the medium is video-
games. the language
is, therefore, action:
what do i do?

it is my belief that art,
kind art, successful art,
good art, seeks to not
only stir up questions
but resolve them, to
the best of its artist’s
or artists’ ability or ab-
ilities.

to do: through giving
the player a task to do,
resolve turbulence re-
garding identity in the
player’s life, especially
identities that speak of
what the player does or
tells them what to do.

who am i, and thus,
what is there for me
to do?

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 of discovery, except self-discovery; no prototypes or design decisions are to be made or even considered

a haiku game is made using ready at hand materials, tools, platforms, techniques, and meanings

one prepares to make a haiku game only by making haiku games.

a haiku game has as few parts as possible

a haiku game’s few parts are all simple ^{_{[added june 11]}}

a haiku game’s complex parts are all fake. ^{_{[added june 11]}}

a haiku game cannot be summarized.

[..] ‘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 lose its satisfaction.

I have a fear [..]

[..] I like the discourse, because it constructs a framework within which I can feel like I am beginning to understand it. So that it may become ‘ready-to-hand’, so that I can… hmm. What is it I that I want to do with it?

i have a fear.

today… i spent a few hours making a Very Nice D-pad, and it was sort of fun, sort of frustrating work, and i began to wonder: how necessary is it to have a Very Nice D-pad anyway?

today… i went on a walk with my friend Chris and said i was going to make some haiku games and he said he could guess what haiku games were based on our ongoing discourse, and his guess wasn’t what i thought it would be.

he said something like “Haiku is an art form about writing in the moment, it is about the act of doing and not planning, observing and not interpreting,” and i thought, hmm, that’s actually a huge component that i was missing

–

i think that maybe my Very Nice D-pad is a symptom of something internal and insidious.

haiku games are only distant as long as we keep them out there, out of reach, in the land of discourse and not reality.

i have a fear that the discourse constructs a framework within which i can feel like i am always beginning to understand something and never arriving at the station — that i am looking for stairs to build instead of climbing the sheer rocky face and getting scraped and stuff — and, most of all?, that everydayness is the only possible cure.

i have a fear of making things and standing by them! of making things and recognizing that they are not as wonderful as all these ideas and meta-ideas are. only one way to find out though. only one way to get over the fear.

–

time to make some everyday, perfectly ordinary haiku games.

–

ADDENDUM

regarding droqen’s “fear” (newforum.droqen.com)

“time to make some everyday, perfectly ordinary haiku games”

above

i wrote this as my conclusion to ‘fear’, but i don’t know, i don’t know yet. i do believe in doing the work. but i also suppose that someone must do the work of curation and presentation. it must become normal and ordinary, but someone must do the work of making it normal, of understanding what normal even is, of discovering the information “what is a haiku game?” from the context of not what it means to a creator but what it means to an explorer, an appreciator, a recipient.

what does it mean to seek out a haiku game?
what does it mean to be satisfied by a haiku game?
what does it mean to wait for a new haiku game?
what does it mean to remember a haiku game?
what does it mean to share a haiku game?

when i ask “what is a haiku game?” i am asking all of these questions.

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 friend on the bus) and since then have been thinking about “diary games.”

Jack, I am wondering today, have I misunderstood haiku? Is it a form of minimalist cleverness, a beautiful sleight of hand, or has haiku always been nothing more than the breezy diary entry of a master diarist? As with all things, I suppose that the truth lies in the middle — or rather, in both places at once.

To put too fine a point on it, when you write “Perhaps I want to make games with the same knowing, zen wink about nature, as my favorite haiku,” I wonder if this is failing to seek what they sought. Does the diarist wink at all? Or is it that only something that can be seen in the tea leaves after the tea has all been drunk?

Thinking, And Not Thinking

You write of “good ideas” and being “interested in the shape” and I am caught thinking, emersion places these objects firmly outside the work. They motivate the work, but they do not get wrapped inside of it.

Anyway, to get away from being too prescriptive or even descriptive about haiku games, exotic creatures, I’m favouring the term “diary games,” as a very good synonym for that portion of haiku games interesting me at the moment.

I’d like to have my good ideas in my everyday life. “This is something I’d like to capture and remember” is a type of good idea. “I’d like to catch it using this shape” is another. To me, this is emersion through diary games. The good ideas are not “about” anything emersive, but the act of having them out in the world is itself emersive.

