Author: Jack

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… Continue reading Confused about my dreams, as always

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?…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.…Has… Continue reading My Meaning

What have I been doing? making? reading? thinking? planning? in 2023? I last wrote in April, six months ago! It seems longer. Life has asserted itself in my life, for the past year at least. I’m surprised I got any letters in earlier in the year! I have felt so distracted from thinking deeply about… Continue reading Catching up, 2023

I’m glad you are posing we take this step back. I had been wanting to, sensing the vacuum inside our usage of ‘ALIVE’, and worrying we were lost in search of the form of something we didn’t understand, or at best was different between us. I was going to pose the same to you, but… Continue reading Stepping back

‘ALIVE’ and ‘LIVING’ are strange words. I feel in some sense, we are using them as a stand-in for whatever it is we want to talk about when we don’t know the words. We are trying to wield them, see how they moves, how they fit with other words and ideas, to better understand them.… Continue reading focusing on game-plays

I want to get past this question of responsibility – is the game’s design going to reveal life to any player? Or is the player going to create life from any game? Or should we hope for something in the middle? me, in Understanding Aliveness I am worried my worries about responsibility are a semantic… Continue reading Play to LIVE

I really like this idea, of trying to better understand this feeling of aliveness, of trying to find it in games, which are, on their surface, animated and interactive and so obviously alive, but sometimes missing that special feeling. What exactly is the feeling? What does it mean to feel this feeling? droqen – LIVING… Continue reading Understanding Aliveness

Indeed, what is letterclub? A briefer history to fill in the gaps: droqen and I started talking about haiku games when, in my feedback notes after play-testing Yrrkey’s Paradise, I mentioned that the game was close to realizing my idea of ‘haiku games’, an idea I was having trouble truly interrogating on my own. droqen… Continue reading HNY 2023

I realize that I like a challenge — tying myself into knots trying to realize some impossible structure. The act of making art, for me, is designing a puzzle for myself that nobody has ever solved before… and then solving it. droqen – art as answer-space I feel the same way, for the most part.… Continue reading art as play

Artistic license can’t outwit evidently bad rhyme or bad meter. -droqen, coy form I thought, ‘nu-uh, I’ll show you!’. But it is true, without some greater trick, a limerick with broken form is hard to get away with. The form is limiting, but as always, that can be a source for creative expression – constraints… Continue reading I once met a man from