moon, five of wands, seven of swords, seven of cups

i want to follow my intuition through the darkness.
my fear is getting nowhere, struggling and ultimately finding myself in the same place
it feels like i'm getting away with something i shouldn't: i'm sneaking around, it's cunning, it's not what i should be allowed to do. is this a good feeling? no, not really.

it took me a while to figure out the last card. reaction: seven of cups. my response has been indecision. in a very real way i'm recreating that fear of getting nowhere by not choosing a real path; this comes of my seven overlapping paths. i can't get anywhere while i choose to walk every path presented.

great reading.

i have been trying to figure out a new spread and this feels like a good/powerful one for focusing things, will report if i make more draws of this spread?

DESIRE - what do i want to pursue
FEAR - what do i want to avoid (what's getting in my way internally?)
REACTION - what do i feel immediately
RESPONSE - what do i do with it

oh no, i got derailed... my new question today was, "what am i avoiding thinking about?" this was my old go-to question and i want to get back into fear-facing journaling. so i think i'll play with queries along those lines.

i drew the seven f wands. standing up for myself...

uhh, i thought it made no sense at first but now that im writing this it's kinda clicking. i wonder if my weird new copyright video project is forgetting the part where i mean to stand up for myself? and i think in general lately ive been missing a certain vital fiery energy in just doing what i want -- instead i've been logicking and reasoning and doing what i think i've GOT TO do.

no way! i should be doing what i want! id like to come back tomorrow and ask some questions and kill a fear, a hesitation, a doubt... kill fear...

oh no i'm still ruminating on this.

i'm looking back on how this argument got constructed in the first place and i can see the pieces falling into place all over again:

what really is the difference between a system and 'value structures'? a system contains values (for instance, the x-position of the player is a value), and when the player intervenes in the system, they introduce their own values - and the player may value anything within the system, meaning that in practice the first category (interactive system) does not exist in the pure. all elements of the system may be taken to, at some point, be itself a value structure or value measurement if we allow that the player and the player's values are part of the game (which is rarely brought into question).

therefore, all aspects of the system must be either subjective or moddable... and since i've defined 'subjective' to mean 'does not affect the interactive system' i really ought to rename subjective to something else... oh no... someone, come help me out of the hole i've fallen into.

well i'll sum up by saying that following this line of thinking, all parts of the gameplay-system must either:

1. not affect any other part of the gameplay-system, or

2. be moddable by the player.

~

i'm open to all attempts to rescue me from this philosophical trap, thank you!!! goodbye and good night, love, droqen

a loose definition of 'gameplay' (wtf? this was not the point of this project) to help discuss the topic, which i'd like to shape up:

if we define 'gameplay' as some combination of
- interactive systems (which can have different states and/or produce outputs) and
- value structures or measurements (of systems' shapes and outputs),

then 'kill gameplay' can be understood as a call for all of games' value structures and measurements to be non-authoritative.
this can be accomplished in a few different ways, which i think can be organized into two categories: (1) subjective, and (2) moddable.

1. a subjective value structure never affects the interactive system. thus the player may be invited to value what the referee values, but there is no material consequence for choosing different values. note this does not necessarily overcome the 'superego' aspect indicated above, 2 posts ago.

2. a moddable value structure can be altered freely by the player. thus the player may be forced to value what the referee values, but the referee's values may be changed to any value that the player has. multiplayer complicates this, but that's a very large separate topic.

in physical games, the interactive systems are generally all real systems first (e.g. a football, real-world physics, our bodies).

my response to a further inquiry re: the definition of gameplay clarifies something about the whole thing for me:

Quote from: anonymousWould you . . . partly define gameplay by the existence of a third-party rule-enforcer in general?

i guess the gameplay in kill gameplay might be definable this way, although if true this means that my usage of the term is very incomplete (as i always knew it had to be, but still). in the context of this discussion right now, i agree that the third-party rule-enforcer is critical to that which i take offense at.

Quote from: anonymous. . . in order for a game to function it does need some authority. . . but [under "kill gameplay"] the authority should be the participating players, guided not by a referee of an idea of what the rules *should* be, but the rules they find to be valuable.

i need to write a little more about the connection between this & Christopher Alexander at some point, but the very short version is that he expresses a difference between the forces that motivate most architects now, vs the way that 'architecture' in general should be: motivated by, answerable to, the people and forces and patterns that already exist and live in the real place itself. the architect's responsibility is to them, and the architect should seek to involve them as much as possible.

in the case of games, at some level i've lost sight of that because it's a lot of responsibility and building systems that truly respond to their players seems like a lot of work that i don't actually want to do.

a different solution, which perhaps goes by the name "kill gameplay", is to place the focus outside of the system itself, such that what is really important about a work is no longer what is being refereed by the system, but lies outside of the system, instead in the realm of experience and interpretation.

once that's what is important, the player regains total control over the important thing... but maybe by violently redefining something. hmm.

just a thought, i guess.

Quoteif gameplay is killed, should there also be a void where gameplay could be?

this is such an interesting question and im enjoying the idea that teog feels like it doesn't have such a void... honoured really by your description of it. altho 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.

in general i think this is actually something that kind of catches a lot of people off guard about teog, i've received specific feedback that a few of the levels feel didactic, for example, "open field" -- the negative space of this statement is that the vast majority of other levels aren't like that, i.e., aren't doing the 'finger wagging'.

