2025, dec 5 - a new year's resolution.

[droqen]

i was listening to the first episode of The Secret Lives of Games' series, "All Systems Brough - Introduction," and in the middle of listening to this episode, i went to a workshop to learn how to make a paper flower. it was beautiful, i loved it, i took one photo, and then i lost it -- it flew away. i was really distraught by the loss of this paper flower, but i think i was also getting emotional about this look into the past, a much larger and more important thing that has been flying away from me lately: gameplay.

[droqen]

earlier this year, on May 12, the day of the full moon, i released what i called "my masterpiece": The End of Gameplay. i can't, won't try to, capture everything about it here. it's a short game but it's deeply connected to many things.

the first negative review that was posted on Steam was deleted, probably in part because of the video i made breaking down (and, sort of attacking) the review's contents, the nature of the review, and so forth. but as a result of that video i actually had a really fruitful conversation with the reviewer, which was what i wanted. i wanted to have this conversation.

recently, another negative Steam review has been posted--and a comment on a youtube video by the same person--and a negative backloggd review, too, the most negative to date. looking backwards at it the purpose of making that first video, which is not to say that i'm proud of it (i have intentionally not even linked it), was to experimentally deal as completely as possible with the negative emotions that i had experienced and get through to the other side, to understand: what can i use a negative steam review for?

my conclusion is that i could use it to grow. an outside perspective by someone who has given themselves permission to be brutally honest: "i didn't like it, and here's my best attempt to describe what i didn't like." it shouldn't be as rare as it is to get that kind of honesty, but it is. (edit:: that's not to say every negative review has such honesty or specificity. sometimes a negative review is useless. luckily i have not received any yet. they've all been really interesting.)

[droqen]

in "All Systems Brough - Introduction" the speakers were discussing Michael Brough's games; somewhere between 1:26:10 and 1:27:32, Frank Lantz said this about Brough's 868-HACK:

What if our relationship to software was crucial . . . and every input mattered and every choice and every decision. And it's almost exhausting. I think one of the reasons [Brough's] games are not super popular . . . has to do with . . . most people don't want that from games. What most people want from games is a kind of self-soothing--what I want from games is usually a kind of self-soothing, a kind of distraction, a kind of pleasant, rhythmic activity.

i've read Lantz's recent book, The Beauty of Games, as well as an interview, and some articles, and i think i understand what it is that interests him, and at the moment when i heard this i thought, ah, this man can only imagine one axis for games, either players are thinking about what they're doing a whole lot, or they're not thinking about what they're doing very much or at all, and everything lies in the middle.

and this echoes a lot of how i feel videogame literature speaks about videogames and games and so on. so prizing the decisions of players as though it rises above all else.

in that same episode Zach Gage says, somewhere between 1:24:30 and 1:25:35,

The fantasy that you have when you play a Michael Brough game is, "I'm smart, and I'm going to figure this game out."

there's all this videogamesphere language that i understand and i don't want to understand. i want to kill gameplay! i want to be free from this way of thinking about games--no, not games, about art, about any art at all--i want to cease thinking about the works that i and my peers produce through the lens of how much energy, how beautifully energy, is expended by players upon figuring it out, making decisions, mastering it.

it is surely a craft but it isn't what interests me and it's hard to share space with people whom i respect and have love for yet who still live and breathe this language. worse, i know that i am complicit. i think that all of these people who speak Game Design also speak other languages but because we have this one secret language, this one wonderful secret language, in common, it's all too easy to slip into it out of habit, and i can't say no.

[droqen]

when i think about works of art i often seek a name for the one who perceives, who regards, who is not one with the art and yet opens themselves up to it. for a time i would use the word "appreciator." now when i think about a poem or a story or a television show or a film i wonder if it would be so bad to call this person the "player." we have that delicious shorthand. the player, the player, the player. what do you call the one who looks at a painting? does it mean something that there is no word for this person? does a painter not have that haloine outline of an individual always hovering there, eyes on the canvas, looking over their shoulder, asking if they can remap the keys?