So, diary games.

Pictured above: “One Particular Garden Market“

There is an itch that I want to scratch, and I had a feeling Zeigfreid’s Miraculous Coincidences would help me get there:

“Why was Jermaine painting landscapes in the first place? Suppose that he was trying to make art which notices reality; suppose that he was trying to celebrate, or capture, or express the beauty that he saw in the world around him. His abstract art still does that, certainly for him but also for those with an eye for it . . . I have to work deeply with the medium, to understand how it is expressive . . . you can’t escape needing a medium.“

. . .

I read a book in a thrift store about ‘haiku drawings,’ and I’ve been kicking myself for not picking it up. I flipped to a random page, totally random, and the author gave a quick description of what it is that haikus are: descriptions, snapshots, a noticing of some moment or thing.

Perhaps I am in the minority here, which would be okay with me, but I’d like to put forward a picture of these diary games.

very close to home for me. So close that I scarcely know what to say about it! “Yes, this is the way it is”.

from Confused about my dreams, as always

“Yes, this is the way it is.”

I began writing this with the thought in mind that the “wink” was a wrong goal and “yes, this is the way it is” was a right goal. But I’ve realized that they are both interpretive goals, goals about the way a thing is received and taken.

“Yes, this is the way it is” has a calming effect. A wet, warm blanket on discourse. It strikes me as emersive in a way. I guess it is an aesthetic goal that I have.

I like the cleverness of the wink when it comes, the noticing-of-the-medium when it is effortless, but catching something true and rendering it in a way that is both brief and successful… hmm.

The expertise and care it takes to do that feel right to me, and they feel like they take the work that I want to be doing:

1. Remain emersed, gathering experiences and inspiration
2. Engage with, immerse oneself in, some medium — sufficient and necessary — to catch the stuff in one smooth motion
3. Finish it, and let all these nice interpretations bubble to the surface — is there a wink? does it emerse me? does it make me feel something?
4. React to these interpretations. Adjust the process accordingly.

Knowing without naming

“But do you think the process really leaves nothing behind? No imprints of knowing? No experience internalized?”

There are imprints, but they are invisible. They are not lines. At least not for me. I’m terrible at documenting what I’ve learned, and even more terrible from really learning from documentation. The very best internalized experience has no imprint…

“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.

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.

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 justify a title that I thought indicated something cool:

• bowling without bumper rails, leaving the machine zone, and emerging
• “good shape”
• the paradox of secret design
• momentum: a post-mortem of acceleration and velocity
• prototyping & outlining
• then again, signifying nothing
• Energeia

Zeigfried: You orchestrated the meeting of myself and one Christopher Langmuir, and our interaction lead me to recognize and come to terms with my long-time disconnect with theory-speak. I like to get things done, and I worry that for example talking about haiku games is sort of antithetical to getting things done. Although I do value it, I want to find a way to integrate it into a practice.

Like, could I make a practice of making haiku games? I don’t know that talking about haiku games would get me to that place, I expect (and fear!) that trying to make a haiku game every day would bring the concept crashing down about my ears in an uninteresting way, that is, in a way that did not do much except prove to myself that I can’t make haiku games.

Uninteresting in the context of haiku game discourse.

Anyway, I wanted to share this poem. It came out in the course of thinking about process.

The image below is a screenshot of what Kinopio shows you every time you create a new space: a strong inspiration for these process-thoughts.

I had wanted to write “prototyping & outlining” on the topic which this poem is “about,” but I was not happy with prosing my thoughts, not happy with writing articles whose intention is to clearly lay out the facts. I don’t know the facts. But I do know how to catch one tiny feeling that floats along in the cloud.

Anyway, here is the poem I wrote, I hope you like it

mind map

ten or ten thousand points

connect a point with a line
arrange unruly swarms into
triangles, cubes, networks,
latticework becoming

overdeveloped structure
too busy to navigate
too laden with meaning
too dense to be read

start over having realized

past a half threshold notating
not-lines would be kinder
as connections form erasing
only indications of disconnect

slowly achieving what we started with in the first

ten or ten thousand points
no lines drawn between them
as quiet maps devoid of all dis-
harmonies have nothing left to say.

