Pokemon Red/Blue (1996) for the GB is 373 kb and takes between 30 and 100 hours to finish (although you might spend much, much longer playing it). It was developed by a team of ~35 people (depending on how you count), including 5 people credited for map design, 6 for monster design, and 4 for game scenario. There is only one person credited with game design, but you can imagine that with such a small team the reality is probably more collaborative.

Pokemon is in every way a deeper game than Dragon Quest. Comparing the stats for both games, we can see that: the file size has increased by a factor of six; the team responsible is double the size; the playtime is reported to be between 3 and 10 times longer. If we take a step back and look at Pokemon compared to Dragon Quest holistically I think it is reasonable to say that Pokemon is a significantly richer game than Dragon Quest. I’m a big fan of both games, but Pokemon is a much deeper, more engrossing, more personal experience. The experience of playing Pokemon feels more expressive, more nuanced, and more full of interesting little mysteries, questions, and rumours.

Pokemon Gold/Silver (1999) had a similar team size, with a similar focus on monster design, map design, and scenario. The ROM weighs in at 710 kb and, in a marvel of technology, it essentially includes the entire previous game’s world. Once you become the champion of the Johto region, you unlock the ability to return to the Kanto region and go on a second gym tour. I cannot convey to you the impact that this had on me when I played the game the first time. The game is reported to take between 40 and 200 hours to clear. By virtue of the structure of Pokemon games, as well as how much code and content these games shared, I think it is reasonable to say that Gold/Silver is richer than Red/Blue by some factor. Gold/Silver includes all kinds of subtle improvements over Red/Blue: tweaks to inventory management; the battle system; new types; pokemon have genders (for better or for worse); there is breeding; the game has a day/night cycle, etc… The ROM only doubled in size, but the depth of gameplay feels like it grew by a factor of ten!

The steps from Dragon Quest to Pokemon Red/Blue, and then to Pokemon Gold/Silver each involved less than 10x increase in what I would like to to call “size”, but subjectively I would say they each resulted in a greater than 10x increase in what I have been calling richness.

Pokemon Sword/Shield (2019) weighs in at a whopping 12.4 gb (18,000 times bigger than Pokemon Gold/Silver). It is said to take between 30 and 100 hours to finish. The game was developed in 2 years by a team of roughly 600 people. This team includes more than 100 members of the 3D graphics section, and the credits include thirteen “3D Graphics Section Cooperative Companies”. That is to say, we have no way of knowing exactly how many people were working on 3D graphics. Suffice it to say that at least 1/6th of the entire team was graphics. To the game’s credit there is also a significant “World Planning Section” that includes around 70 people, with 16 on monster design. I personally enjoyed playing Sword/Shield, and I thought that the setting in particular was quite charming and well thought out.

You can probably see where I’m going with this: I think that if a ROM is 18,000 times bigger, or a team is 20 times bigger, or a budget is however many times bigger, then we should expect to see a corresponding increase in… something. In particular though in my case I would like to focus on the ROM size rather than the team size, or budget. I personally believe that if a game is some number of times bigger, then it should also be some number of times richer, deeper, or gooder.

I realize that this is a naive premise: that the size of a videogame should map to the richness of that game. It’s silly, I understand that. Imagine if I made a similar claim about the weight of a work of art.

Michelangelo’s “David” (1504) weighs roughly 5,660 kg while “Mona Lisa”, produced in the same year, weighs only 8 kg. Am I claiming that we should expect “David” to be 3 orders of magnitude “better” or “richer” than “Mona Lisa”? That’s absurd too. It’s reductionist thinking to the extreme. The impact of a work of art has roughly nothing to do with it’s size, weight, or carbon footprint.

At the same time, it isn’t wrong to say that Mona Lisa may be (ironically) a denser work. That is, if we think about the amount information packed into the Mona Lisa per gram, compared to David… Hmm.

But that is comparing apples to oranges. Imagine instead a series of large naked old testament man statues, each larger and more ornate than the last. Is there not a point of diminishing returns? At some point I think it becomes reasonable to say “no, I will not make a bigger statue”.

—

So, I admit that this is a silly premise. However, I think that underneath the layers of silliness there is a kernel of solid criticism here. Without defining exactly what “good” means, and acknowledging that this is not a nuanced lens through which to think about videogames or anything else in general: I think a lot of people might agree that Pokemon Gold/Silver was at least “twice as good” as Pokemon Red/Blue. To me it’s a marvel that they managed to fit so much love, such an interesting world, and so many curious interacting systems, into such a relatively tiny ROM. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone could really say that Pokemon Sword/Shield was 18,000 times “better” than Gold/Silver.

