Author: Droqen

start with an oceanof questions of id-entity. who am i? the medium is video-games. the languageis, therefore, action:what do i do? it is my belief that art,kind art, successful art,good art, seeks to notonly stir up questionsbut resolve them, tothe best of its artist’sor artists’ ability or ab-ilities. to do: through givingthe player a task… Continue reading to do

a haiku game does not have a game loop a haiku game neither features nor contains decisions interesting or otherwise however, a haiku game may use those and any other elements of games so long as it remains unpoisoned by their ambitions. [added june 11] the development of a haiku game does not involve moments… Continue reading a HAIKU games manifesto

[..] ‘what are these games we dream of? why do they feel so distant? where are the stairs that lead to them?’ [..] it sounds like… you imagine it as this thing that should always be out of reach! And as soon as you would start to treat it as an everyday thing, it would… Continue reading fear

Pictured above: “Hawk Cliff Today“ I do not think that Hawk Cliff Today successfully or appropriately conveys what it is that I wanted it to capture for me, but I showed it to a friend on the bus (on the bus! what an amazing thing, that i can show a tiny Godot videogame-thing to a… Continue reading Yes, this is the way it is.

“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… Continue reading playing the rain woggle

Dear letterclub: I have been trying to (metaphorically) pen many letters over the past few months entitled things of more pretention and less, always intending to convey something and failing. Some of my unpublished pieces’ titles, which will never see the light of day because they were 90% title and 10% trying and failing to… Continue reading excuse my letter silence, here is a poem

Computers can’t pass human judgement on things. “Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. . .” (Thinking in Systems (Meadows), p175; full-er quote here) Computers can measure. Computers are computing machines, and they’re great at measuring. This isn’t just… Continue reading asking the player

I played Slay the Princess very recently and have had very specific feelings as a result, ones about the plurality of a human existence, the sort of feelings that I have not much been in the habit of considering or sharing. I will continue to not share them. Not sharing these feelings, however, is the… Continue reading meaning and metameaning

Keeping track of the score doesn’t make tennis into tennis. . . . part of tennis as we’ve come to understand it is in trying to make the other player miss. . . . because it helps each of us to experience playing well, it is right and good that I reward you with a… Continue reading What do we want to get points for?

what is a game if not a means to an end? these three works describe a line which moves from form to effect, escaping from a world in which rules are “half” of games — into one where a game has rules but is not defined by them in any exclusive sense — to finally… Continue reading meaning, for a moment