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part of kill gameplay is constructing/accepting an entirely new way of relating to each other which is, i guess, anarchy-like. “non-coercive.”

but when it comes to randomness in videogames, at some point you hit a block of, “ah, there was no reason for this at all” -- at least no reason anyone is intended to notice or pay attention to.

i don’t think it’s good, i think it’s actually a terrible thing, to create this ‘dead’ meaning in people’s lives, when ‘living’ meaning is at least theoretically available.

in the case of this Shenmue example, we have a system that accidentally produced something which you found resonant, but what is the meaning of that resonance? you were not connected to another expressing human being or a force of nature

the end of that line of thinking was that the only way for something to be, i don’t know, worth anything to me, was for me to regard every piece of its history as worthwhile, rather than coming from a ‘bad’ place

imo you should not read a pattern language first... it explicitly requests this of you, actually. it follows The Timeless Way of Building, which is a good read.

yes i’m very interested in this kind of game, but even a goalless structure does impose some restrictions. e.g. in the case of a flatgame, you might still get lost and wonder if there is a secret out there and not have the capacity to discover if you’re right or not

i’m not sure i have a better or more complete answer than this at the moment, but i do think it’s an important question.

part of kill gameplay is certainly the responsibility of the player too.

“mmm i am seeing what you’re saying now (i think!). i feel a lot of games i have some notion of how the game “should” be played. even in flat games! (see everything, reach the ending, etc) do you think part of “kill gameplay” is disallowing the player from developing those notions?” -joey

board games do push back in the same way, there is a minor difference in that we are the ones who enforce the pushing back, but we enforce it according to rigid rules rather than according to our feeling or intuition.

“mmm this i resonate with. it does feel like games are the most “corrupted” art form at the moment (in their nearness to capital), and i wonder if that corruption is more ingrained (and downstream, to even the hobbyists, to even myself) than is obvious” -joey

“i hope it’s good O.O haven’t read anything by him before so possible it doesn’t live up to my imaginings...but easy to just stop reading in that case!” -joey

“oh wow okay, i will do that then! i guess i accidentally did the right thing haha, thanks for letting me know :)” -joey

“you mean in their changeability / interactivity? (the sense that they are always “pushing back”) (talking of video games here i suppose i should clarify, not sure if board games “push back” in the same way)”

(conclusion)

i want all your experiences to have an unbroken connection to the very source of reality, and there is no reason for them to belong to processes so disconnected from the beautiful complexity of what is already there.

one of the things that i have enjoyed about growing up, i guess, growing old, growing more experienced, is that i have begun to realize that there is always a reason that things happen, and that there is something that i can learn from that.

among my many wild takes is that i don’t think randomness is virtuous (or real)

i was thinking about generative AI and the possibility of a future in which we can generate stuff that appears “beautiful” and even “meaningful” without human intent.

i would say that this is the feeling of immersion and it is essentially “fake aliveness”.

while it is true that we are capable of appreciating the outcomes of random meaningless process, i think it is a waste of our capacity for empathy and understanding. when you dig deeper into the example of the tree cutscene, you recognize this yourself:

“sometimes, inexplicably, things just happen”

″...to the desire to still see everything. like there’s some sense that i’m missing something when i pick a path. and i don’t like this feeling! and i am fully aware that i actually do not care about what lies at the other path, i just can’t shed the awareness tha someone built...” -joey

sort of a tangent but this is a design problem i have been thinking about a lot myself lately. even as someone who is really not interested in “seeing everything” in a game (i don’t care about “content,” i just hope that the things i encounter are meaningful), i somehow am not immune” -joey

none of this might be relevant. but “kill gameplay” is VERY distinct from, for instance, “kill games”; it admits the possibility of games without gameplay... and likewise, gameplay without something we would recognize as a game (see above where i rant a little about democracy!)

however, gameplay definitely does more ‘conflicting forces’ than do works following the rules of, i guess, visual composition.

i guess the only difference is that games are more popular and probably profitable, so if someone is going to be egotistical and attention-seeking they would probably choose games or paintings, given the choice.

i will check it out! i haven’t been finding as much time for reading lately but i really want to chew on a book recommended so specifically to me & in this context. thanks for the rec.

