All that time I thought mainly about how to intervene in the dangerous act of game making. This is all that I came up with.

The haiku game has become a salve of sorts for a deep personal dissatisfaction with games as they are now. I return to it often, each time I recognize a tiredness and seek an oasis. This is an attempt to draw a map to that oasis.

love, droqen

player does something (with a machine) => player judges

really lovely post

i particularly liked “I’d like to make more games that ask players, explicitly, to judge things.” and “Screw that!”.

this made me think about making explicit an avenue for offering judgement in Untitled Tile Merging Game. it’d be cool if you could tell the game “Screw you!” and it would say sorry.

I have this feeling though… what about process? There is a joy in painting in producing any work of art and it varies with form. Ceramics, tiny lego robots, musical instruments… the pleasure of the process of making art varies with each of them. Making a guitar is a very different process from playing one, which is different again from listening to music. I feel like there is a symmetry here, like on both sides of the painting there can be this “kick”. In my experience, when I’m doing something and it “clicks” that sets my mind on fire. This is often the pleasure of puzzle games, right, the “ah-ha” moment, rather than or in addition to the “kick”… making braid was a process, full of its own pleasures and feelings, playing it is a process with pleasures and feelings, and then appreciating it afterwards, letting it kick your brain with its content, is another thing.

I guess we’ve called the “process” of play a rollercoaster up above. But is that it? Feels cartesian, like trying to separate the music from the instruments. Suppose we want to play with love as you suggest, and we make a game. That process must be what matters to us, right? Because there’s not way the author’s mind can receive the same “kick” as the consumer’s mind, considering all the context. Maybe that process of playing love on a game-o-phone and some goal out at optical infinity.

And then we have a game, and in making a game we’ve made a work of art that can give folks a kick but we’ve also made an instrument, a new form, that someone must learn to play.

In some cases they have to learn to play so they can get they key on level 4 to unlock the door on level 6 so they can see a painting… but in other cases it is in the play that they get their kicks! A game player is like a painter with no canvas. Unless they record the activities of the game, they won’t end up with a painting. They’ve played an instrument, felt the pleasure of process, been kicked, perhaps, but are left otherwise empty-handed. It’s art that requires the audience to become an artist in a different medium! Like if the only way to appreciate a painting was to play music to it.

I think I feel a letter forming!