Correctness
I find it’s more exciting to be an explorer, a detective, when I think there might be some big fuzzy ‘real’ answer and that I’m not just doing all this work for the sake of leaving behind footprints.
droqen, Interpreting 靜夜思, and the Timeless Way
Touche! It seems that I also used some terminology that I’m not sure whether I regret or not, haha. I said I wanted my players to ‘play the same explorative detective game that I am playing, but one that ultimately has no clear or ‘correct’ answer’. But I also described a ‘center’ that I was ‘stuck circling around’… I don’t want to just do all this work for the sake of leaving behind footprints, but to get closer to that center myself, and to make something that helps other people see that center, and start them circling around it too. And in many ways that center can definitely be described as the ‘real’ or ‘correct’ answer…
I think my point is really that I’ve come to think that the best way to point at that is to… not try to point at it. Instead, I think it’s best to just go on an ‘earnest pursuit of some distinct and timeless truth’ as you so beautifully put it regarding ‘The Valley’ – ‘dance’ around the center and document and share my search, in whatever way seems best. And so when I started thinking about how games’ positive and negative feedback capabilities might provide some useful arrows to point at some center, it feels unproductive in some way. And ultimately you were also saying they were not enough to prevent failures of ‘progress’. They seem useful for pointing at the ‘clues’, but as for the bigger picture…
Progress
I don’t value these because they came from a place of authority, but because they rang true to me personally. A walkthrough to guide me in my pursuit of truth, exposing something to me that had previously gone unrecognized. In videogames as well as in poetry, this is how I measure success.
droqen, Interpreting 靜夜思, and the Timeless Way
I like this answer, that progress is progress towards that center, that timeless truth. I’ll call it the ‘pursuit’. But it also points at a difficulty I often return to, which I’ll try framing like this: separating the ‘game’ from the ‘pursuit’. You also seemed to conflate these, initially thinking ‘Games can’t [fail to convey their truth] because they provide clear feedback’. I’m always fighting against this too. But I think the ‘game’ is different from the ‘pursuit’. The ‘game’ is the vehicle which carries you in the ‘pursuit’. You must learn how to play the ‘game’ to go on the ‘pursuit’, but it is not the ‘pursuit’. Progress in the ‘game’ is different from progress in the ‘pursuit’, but it is often a necessary prerequisite. Feedback operates in the ‘game’, but not the ‘pursuit’. But you even notice that feedback in the ‘game’ isn’t always enough to prevent failure of progress within the ‘game’!
I’ve used different words to talk about this dichotomy in the past I think, but, hmm, maybe this is not actually helping right now, I’ll leave it like this for now. Because what I really want to talk about is:
Timeless Truth
there are things that once discovered appear to be truths, impossible to refute or ignore. The author may have been aware of it or not; they may have intended it or not; but some aspects of what I’ve said above are not interpretation, they are facts.
droqen, Interpreting 靜夜思, and the Timeless Way
there is some infinite truth-space which I can move towards, but I genuinely can’t tell whether this is the death of ego or instead a blindness to it, like I’m believing there is a way to sense actual truth in art beyond myself when in fact I have simply identified my subjectivity as some objective thing!
droqen, Interpreting 靜夜思, and the Timeless Way
I have been thinking a lot about this ‘timeless truth’! We both read ‘The Timeless Way of Building’, which addresses it directly, but I’ve also been seeing similar ideas in other things I’ve been reading. Maybe for now I will just share some quotes from these readings, and connect it to process and practice next time…
Starting with Christopher Alexander in ‘The Timeless Way of Building’, talking about the timeless truth of a whole craft:
[…] the more one understands of painting, the more one recognizes that the art of painting is essentially one way, which will always be discovered and rediscovered, over and over again, because it is connected with the very nature of painting, and must be discovered by anybody who takes painting seriously. The idea of style is meaningless: what we see as a style (of a person or of an age) is nothing but another individual effort to penetrate the central secret of painting, […]
George Saunders quoted Milan Kundera in his latest ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain’, talking about how serious, attentive craft reveals a ‘suprapersonal wisdom’, a greater truth than the author could have intended themselves:
Not only is the novelist nobody’s spokesman, but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas. […] When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
Nobuyuki Yuasa translated Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and in the introduction describes Basho’s poetic ‘maturity’ in a story about the writing of his famous frog/pond haiku:
Our master was deeply immersed in meditation, but finally he came out with the second half of the poem
A frog jumped into water
– A deep resonanceOne of the disciples sitting with him immediately suggested for the first half of the poem
Amidst the flowers
Of the yellow roseOur master thought for a while, but finally he decided on
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pondThe disciple’s suggestion is admittedly picturesque and beautiful but our master’s choice, being simpler, contains more truth in it. It is only he who has dug deep into the mystery of the universe that can choose a phrase like this.
Yuasa goes on to explain Basho’s belief ‘that there [is] a permanent, unchangeable element (fueki) in all poetry‘. Curious…
Basho was a student of Zen Buddhism. Alexander’s Timeless Way makes frequent reference to Taoism. I want to know more about these philosophies myself…
Intro To Practice
There are other parallels in these books, too. Of letting go of your ‘images’ of self to better attain the timeless truths of your craft. Of letting the timeless truth reveal itself to you, through acts of pure honesty to yourself and nature, instead of you fighting to reveal what you think the truth is. And that kind of thinking resonates with me, and leads me towards rejecting design as a tool to point to these truths, and towards embracing going on that honest pursuit myself as enough to make something that others can use to find similar truths. It’s not ‘just’ leaving footprints, but a necessary way to get there.
But obviously, design is useful and important…so what are we doing when we do game design? What about when we do artful game design? What is it that I believe (and I do believe) that playing certain games, and making certain games, help me get closer to?