A Pattern Language is like a fun glossary, but The Timeless Way is the grammar and glue that actually lends context to all these pieces. it is extremely good and the instructions on how to read the book literally unlocked in me the capacity to read nonfiction books (no joke) which i now value highly

or, there might be a ‘correct’ way to read the flatgame -- i don’t mean interpretation-wise, but physically it might be laid out in a way that the player misunderstands

both games and paintings can be equally egotistical or non-egotistical.

a plurality vote which unilaterally determines a shared outcome, too, discards human judgement according to a systemic decision. therefore here we have gameplay.

when you said this, you are naming two non-human-judgement-centering value structures

a corporate structure or hunt for “marketability” has stamped it out

but when systems become dominant over human judgement & intuition, and such systems are entrusted to pass judgement, the judgement is incapable of being human:

likewise when i say “systems are inherently incapable of offering human feedback” i have recognized that i am referring, in a no-true-scotsman-like way, to the subset of systems to which the statement applies

there are plenty of systems that, though they were created to resolve problems, feel today like they take up too much space -- one example of this that comes up for me is.. uh.. democracy as i know it.

specifically, a plurality vote to unilaterally determine a shared outcome is a solution which does not resolve all the forces at play: it solves one problem, “how do we make a decision NOW?”, but it does not resolve all of the problems, and these unresolved problems fester.

i use the word “gameplay” a lot, and i extend it to fairly far reaching things to capture a larger space than it normally encompasses...

game systems in particular feel ‘dead’ to me because i don’t understand the purpose they serve; they appear to be an egotistical, attention-seeking material made of conflicting forces, like the (slashed square) above.

i have a lot to say about many of the topics you’ve brought up, joey!! but i’ll keep it to the topic at hand:

so let’s bring it back to those SKEETS!

“the idea that computers / systems are dead or anti-human”

“the idea that computers / systems are dead or anti-human”

i think it is important to say that he was not anti-technology, or anti-progress, but technology and progress, like any thing or change, may be either ‘alive’ -- the result of only structure-preserving transformations -- or dead.

Christopher Alexander is, as am I now, of the opinion that ‘life’ is something like a moral good in this world for humans - he goes further and says it resonates better with the ground of the universe. You, however, don’t need to go that far: for our purposes all i want you to notice is the FEELING

the basic idea, however, is that if you look at these two squares, you can feel the difference; the top (double square) has a more ‘living’ quality, while the bottom (slashed square) has a more ‘dead’ one.

there are a lot more examples and descriptions of this in The Nature of Order, especially Book 2

in this example, the top square has undergone a transformation which ‘preserves’ the structure of the square; the bottom square has, by contrast, had its structure ‘destroyed’

christopher alexander proposed the concept of ‘structure-preserving transformations’, whose opposite is ‘structure-destroying transformations’

″[i don’t like gameplay] doesn’t seem to be what you’re saying”

yes or at least i don’t think i am saying it! remains to be seen.

ofc whether you like this mode of expression is another thing altogether! but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re saying (if i understand correctly!)

“i don’t understand how systems are any more [dead than] paint is”

of those who made them (except ofc in cases where like a corporate structure or hunt for “marketability” has stamped it out, which happens with all art :). i guess i don’t understand how systems are any more [dead than] paint is

″[artworks can] inherently reveal the quirks, interests, hearts of those who made them”

sorry if you have answered this before (i have been loosely following your threads from a distance!) but something i dont quite follow is the idea that computers / systems are dead or anti-human. game systems are made by humans! they inherently reveal the quirks, interests, hearts...

“game systems are made by humans!”

in response to the following of joey’s bleetskeets