my bleets to which raigan responds (in blue)

beginning of thread linked below

I don’t understand how this could apply to eg Super Mario Bros: it’s all clearly there and directly perceptible, just a little arcade-action world of different types of little dudes who all have positions, and causal relationships between them driven primarily by their relative positions.

I do think there’s something akin to an optical illusion happening, where speedrunners/etc. “peek behind the curtain” and engage with things as they “more truly” are, rather than with the facade/illusion, but what’s the true truth of a sound: the Fourier decomposition, or the experience of a chord?

“it’s all clearly there and directly perceptible”

it’s the action part. TAS runs are different from human runs because we can’t perceive the action in perfect detail due to its quick, realtime nature. probably “confusing” is the wrong word (a confusing one, haha)

but what good is a mind practiced in complex understanding if it is turned only toward satisfying that practice? and, is there any proof that chasing this “gameplay high” actually exercised the capacity, or did it only satisfy it, for a time?

we can see that it is comprehensible, in that each of the components makes sense in isolation, but the entire system is beyond perfect grasping.

I don’t personally see a need for any higher meaning/purpose/utility for any human activity beyond “it helps to temporarily relieve the incredible suffering of existence/boredom, which our brains are forever subject to and will never truly escape (thanks to evolution)”.

(What is the purpose of practicing guitar until you can totally shred on it? None, other than that the act of totally shredding on guitar is presumably enjoyable for the guitarist, and ideally their audience. Maybe you can also find work as a session guitarist, or form a band, but that’s ancillary.)

the part i take “offense” at is the pursuit of this pleasure rather than its decomposition -- yes, the world is full of beautiful complexities, and i enjoy embracing & accepting those. what’s the benefit of making more? i feel as though the fetishization of complexity has negative side effects.

What good is a mind practiced in solving sudokus, if it’s turned only onto towards solving sudokus? Presumably because the act of solving sudokus is gratifying/pleasurable/enjoyable/beneficial in some way. There really can’t be any more-fundamental justification for human recreational activity IMO.

there are tools that i enjoy because they allow me to better appreciate but also navigate the complexity of the real world -- this is beneficial to me and to my life!! it allows me to navigate real complexity.

(What do you mean when you say 𝑎𝑛𝑦 human activity? Is there never any justification for anything better than relieving boredom recreationally?)

one of these tools is tarot, which is a little embarrassing to admit. but i like the cards, they help me to think about the complexities of experiencing life and navigating the unknown future & my relationships etc.

by contrast, i suppose my feeling is that submitting to a game-system is embracing the joy of the futility of understanding things?

I just meant that relieving boredom is a totally valid and sufficient motivation/justification for any human activity, IMO. Of course there are many “higher” goals such as directly helping people thrive, reducing suffering, educating, etc. :)

that’s not an amazing description of it and i’m still struggling to describe this in a way that properly describes what’s going on in my reaction.

there is a kind of “oh, i’m helpless to change these grand systems, so i’m just going to let myself get washed away by the tide” response to large-scale problems that i think games lean into and reproduce for fun, which i am deeply opposed to.

i don’t think it’s enough for me to presume, considering what i know about the capacity that humans have to be manipulated.

hmm. “higher” goals.

what makes them higher? what is the meaning of a goal being higher? i have never disagreed that there is some validity to the pursuit of relief from boredom. it’s not that pleasure-seeking has zero value.

i desperately want to live in a world where each gratifying, pleasurable, enjoyable act is equally beneficial. but as many people know, including game designers, it is almost trivial to make something gratifying that is also MATERIALLY HARMFUL.

like the aesthetic appeal of games, of gameplay, that i am fighting against, is submission to the values imposed by uncaring systems -- instead of destruction of, or productive disregard of, them.

I find this quite challenging because I keep trying to map it onto other things, and it’s not quite working. What’s “kill gameplay” for music? “kill melody”? “kill harmonies”? “kill catchy riffs”? “kill the grid/western musical practices?”. I’d sign up for “kill 4-on-the-floor drum patterns”. :)

in any case, i’ve (a little painfully) turned my mind elsewhere, and without the gameplay demon eating up my best brain cycles, life is really good. i’m so excited to do things, to face real challenges, to accomplish weird stuff. again & forever: kill gameplay, kill gameplay, kill gameplay.

as a result i can’t trust the pleasure signal when there is any chance that it is being manipulated. i must examine it further.

there is a qquote from The Creative Act that i can’t find, which says something essentially like “don’t consume your art unless it’s to work on it”

and... i don’t believe that we can fight this with gameplay, because gameplay ultimately always captures the human action and converts your agency into something that it controls. to combat this, we must go beyond gameplay.

i think it’s relevant here, which i hope to make sense of.

when i’m making a game with lots of gameplay, i usually feel compelled to engage with it, i play it for fun, it draws me in.

e.g. we can’t make a game that is “about” breaking rules

e.g. don’t listen to your music passively (unless it’s done)

and when it stops drawing me in and i’m in the gameplay-making mode i think, huh, something is wrong, this isn’t catching my attention anymore

if our goal is to truly foster a genuine feeling of systems being escapable.

so maybe i could say the equivalent of “kill gameplay” is something like “kill catchy riffs” -- that’s probably the closest?

even still, it’s sort of different. i think the function of a catchy riff can be to carry a message. rhyming poems come from, i theorize, the value of oral tradition. it’s easier to remember and pass on stories when their sound makes them more transmissible.

if more games were using gameplay to make valuable human ideas more sticky, then maybe my relationship to it would be different, but as i see it the vast majority of games are just using gameplay to catch the mind because it’s pleasurable.

in general this is still basically OK. i’m not judgemental of people doing it. but i’ve been thinking a lot about the kinds of values that it reinforces. see my point on the far left.

not in an “evil” way, even. just an innocent attention-grabbing way. it’s fun to make something that addicts me for a little while! then when that ends, i can tune it up to give myself another hit.