I would not like to claim that the relationship I desire between the size of a game and it’s richness should be linear. In other words I would not expect a game 18,000 times bigger to be 18,000 richer. In fact, there might not need to be any increase in the so called “richness” of the output at all: but we should expect some kind of positive outcome. Because otherwise we’re just accelerating the heat death of the universe, burning down the forests, and releasing our precious entropy into space… for nothing! If I’m doing categorically the same work as you, but it costs me millions of times more resources, then there should be some expectation that my results will be better along some metric.

For example, GB Studio games are much bigger than GB games developed in C or assembly. I think the minimum ROM size is 512 kb, which is bonkers. If I ported my puzzle game Ark to GB Studio the resulting ROM would be 16 times bigger. That would be bad. The thing that GB Studio buys us with that increase in size is democracy: a lot more people from a lot more varied backgrounds can make games using low code tools and engines like Bitsy, Twine, GB Studio, or even big engines like Unity and Unreal. That’s worth it! That’s a good trade-off.

So what’s the trade-off that justifies Sword/Shield being 18,000 times bigger than Gold/Silver?

Well there is one enormous, shiny, glaring metric along which many might be tempted to talk about Sword/Shield being some number of times “better” than Red/Blue… which is to say graphics. Someone might argue that the game looks “orders of magnitude better”. But that argument would essentially boil down to the claim that 3D graphics look better than 2D graphics. That’s a tough sell. The way something looks obviously depends more on things like cultural context and the quality of the art direction, and should be basically independent of the medium, right? At least, over time that should be the case: there might be a culture that for some number of decades values oil paintings higher than acrylic, but that’s a transient state. The idea that 3D graphics are “better” than 2D graphics by any factor, is absurd. It is like saying that sculpture is just better than painting.

I reject the idea that Sword/Shield looks better than Gold/Silver. Or no wait, maybe I don’t: it was a rather lovely game at times, and Gold/Silver honestly looks kind of bland at times. So instead I’ll say that I reject the idea that Sword/Shield categorically looks better than Gold/Silver, or that this improvement accounts for the 18,000 times increase in size. It looks nice, but I think that fact is independent of the spend. It could have looked nice and without needing to be 12.4 GB.

—

OK, but what if the argument was not that 3D graphics “look better” but instead that they are “more immersive”. The addition of specular lighting, depth of field, grass physics, and robust facial expressions make the game more realistic and thus more immersive. I think that the this kind of thinking has taken hold in our society and is really at the root of my whole beef.

Consider this clod of dirt:

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I think videogames have a “resolution problem” that the real world doesn’t have. Imagine that the clod of dirt pictured above is freshly torn from the rich loamy forest floor. It is teaming with microbial life; probably contains a worm; or a pill bug; might include tunnels carved out by ants; almost certainly is laced with roots and mycelium engaged in a the chemical equivalent of a trade war. It is a master work of level design. You could study the contents of a clod of dirt for your entire life; you would never run out of things to learn and discover. Perhaps the demiurge would disagree but, from the perspective of a humble human, no: for our purposes reality has infinite resolution.

The real world does not have a resolution problem, and literally any human could spend a decade exploring literally any patch of dirt and grass on the surface of the earth. The real world is infinitely deep…

myself in Brevity is the Darksouls of Witt

This clod of dirt might just be more interesting than any videogame that ever has or ever will exist. Just like a potato chip (10 calories) contains more energy than a AAA battery (8 calories), only it is locked up in fats and difficult to access, this clod of dirt offers an inexhaustible universe of play… for those with the mechanism to unlock it.

I am not exaggerating when I say: it is quite possible that we exist in the richest, densest part of the entire universe. We live in a bustling soup of information in an otherwise mostly empty void.

Why then do we waste so much energy trying to simulate things when we already live in the most interesting part of the universe? Why are we so impressed when our videogames look “realistic”? The inescapable reality is that we will never be able to accurately simulate anything. Our videogames do not and will never look “realistic”. All it takes is a moment of close inspection to undo any multi-million dollar attempt to make a videogame look “realistic”. Just walk closer to anything than the designer intended you to, and it all falls apart immediately. Eyeballs become glassy and hollow; hair is made of thick tubes bouncing and crashing against one another; the textures of rocks and grass repeat endlessly; the texture of wood is a photo plastered across a flat plain; your arms clip through the walls. Billions of dollars are spent every year on making videogames more realistic, but because of the resolution problem all we can ever achieve is a superficial, hollow realism that falls apart when prodded. So stop doing it!

