So I saw this link to a new CrowdSupply campaign, for a new device called "Ink Console", which is designed for playing text games. It's got an e-ink screen and joysticks, they're gonna make a tool to let anyone make games for it... I like new hardware devices, I like text games, I like new tools for making games... why am I not excited for this?

Well, mainly it's that it doesn't seem like a serious attempt to do these things. The games look like they're made with AI, the organisation behind it is just one guy (I think), the page is light on details, the photos are random shots... all seems like a punt, to me.

But it provides a nice excuse to talk about making a games console. The thing about making a new console like this is that designing the device, whilst very difficult, is also one of the easier parts of the problem. Harder parts include:

• manufacturing and shipping it
• managing capital, cash flow and inventory
• actually having some games on it that people want to play

Let's focus on that last one, because it's the evening and that's the fun problem not one of the depressing ones.

If you invent a new device for playing games, where do the games come from? There's a few options.

Option 1) the games already exist. You make a device that's compatible with previous devices. Great! Sensible solution! The question now is... if the games already exist, and can already be played elsewhere, why do people want to buy your new thing? Maybe the answer is that it is more portable, or better set up for playing games, or doesn't involve having to deal with Microsoft Windows (the Steam Deck is all of these). Maybe it makes the games run better ("pro" editions of consoles, or every incremental PC hardware upgrade). Maybe the old thing just isn't made any more (so, lots of GameBoy projects, such as the Analogue Pocket). Maybe it just looks cool! (a bunch of weird hardware mods).

Option 2) you just make the games yourself. Look, it works for Nintendo. Honestly, this is one of the better options here, although any plan which has as a necessary step towards success "make multiple exceptionally good videogames on time and on budget" is... I mean, there's some risk involved, is all I'm saying. Even if you're Nintendo, and have the deep experience of making good videogames they've nurtured over the past forty years. And the rights to fuckin' Mario.

Option 3) people make the games because they want to make money selling them to people. The best way to convince people they might make money by making something for your hardware platform is to have a lot of people own it, and to have those people eager to spend money on games for it. This is unfortunately hard to achieve unless you already have a lot of games for people to buy, or a really good marketing team with a lot of money. Great position to be in once you're there, though. Especially if you can take a cut of every sale - a back of the envelope calculation estimates that Apple makes at least $15 billion per year from their cut of games revenue. That's a good business model!

Option 4) people make the games because you promise them some money if they do. Great, perfect, absolutely the traditional route to take when trying to establish a new games platform. This kind of thing was propping up the indie games industry for years! There was so much money available to put your thing out on a platform that a large corporation was hoping would some day be the monopoly player in how people obtain videogames. Or to put your thing on a service which would hopefully attract people to whatever non-games thing they cared a bit more about. A TV subscription package, probably.

Unfortunately then interests rates went up, and all those platform plays that were not really going anywhere at any particular speed suddenly lost their budgets for buying the rights to interesting but questionably popular indie games (the really popular games were out of their price range). And unfortunately, as I previously said, they were propping up the indie dev industry, and now that prop has fallen away, and no-one is particularly enjoying the consequences.

Option 5) people make the games because making games is fun, and your device is especially fun to develop for. Look, a lot of this post has been quite cynical but here I get to celebrate some fun stuff! Like, the Playdate - just charming, and the constraints make it more fun to work with, and the tooling was pretty great... Or, all the people making weird Gameboy stuff - a big boost from childhood nostalgia and that Gameboy is now a standard... but it's fun, hard hardware constraints, but they're well understood! Heck, even consoles that don't exist, like PICO-8, can be fun enough to develop for. I think the trick for pulling this off is to be very thoughtful and very charming. Difficult but quite possible! Of course, this does then mean the platform is full of enthusiastic hobbyist stuff, which obviously I'm a huge fan of, but doesn't necessarily attract millions of players. If that's what you're looking for. Maybe the hobbyists are the point.

I think that's all the good options right there? There's a few more I can think of that I just don't think work, let's quickly go through them:

Option 6: AI??? Okay, sure, you can generate the games with AI. But unless you've invested billions into training new and exciting AI models, then so can anyone else. So why are your AI games a draw, when people could just generate their own games. And anyway... I have not yet seen a game made primarily by AI, and I am sceptical that the technology exists to do it, or that it would retain a player's interest if it did exist.

Option 7: Ignore the problem, hope it solves itself, we're busy making this complicated device right now, we'll sort that out later. A surprisingly popular choice, but alas it works about as well as you'd think it does.

I think that's all the options? None of them are especially easy or cheap or reliable routes to go down, but then there's no reason that building a sustainable platform should be an especially easy thing to achieve.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this kind of problem - it was the implicit background for a lot of the work we were doing at Sensible Object when we were developing Beasts of Balance (we were never quite trying to make a hardware platform for other people to make games for, but largely because it's as hard as it sounds). And then, while Downpour is not a hardware platform, it is a platform. I just deeply enjoy thinking about the way that play interacts with it's surrounding context. How does the business model shape the game design? How can the hardware affordances shape it? How does the social context people approach the game with shape it? Fascinating, chewy questions, but also ones where you can find surprisingly specific answers if you look.