“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 about computers: we also have mathematics and logic. Jack: I can relate to what you said a couple years ago, that you felt “much more familiar with truths in logical, didactic forms than the kind you see in poetic forms.” It’s comforting to have a scheme, the “promise of a solution, of a right way to do things“ — some beautifully unambiguous feedback that we’re on the right track.

Years, years, years ago, I was having lots of conversations about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, as if one was better than the other; then I convinced myself that one was not better than other; and now I’m back to present a quick framework that shows how one is clearly better than the other.

Prelude over. The real blog post begins here.

Who Is Responsible?

Oh, it’s this old theme again

Extrinsic rewards or feedback take the responsibility of judgement away from the player, but the more important part is that the responsibility is taken away from the player and placed into the hands of a machine. Machines are good at measuring some things, not so much others.

That relationship goes like this:

The player does something -> The machine judges

Intrinsic rewards or feedback are things that are ‘intrinsically’ valuable; that is, the player values them for themselves. Supposedly! But this distinction has never been good enough for me. As usual, I do prefer a clean solution, a measurable solution So, to contrast the above relationship, we have one where the roles are reversed:

The machine does something -> The player judges

This also reveals a couple of interesting variants, but rather than get into any sort of taxonomy of discrete cases, let’s just make a nice two-axis graph.

Responsibility Graph

I have the feeling that most discussions of interactivity have focused on the horizontal axis: who acts? If it is on the right, if the players act, then it is an interactive experience, thus a game of some sort. If it is on the left, then it is a non-interactive experience, thus not a game…

I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a framework for discussing what lies on the vertical axis. Am I judging, or is the computer/machine/system judging?

The Consequences.

I opened with a short quote from Thinking in Systems. A quote from later in the same section goes like this: “Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models.”

It’s interesting, because there are things that computers are good at, that they’re great at. Computers are great at refereeing “hard” systems, and as a result the bottom-right-hand portion of our graph is well-covered by those parts of videogames — where you do something, and the computer gives you feedback on whether you did a good thing or a bad thing and you use that to update your model.

Okay, it’s time to get into the most inflammatory topic ever…

Aside: Are Videogames Art?

I won’t introduce this long-standing and ridiculous debate, haha. I bring it up in a mostly tongue-in-cheek kind of way. But there’s something very interesting to me to think about how “videogames” and “art” fit in to this graph. Of course we do judge videogames ourselves, at some level. But there is a significant proportion of gameplay which involves being judged ourselves — not by people, but mainly by machines who are best at measuring a limited spectrum of what may be judged.

Okay, back to the real topic.

The Consequences. (No, Really.)

I opened with a short quote from Thinking in Systems. A quote from later in the same section goes like this: “Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models.”

Even later: “No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value.“

The consequences: The part of the medium of videogames that relies on a computer to referee — and actually, the part of our world that relies on rigid systems to referee our actions — are incapable of responding appropriately to any value that cannot be measured.

I always say this, but I think that’s the form of something that’s been bothering me about games for a long time, and I suppose the shape of what haiku games feel like they promise an escape from. If only we can realize them.

Tools, the future.

For me, this represents a heartening tool; the first step to solving a problem is identifying it, right? Getting my hands on it.

I’d like to make more games that ask players, explicitly, to judge things. More gameplay that asks you, hey, what did you think of that, what did it make you feel?

What category does this belong to?

Which option is better?

And, especially and specifically, asking these questions in a way that does not feed back into the judgement of the machine. Games that let you make a ‘build’ of capabilities don’t count if your judgement is then judged to be correct or incorrect in some concrete way by the game-system.

(E.g. Magic: the Gathering allows me to make judgements about what card is better and what card is worse, but then my judgement may be proven true or false by actually seeing how the card functions during play. Screw that!)

P.S.

Thank you for reading my letter, as always <3 I wrote it all the way through in one go and basically did not edit it. I’d like to improve on that, but damn, blogging software makes it so easy to write something and just publish it straight away. What would it even be like to ask someone else to really judge my words? To improve my writing, to edit? Scary as hell.

Sounds fun.

Not sharing these feelings, however, is the core of this topic, meaning and metameaning; in meaning, for a moment, I said, “what is a game if not a means to an end? . . . i feel ready to transcend form.”

