Hey Droqen,

I think that is a good idea, it is shame the spam bots have invaded

Gabe

I am tired of talking/thinking/wondering about "killing gameplay"! The more I try to spin around the idea through text and words, the more confused I get... This format has exhausted its usefulness for me! So, I need to make something and just see what happens.

So I'm making a piece of software!
My Idea is that it will involve sticking stickers to things. Perhaps a diary tool of sorts. I've developed this idea a bit, and you might control a little cyclops.



And I'm going to keep a diary of its development, so that I have an ostensible audience which I must give coherent thoughts to (tricking myself into confronting the idea fragments floating around), and so people can look at it and say things if they want, and maybe say "hey I should make something too".

So, I've actually already started. I think like 2 3 days ago. I'm using Adam Le Doux (of Bitsy fame)'s Cartlet 'found software' format. (Read about it here, make your own!)

The first two days, I basically spent a while just going through the Cartlet tutorial and reading the source code for Adam's WIZARD GARDEN to figure out how this thing works. I formatted the code properly since it had been condensed into one very long line, and then threw some console.log() statements in there to see what some of the numbers were doing. It was pretty cool (I've attached the formatted source code to this post, for your reading pleasure). By the end of day 1, I had drawn a little guy and made them able to move around the screen in a tile based fashion.



I haven't really coded in a few years, but I did learn Java once upon a time. JavaScript is, unsurprisingly, very similar. So after getting comfortable with all that, I added some animations to my little sprite.



At this point I had my sticker idea already, but I didn't know much beyond that. How would you place them? What are the essential qualities of stickers, and their placement? Do I actually like the way I made the little guy move? Will you be exploring somewhere or just placing things? Should you have limited stickers? Is that gameplay?! Woe!

I'm writing this, as I have stated, 3 days after starting, and have now answered some of these questions for myself, I think... But that's probably a good place to end this first entry.

So that's post #1, thank you for reading! I don't do much writing besides for university, so hopefully I'll get better at it. Please feel free to post your thoughts or whatever here, let me know if you're wondering something or have suggestions.
- Page

I wrote a little short story (rough) (pieces of it,perhaps), and I drew a card to ask, who should I show it to first? DEATH is S ofc. but I figured S won't be able to receive it until I edit it... i'm thinking of keeping it to myself for editing purposes, first. What's my desire/fear reading?

desire - da queen of coins
i think im hoping S will be able to help me bring my resources to bear,, i'm not hoping for wands (inspiration) or cups (emotional support/resonance/clarity) though I do think i'll get that. no swords either - this is an almost unconscious process, this writing, intelligence won't help. coins... what is that? time? the queen of time.

fear - ACE OF COINS! What da hack
this is meant to oppose the desire, 'tis what gets in the way
i don't want to start some kind of resource-consuming process...
sigh, it tru, this shouldn't feel like the start of a whole damn COIN PROCESS...

reaction - TWO OF COINS
frick
so many coins, shut up coins
so my inclination is to Do It All
...

RESPONSE? - the hierophant
hm. old fashioned ways, eh
I feel like im going to do some Normal Editing

three of cups / two of cups
ten of wands -> eight of wands

WEIRD

it's completely sensible to limit your response to not exhaust yourself, I definitely exhaust myself writing those big walls... I conceived it as a brief response to the main points, but then the words just keep falling out lol

You're right that games are more picky with rules and contracts than other art forms, though I'd say it's just a degree difference, rather than the contract being an entirely different sort of thing. You can probably conceive of performance art type of things that specify more rules for the audience to interact, and maybe someone'll append the word "interactive" to it, or call it a "something-game", and I'm sure there are examples of that. Regardless of the amount and specificity of rules to follow, they're still rules to follow though... I think this sort of "contract" is probably a lot more common, and implicitly assumed, than it would be naively assumed. I'm thinking that things like casual conversations with other people, still have the "contract" that you'll listen to them and at least acknowledge their input.

Still, I've become even more confused about what you seek after you referred to your point about "design thinking" in the discord, where you said that the effects of playing are irrelevant to the decisionmaking process. Your "We can do whatever we want" post adds to my confusion. Does this mean you've realized you don't care about the end result--be it the game or whatever artefact seems to contain gameplay--and rather it's more about a... creation philosophy? even if the starting point was a discomfort with games "as artefacts" (as results that you play with)?

I think at least the notion around "gamification" is more clearly grounded, and I think I can tenuously see it's relation to "design thinking" maybe as some sort of bias towards pursuing metrics? Gamification is about adding superficial processes that drive behaviour in games, to somewhere they're extraneous, to motivate behaviour there... things like score, explicit goals, and rewards for goal completion, right?

I think maybe the notion of "extrinsic rewards" vs "intrinsic rewards" can help clear up the distasteful parts of gamifying. When you're motivating an activity using external elements that are valued by the player, but the activity itself isn't valued, that seems like a clearer case where evil is happening.

I also note that the reward being extrinsic or intrinsic is separate from the quality of the reward. An extrinsic reward could be low quality, like addiction driven simplistic stimuli like casino lights, or cocaine, or money; or it could be high quality, like someone wanting to keep playing a game because it has a really good/deep story they want to see to the end. Similarly an intrinsically rewarding activity could be only shallowly valuable, like if you really became addicted to a simplistic activity, because intrinsic and extrinsic only refers to how it relates to other parts with which it comes bundled, although to be honest I wonder how that notion would hold up under scrutiny, I have more trouble coming up with specific examples where someone is drawn, perhaps unhealthily, to an activity that is obviously not valuable or shallow, because many obvious examples I can think, also seem to be tied to some extrinsic reward... though I'm sure it's possible to be addicted to something simplistic?

