approach like a spell book, every card magic... quickly did a draw from my deck and my JUSTICE is so different from The Wandering Star's, haha

returning to a couple guidebooks in the book store —

one is "Wild Whispers", an oracle deck (i never look at oracle decks...) that describes each card under multiple headings:

whisper as calcination, introspection as dissolution, and five more like that.

the other is "The Wandering Star" because of how personal it seems? but also, how casually written? upon a second look i don't know how connected i feel to it, but i love the tiny book, and The High Priestess' page begins, "Ah, the Priestess High!" — i just like the casual excitement

X

one of the guidebooks i encountered during my research, as well as the site i use, contains many prompts per card. i think my go-to site contains more sensible categories that i have found use for over time (career, finance, love), whereas the guidebook i skimmed had more woo-woo nonsense categories.

i will probably end up writing things about my cards that belong to some real nonsense categories.

given what i wrote in the "key to the tarot" meta thread, i'm going to try to focus in somewhat on my own relationship to reading each card. it's gotten to the point where when i draw a card in most readings i immediately have a strong sense of what it means... this is good but a bit scary? if you've driven a car for a while and start to get comfortable, there's a moment when it feels like "autopilot" and you don't even know how you got there.

i want to describe how the card feels to me while also leaving space for someone to fill in the gaps. but i don't know if that will make any kind of actually useful reference book, and that really scares me!! what is this book that i'm going to write and publish?

i hope that when someone is learning tarot they use another source, and not only what they find in my silly little lookup tool and book-to-be...

but, i know what i am capable of writing, and it's not an exhaustive handbook. it's just a vibey little pamphlet. that's what i'll aim to do! what i know i can deliver well, what reminds me of things that my brain likes to forget... ah! here i am with the flavour of ambitiousness in my mouth...


i do, after all, want a book that i love to use. that's really my goal. should it be spiral-bound? argh!

Quote from: droqen on Jul 26, 2025, 06:57 PMaltho it is possible it only feels like it does not have this void because ultimately there is gameplay, haha. i wonder what to make of that.

i think trying to measure and gradate the extent to which gameplay has been killed with a given work sounds a bit like gameplay to me x_x;
to even do so would require much more straightforward goals than are actually defined to go off of
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i think to explain a bit further how i came to the conclusion i did (remembering that i did infer the intent was at least exemplifying kill game play in some way) - a lot of the utility that we have for gameplay as designers is that it is a kind of shared language. it feels like a lot of the games like starseed (that era as a whole) felt tasked with communicating solely through that language, and games have forever felt very insular in that way to me. i bring this up as an 'era' because it really did feel like for a while there was such a focus on how cleverly one utilized that language, and it seems we've continued to veer off over time that continues to value that moreso than what it is actually being used for, or to say. thats been my impression on the importance of TEOG as a 'response' to starseed specifically, which i think i have heard reference to in some of the writing/videos on this game

so what i really enjoy about 'how much can be done while avoiding consideration for it at all' is that it is like this 'ignore previous instructions' moment, and starting context-free, there is still language being employed but the motivations to do so feel entirely personal now. otherwise a lot of the 'finger wagging' i see and feel comes from that kind of malintended 'deconstruction' type works, which i assume you'd agree you have a few of? going any direction at all from the inflection point of kill gameplay is a lot more additive in nature, and hey, sometimes you do end up reinventing the same things, but the use is more dialectical. maybe this is a lens that helps with how to justify those overlapping 'gameplay elements' like in open field - because while a score does get introduced its also very clear there isnt anything evaluative in that game, hence, no 'absence' despite the use of that shared thing
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i like what you are saying about the oubliette-likes here, because i agree it is a path away from that finger wagging, but interestingly the comparison to non-digital games sounds like it is capturing a lot of the wrong references? im not sure i think the focus on 'end states' has much to do with absence/void. in fact the propensity of the oubliettes to empower a player to sort of define their own terms for an end state (and therefore decide "what they should get from it and when") i think draws a lot from folk games, which i felt were a bit absent (though the question in that thread did not mention them, to be fair). to me this is not 'void' because as an individual element it feels more intrinsic to 'game' (definitionally) then 'gameplay' (structurally). the point at which any game starts to feel satisfying has always arbitrary, death of the author stuff, like why keep codifying these end states at all?

so, i think this call to define the terms for oneself can be very implicit or explicit - Think something like the rules of Yoko Ono's 'snow piece' https://www.are.na/block/1607229 vs. the rules to a road trip game like 'slug bug'. In both its to be understood that you are in control of the end state, but only the former actually bothers to define an end state at all within the game. i do think digital games have run into this a bit as well, like https://pippinbarr.com/it-is-as-if-you-were-playing-chess/info/. whats important about being able to do this to me, is the number of games that offer that same sort of exit point 'control', but explicitly do not empower players around it, seems to be the driving design around a lot of roguelikes etc today. im thinking that the oubliettes in TEOG fall more in the implicit category than some of the earlier attempts.

wait, i'm falling into the trap of using hidden.droqen.com the same way i use newforum.droqen.com -- this is a place for CONVERSATION not for me to RECORD MY THOUGHTS. will write here once i have more of a conversation-starter.

David Giles started a conversation with me on bluesky which eventually led to the creation of the video; probably some of this conversation {inspired / made it into} the video, so it may be relevant: "
I just beat The End of Gameplay and was reading through some of your posts[ on newforum.droqen.com, I expect]. . ."

to make sense of jlater :
.five of swords (bang on, imo)
.knight of coins (?)
.four of coins
.ten of wands