Dear Jack, on my first read of your Catching up post, I was inspired by what you wrote here — then on the second, I was uncertain about my own feeling — and on the third, I had arrived firmly in this place of wanting to escape form.

I can see a nice through-line from many of my earlier puzzle games through ComboJumper – a focus on movement mechanics in a grid, and a reverence for mechanical interplay in that space. It’s encouraging to see evidence of that kind of journey.

These are mechanical concerns, mechanical patterns. But are these emotions? Are these feelings? Are these the building blocks of feelings, or mere building blocks? You have a medium, but what are you pushing through it?

You don’t have to answer that! I’m interested, but I also am not sure how to start a conversation like that. I’m not sure I’d want to answer it.

haiku games as a metaform, for metameaning

I am supposing that haiku games as we have been discussing them are not a discussion of meaning, but a discussion of metameaning, a discussion that supposes to transcend any particular meaning, and therefore never touches meaning at all.

That is, what if our construction of Haiku Games is as misguided, as simply confused, as the hope to make games with some meaning, any meaning at all.

I am left wanting – wanting for something more than the crystalline perfection of the design. I’ve learned this system, but now what?

~ Jack, HAIKU games

I want to discover beauty about the world – my world – through play. Beauty of a natural flavor, rather than the mathematical beauty you can find within systems themselves.

~ Jack, HAIKU games

what is it that we want our games to do to each other?

~ droqen, meaning, for a moment

I dip in and out of theory, but I wonder — is theory where I go when I’m afraid to share a real feeling?

We could spend eternity describing the parameters for beauty and die without ever finding it.

But that’s what we’re here for, right?

We want to find things.

Meaning, or feeling, or something like it. Not the idea of aliveness, but aliveness itself.

Has letterclub helped me find meaning? I think so, but I am finding it more and more difficult to engage with theory (to excuse my, or our, slowed pace). Has letterclub helped you find meaning? Is there something else we should be doing together instead now that we are where we are?

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 point [when] you [give] me a shot I couldn’t return.

…

It’s really amazing how much a game changes, how different it becomes, when you change whatever you are scoring for.
Let’s score each other for bravery. . . .
Let’s score each other for grace, flow, harmony, endurance, agility. Let’s score ourselves.
It all comes down to this: What do we want to get points for?

What do we want to get points [in return] for?

We have been asking this a lot lately.

• “what is it that we want our games to do to each other?“
• “What do I. . . want from games?“

And, it is a good question to ask, but DeKoven’s formulation here is a revelation to me–it is the same question about the content of games, but given in the language and form of games.

It brings us into the language of points. Rewards.

What [purpose] do we want to get points for?

We have expressed some doubt of the value of scoring, throughout letterclub. Why points? We can reject them:

• “Pursuing a high score is not enough. It must be done as a way to play well, as a way to preserve something else.“
• “I decided at some point that I could abandon a book halfway through and still “check it” in my imaginary list of things I wanted to read. And that experience sufficed.“

And why not reject them? I feel that reasons to accept points have slipped through my fingers over and over again. I have been a great points nihilist in my time.

What do we want to get points for?

Returning to this question again with a more full understanding of its double meaning gives us two questions, not one:

1. What do we want to [do, and] get points for [doing]?
2. [Why] do we want . . . points. . .?

I have answers.

1. What do I want to do? In the abstract, that’s easy: I want to do things that feel right and good — things that align with my values, the way I see the world, the way I feel the world. When I do them, it’s obvious which things feel right and which ones feel wrong.

Points? Why would I, or anyone, want points?

2. Why do I want points? I don’t value points — I value doing things that help people, doing things that people want, doing things that make people happy, more alive, better. Things that make me happy, more alive, better. I value understanding others and myself and the world around me. Learning is fun and occasionally useful.

Points, what about points? Why do we want points, then?

I’ve found it easy to say that points are vapid, meaningless. Money and likes and subscribes are all foolish and absurd measurements of something which occasionally aligns with my values — and at least as often misaligns with them.

But they are measurements of something.

And, I think this is what points are — not just points but any kind of schema of value judgement — unambiguous value judgements, clear feedback on right and wrong, that sort of thing. Why points? I now suppose it is because of their form and what that affords us in terms of their content: we can see what they are saying, and think something of it.