Anyway, just to end this on a plug: if you are making a new hardware platform, I would love to chat about it. I spent some enjoyable time last year prototyping a new game for a hardware platform with novel interaction affordances. We made some good stuff and of course I can't talk about it - but I would love to do that kind of work again. Or frankly just hear what you're up to, I'm always curious about new takes on a crunchy problem.

Hey, it's a vaguely work themed post! Today is the release of Terry's Other Games, a nice collection of, well, the games that Terry Cavanagh has made over the years that aren't his big commercial releases. Commercial releases like VVVVVV, Dicey Dungeons and Super Hexagon - all good games!

Why am I posting about it, other than I'm friends with Terry and just generally excited about the release? Because one of those games is A Proper Cup Of Tea, a Downpour game which is probably the most popular thing made on the platform (look, he's good at making games, okay?). And this means that this is also the first commercial release of a Downpour game!

Structurally it feels like this is the place I should describe A Proper Cup Of Tea. But actually I think you should just play it. Here you go, it's embedded just below, it's a short little thing to click through, it'll take you a minute or two:

How was that? Good, right? If you only made one cup of tea you should go back and play it again, you won't properly get the joke otherwise. It's a good joke, imo!

Anyway, yes, it's been great to see responses in the runup - the Reddit AMA Terry did had a bunch of people asking or referencing the game, it's nice to see how it's sunk into the pop culture. To see streamers streaming the game too, playing it really fast and singing a little tea-themed song while they play. It's a weird thing, making tools - you have these feelings of pride and accomplishment, but over things that other people made, that are fundamentally not something you would have made. It's a very good feeling. I wonder if I'll see even more people posting about it after the launch?

I should also say: I'm proud of A Proper Cup Of Tea being included in the collection because the collection is the result of recoding the games so they all work from within the same codebase, they're all maintainable together and not a disparate collection of .exes that work or don't work under different circumstances. So it wasn't a case of plopping a web browser in there to make the game playable, but reimplementing it in a new language. Which is something I worked hard to make possible! A design goal when I was making Downpour was to allow people to take the games and do things with them outside of the contexts and tools that I provided. So you can export games from the app, and they are a html file, a folder of images, and a data.js file. That data.js file contains a big JSON blob containing all of the game data, in vaguely human readable format. So what Terry did was he wrote his own parser for that format, he positioned images and text in the correct places as that file specifies. He told me it was "not too painful"*. A proud moment to hear that! And also a reminder that maybe I should document the format properly so some of the corners that are a little more cryptic make sense (for the record, b_c is border colour and bg_c is background colour).

And then of course, Terry has done the work to make this a proper release - and that means that he's added controller and Steam Deck support, and he's added localisations into a ton of languages. So now I can see what a Downpour game feels like when you're using a controller. This is also the joy of making tools - doing hard work, in the hopes it will pay off in an unknown way in the future. Making something rich, and leaving all these loose threads that someone can hook into later on and build it out in ways you wouldn't anticipate.

Anyway - the collection just came out, go buy it. If only for Tiny Heist, which is pretty addictive. Here's a big thing to click:

* I checked this quote with Terry on Discord:

So, yeah, on the record: it was delightful.

A tired joke. But let's see if there's any interesting insight to be found within it. Let's examine each word in turn:

"Can" - a defining quality of videogames is that they offer means to exert agency. Is it meaningful for a game to feature dog-petting if the dog-petting is compulsory, automatic, involuntary? "Can" here implies that the choice is offered to you. And that's an important emotional beat - if the dog wags his tail you want to know that you were the one to make that happen. Otherwise where is the satisfaction?

"You" - I started writing this post as a way of expanding on this post from earlier:

Implicit in the question is a conflation between "you" the player and "you" the character that is controlled within the game. A conflation that is simultaneously natural and fraught. I can't find the quote, but I recall someone talking about how when writing about videogames you naturally shift across all of first person ("I jumped up on the ledge"), second person ("you then need to find the key") and third person ("Lara Croft discovers the secret entrance"). It's worth noting the power that playing with the distance between player and character can have - the twist in Bioshock, the subtle shifting of viewpoint in Kentucky Route Zero, the reflection in the screen in Her Story.

"Pet" - As a English speaker living in the UK I have only encountered the verb form of "pet" within the context of "petting zoo", the phrase "heavy petting", and the question "can you pet the dog?". It's meaning has always felt a little mysterious to me. I mean, I understand that it's physical touch, intimate and affectionate in nature. But the similarity of the word "pet" to the word "pat" makes me feel it is limp and slight contact, unsatisfying to the giver and to the receiver. As an English person, I would much more naturally say "Can you stroke the dog?". And on looking up if this was a me thing or an English thing I saw that Irish folk might well say "Can I rub your dog?" - a funny phrase to my ears. So "pet" is a reminder of the way videogame culture can spread a certain kind of implicit Americanism world-wide.