—

I like videogames! I like Super Hexagon, and Pokemon Crystal. I like Minecraft, and Starcraft, and maybe even Warcraft. I like Starseed Pilgrim, and The Beginner’s Guide.

I wish I could like Horizon Zero Dawn (2017). That game really felt like it had a novel setting, but it didn’t really click for me. I’ve heard that it cost $45 million dollars to make, and was 70 GB. When I installed it the minimum requirement was 100 GB. The team that built that game was more than 2,000 people and who knows how many uncredited contractors. It takes between 20 and 60 hours to finish. The recent sequel, Horizon Forbidden West (2022), cost $220 million dollars to make, wants 150 GB (of SSD no less), and offers 30 to 90 hours of play time.

There is a kind of obligatory spend mentality going on here. I feel like people are making what they think they should make, rather than really deciding what’s right. They are enacting a ritual to summon the sales figures. A friend of mine pointed out that if you make a game with motion-capture faces for dialog and such… you basically have to make the hair move realistically. Imagine the dissonance of having motion capture faces if the rest of your game looked like Half-Life. Similarly, there are games where customizing your character’s look is an important part of the experience. You can’t be punk if you can’t dress the way you want, and you can’t be cyberpunk if you’re not punk. In such a game if you give yourself a ponytail and a trench coat, they damn well better flap in the wind when you ride your motorbike down the rain soaked streets of New Neo Tokyo.

This line of reasoning, to me feels like it’s own antithesis. If motion capture is going to be indirectly responsible for bloating your game’s budget to $220 million dollars then maybe don’t do it. What game could possible need motion capture faces?

I’m not saying it’s bad to focus on graphics, either. I’m saying its bad not to focus. I’m saying it’s bad to try to simulate reality in a videogame for its own sake. Your goals should be the goals of your game. If you are making a game where you climb, “Shadow of the Colossus” style, over human faces then OK maybe you need motion capture and hair physics to get that feeling really tight. Imagine Aloy’s braided lock crashing towards you at break neck speeds as you climb the enormous seems of her vest! That’s gameplay! But if your game is just about talking to NPCs, and rolling, I feel like we’ve been doing that just fine without motion capture for like 50 years.

What about “Baldur’s Gate 3” though… is the argument that the dialog is so poorly written that it can’t stand on it’s own without mo-cap faces? I haven’t played the game, but I’ve heard it has good writing. Do these same people think “book” would be better with motion capture talking-heads? The comment I’ve heard is that the motion capture faces improved the overall experience. Fair enough! But it is then our responsibility to ask the question “how much did this improve the experience, and was it worth the cost?”. If we don’t ask these kinds of questions we are doing ourselves a disservice. I think in almost any case if you imagine the budget your favourite AAA game going towards more of that game, rather than hair physics, you will be imagining a better game. A better use of those resources.

As an example of a well-managed relatively recent project, consider the budgets of botw and totk.

BOTW released the same year as Horizon Zero Dawn was 14 gb, was developed by a team of roughly 1000 humans, and takes between 50 and 200 hours to beat. TOTK (2023) was 18 gb, was developed by a team of about 1500 humans, and takes between 60 and 250 hours to beat. That’s not even a 1.5x increase in the metric I care about, ROM size, and yet totk could easily be describe as 3x bigger in terms of just the explorable surface of the game. Looking at the two game more holistically, side-by-side, in terms of richness… love it or hate it, it is not a stretch to call totk 10x richer, or deeper than botw. I played both and prefered totk’s moment to moment gameplay but think botw had the better overall structure, so I’m not even that deeply biased one way or the other.

In addition, comparing botw, totk, and Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t even apples to oranges. They are so similar in so many ways. How did Nintendo do it? How does Nintendo keep doing this?

They build inward, complexifying, deepening, enriching, rather than building outward, embiggening, expanding. They are efficient and focused.

I’m not saying we should forbid the “big budget flashy hyper-realistic horse dick-physics” game development style. What saying is that I want to see a AAA studio make a $220 million dollar MUD. Or a $220 million dollar Dwarf Fortress. Or a $220 million dollar successor to Pokemon Gold/Silver. I want 100 GB of Gold and Silver!

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?

I’ve been enjoying listening Dreyfus. He is energetic about his topics, he is humble and curious, and has an perspective on western thought that resonates with me (or maybe its just that his energy is contagious? either way, his ideas and opinions seem constantly relevant to my gamedev/creative/art thoughts). I listened to maybe half? of his lecture series on Heidegger’s Being and Time, which was still a lot, and though I sometimes lost the thread amid the philosophical weeds and arcana, I generally could follow along and glean interesting insights from the series.

