languages

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

p.s. i thought should i write another poem trying to get the same concept? not to get closer, just to show it another way. that felt powerful, seemed meaningful. i don't feel that about games but maybe someday i will. i like level design more than i like system design, but i think it's the plurality. i have a hard time believing in a system's ability to convey multiple perspectives. it's jammy. someone can have multiple perspectives of a system but that's on them, it's too second-degree for my liking or for me to be able to actually think about. (i want to make things, not make things that make things.)

ship in a bottle, no thanks

i will come back to this topic of poetry, of film via the mystery story genre, of games via angeline era.