"The" - Implying that there is only one. A nice humorous simplification. Well of course there's a dog in your game about X. And of course there's only one. But also, if you are making a game, it's interesting to reflect how once you have made one dog, the second dog becomes much cheaper. A third dog, well, that's cheaper again. And the tenth dog! The dogs start becoming almost free at this point. But at a certain point you start having so many dogs that you have to start doing dog-specific optimisations to keep going. All this reminds me of Bennett Foddy writing about numbers in game design:

As I play through the latest warmly received game that has Good Game Design I always find myself wondering: could it be that zero, one and infinity are the only reasonable numbers in game design?

(https://thatsnot.fun/zk-map-for-stranger/)

"Dog" - Of course, you can pet other creatures. Much fun has been made taking the format and applying petting to other objects. But when I think of this, I mainly think of a blog post I remember reading from Matthew Inman, the former content marketer who does The Oatmeal, writing about how it's important to follow your creative impulses even if they're not perfectly aligned with the market, and giving as an example making a comic about dogs when the common wisdom is that the internet prefers cats. Which wasn't a hypothetical example, he did make that comic, and he does seem to be someone who owns dogs and does not own cats - we can imply that his personal interests really do align with dogs. Of course, it was his card game Exploding Kittens which really pulled in the big bucks and got a Netflix deal, so... I'm not sure if the lesson really applies. Maybe we should be following the most tightly commercial thing, rather than trying to follow our own interests. Or maybe we should try to avoid rewarding anyone who has this kind of deeply cynical instinct, even if in this particular instance it does align with our interests. A stand against "selling out", I guess you could call it, if one wanted to assume that people naturally start from a position that is not sold out, and are only later tempted to it.

Thinking today about how much of game design is about creating desire from nothing, or from the smallest things.

You sit down to play a roleplaying game. You create some characters. Who are they? Where do they come from? What ... wait for it ... do they want? They go into a tavern, they meet a wizened stranger, he offers up a quest, and at the end of it... We look for things to desire, and when a possible object is offered up, we leap at it. It is the thing that animates the characters and brings them into conflict. One desire leads us on to another - What does my weary warrior want? He wants peace. He wants to retire and settle down. He needs enough money to buy that cottage in the countryside. He needs to take on one last job. He needs to trust his companions to succeed. From one desire, many desires are created. The chips are down... he sacrifices himself, his original dream, and saves his companions. None of that momentum is possible without him starting off by wanting something. And then a satisfying (if tragic) resolution. Desires come into conflict, and the character says something meaningful by choosing between them.

You install a free to play game on your phone. It looks neat, and you're bored one lunchbreak. It's a tactics strategy game, you have a cast of characters and they do different things. They look different, too. One of them has a cool coat. And there's little levels to solve, almost like puzzles sometimes, each needing a different combination of abilities. Abilities that your characters have, in varying amounts. And – did you notice? It happened so quickly – already desire has crept in - you were given some tasks, and now you find you want to complete them. You're working through the levels. The starting characters get you through the first week, and you're levelling them up to make them stronger. But you know (you've played this kind of game before) that their power curve will tail off and you'll stop making headway soon. You turn to the slot machine (of course this game has a slot machine). You can see the prizes you might win when you pull. There are characters who are strong, characters who are interesting, characters who are... sexy?? The financial success of this game relies upon offering up access to the JSON files and JPEGs that constitute a character. Small amounts of data, sitting behind a CDN, ready to be enabled once a variable in a database is set correctly. But yet that data has meaning behind it. What a magic trick, to design a system such that these bytes have such weight!

A clown walks on stage. The clown is wearing a hat. Another clown walks on and stands next to him. The second clown looks at the first clown, and thinks... I want that hat. A whole routine ensues. The hat moves onto the floor, onto another head, onto the floor, is kicked about, goes into the audience, back on the first clown's head, is sat on, and finally into a bucket of water. The hat is just a hat, but the clown works hard to want it, and to express that wanting to you.

You're playing a game where the flow of water has been modelled with care. You have the ability to build dams. A small river runs through a deep valley. Do I need to say more?

I could continue, and maybe some day I will. I'm fascinated by this magic trick we do when we design a game. Where does this desire come from? We start with rules, images, text, movement. Players construct meaning from them, and find that that meaning brings with it desire. Something is unresolved. We want to resolve it. We want, we want, we want... But as designers we need to carefully nurse this desire, we need to cradle it like a candle in a draughty house. A gust from the wrong direction, sustained a little too long, and it can be extinguished. Boredom, the ick, overwhelm, distraction. But if it is sustained, then it can pull us for forwards through a game. It can drive us into new situations where we find, maybe, new things to desire and pull us yet further onward. What a thing to work with as a raw material!

I was going to end it there, I felt that was a nice conclusion to the post. But then I had a little time after and I realised I actually had some practical advice for game designers coming out of this. And that advice is: remember that you are not just responding to desire, but also creating it. A system which takes existing desire and works out how to resolve it is a tool, not a game. So if there is a problem with your design, think about how to inspire desire in the right places, as well as just fulfilling it (or not fulfilling it, in the case of free to play).

i am a big fan of Emma Garland's newsletter Gabrielle. which honestly could be the whole post, heading "some good writing about desire", body "read Gabrielle". but i want to more specifically point to a recent essay she wrote about shame:

Gabrielle #30– Shame

The forbidden emotion.

