playing the rain woggle

“Videogames” is a hobby with a great deal of depth and room for study, but I think each videogame is more like a hobby with not a lot of depth. You can learn to play Mario really well, or you can learn to play the piano really well. You can learn Braid or you can learn Spanish.

Brevity is the dark souls of wit – Zeigfreid

I think you first need to immerse someone, but in an incomplete world, with enough holes so they can emerse through them.

Dripping self through the plotholes – Mer

…

I had a song that I wanted to play, but I never could get it to sound right on any instrument I ever encountered. To play my song, I invented an instrument… the RAIN WOGGLE.

The song doesn’t have a name, but I can describe the way that it makes me feel. It makes me feel nostalgic; it strikes a longing into my heart; it makes me feel immensely far away and removed from something I miss very much, even though I can scarcely remember what it is that I’m missing — if I ever really knew it in the first place.

You cannot hear me play the song. Separated as we are in our faraway cities, in our different towers, you cannot hear me play the song. If you could, things might be different.

…

You cannot hear me play the song. But the instrument itself is portable, replicable, infinite. It is not a conceptual thing prone to interpretation; it has a definite and unchanging shape; it is a digital object. Unlike my song, it is immune to separation by distance, it has a name, and you can have an exact copy.

…

A guitar has a finite number of strings. The human voice has a decibel limit. A piano is not a fish.

When I designed the RAIN WOGGLE, certain limitations followed. I did not disallow (or allow) certain things to ensure sure it was played “correctly.” I was one person designing an instrument for one person for playing only one very specific song. I knew that I would play it correctly enough. I made it that way. I made sure that to the first and only expert, it would make perfect sense.

An incomplete instrument complete in only one way, but the most important way:

It was the best instrument in the world for playing one song.