Author: Droqen

I’m lucky enough to live with someone who reads Mandarin with some fluency. Together we were reading translations of 靜夜思, and I was struck by how much her attempts to literally translate it to me captured which these plain-English translations did not. Wikipedia presents this translation of the third and fourth lines of the four-line… Continue reading Interpreting 靜夜思, and the Timeless Way

Today I read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost through a few times with my partner, and discovered (with the help of a “poem guide”) that I had spent over half of my life so far supposing I understood it when in fact I had misunderstood it crucially in a common way, common to… Continue reading The Road Not Taken

I want to describe to you a kind of game that I like to play, and a kind of game that I want to play.  https://letterclub.games/2021/05/01/haiku-games/ Bogost’s PLAY ANYTHING attempts to define play as an act of appreciation and acceptance of a new perspective, through living it. Playgrounds are boundaries inscribed around materials, and to… Continue reading play is form

The value of a constrained play-space, in this case by contrast we have Gris’ highly unconstrained meaning-play-space, does not come from there being more or less constraint. It comes, explicitly, from DESIGN. Constraints are put into place, and affordances are added!, in order to make undirected play more often fruitful and meaningful to a wanderer —… Continue reading playgrounds cannot be designed!

I watched Zach Gage’s talk from PRACTICE 2014, Designing for Problem-Solvers, today, and it really knocked my socks off. Jack: I think this video might be very helpful to you regarding playgrounds! It’s extremely good. I cannot overstate how much I love it. The key with these goals is that all of these things are… Continue reading playgrounds can be designed!

I guess the theory I have is thatgames are like white sugar and white bread,distillations of experiences down to their purest form.Or, they can be.And sometimes you need pure MSG,not the rest of the tomato that comes with it,for the sake of creating something particularwhich could not otherwise be tasted, or experienced. But we play… Continue reading Whole Grain Decisions

Hey everyone! This is a meta-post about letterclub.games itself, but I suppose also about the idea of videogamedesigntheory and my relationship to it. As I peel the internet from my bones and multipresence with it I realize I have always been the one to decide how many people I have to be and any number… Continue reading i need a biiiig hole to fall into. on themes, and theories.

The aspiration of HAIKU GAMES to be like haiku, like this one specific form of poetry, is often inspirational to me in and of itself. It’s a place I like to return to. Is the poet responsible for being understood? By way of @johnnemann (a Twitter user, a real person)’s tweet, “Here’s what I have… Continue reading Difficult Poetry

Oops, turns out I wasn’t done. Jack, this is what happens when you make two blog posts in quick succession: I do too. After writing and packing away Emerging, I immediately recognized: an emotional theme I’m very interested in is something like “revealing freedoms through contrast.” Seeing and owning the transformation from being constrained to… Continue reading What (or Who) is responsible? Whoever takes responsibility.

After some thinking on What isn’t emersive?, I’m tempted to say “I guess there’s actually no such thing as emersive design.” It’s more about what the player chooses to do. The other side of an emersive work is an emerging player, which is to some degree outside of our control. As some result of playing… Continue reading Emerging