GabrielleEmma Garland

and just as a treat, here's the first para, because it's great and you'll get a sense of whether you'll be interested from it:

Like many women, I once dated a guy who punched a hole in my headboard. He wasn’t a violent man whatsoever, but he had certain sexual impulses that he didn’t like. In the heat of the moment, rather than act on them, he would hit something – the headboard, the wall, himself. It was sad, not least because they were impulses that dovetailed with my own, so I would sometimes find myself in the humiliating position of feeling jealous of a wall. Still, there was nothing to be done about it. Shame had already taken root.

she talks a little bit about changing mores, as examined through culture, but if you want more on that, she also wrote this recent piece for Dazed, as a kind of update to the 2021 essay, Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny:

Everyone is horny now

From FKA twigs and Ethel Cain to Babyratu, it seems like the stifled sexual expression of the last decade has finally breached containment – and it’s filthier and messier than ever

DazedDazed

she talks a bit about Nosferatu in that, which she previously went deeper on:

Gabrielle #28 – Too Much Blood

Sirens and vampire simps: what Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu says about contemporary sexual anxieties.

GabrielleEmma Garland

(here's what i thought)

i think you can take this whole cultural criticism thing too far, people's lives are wild and diverse and buck against trends in every which way. a classic variance within groups is larger than variance between groups situation. but also it is so hard to talk about vibes changing without reference to a thing, and i love the way that criticism, good criticism, can use culture as a lever to grasp otherwise very slippery things.

anyway, some good writing, i recommend it.

thinking about the things i think about, care about, post about elsewhere. and comparing that to the things that i end up posting about here. so often this blog dives in towards the trivial, it's a "look at this cool detail" rather than talking about larger things or more systemic things. and that's fine, i value my ability to notice a cool detail and think about what it is and why it's there. but sometimes i wish i could talk about these larger things here.

but the thing is, to talk about a large thing properly, you either need to write a lot, or you need to have done a lot of thinking and editing to get a short thing. and both are a lot of work, and the guiding light for this blog is to keep as low effort as possible. the platonic ideal for posts on here is a single paragraph, written out and posted without having been read. i never hit it, but that's what i dream of. it's close to "microblogging", that surprisingly popular pastime made famous by Twitter. but definitely not macroblogging, either. i guess i'm aiming for midiblogging.

just want to quickly connect a few thoughts here, inspired by Mike Cook posting this:

this links to the pastagang blog and a post almost certainly mainly or exclusively written by Lu [not true! see correction below]. pastagang is a bunch of people who make music together by writing code in a shared room (this one: http://nudel.cc/ - you can go make music there right now! you can join the pastagang!)

that post talks about a lot of futures of computing, talking about three different approaches to it, and trying to find the common element:

my idea was that they all acknowledge that code can break and die in various ways, and that we should plan around that.

in my opinion, the three movements don’t say that code death is something to be avoided, but rather that it is something to be handled gracefully.

something here about entropy, about failure and accepting it, using it, turning it into something else.

and then Mike connects this with the idea of the archive as attempting to not just capture the artefacts that resulted from people's lives, but, more importantly, to try to understand the context that people made them within. the kind of archival work that Holly Neilsen partakes in:

or look at the work of Kat Brewster, looking through the archives of the GayCom BBS, which was operated for and by gay men during the AIDS crisis:

Kohn’s work establishing GayCom as a means for LGBTQ+ people to connect during a “time of multiple crises,” was integral to his ethos of liveware — an approach that valued the people who maintained systems just as much as their hardware or software.

this kind of archival work is kind of defined by it's futility - no matter how extensive the archive, it will never fully capture the richness and texture of life. but it can get close! and it can give us glimpses of lives outside our own.

but actually i think the thing that i thought of when i saw "let code die" is that it's a mantra that has come about [is here used] in a very specific context, which is people playing music together. and that instead makes me think of this long article on Nine Inch Nails, mysticism and Robin Finck that i read instead of getting out of bed this morning.

‘They’re Really Close To My Body’: A Hagiography of Nine Inch Nails and their resident mystic Robin Finck - The White Review

‘We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say “I”. This is what we must yield up to God.’ — Simone Weil ‘God break down the door You won’t find the answers here Not the ones you came looking for.’ — Nine Inch Nails Photosensitivity…

The White ReviewFred Fernandez Armesto

here's a relevant section:

It has long been said by musicians that you can tell a good one by what he doesn’t play, by the notes he chooses to leave out. It reveals his understanding of the song as a structure, and how his decisions not only hold it up but give it space to breathe, let it live its own life without him. It also shows how self-confident he is as a player, knowing that he doesn’t have to blow his load over everything to leave a mark. Of all the rock gods, Robin is the only one I can think of who lets one or two notes do for him what the rest of the guys use dozens for.