Speaking of value, I agree all the value structures we could identify separately still interoperate very meaningfully, but it's still useful to identify them as somewhat separate, to be able to more precisely speak and identify what are the elements and forces involved. Not sure if those 4 are the best separation of course, it's just one I thought of in the moment. The extrinsic/intrinsic seems like another useful separation, we can identify that the audience values different elements, and we care if they value one only because it's attached to something they value, or if they value it on its own. I think finding what makes an element valuable on its own could be useful to separate this "gamification" component, trying to find what is actually valuable on its own, without adding anything else, and in the case where it actually is valuable on its own, maybe then "gamification" acts as a neutral force.

in order to help people, i think that it's of the utmost importance to allow people to do the above things better, and nothing else. specifically, a few skills and affordances and resources that can really make a difference in someone's life:

• being able to perceive what you want to do
• being able to perceive the quickest way to do what you want
• being able to perceive things that are not actually obstacles, in order to not expend energy on dismantling them
• being able to dismantle or circumvent obstacles with as little wasted energy as possible
• clear objective* feedback on the effects of their actions so that they can become a better person according to their own judgement
• self-acceptance

*objective feedback: "what you did made me sad." subjective feedback: "what you did was bad."

"we can do whatever we want."

in adopting and ultimately defending "kill gameplay" i think i lost sight of an earlier and more important revelation, which is that as people we really can do whatever we want. that's the important thing. to 'kill' 'gameplay' sounds to me like it's advocating the destruction of systems. it isn't, although i think that the destruction of systems is the natural consequence of the underlying philosophy.

to really embody "we can do whatever we want" is to ignore all these absurd outside forces that seem to get in the way and just do things when the desire is pure -- whatever that means. (i'm sure there's some no-true-scotsman-ing going on there.)

in short, here's the good stuff.

• do whatever you want.
• if you can't, figure out why you can't. make it possible to do whatever you want.
• do whatever you want.
• everything you want is inherently good because you want it.
• always become a better person. (this is the hardest and most contentious instruction.)

p.p.s. whoops, i left out a whole section.

defining gameplay

   What struck me years ago was the desire to identify something specific about "gamification". To "gamify" in the common parlance meant to add a certain 'something' to a non-game, and I became mildly obsessed with the notion of removing that 'something' from games. I named these things 'playables', and I made some conclusions, and then moved away from that experimental branch. I'd like to come up with a clear definition of what I mean by gameplay and I appreciate the discussion, and the specificity about the value of being clearer with my words. In this case, I bring up the "gamification" example because I think my idea of "gameplay" is, what is the form or subset of play that only exists in games? All play that could exist anywhere, i.e. not bound within the game form, is not gameplay. "kill gameplay" is a generalization of the idea of making 'games without gamification' -- to remove 'gamification' from everything, not just games.

p.s. thank you for your thoughtful engagement, i've got a lot of notes but i'm trying a new thing where i don't... exhaust myself trying to make every single thought visible and sensible. if there's anything i missed that you regard as particularly important please do mention it, i'm happy to give some more attention to anything that you believe is particularly relevant and share my thoughts. i've focused in this case on the high-level responses and conclusions that feel like there's a significant amount of meat left to explore there. things that won't get us running in little circles, going nowhere.

clarity

    Yes, my ambiguous use of "value" in the last couple posts is super confusing. Maybe even confused myself there. I agree with what you said in the Discord; "state" is better. I would also use "measurement"; a measurement is somewhat value-neutral until we value it. (Tautology of the year, here.) Making something visible, however, is very impactful; when something is visible, we are capable of assigning it value. We are not capable of valuing what we cannot observe. (Giving things names also has a lot of power here.)

value structures

    I wouldn't separate values into these four structures, since they all interoperate very meaningfully. Something is possible, making it visible to me and therefore more possible for me to value. I value it, making it possible to cause me to value a resource or state which allows me to experience it.

    For example... winning the jackpot gives me a material reward and displays pretty colours and lights, I enjoy all of the aspects of winning and want it again, the system provides a way to win again, therefore I perform the action which the system requires I do in order to win. (Put in the money, pull the lever.)

    I don't value paying money or pulling the lever, but the constructed scenario requires that I do those things in order to pursue my goal of acquiring that which I do value, and the lines start to get blurred. Do I value winning the material reward? Do I value the pretty colours and lights?

the contract

    I can't think of another art form so picky about its verb of engagement. Games and games design are deeply interested in play -- in perceiving, predicting, and playing with or manipulating the way that its players interact with it in this specific way. I might just be too far inside games and too far outside everything else. Your suggestion that all art form engagement is the same sort of contract doesn't ring true for me. It's different, but I can't put my finger on it yet.

design

    I've recently come to realize that running parallel to all this is an anti-design sentiment which differentiates products from art. I'm frustrated by the way these two activities have become so intertwined in games, the assumption that every choice must be weighed in terms of the effect that it has on the player.

    That is not to say that "kill gameplay" is synonymous with "kill game design", but it might be useful to see "kill gameplay" through a lens of being trapped in a design-centric mindset in a design-centric world.