I started listening to a new lecture series of his though. It is a philosophy course that does close reads of great works of literature – books chosen by Dreyfus for their ability to ‘articulate a world’, and more specifically the real contemporary worlds of the authors, in a way that helps those communities better understand themselves and live in their world. Books that sustained a culture for hundreds of years, that were quoted again and again in everyday life as a way to remember that ‘yes, this is the way it is’. He starts with Homer’s Odyssey, and ends five books later with Melville’s Moby Dick. I am on lecture 4 out of 6 on The Odyssey, and it is great. I think you will like it, if you have the patience for a lecture series littered with some student questions you often can’t hear.

Here is the playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm1Xy4zHBXgBp3NAAK2CPj5ASOoQfF59X

“Yes, this is the way it is”.

– droqen in Yes, this is the way it is.

Such a serendipitous series to have started now… as we were discussing this feeling. As Sylvie was discussing Worlds with a capital W again, and the ways we find meaning in things. As we were wondering about our self-serving holes of curiosity and how we should treat them. Dreyfus’s investigations of these texts strike me as a well-trod adventure towards understanding ‘Yes, this is the way it is’ for different cultures in time, and treating them as different perspectives on human nature, rather than some ladder that humanity has been climbing. Dreyfus is always eager to point out the ways that the perspective of enlightenment thinking intentionally overlooks things that are actually very important! He applies Heidegger’s theory of moods as a tool to understand the ways that people find meaning in their actions. I’m not always convinced by his arguments on how he is reading certain passages, but it is always interesting to consider what he is saying. It is way more fun than the dry philosophy of Being and Time, and still hits on the most interesting themes from it.

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.

– droqen in fear

Do you think these are all necessary to answer before doing the work? It must be that doing the work will help to answer them… not that I am doing the work either But I think that it is okay for it not to be ‘normal’ for a bit, until it there is enough there to draw some lines between, and then erase.

I am still convinced that the formalism of my puzzle work is connecting me with my world in some way. I was asked by my Dreyfus recommender about my experience with puzzle games, if I felt like playing puzzle games enlightened me about my life at large. I said I have been struggling with that question for a while, but I think it must, otherwise I would not keep doing it, not feel so whole when I am in the right mood for it. He suggested I just have an energy to do these things, and if it wasn’t puzzle games, it would be something else, something else I felt a need to organize. It’s an interesting thought, treating it as a soothe for a fixation. But I’m not convinced that is all it is. It is not engaging with a cultural world as literally as Dreyfus’s great books, but I do know that puzzles are continuing to reveal clarity in forms to me that feel true in the largest way, in a way that does give me new perspective on my interactions with my world. They are just very, very abstract.

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…

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.

I have also recently been more driven by doing and less by talking. I also value our haiku games discourse, and generally talking through our half-formed ideas about ‘what are these games we dream of? why do they feel so distant? where are the stairs that lead to them?’

I wonder: why don’t you think you can make haiku games? What is interesting about haiku games discourse – which part of it do you value? Strange, I’m not sure I could answer these questions myself. But 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.

Perhaps it’s the same as yours: I have a fear that I won’t actually be able to make haiku games the way I imagine them because I’ll inevitably get interested in the shape of a system, instead of how I am feeling about it, and so all my good ideas will be about ways to better ‘see’ the system, and not about anything emersive. I am rarely motivated to make something to help me understand how I feel about it. I am way more often motivated by something I can kind of ‘understand’ or ‘explain’, but there are some tantalizing gaps there that I want to bounce into, get to grips with, and absorb into my brain map, something I can mentally navigate with swiftness, maybe even do tricks with — I want to make it ‘ready-to-hand’ in Heidegger-speak. To make it invisible, so I can… hmm. What is it that I want to do with it?

And then, about the discourse. I suppose 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?

Perhaps I want to make games with the same knowing, zen wink about nature, as my favorite haiku. A moment to stop and appreciate, in the language of systems and reactions. But you don’t need games to recreate reactions – games enable inter-actions! Am I interested in ways to probe a natural, zen moment? Perhaps this is where it breaks down… I like probing puzzle systems, theoretical frameworks, programming problems. I like having a haiku show me something, wink, and then show me something surprising, and yet mundane.

My partner is interested in making haiku games with me. We have brainstormed a bit. We have fun ideas, but I think there is a pattern where we get stuck figuring out what the interaction is. Maybe we are just looking to the wrong feelings and moments for inspiration.

I like your poem, though I trip on some of the loose grammar. It strikes me as an affirmation that we can see and know, without first organizing. But do you think the process really leaves nothing behind? No imprints of knowing? No experience internalized?