Points.

Points, rewards, and goals: they are the absurd tools of fools, of those without the foresight to realize that all is meaningless, that nothing can be said or held or believed for certain! Or in other words they are our imagined armour against nihilism; but it’s not that points, rewards, and goals say “Nothing matters, so let’s make up meaning.”

Of course something matters, but it’s impossible to say exactly what matters, or how it matters, or why it matters. These are our stakes in the ground. We know they are wrong. All precise statements of truth are deeply, and someday provably, wrong. Points are such precise statements of value. But we have to say something!

Points are one of many attempts to say what is good.

But that doesn’t answer our question–

What do we want to get points for?

…

We want to get points for our values.

I feel most alive when I can trust my instincts to push me in the right directions: towards what both feels good and is good.

I think when Frank Lantz said, “I want you to disappear into it . . . I want you to want its hooks in you and then I want those hooks to go in,” he was talking about something similar to this.

The world is a complicated place. When I say that the world is a complicated place, what I mean is that I have to think too much to figure out those things which both feel good and are good.

But I can find these things now and then. I think, a lot of the time, this is what games are all about. This is what flow is all about. This is what immersion is all about.

When you feel your values completely align with the values of the world that immediately surrounds you… What do we call that ephemeral state of sublime ignorance? There’s nothing like it.

Almost there.

once more, with feeling:

what do I want to get points for?

I want to feel the feeling of being connected to the center of the earth, now and then. I want to want to do something, it doesn’t matter what yet, I just want to know that the thing that I’m doing is the most important thing in the world right now, and when I finally fall out of the sky and remember to notice the rest of the world, I don’t want to think I was lost in some empty fabrication. I want to feel like there was some sort of connection:

that when i was lost i was lost in a beautiful piece of reality.

P.S. Dear Zeigfreid,

There is often nothing inherently in there asking you to appreciate the whole as a whole.”

~ Ziggy, Videogames are process

your letter, especially this quote, deeply underlies mine; I thought a lot about what it means to appreciate the whole as a whole. I wondered, what is the whole you might be asked to appreciate? But more than that I wondered, what is that most inherent mechanism by which a game asks you to appreciate something, anything?

Points, points, points.

• in Half-Real, Jesper Juul explores the nature of games as a medium caught between “real rules and fictional worlds”.
• in Across Worlds and Bodies, Brendan Keogh suggests that games criticism and analysis ought to move past determining which elements of a game are and are not the game and instead focus on the “phenomenological pleasures of videogame play through [game-and-player] cyborg bodies”.
• in Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai describes the impacts of art through the lens of affects–emotional states making actions, transformations, and other emotional states more or less possible.

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 a book which is not about games at all but discusses tone supported and conveyed by the material of the thing without submitting to that material for its own sake.

i feel ready to transcend form.

~

why define or rely on definitions of games or play in the first place?

i read Across Worlds and Bodies at Zeigfreid’s suggestion, in response to my expressing some negative feelings about the games criticism that i had read.

after reading: i suppose that i believe Keogh doesn’t go far enough, ultimately falling back into the formal argumentation he argues against — moving the focus from the meaninglessly material (“a pre-determined and arbitrary notion of ‘gameness’”) only to fall victim to an even deeper well of still-material clutter (“semiotics, actions, and systems . . . controllers, screens, rumble motors . . . characters, a projected world, music, menus”)

~

we’ve taken two steps forward–what if we now take three steps back?

rather than playing well, what is wellness itself, and how might we pursue it?

rather than LIVING games, what is aliveness itself, freed from form?

rather than HAIKU games, what is haikuness?

~

jack: in your recent letter, focusing on game-plays, you wrote

“I want to get back to my point of there being something else beyond playing well. That playing well allows you to access. . . . It is a latent, deep feeling of ALIVENESS . . .”

i’d like to catch you in this moment — before you returned to that world of material, of invitations to play, of boundaries, of space.

in some way i regret moving the conversation from HAIKU games to LIVING games — i drew a line through one ‘games’ topic to another ‘games’ topic, instead of moving past the gameness of games at all.

what is it that we want our games to do to each other?

what does it mean?