Look at the video of GNR guitarist Richard Fortus and Robin playing an instrumental cover of Christina Aguilera’s ‘Beautiful’. Fortus starts with a cascade of noodling. He’s a fine player, and I have nothing against him, but when Robin starts playing, you can see what is soul, and what is not. It has to do with Robin’s timing, his choices about what not to play. Remember that he thinks of the breaths between phrases, like a horn player, so he doesn’t fill all the space with wiggly notes, showing off how quickly he can go through scales. He lets one note sing, really sing, and there are as many soundless pauses as there are notes. At around two minutes, he starts to play rhythm so Fortus can have his turn to solo. Listen to the difference. The spacing becomes rapid and crowded, which indicates rock-guitar expertise, and draws the focus to Fortus as a player, but pulls the focus away from the song. It’s like Fortus has something to prove about himself that doesn’t include the song, whereas Robin is content to let the song be bigger than he is, which it is.

i feel like at this point in the post i should draw a connection between these multiple perspectives. but i don't know that i have anything neat and conclusive to say. the value of leaving space. the value of accepting failure. glorying in the moment, knowing that it's fleeting. making connection with others. all of these things.

Lu responds:

couple corrections:

- the post was not by me. from a count, at least nine people participated. i just moved some of it to a separate file. this is why its best to say "by #pastagang". because it gets so hard to keep track, and its best not to give credit to the wrong person, while discarding the efforts of the others

- the mantra didnt come about in this specific context. its from the tadi web, which nudel is part of, and @froos@post.lurk.org is running with. see: https://garten.salat.dev/meta/youre-do

i regret the inaccuracy, and i especially regret erasing the work of a diversity of contributors while making a post trying to connect a variety of ideas together

okay okay, "clown school" isn't quite accurate, it's just a weekend class on clowning and physical comedy at Citylit. and i've only done one session (I missed the first session from illness). but the session I just did was great.

this post is me writing down some stuff that I'm thinking about on the bus home, so don't take it as too definitive a statement on anything. I give you this warning with the utmost seriousness: I am not a professional clown.

in a previous post I wrote about the magic circle, holding the game and also the context within one's head. clowning talks about playing multiple games within each other: there's the thinking about the performance and the being a clown within that, and then the clown also has stuff that they're trying to do within that. or, there's the game you're playing, the scaffolding of the performance. and then there's the bit that you find within that game, which is also a game. you hold onto the game for as long as there's something there, and then let go afterwards. learning how and when to leave the game is one of the most important parts of the game. thinking a lot about Bernie DeKoven here.

there was a bit where the teacher was talking about how what we're trying to do is play until we find the funny, and then we can develop that further. and it felt like, if you just deleted the "-ny", like I was in a production stages 101 talk at GDC.

it is so weird to try to interact with other players and also perform for an audience. I mean, not weird as a thing, but as someone who has been doing either roleplay/larp or public speaking, but never both... it's a lot to hold attention to!

and actually that holding and understanding attention is a lot of it. where is the audience attention, when do I take focus, how do I project focus (how narrow or wide is that focus). the idea that there is an audience focus is... well not an entirely new concept but it's not something I've had to play with directly in this way. I've done a lot of thinking about pointing attention places (eg doing the thing of inserting a blank slide when I want to do some important talking and I want the audience's attention. or designing the Beasts of Balance UX so the screen only demands your eye when something important happens), but that's typically planning ahead for where the attention ought to be, not responding to the shifts in attention. not seeing the attention as something that can be played with, dynamically.

or, maybe another way to look at this is that I'm used to the outer frame being care for other players and the experience they should be getting. and inside that frame there's the character and what they want. and now there's an extra layer in there of whether the thing we're making is funny, and funny for this audience specifically, and I don't know where to put that extra frame, and i'm not used to it, and it's hard to do other things while also holding this brand new frame, it's so big and awkward. and yet of course, nothing works if you only use one frame at a time, these are games that only work if you play all the games together at the same time.

also, yes, finding the bit, those smaller games - doing something that gets a response, setting up a dynamic between players. and that dynamic is often about wanting something and not getting it. this is something i feel in larps, often. how can i find something for my character to want? how can i find a way for them not to get it?

there's a thing which I kind of came to this to find and I don't know that I will - the experience of holding a strong feeling in my body. it's something I have loved a lot when I have found it in larp and wanted to find elsewhere and understand it more. but clowning is maybe not that, because it's something so focused on audience. the feeling is not in the body, but in the room. between the other performers and you and the audience, in, maybe, the tension between those places. we have not yet (i have not yet) been a clown on my own - maybe that will feel more natural, with one less frame to carry.

I like the teacher a lot - as you'd expect, he did a lot to try to lower the stakes, and accept failure as an outcome to be celebrated. good practical work on that, which I've not seen to quite the same extent elsewhere - when you fail the game, you have to own the moment of failure, you have to accept that attention and acknowledge it before withdrawing. he made a point of learning people's names and trying to get everyone else to learn them - building that into the games - which is a lot for a 18 person 2 hour class (I have to assume he'd prefer to be teaching half that). if I had to think why he'd focus on that, it'd be building that sense of community within the class - mutual trust, lowered stakes, etc etc. i am no longer surprised by this, but it is definitely worth saying how much you can make a room full of strangers feel like a community in a few hours.

anyway, like I said, this is like one class in. but I thought these notes might be interesting to someone else. and for me, later on.