RAIN WOGGLE

droqen – playing the rain woggle

This story feels very close to home for me. So close that I scarcely know what to say about it! “Yes, this is the way it is”. I do feel that I often lose sight of the feeling while making an instrument. And even playing it after working on it feels…different. I suppose because the discovery is gone, already spent. But then, I also suppose there are things there even beyond discovery, that I like to trace through with my fingers, and smile at. That must be my song.

“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.

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 letterclub helped you find meaning? Is there something else we should be doing together instead now that we are where we are?
…
if you’re finding beauty, finding meaning, where are you finding it? How have you connected with things lately? How are you doing?

These are great questions! I have been eager to answer them for the past month… I think I have answers, but have been struggling to put them to words. The first question is a hard one, so let’s go in reverse order, to build up some momentum before we face it…

Finding Beauty

I have been finding beauty, and meaning. In life in general, through being more at peace with my self, my determinations, my relationships, and my anxieties. Living in the present. Dreaming of the future. Appreciating the past. Remembering to be patient. I am doing well. Not always, but often.

This is – not specific. Metameaning only, perhaps. But the meaning is there. Let’s see… Last month I went on a trip to Europe with my partner. We spent a lot of time walking in nature, looking at megaliths. Photographing fungi and rocks and trees and sunsets. Last year we bought our first house, we are learning to take good care of it, and dreaming about how to make it fully ours, slowly making progress. My job is engaging but occasionally overwhelming; I am seeking to do a better job at taming it. In all these things I find meaning. In all these I am reflecting on my relationship with the world around me, learning to shape it where I can, to choose HOW I want to shape it, and otherwise adapt where necessary.

And in games. Let’s come back to games in a bit.

Letterclub

Letterclub has been a big help in my quest to find meaning. We started letterclub at a time when I was not finding meaning in much at all anymore. Our discussions encouraged me to better understand what it was I was looking for. Everyone’s energy was invigorating, your ideas inspiring. I agree our discussion of Haiku Games was a form of metameaning – seeking to understand the shape of how we might relate to our world – find meaning in it – rather than any specific meaning that we wanted to feel. The form of meaning.

After becoming so disillusioned with my past interests in mathematical and puzzle formalisms, I wanted to connect with something again. And if it wasn’t going to be form, then it must be content. As if meaning could only be felt in relation to content. I think, after all of our discussions, after accepting responsibility for the way I relate to things and find meaning in them – after deciding to make Haiku Games about ‘the sun’ and routinely getting discouraged by my ability to sculpt the form of my games, after letting my curiosity repeatedly succeed in drawing out energy to practice games in search of beauty in formalisms, I have realized that I have found the meaning and beauty I was searching for back where I left it. But I have a new relationship to it now. Less image-based, more focused on the moment (of practice).

What should we do together now? I think continuing to work together to understand the way we find meaning in games, the questions you posed to me, is really what we were doing with Haiku Games. There is still a part of me that wants to understand the content side of this games equation better, and Haiku Games will always stay within arms reach of my mind for that purpose. But even in my formal games, there is always the meaning that I draw from them which I can push back through the medium. Reverence. Patience. Practice. Frustration. Grit. Whimsy.

You said, again, that you are ready to transcend form. Great! What are you curious about? What could you learn more about by pushing through your forms?

Theory

Theory is another form to love. We can escape to it, or use it as a crutch to feel closer to an emotion than we are. But I think emotion is always going to be a more immediate feeling.

Emotions

I described the journey I’ve recognized in my game design practice: ‘a focus on movement mechanics in a grid, and a reverence for mechanical interplay in that space’.

Maybe these are not emotions. I think I am mostly driven by curiosity. But I have been recognizing, as I work on combojumper more, as it gets closer to a finished form, that I want to imbue it with more of the emotions I feel when playing, when contemplating, when relating to it. There is room in every corner of the form to do so, and I can sense a growing curiosity to capture these feelings in that artifact. But these are emotions in relation to a specific formalism. Something broader than just what combojumper is, an incomplete trap for the feeling such that is must be. But still, I think it is a relation to the formalism I see behind a lot of problem solving, the moment-to-moment of adventure, the pursuit. These are things I feel at my job, when working on games, when learning about anything, when wondering about anything. These are real life feelings! But as I live a life steeped in formalism, as a programmer, a mathematician, as someone historically afraid of my interpersonal emotions, that is what a lot of my emotions are in relation to. And that is where my curiosity is idly aimed. Maybe, as I continue to grow, when a healthy relationship with forms is sustained for some time, my curiosity will be redirected. But I’m not sure I want to force it.