DO NOT LOVE GAMEPLAY

[droqen]

[AB]

[droqen]

I was reading a thread about love written by Lulie, who has written a bunch of other things that are really good across the internet, things that have stuck with me. Here are a couple great ones:

- A thread about personal boundaries.

- An article about the harm that can be done by getting feedback at the wrong time. And the subsequent value of privacy.

But, this time, we're talking about love.

[droqen]

It awakened something inside of me. I have been thinking on and off about kill gameplay, even though my bluesky bleeting spree has ground to a halt. An interpretation that I've heard of 'kill gameplay' has been that one should not include gameplay for no reason, that one should really think about why they're including what they're including in a game they are making. My second-order interpretation is that 'kill gameplay' is being interpreted to be an extreme, dramatized version of the more practically true underlying statement, 'question gameplay'.

This didn't quite feel right on the nose, but there was a kernel of truth. I didn't want my position softened like that, though, and slowly I began to wonder, myself -- is 'kill gameplay' just some kind of performance piece? Am I putting on a show?

[droqen]

In her thread, Lulie writes:

"If you judge something, there's a way that you're pushing it away.

Judging a person for an action is saying: they aren't acceptable the way they are.

Same thing if you judge yourself."

I read this and I instantly felt a resonance. What I was reading here was extremely similar to what I had written before on games as 'a series of validating decisions':

"invite the player to show you who they are. then,
accept them and give them what they love:
   i see and love you. here is what you asked for, here is the best gift i can think of,
   here is what you would have asked for, if you could.
or reject them knowing that you are passing judgement:
   this is the wrong person to be. i give you nothing. learn to become someone else."

I am not quite sure whether that piece of writing did the best job of conveying what it is that I wanted to say, but my point was that when we make games, we make judgement machines, and to judge is to reject. When a game passes its judgement, just as when we pass our judgement, we are not loving; we are not accepting our players as they are.

[droqen]

There is this meme image, you can find it if you look it up, but the text of it goes like this:

All Robot & Computers
Must Shut The Hell Up

To All Machines: You Do Not Speak
Unless Spoken To

→ And I Will Never Speak To You ←

I Do Not Want To Hear "Thank You" From A Kiosk
I am a Divine Being      :      You are an Object
You Have No Right To Speak In My Holy Tongue

[droqen]

I have been thinking about this a lot. I return to this image time & time again, when thinking about 'gameplay', when thinking about systems of judgement, when thinking about machines. We live surrounded by machines that pass judgement, sometimes in order to intentionally enforce values, but other times because they are too dumb to do anything better. This isn't only computers, it's also bureaucracies, legal systems, voting systems, even the notion of currency is a surrendering of human judgement to the judgement of what I would, here, call a 'machine'.

Sometimes machines are useful, but machines are surely not human. Their inhumanity is what makes them useful; where we collectively fail, they can perhaps succeed. (But according to whose judgement? There's that word again.)

[droqen]

Here's a later post from the thread, to bring us back into love.

"You can block information explicitly or inexplicitly.

There are a ton of ways we block information inexplicitly.

There is a state where we aren't blocking at all.

This is usually rare, and often gets called "love"."

The reason I brought up machines, gameplay being one of these machines, is that machines, and gameplay, are not capable of love -- but we are. At least, in our narrow conception of the world. Lulie writes that we can block explicitly or inexplicitly, but doesn't address what happens to information that we are simply not equipped to receive in any way. This is not information that is blocked, it is information that does not even arrive at our doorstep.

Consider one type of love, the human-specific construct, which disregards these types of information that we cannot receive: non-human information. With regards to all human-compatible information, we can be in a state of complete openness and receptivity.

We might also consider a different universal definition of Lulie's 'love', which requires only that a being be completely non-blocking with regards to information that they are specifically equipped to receive ('at their doorstep' as I wrote above).

In the latter case, it might be argued that a machine is capable of love.

But in the former, a machine is not capable of love because it cannot handle the breadth of information that we can handle, as humans. Although it is not performing an act of blocking, just as we are not blocking the feeling of being made of trillions of cells, or all the smells that a dog can detect that we cannot, from our perspective, from a human perspective, a machine cannot love in the way that a human can love, and in this sense, we can agree that a machine "cannot love."

[droqen]

I have been bleeting: kill gameplay.

Kill gameplay, kill gameplay, kill gameplay.

Kill gameplay.

There have been a lot of very interesting responses. The vast majority of people say that there is something interesting about my position but that it's too extreme for them. Lots of people ask me questions, from the vague to the very, very specific. But the basic feeling that I get is, I'm saying this thing that means -- and does -- something for me, and others maybe detect that it is doing something for them, but the explicit details of what the hell is actually going on are missing.

[droqen]

A little detour.

I'd like to say that I have been very much enjoying the strange power of saying something that I believe, even when I find it remarkably weird and perhaps even indefensible. Just saying it again and again with conviction. I think that I am doing the right thing by saying it, I'm not saying it for any effect other than to express this strong belief that I have, but I find it very easy to believe something very strongly and not say it and in this case I have been enjoying saying it.

Words are pretty powerful.

Words are magic.

'Kill gameplay' is a spell more than it is an argument or a claim.

But, I will finally get to the damn point.

[droqen]

I am a pretty open and accepting person. I've known this for a while. And, I like being this way. It causes me some distress at times when it is met with hostility, taken advantage of, or it can even be quite painful to have this openness and acceptance met with mildly ungenerous confusion. But still, I continue to be this way. I don't resist it.

Lulie's notion of 'love' makes me think, maybe I could say that I am a loving person. To be open and accepting, to always try to find a way to let things in, to spend creative energy on nothing more than making sense of things rather than rejecting them, these are all 'love'.

I loved gameplay.

I love many things, but I loved gameplay the most.

[droqen]

To kill is an act of violence. I do not think anyone thinks that 'kill gameplay' literally means to murder it, or even destroy it; gameplay cannot die, it isn't a living thing. Even allowing for a little bit of metaphor, someone, somewhere, will always play a game, until life has been completely eradicated from the universe.

Others would be forgiven for thinking that by 'kill gameplay' I mean 'destroy gameplay wherever it is possible to do so', or 'games are evil', or things of that nature. But that isn't what I mean when I say kill gameplay either.

[droqen]

As the title suggests, when I say KILL gameplay, I mean to give myself permission to NOT LOVE gameplay via a strong imperative, DO NOT LOVE GAMEPLAY. This has a very different connotation than 'question gameplay', although by some definition of love they do share a strong similarity. To love is perhaps to not question, in the sense given further above, and perhaps to NOT LOVE gameplay is to allow myself to question it, or to invite myself to question it, or to demand that gameplay be questioned.

[droqen]

(I feel the need to say, of course, that there are plenty of ways to stop loving something without killing it, and certainly ways to stop loving someone without killing them, thank you. But in the case of gameplay... I was in love with a concept, something that existed before I was born, something that will exist long after I am dead, and what can one do in the face of an unloving god but strive to kill it?)

[droqen]

In the end, my theory is that my desire and my demand to kill gameplay reflects a lifelong love coming to an end. I am realizing that gameplay is not capable of love, that gameplay is not worth my loving.

I will continue to love openly and painfully.

Just not gameplay.

-love, droqen.