My notes from the cruise

[droqen]

I went on a cruise with my mom in late March 2023, and on this cruise they had a library -- I took out a couple books, and wrote my notes for them on these crappy little sheets of paper.

It is now time, at long last, to review my notes from the cruise. So I can throw them out and free up some space in my little cabinet of things to remember.

[droqen]

1. actors -- actors reproduce... utilize images
2. watching one singer, or dancer in
3. particular. she was great!

5. great individual performances
6. individual

. . .

11. why define games at all? -properties of?
12. -playing vs working
13. "new gamforms" "It is easier to break
14. SO THE QUESTION     |     the rules once you
15. OF DEFINITION MUST     |     are aware of them"
16. BE A QUESTION OF FUNCTION, of USE

[droqen]

Ah, yes. Good thing I wrote the title of one of the books here. I was reading "half-real."

half-real
Meadows in TiS -> Avoiding the slippery slope.
"HARD" definitions are good for this ^
BUT---Juul explicitly ALSO refers to
"creat[ing] new kinds of games"
--->Is there any problem with slipping?
or is it in fact desirable?
hard definitions' purpose is to
resist change.
see Hofstadter's "productive set"
        are hard definitions really good for producing
     "NEW (TYPOGRAPHICAL) DESIGNS"?
limitations->creativity
             ->within a domain?
UNDEFINED vs   PRODUCTS
INDEFINITE  //     CULTURAL CAPITAL
                         TRADITION?
                        VALUE [fungible]

PURPOSE OF "DEFINING GAMES" ---> SAFETY(SOCIAL); SHARED UN-
DERSTANDING;
ART AUCTION ---> VALUE OF ART
DEFINING "GAMES" DOES NOTHING ----
WHAT IS PRODUCTIVE IS DEFINING
(DESCRIPTIVELY) WHAT CONTEXTS A
GAME FITS INTO, AND HOW ----
THERE ARE MANY SUCH CONTEXTS
AND THERFORE MANY "GAMES".

MUTATIONS OF "GAMES" THEN ARE
INNOVATIVE (BETTER?) SOLUTIONS
TO EXTANT PROBLEMS FOUND
IN EXTANT CONTEXTS SOLVED
BY EXTANT GAMES.

[droqen]

god damn maybe i should have put this in "close reading". anyway, noting a few things i remembered:
- watching musicals on the cruise
- visiting (briefly) an art auction

[droqen]

p.s. the numbers are because many of these notes were written on numbered lines sheets of paper used for writing down answers to trivia questions.

1. "an open landscape of possibilities" p75, juul
2. "solve problems the way they want to
3. solve them rather than in the way the
4. game designers planned"
5. HARVEY SMITH -> IT ALLOWS CONTENT TO BE
6. CREATED FASTER (emergence that is)
7. *RICH CREATIVE ENGINE-SPACE.
8. "Emergentness" describes more than ⭐ (a star on the left side, in the margin)
9. PLAY-space; it describes creative
10. space, art-space. HUman activity may
11. happen upon some rich untapped vein
12. of art-creation-play and then people may
13. explore to their hearts' desires.
14. --> stories about superheroes, for example.
15.
16. p90 "these variations completely change the game"
17. ⟲⟳ What if the language was instead:
18. A VARIATION OF THE GAME MAY
19. PRODUCE DIFFERENT FEELINGS... not
20. lists of variations (NOT VERY IMPORTANT) but
    one wholly understood & pursued variation
    in FEELING! ^{but even still..}

1. half-real--> ██ WHAT IS A RULE?
2. it seems there is a conflation of
3. a videogame rule with an e.g- board game rule,
4. e.g THEATRE vs FILM are distinctly different
5. KINDS.      Juul gives 'bad' or 'non' rules (63):
6. ". . . checkmate[:] . . . king is in a hopeless position"
7. (64) "The ball is out . . . when it is far away"
8. --->but these rules seem fine, as CENTERS in a
9. process. They do not need to be made definite
10. until their indefiniteness presents an actual problem!
11. A GAME AN ARTWORK MUST DELIVER
12. SOME DEEP FEELING BEFORE WE CAN
13. WORRY ABOUT DEFINITENESS!
14. [p68-69] Juul compares PONG to THE HOBBIT. [the 2003 video game! not the book]
15. states, "The Hobbit . . . contains a wider range
16. of . . . actions . . . Even so, the complete solution
17. to The Hobbit fits on a sheet of paper."
18. -----he classifies games into "emergence" versus
19. "progression" which I believe is a non-useful
20. classification?