if i was reading text, like this, on a web page. and i was on my laptop. and i felt a little discomfort at the small size of the words on my retina, if i was straining a little to read them, how could i make them larger? here is a list:

• i could move the screen closer to my face. sometimes i do this, but rarely. it's more enjoyable since having a high resolution screen - or maybe it's less enjoyable. i do like it when the materiality of the digital insists itself - i enjoy it when i can solve a problem by using a physical ruler on a digital screen. tracing onto thin paper would be a joy but feels so risky - the ink or the pressure leaking through. i am someone who lives with perpetual smudges on my screen, though, it is not an immaculate portal.
• i could press Cmd-+. this is the classic browser zoom, it does something to the CSS and then triggers a rerender. enjoyable how this alters the logic of the page at a deep level. but i do find i don't trust this fully - so many layouts don't rely upon the meaning of em or rem at a deep enough level to adjust properly. Downpour doesn't, for instance, although the bottom bar does increase in size.
• i could use my trackball mouse (an Ergo M575) to put the cursor over the main body of text and then hit one of the secondary buttons (the bottom one). this changes the field of view of the browser window so that the span of text under the cursor takes the full width of the screen. i do this often, although it does have the disadvantage that it seems to break scrolling with the scrollwheel. i'm not sure exactly how to characterise how scrolling is broken, but i do dwell on the issue.
• i could reach a little further, to the trackpad, and reverse-pinch (spread, i guess) two fingers on the touchpad. this does a similar sort of zoom, except now i have control over the degree of zooming. i don't know whether it would be good, or indeed be funny, if i could rotate a webpage this same way.
• i can hold Control and then scroll (either with my trackball mouse or on the touchpad). this, on my laptop, causes OS X to zoom the view on the monitor. this is an accessibility setting i enabled when i was working with a colleague who had vision issues and needed to have his computer zoomed in to a great degree to make out text - it was handy to have about in case i needed to show him something. since then i have left it enabled because i find it often comes in handy. so often i do want to look at something more closely, and the controls within each individual application i find leave something to be desired.

well, that's all the ways i can think of for now. or, i can think of more ways (go to a reader view, modify the CSS using the web inspector or an extension, copy elsewhere where the text is more modifiable, use some kind of lens between my eye and the screen, etc etc) but i don't use any of those on a regular basis.

why am i posting this? i guess because i find it interesting how many ways there are to accomplish a straightforward task on the computer, and how designing something reasonably straightforward (render some text on a web page) can interact with various of those ways, and how thinking through a widely usable interface requires thinking through all the idiosyncratic ways people use their devices. selecting text, for instance, which some people (including me) do as a kind of digital fiddling while reading. so easy to add some extra behaviour to this kind of thing, and thereby discomfort us (or the people you have now subjected to our fiddling).

a friend was like "i really like your blog" and also was like "i like how upfront you are that your current rate of posting will not last, and is in fact early January energy"

well, guess what? it did not last. i got ill instead. i think it's the flu? lots of snot, developing into a cough, with a stretch in the middle there where i think i was a little feverish. yesterday i did some really heroic amounts of napping, before (and i was worried about this) sleeping through the night. today is a little better, but i did not make it to clown class.

and this is the worst thing about getting ill, in my book - it's the sense of isolation, it's the way that i feel disconnected from all the stuff i had happening in my life beforehand. my POTS means that hitting a crash or getting some other illness that incapacitates me for a few weeks now happens kinda often (a few times a year), and while i am grateful for the reflex that makes me just immediately dump all my ongoing responsibilities to focus on getting better (it's the response that's best for my health, for sure), the situation of getting a little better and going... what was i doing? how can i catch up on all this? i feel lonely and isolated and i don't have any plans planned... it's not my favourite.

anyway, i do seem to be on the mend, so hopefully in a day or two i can start picking up the things i have committed to doing. i'm finding myself making lists already, so that's encouraging. and also writing blog posts.

sidebar: media consumption

• a big book from the 50s on clay chemistry. probably gonna stop reading it now, it's got onto glaze & i don't have that many pressing glaze questions
• The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett - started this, seems good so far, enjoying the worldbuilding & the energy between the protagonist & his boss
• A City On Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith - continues to be entertaining & factual. although there's a bit where they take against the entire concept of auto-ethnography, i think unjustly.
• the first hour of Barry Lyndon - a good film but too many people doing foolish things to be an easy watch
• random snatches of Games Done Quick - great as always, but a bit too hectic for my struggling brain
• First Blood - right at the start when i still had brain, Letterboxd review here. fantastic film.
• lots of jigsaw game

oh, and

very glad i got a flu shot, tbh

Today is the 7th of January, 2025, and yesterday evening I moved my phone charger so that my phone can charge overnight on the other side of the room. Some people would say that it is too early to give an update on how this is going, but I am not some people.