[droqen]

That was a lot of work to ultimately say something pretty mundane. I guess for me, I'm looking for my art to not just be a communication of vulnerability, but to say something interesting. Hacking down the 4th wall to say the walls are fake and the common structures of the medium are fabricated just doesn't hit with me. Especially when, if the thesis statement (near as I can tell from looking at Droqen's words online combined with playing this all the way through) is that the use of gameplay has been unartistic in many games, then I question the extent to which this also applies to this game? To what purpose do we jump and slide and roll climb up the walls. It isn't any more meaningful or artistically honest than anything else, it lends itself no credence to its own purpose.

None of this is to say that I generally disagree with Droqen's (seeming) broader point. Lots of video games are unartistic in so far as they fail communicate a greater point or a reflection of the creator's vulnerabilities and flawed perspectives (especially when they are made by too many people to function under a true unified vision), and that the gameplay of a video game is frequently an outside entity to the larger point of the game. But I just can't look at this and think to myself "this is the direction for games." Maybe I'm just dumb or a philistine, but I honestly recommend reading Droqen's tweets and their rants than playing this. They are more interesting.

[droqen]

. . . to what purpose do we jump and slide and roll climb up the walls. . . . I just can't look at this and think to myself "this is the direction for games."

[droqen]

neither can i. that's the whole point.

i don't see a direction for games. at some point, i did. i've never been happier with anything i've made, ever. i quipped a few weeks ago, it's always sort of haunted me that Starseed Pilgrim is the game i've made that other people like the most--i've been trying to unseat it and failing. finally accepting that, i made The End of Gameplay, which will probably end up being the game of mine that i like the most. it's a scary thought.

the game is called the end of gameplay. what did you expect? hell, what did i expect? what i'm amused by most of all is how, i think, insightful the review is, and simultaneously incapable of escaping from exactly the conceptual prison whose escaping is this game. perhaps this is the "vulnerability" that they perceive which is not "interesting", because i failed to convey to them the means of my escape, or the justification, only a set of emotions associated with doing it.

but what a perfect encapsulation of the mindset that i associate with games, and with escaping along with escaping gameplay.

[droqen]

it isn't interesting unless there's something for me to choose, to decide, to figure out, to learn how to do. there is a blocker here inside the medium i loved, everything seen through one lens, that of (as Lantz puts it) "thinking and doing". the game cannot only show that something can be done, it must produce also the environment in which it may be practiced to the point of losing sight that it ever had a real function--it must teach a skill and at the same time capture it so completely.

the skills taught by successful videogames have been pruned over decades of design to be so beautifully capturable that they can never escape the prison into which they are born.

[droqen]

i still remember that one of the first questions i got on blue sky in response to "kill gameplay" was someone asking the question, does that mean you want to kill games? and at the time my answer was, no, but is that is the natural consequence, then so be it.

can games survive without gameplay?

at times i wonder this, but it's time for my new year's resolution.

there are many reasons to create things, and i've come to recognize that i love the world, i love making things, i love thinking deeply about deeply interesting things. for nearly my entire life i have called myself a game maker, i have made games, i have met hundreds of really genuinely fascinating, loving people through this practice. for a few years now i have continued to describe myself as a game maker, a game designer, and whatnot. sometimes a "lost" game designer. but never, quite, an "ex-" game maker.

my new year's resolution for 2026. i'm going to shed the label, for whatever that's worth. i became an indie game developer, only to have that lose all meaning to me--a quietly painful and confusing experience. then i was just, i don't know, a game maker. a person who made games. a person who thought about games and cared about them. a player, and a maker.

i'm done. i don't have a fun new word for the things that i do. i write and read poetry, i do pixel art, i do other things, i'll keep doing everything i want to do. i'll even make platformer character controllers, when the mood strikes. i'll even put all these things together into one object. it won't,, i hope, hurt if i make something that other people want to call a game. i don't care what it's called, really.

rather than being concerned with whether i am making games or art or not-games or not-art i will make things and forget about all allegiance i might have once had to this world of games that i once loved.

[droqen]

love, droqen.

[droqen]

P.S. thanks to Jenny Offill for authoring Dept. of Speculation, the book that opened my eyes to the realization that i could write like that on purpose. broken, like my brain.