[droqen]

it's fun revisiting this book through all my old thoughts. i don't agree with all of them but on the whole i love my thoughts & i love the opportunity to mull over them a second time, given some distance.

bunches of theory i don't care about at the moment, but a big inspiring connection jumps out:

emergence as a way of producing unintended, unconscious content quickly
X
indefiniteness of feeling; unambiguous codified rules unimportant until later;
playground of interpreted rules instead of rigid rules

[droqen]

juul specifically discusses rigid definitions for avoiding "slippage"; there is a mention of a "productive set"; i express doubt over whether avoiding "slippage" is even important; now picturing building a tower out of blocks; rigid definitions allow the tower to grow higher wherever we choose to start; nonrigid definitions allow the tower to topple and spread and germinate; i suppose i agree with juul in the abstract, although in the specific case i have always preferred experimentation...

playground of interpretation requires a domain
X
bounded experimentation, freedom, productive set

[droqen]

next

1. Charm of the day   a normal pencil yup.
2.
3. Half-Real --> concerns itself too
4. much with form. ███████████
5. ████ Juul answers █████████
6. ████
7.
8.███████ the title, Half-Real,
9. is formalist: what is a game?
10. Juul answers: __________.
11.-----"admit a debt" to some other
12. study? No thanks ---- "dominant
13. strategy", game theory. -- game
14. theory
15. -------- half-real -------------------------------------
16. WTF?! P.11-12 "Game rules can
17. be . . . reinterpreted . . . " . . . games
18. cannot be . . . only as the rules . . .
19. to a logical extreme . . . the game
20. rules do not matter at all
      * HOW IS THIS A "LOGICAL" EXTREME?!
----------------------------------------------------

i have no idea what this last section is on about

[droqen]

1. 12-- "video games are rules and fiction"
2. Goffman has proposed . . . that [e.g] the
3. specific shape of a piece in a game is
4. not important
5.
6. --> rooted in a too-rigid LOGIC
7. seeking to describe wholes in-
8. stead of centers. Tuning forks.
9.
10. 18-- Why be limited when we can
11. be free? . . . [Because] games pro-
12. vide context for actions . . .
13. *AN ACTION-CENTRIC PERSPECTIVE!
14.
15. 20-- "it is hard to create a game
16. about emotions because emotions
17. are hard to implement in rules"
18. *NOTE THE ASSUMPTION (UNSTATED) THAT A
19. GAME IS ONLY "ABOUT" THOSE THINGS WHICH
20. ARE "IMPLEMENTED IN RULES".

oookay i'm getting a fuller understanding of my response, these early pages were laying out a definition of games in pieces, which was frustrating to me.

my reading of juul seems to be catching two opposing views expressed by juul which makes sense for my current understanding of the title "half-real"; juul is presenting these two incompatible(?) halves, and games lie between them, somewhere, bridging the gap(?)

there's something interesting about that but it feels a little... bit... i don't care about the two halves very much. i care about the integrated whole. also i care less about rules than i once did.

[droqen]

8. JUUL --> p55 "rules are the most con-
9. sistent source of player enjoyment
10. in games" --> QUESTIONABLE.
11. but "in games" introduces the bias of
12. definition. Are Juul's games just
13. those things which involve rules-based
14. enjoyment?
15.
16. "[rules afford]" "⁽⁵⁸⁾Rules . . . afford . . .
17. players meaningful actions that
18. were not otherwise available"
19. --> They were available though. ⭐

do rules afford actions? rules bound a domain... rather than affording meaningful actions, they enhance meaning of already-afforded actions; it appears to be the creation of actions but is it not. games cannot create action, they can only agentify action

(agentify is not a word, but i use it here to mean "grant agency to" or something like that)

[droqen]

1.  ████       SNOW WHITE
2. MERYL STREEP^?_{Oscar noms}

. . .

[trivia answers]

[droqen]

[notes on Off and Running, Zussman]
[notes on a powerpoint presentation about how the cruise ship operates]
[notes on kitchen tour]

These notes have not really aged well! There's not much of interest for me to glean from them, we might say they are bad notes. Interesting, I wonder what makes them bad... maybe just not interesting to me now so it's not tickling my brain into actively thinking about them.