Effects I have noticed, so far:

• My bedside lamp is in a dumb place - I need to dig out a longer extension cord so it can go back to the taller bedside table rather than the stool I have on the other side of the bed. That's okay, though.
• I forgot to take my pills before bed last night. I guess I was riled up from all the excitement of dealing with plug sockets (I'm normally alright at remembering... I forget let's say once a fortnight on average. Not great but not the worst)
• Last night, I read before bed! A reasonable amount and then I fell asleep with the book still open. I generally don't let myself read before bed because either it'll be a book that compels me and then I'll stay up too late to finish it. Or it'll be a book that doesn't compel me and in that case I'll stop reading it after a few stabs at it. I lack persistence in these things and an easy relationship to doing things habitually.
• But this book was fine to read before bed, because it is a 1957 book on the chemical composition of clay. A subject I find fascinating, but learning that clay is typically primarily composed of fine crystals of feldspar does not have me hooked to find out what happens next.
• I'm now considering making a special pile of bedside books, where every book has been prefiltered for being a little bit too much effort for me to be keen to read it.
• I then woke up earlier than usual, and had a nice reflective hour or so as the sun rises compiling my intentions for the year. I don't know if I can ascribe this to the phone thing, but it was nice.
• What I have really been hoping for did happen, although it is again too early to credit this change - I woke up, I acknowledged that I was awake, and then I got out of bed. I did not check what was happening in the world and what messages I'd received for approximately one hour longer than I would have intended to.
• I was thinking about this reflective time, and how I wanted to maybe use some of this time around bedtime not on a device, so I moved a couple of spare notebooks down to sit beside my bed.
• And going to bed this evening, I find myself in bed at 11PM, a whole hour earlier than I usually am! Incredible! And I'm looking forward to learning about how different types of clay differ in crystal formation.
• The punchline is, of course, that I am currently writing these words on my laptop. Probably it isn't a positive step that, in the absence of little computer, I find myself on the big computer instead. On the other hand, I am using it as a typing-words device, not a checking-up-on-the-world device. But I do understand how a slippery slope feels underfoot.

But still, it seems like a good change, we'll see how it goes over the longer term. Arguably worth it even if it only gives me a week of vague benefit, it was not a lot of work to do. I struggle with setting habits, with valuing """self-care""", with sitting with myself. So it's better, where I can, to shift the way my environment works instead. Forcing functions & ways to lower activation energy for things I want to happen.

One example of this is that I have always been bad at opening and closing my curtains at the correct time of day. I know I'll just have to do it all over again, and besides, once I'm up I'm up. And before I am... well, it's dark, do I really need to get up. So now I own my place, I bought some expensive and complicated "smart blinds", the selling point of which is supposed to be that I can operate them from my phone, but the real point of which is that they go up at 8AM and go down some time after it gets dark. I wake up so much more reliably now that the sun shines across my face at the right time of day. (There is a downside, however).

Anyway, time for bed actually going to sleep. Thank you to Holly for inspiring this positive life change. And to that particular mood that comes over a person at the very start of the year. Here's to good intentions!

i've been thinking about games which make use of an already existing design, the way that they can be more interesting and lumpy than design which has been specifically designed

some examples:

[[fr0g] clan official server 24/7 zk map (for stranger)

lemme just quote from bennett foddy's great post on this:

The thing about making a game involving route-finding is you can't really get there by designing great routes. No matter how good your level design skills are, if the player is following a path you laid out for them, they aren't really route-finding at all. The player becomes too aware of your intentions, and their own autonomy becomes subsumed in them. As mkapolk explains:
My process for making the levels was to scatter geometry more or less randomly and then try to traverse it. Sometimes when I was going down a map if I thought that an area shouldn't be a dead end I'd add some more stuff to it, but that's about as far as it went.

You can construct a level that players can route-find through, but you can't design it... or to put it more precisely, you can't crack out the Good Game Design if you want players to experience route-finding. To pass through a well-designed level is a hike, not an expedition.

this technically isn't a case of pulling from the world but from randomness. but it feels kindred, and gets to a similar place.

OS map jigsaw

i was doing a jigsaw puzzle with my mum at Christmas. we played one that my aunt had given her, where the image was an Ordinance Survey map centred on her house. i suggested we played without consulting the map itself, which made the puzzle more interesting. the process went:

• finding the edges and the corners
• finding pieces that contained landmarks we knew the rough location of
• finding pieces which contained major arterial roads, and trying to put those together in ways that connect across the map in the places those roads are
• finding other routes that connect - train lines, marked footpaths, the run of the ridge across the left-right sweep
• finding the numbers that label the gridlines, and putting those in order
• filling out the green for parkland
• doing all the fiddly little bits

so many of these steps are satisfying in themselves but more satisfying when you know that no-one designed them for you. that no-one else has done this puzzle. that the order you are uncovering is truly being uncovered.

i think it's also that i like noticing details about the world or about a work, and this means there's more of them. the ugly copyright line at the bottom right, and how it confirmed some pieces. a designer probably wouldn't've put that there as a game element, but it worked as a game element.

