2026, feb 5 - I understand.

[droqen]

On January 31, Alex Beachum blote thus:

stumbled across this this thread because i'm rereading Understanding Comics and decided to check if anyone has tried to Scott McCloudify video games...idk if this is that but it's interesting! also i'm curious, would your non-player-centric definition include a game that literally plays itself?

link to bleet

[droqen]

On February 4, Paul Diaz blote thus:

sorta tangential, but this reminds me of Katherine Neil's article, because of sheet music being this abstract design tool which is something games do not have: https://medium.com/@haikus_by_KN/how-we-design-games-now-and-why-bcbc1deb7559

link to bleet

[droqen]

I began to read Understanding Comics, not for the first time, on January 31. I finished on February 4. Then I began to read Katherine Neil's How We Design Games Now and Why.

[droqen]

The moment of understanding occurred while perusing a Raph Koster presentation linked in How We Design Games Now and Why as follows:

Designer Raph Koster highlighted the imprecision of natural language as a tool for designing gameplay, and proposed we develop a graphical notation system for game design

(This sentence and this link were provided in context among many other designers' statements and proposals. Here I have included only the one that contained what sparked the moment of understanding.)

[droqen]

One of the slides in Koster's presentation began to give me a feeling. It reads as follows:

Clarifying dimensionality

Depth
   Literally, the depth of recursion

Breadth
   Literally, the amount of parallelism

Size
   Literally, the amount of sequentially chained atoms.

(Isn't it nice to finally know what these
   mean?)

It was the last parenthesized rhetorical question. Though I cannot transmit the feeling, it was a kind of dismissive, disgusted, superior feeling I associate with the thought that I have recognized someone has produced a simplifying (but inaccurate and destructive) lens and is presenting it smugly as the truth. I was not having that explicit thought specifically at the time, and I'm not suggesting that Koster is smug - either here or in general - but I was having the feeling that goes with the thought.

[droqen]

It was the immediate next two slides at which I stopped dead. They read as follows:

Cost of failure

Syntactically, atoms must
always have a failure state
link, even if said failure is
only an opportunity cost.

Why?

Any atom that involves risk must have
at least a binary result.

   This is why we do not consider
   moving a checker piece without a
   capture or a setup to be an atom.

   I've notated these using red arrows
   rather than blue.

[droqen]

In Koster's proposed notation, movement around a safe screen in a platformer is not an atom. As a result it cannot actually capture what games are. The notation excludes significant detail from consideration.

"The map is not the territory"

The map is never the territory, but we must remember to regard it as a map. The "Why?" slide fails to address the simplifying effect and presents this notation as territory.

I believe that I have in mind the abstract concept of the whole territory.

[droqen]

My understanding is more about systems than games, but an understanding of games will be able to emerge from it.

Notation fully unfolded, a system can be understood as a set of states and connections.

A system is a graph of nodes and edges.

All other theoretical models of games are simplifications of this full system-graph view. Koster's "Any atom that involves risk must always have a failure state link" is a statement of simplification. This notation erases all states that do not contribute to a structure of choice-making and risk-taking, and therefore encodes an implicit definition of what a game "is."

[droqen]

There remains a discriminatory element which separates a game from a system. I have not discovered this discriminator.

For future readers, by "states" I do not mean computer-states. Systems may themselves be mere descriptions, models. The game of tag defines a system within reality. Its system involves some parts of reality and some fabricated/abstract/imaginary parts (Juul's Half-Real may be relevant reading on this). In the case of tag, a 'real part' included in the system by necessity is the position of the players, and an 'imaginary part' is the designation of the tagger ("it").

I do not suggest that the state-space has perfectly hard edges. See:

On February 4, Llaura Orrealis blote thus:

. . . cosmic rays are a rule. every game has them. somethings they hit a bit and flip it.

link to bleet

However, the idea of a defined set of states remains useful. Any system is a defined set of states (and connections, but I consider these connections to be endemic to the states - more on that later, but some parts of The Nature of Order (Christopher Alexander) may be clarifying); definitions are themselves prone to dissolution and shifting. I cannot think of any real system with hard edges, and yet despite the hazy edges I can still think about a system's specific, well-defined shape.