[droqen]

p.91 (juul, half-real)    "Everquest promotes playing in
groups and guilds simply because this is the best
strategy" [emphasis added] --> THIS CONFUSES
THE TOP DOWN DESIGN PROCESS.
It is just semantics, but clearly,
Everquest promotes playing in groups and guilds
by making this... the best strategy, because
(why?)
--> even this ascribes cause & effect too cleanly

{diagram:

{enabled, supported by a "smaller" pattern.} > {playing in groups and guilds} > {enables, supports a "larger" pattern}

BUT... IT IS JUST
SEMANTICS IN THE END}

----------------------------------------------------------
(96) Juul discusses "practice"; noticeably privileging
a particular-play-experience-forming-game, the "skill" game.
Rather than This lens understands games as
CHALLENGES. chapter 4 (121) will discuss
"fiction", some other half of games - particularly
VIDEOGAMES.
(122) "all fictional worlds are incomplete. No fiction
completely specifies all aspects..." BUT IS THIS
A PRODUCTIVE POINT OF DISCUSSION?
read more: principle of min. departure, Marie-Laure Ryan.

[droqen]

my habit of hearkening to semantics. oh, it's just semantics! it's semantics! bleh bleh blah. if i'm complaining about words then there is something deeper to complain about as well.

everquest uses the design strategy of appealing to efficacy in order to guide/encourage/force players to play in groups and guilds;

playing in groups and guilds is an action granted legitimacy by the system & its economy/economies;

[droqen]

we're on the last page of notes, let's go

SKIMMING HALF-REAL, I BELIEVE IT
MAKES AND ARGUMENT THAT NEEDS NO
ARGUING, BUT... WHO KNWOS, PERHAPS
IT MAKES ITS POINT SUBTLY.

GAMES ARE THE CRAFT ART OF
CRAFTING, HONING ACTIVITY,
ACTION, INTERACTION. THAT
   IS TO SAY, I AM INTERESTED IN
HUMAN PSYCHE & ACTION

I AM NOT SO INTERESTED IN IMAGE OR IMAGE-
OBSESSED ART; I AM VERY INTERESTED IN
FINDING AND HONING.

not sure what i mean here,
or maybe i am sure what i mean and i'm not in agreement,
and i assume that i am in disagreement because of a misunderstanding.
maybe i just don't agree.

half-real, 131-
Juul presents RESTRICTIVE, HARMFUL categories:
Abstract, iconic, incoherent world,
coherent world, and staged games.
"ANY GAME CAN POTENTIALLY BE
READ AS AN ALLEGORY OF SOME-
THING ELSE" -- 133 -- "Any game can be
potentially read as an allegory of some-
thing else but some readings will be more
convincing than others."
Juul talks on & on (133-139) about how games
project fictional worlds through a collection of
discrete means. But is it useful to demarcate
each thing so neatly? He says videogames are
"UNIQUELY PRONE TO RUMORS", here
positioning videogames as uniquely distinct. Hmm.
Here too is a striving (a dumb striving) for the
IDENTITY of a thing.

i call juul's striving dumb! how rude.
i can relate better than before to this striving for particularly afforded uniqueness; what can this new technology enable? not only computer-technology, to be clear, but any sort of novel technique too. what can any new technology, technique, or discovery, enable?

juul's take on readings--i need to get into the omni-reading instead. but it's something worth noting for me. on the 'meaning' of a thing, juul says "some readings will be more convincing than others." this rubs me the wrong way although it is only a statement of fact; is juul revealing a subcutaneous tendency to prize convincingness of one reading or another or is he only stating a fact? i wish i had more context. also, The Beginning of Infinity's "better explanations". is 'reading' a work of art a science or something else? do art and hermeneutics intersect? ought i lean into or out of this frame of mind?

are there 'better' readings and 'worse' ones? am i concerned with efficacy of a reading? i suppose that i must be -- even if i am interested in all valid readings, first of all the validity comes from somewhere, and second of all in the space of all valid readings i am interested in everything regarding said readings, all of their qualities.

i like a reading that is not especially efficient but is especially beautiful. perhaps i am concerned with efficacy not in terms of my acceptance but in terms of visibility to others.

good but too weak.

beautiful but not convincing.

i want to take these things and '''improve''' them. in the way that a game does not create action but grants a certain action viability or legitimacy, i wish to not create goodness or beauty, but grant it strength and efficacy.

to find goodness and beauty, and make them stick.

i like that