Nico's jigsaw game

and of course i have to talk about Nico's jigsaw game, which we have been playing with a group of us on a Sunday morning (slash evening, half of us are Australians). it's an online web browser thing, still in development, where we do jigsaws together.

the way it's different from a normal jigsaw puzzle is that you just swap the tile positions. which leads to interesting stuff in terms of - you have to manage space, you have to shift completed sections carefully, you can get annoyed when someone loses a bit you just put together.

but the bit that's even more interesting (and relevant to this post) is that we're doing jigsaws of paintings, and the paintings are not designed to be jigsaws. it's great to look closely, to think about the texture of the chunks, to think about brush strokes. opening a new one and groaning at how brown it is. but then when the composition is completed, marvelling at how awash with colour it is, the macro structure absolutely informing the colour structure. thinking about planes and perspective and meaning, and all of this feeding into the puzzle solving while also not being designed to do so.

and the metagame of choosing pictures that would make good puzzles. or terrible, annoying puzzles, that too (still remembering Goldie picking that picture with disjointed tiles and then getting the splitlines just right so that they matched).

the game as a way of looking at a painting, not the painting as a way of finding cheap content for the game.

Untitled Goose Game

And since Nico & a bunch of the other people who play jigsaw game are the devs of Untitled Goose Game, it feels natural to mention it here. they did a whole talk about how the level design for UGG came out of doing location scouting - finding real locations and repurposing them for the game. finding details that would be extraneous if you were designing from scratch but... help give it an air of authenticity and specificity when pulled from a real place

(there's also a lot of interesting stuff about the relationship between Australia and the image they have of England, and of using references from the other side of the world)

but also it's fascinating, having played the game, to go visit the locations in real life and recognise bits. that path to the corner shop, that weird metal thing on either side of the door, the actually very nice fish restaurant that isn't in the game but you can see where it might be.

found videogames

we never actually finished it, but a good number of years ago i was working with some friends on a zine about the idea of "found videogames", the idea that the formal properties of a videogame, something like:

• has electronics
• has input and output and a relationship between the two
• has a sense of challenge
• affords "play"

is something that does not need to be created as a videogame, but is instead a set of properties that can be found within the world in many systems, which can then be viewed as a game. and so the idea was that we would create an imaginary catalog for a impossible exhibition of these games. one of my favourites was "using a subway system in an unfamiliar city". it has feedback loops, it has electronics, it has a system to engage with and gradually come to master. it does potentially have the lack of optionality, the unavoidable stakes, the ability to quit, that is possibly characteristic of games... but still, an interesting frame to see.

in this case, we are not just repurposing geography or architecture or an image as content for a designed system, but instead adopting a system wholesale and instead imposing a particular frame upon it.

some others

I don't have much to say about these right now, but I feel like I should include them:
- Geoguessr
- Audiosurf
- Scrabble
- most folk games
- football (soccer) (by which I mean, how big is the pitch?)
- mods which recreate existing places within game engines
- gambling on horse races

in conclusion

i don't know that i have a conclusion. it's something i've been thinking about, it's something that applies to a lot of the things i've been recently working on professionally (but can't talk about). most of my work within games has been on games which have one step into the "real world" - whether that is using map data or responding to social contexts or the hard constraints of making physical components. the examples i've pulled from generally sit more within a traditional game framework, but still pull in the world within them, with all the texture and rich context that provides. maybe i just like noticing things, and this is a technique that gives me more things to notice!

comments

there's not a proper comments section on here, but let me link some stuff people have said:

which in turn makes me think of plunderludics - this stuff is kind of the opposite of what i've talked about here, using the found texture of videogame as raw material for... sometimes more game, sometimes something else

Nico announced it!

School! Yes, I agree - so much of the design work I do is about creating contexts for other things, or providing new contexts for existing things.

(Marie is the "m" you can see, busy assembling the painting)

(Marie was also the host of the first Party In A Google Sheet)

step 1 is not to start writing a blog post instead. but let's ignore that part for now.

step 2 is to do nothing. just sit. no, sitting is too active, lie down if you can. close your eyes. do nothing.

step 3 is: that's boring isn't it? i find i immediately get agitated. but agitation is one of the things that is the opposite of rest - rest is not exerting yourself either physically, mentally OR emotionally. so

step 4 is: try that again, knowing that it's useful to do even if it's boring and even if it's confronting. you're not meditating, it's fine for thoughts to wander through your head, but try not to solve anything. if you're reading this then you probably do really need to do some resting, so: this is more important than the worrying you have to do.

step 5 is: okay this is still difficult. so let's set a timer. 15 minutes. it's a game now, can you lie there and not do anything, not try to solve anything, for fifteen minutes. if you fall asleep then that's fine - but it's also not the goal here. it's like having insomnia and lying there, knowing that you won't get some sleep but trying to gain the benefit from some quiet lying down anyway.

step 6 is that your housemate starts making some noise and you try to ignore it because the timer hasn't went off yet. you can hear the plane outside. this would be easier if it was warm and you were in a hammock. a bunch of time has passed, i wonder how much. i think i'm doing it!

step 7 is more of the same. worrying is also exertion, so try not to worry that you're doing this wrong.

step 8 is that your timer goes off and wow! you did it! you rested!

step 9 is that you probably need to do this again soon

step 10 is: i guess i should rework my attitude to this, try to make this necessary thing not something i actively dislike. better to enjoy it if it's necessary. better to do it sooner rather than waste a lot of time failing to do it but also not doing anything enjoyable either.

for more information on resting, please see this video:

Is over here