The End of Gameplay - platformer poem anthology.

[droqen]

[AB]

[droqen]

screenshots from The End of Gameplay, Dec 31, 2024: instagram post

I have been saying "kill gameplay" on bluesky for about a month now. Initially, I wanted to write a blog post. Or a zine. Or something that made sense, that someone could read and either agree with or disagree with.

Normally, however, I do my best thinking while also doing the thing I want to be thinking about. So I gave in to the urge to make a game. It's in the style of my droqevers, none of which are playable now. They're like little platformer poems, I guess. You play them, you read stuff, you listen and look and feel.

There's nothing new about this, but I am neither surprised nor uncomfortable about that. It's sort of a goal of mine, to make something... not archaic, but something that has a timeless quality, something that is not caught up in its own innovation, something that is not trying to prove itself. These are simply experiences conveyed and shared, presented in
a linear as-you-like-it menu, like pages in a book.

One of my favourite short stories is Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." It is written in the form of an obituary about a man (Menard) who sought to rewrite Don Quixote, word for word, exactly as it was originally written, in a way that is presented as not being quite like copying at all, but re-living in order to produce the exact same work. The thing that to me the story serves as a lighthouse for finding is that there is no inherent lack of value in unoriginality -- if the work comes from a new place, then it is a new work, even if it is utterly identical in terms of output.

it is the internality of art that matters.

I might change its title. At present, "The End of Gameplay" is an artifact of where I was at the start of the project; I thought the intention of my action was to 'end gameplay,' or to show how it could be ended.

I understand now better than at the beginning my relationship to gameplay. It is a god, and I am a mere mortal. I will die, and gameplay will outlive me. I went to a friend's place for a party a few days ago. She was wearing an 'Eat The Rich' Christmas sweater, and her friend had an 'Eat The Rich' tattoo. There are likely some people out there displaying the phrase who also have money and are, according to some relative perspective, rich. It is a call to action, but the action itself is metaphorical. It is a memorable, but often not literally defended or even considered defensible, slogan which refer to some set of related but different positions, political and moral and otherwise.

This was supposed to be a devlog. Well, here goes. Devlog time.

- Two of my friends have played the game and gave me feedback.
- Some of the feedback was that some of the individual 'poems' in the 'anthology' are giving some really cool good emotional responses, ones that I feel too.
- Some of the individual 'poems' seem to be lacking in this distinct strong feeling or flavour. There has not been any 'this is ugly' or 'this feels bad to play' feedback, which is fine and dandy (it's just not the point of the thing), and all of the feedback has been 'I don't get this' or 'This doesn't make me feel as strongly as that other one'. This is extremely heartening. I want to be dealing with this type of feedback. And, as a bonus, I feel that the feedback is 'right', in that I feel it too. Tough decisions to be made. Do I throw out the 'weak' levels? Do I strengthen them? How do I go about doing these things? I'm excited to find out.
- Finally, overall, is it doing the work necessary to, I guess, 'justify' the energy started by the title, The End of Gameplay? Is it a good title? This is the reason why I'm considering changing the title! But I'm going to let it stay for now, because I like it as a title. I find it motivating me, I have a conceptual goal, an intuitive metric by which I can sort of measure whether I have achieved or not achieved something.

The goal of The End of Gameplay is not to convince anyone to kill gameplay. It is something else.

-droqen.

[droqen]

January 5th, 2025

I do not know how to describe what has happened. I could not regard TEOG as anything resembling good.
I tried to fix the levels that I had. I tried to make new levels, cutting the old. Every new level was creatively bankrupt. Hollow.
I tried to do nothing. Was it possible that it was good and finished as it was? No, that too was wrong, now.
Was the goal of TEOG itself flawed? Did I even have a goal in mind? Was the goal impossible to achieve?

Gradually through a process of struggle I found my way to a few new ideas that helped me through this strange period of time. I slept a lot. I also stayed up very late at night a lot. I finished reading All Our Hidden Gifts. Then I suddenly had a strange and mysterious dream which I still remember, hours later, but importantly, I wrote down several pages of ideas and thoughts that burst forth from the dream, notes not about the dream but as a result of it... I faded in and out of sleep, taking notes, closing my eyes, returning into a sort of hazy pre-awakening stupor, returning to take more notes.

Then I woke up and proceeded to have a very productive day, with the structural shape of how to work on TEOG clarified (the new ideas were very helpful), and worked on almost nothing but fixing up old stuff. I made machine lovers better. I made blood better. I have faith that I will make pink argument better. All of these levels have become stronger, and I have not damaged the whole of which they are parts:

I do not know what role they played. Perhaps it is crucial that the too-explicit crisis and the utterly meaningless pink argument preceded the tower (20), and without them all the tower (30) would lose its magic? I could cut them, but who cuts an organism they cannot understand? Rather than cutting the parts which gave me this awful feeling, I learned to live with them, and slowly discovered ways to make them better. Ouch, ouch, ouch, what a painful process.

edit :: how funny that i would express here alongside kill gameplay a reluctance to "cut . . an organism [ i ] cannot understand" -- but it is true and i stand by this statement as well as my actions -- i understand games; i understand gameplay. i don't understand every individual game. but seen as a whole i am willing to cut this... organism. i do not understand (i would say yet but i do not know whether i ever will) The End of Gameplay and therefore it would not be right for me to cut it.

kill gameplay.

-droqen.

[droqen]

January 10th-11th (around midnight), 2025

Has it really only been five days since I last posted here, since I last touched the project? It feels like a lifetime ago. I wrote a bit of script for our VN and Maddi sent me some editing notes and I had a minor psychological crisis -- after which I settled down and got some clarity on her (very good) feedback and made a significantly improved version of the script.

And then I tried to sleep.

I did not sleep. Instead, I got out of bed and fixed another one of the levels in TEOG, "crisis." I do not know how long I spent fixing it, but I do know that I was struck by an overwhelming sensation that things can be fixed and put that feeling to work -- not in writing a poem about the feeling, but in productively sticking to my old work, the old work that I chose to keep, and making it better.

Ah... my old enemy, "better." Maybe there is a "better" after all. I repaired all of my complaints. I looked at the level, or the poem, or whatever, and thought -- save the good parts, trash the bad parts. I did that, and I added new parts, and I love them.

The music still sucks though. Maybe I'll try to fix up the old music rather than stick with this weird new music that I like but which simply doesn't fit.

-droqen.

[droqen]

[sacrifice]

as though..