~

this is a super interesting distinction that youve described. personally, i want to get even further away from the finger wagging type of art, you might look at my thoughts on the superego to better understand why finger wagging doesn't appeal to me.

i think a lot of earlier experiments of mine, however, were more finger waggy.
- HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0 has a central notable 'void where [something] could be'
- taken as a body, all the oubliettes play with certain expectations: https://itch.io/c/1047372/oubliettes
- same with what is that outside, the idea that we believe interactions should go somewhere or do something
- cloud exile too... wow, i made a lot of things that are exploring this idea
- an earlier version of YRKKEYS PARADISE which trapped the player in a non-ending
- gosh, even sort the circles with its description that plainly states, "the game is over when you say it is"

a lot of these are, to me, very finger waggy compared to TEOG. i don't think it would have been possible for me to make TEOG feel so "how much can be done while avoiding consideration for it at all" without these experiments/sketches that allowed me to explore and figure out... what is it that i actually want to do? how do people react to the negative space of gameplay? etc.

~

conclusion: you should do what feels right to you in the moment! i mean i think this is what i believe in general. you should take the path that is available to you rather than worrying about whether there is a better path. whether you release the game publicly... or just show it to specific people who will give you the feedback you need... or just keep it to yourself (i wouldn't recommend this, other people are important, but that's just me)... or anything in between, you oughta make the finger waggy work so that you can see what it feels like, what it's doing that you think is right, and what you don't think is right. then you can make the next thing.

my own answer to the question is that it's sort of complicated; as i see it, it all depends on the systems of enforcement. in the case of a videogame usually the system of enforcement is the computer: the rules of the videogame are enforced by the rules encoded into the code which the machine enforces. in the case of physical games, the enforcement is rules encoded which either the players enforce, or sometimes a referee enforces.

when players enforce rules, we can get a little psychological: i like to think about how it's some combination of the self and the superego* which enforces the rules. the players individually decide to enforce the rules; part of that is that they think enforcing the rules is going to lead to a good/desirable outcome, i.e. they want to play the game and believe that enforcing the rules is necessary for doing that, and part of that is that they think they don't have a choice but to enforce the rules, i.e. they "should" or "must" enforce the rules.

*im not a psych major and i havent significantly read literature on superego so this is based on a loose understanding of it. i think of the superego as the voice that says "people should x" which comes from societal understanding and unison, it's the voice of culture that we have internalized.

when "a referee" enforces, it's something external to the players. this is a pretty flexible entity: a videogame has a referee (the computer), but in the case of a physical game such as, for example, a magic the gathering tournament or a televised football game, there may a human whose role is to enforce the rules (the judge, the referee). this is the same role either way.

~

as to the question of whether irl games have gameplay in the same way, i think about this divide. are the players, essentially, empowered to change the rules to suit their play? i think there are two major axes of "kill gameplay" here and both of them are leveled at the idea of giving players control over their experience:

1. "kill" the referee (i.e. dismantle external authority, reject its necessity)

on the game developer side of things, i think that we create systems of enforcement -- this isn't something the player necessarily has control over. there is kind of this unquestioned notion that it is the only way to author play, and that it is necessary for the creation of games, but i wonder how true that is. i question the truth of that assumption. is it the only way? what happens if we reject the idea that we need a referee at all, in any context? can't players look out for each other? can't we look out for ourselves?

2. "kill" the superego (i.e. recognize, reject internalized authority)

on the player side of things, but to some degree the cultural/societal side, there is this idea that people should collectively kind of arrive at truths and this leads to people self-enforcing other people's rules. or in some cases self-enforcing rules that don't belong to anyone else in particular, we make up rules that we think we should follow. it's complicated and weird and i wonder what can be done about this: to communicate to players, to people in general, that we should follow rules because we understand what's good about them, and not out of some vague internal expectation/hope/faith that they must or should be followed.

~

at heart i think im kind of idealistically anarchist, and i believe in the goodness of people. this is clearly naive. this is not really a genuinely political position, i dont actually want to, for example, dismantle the entire legal system and remove all systems of protection. but i also believe in and dream of the idealistic version of that world: can we live in a benevolent paradise of only people who have everyone's best interest in mind?

relevant reading:
- The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin

tag, football, chess, solitaire
- do these have gameplay?
this is an open discussion topic! im interested in others thoughts.

prompted by a good question from an anonymous source

Quote from: anonymoushi droqen
i have a kill gameplay question im curious about, since i think i grasp at least parts of what u mean.
whats your opinion on irl games? kids games like tag, sports ranging from football to chess, games you play alone like solitaire. do those have gameplay in the same way? do they differ in some major way? feel free to just link me if youve answered it before. also sorry if dming is not cool i just didnt know where to ask.

hello there, thank you for starting this site,

i played the end of gameplay closer to when it released, but on remembering im not sure i recall ever really "feeling" the absence of gameplay with it. i think i want to take at face value that gameplay is being killed there, so - i keep flipflopping on this:

if gameplay is killed, should there also be a void where gameplay could be?

when thinking about it, it felt absurd to say that TEOG was a project where gameplay was _removed_ rather intently built up without the need for it. the games within definitely arent _missing_ anything. it strikes me that there is a palpable difference between 'void where gameplay could be' and 'void where gameplay once was' for instance, but TEOG is still kind of neither of those.

im curious about the type of game where it feels more like gameplay was forcibly removed, has this ever been considered as 'kill gameplay'. would there be value in feeling that type of emptiness. it feels like a far more 'active' take on the concept, deconstructing, but leaving behind the traces like that. however the strength kill gameplay seems to have been showing just how much can be done while avoiding consideration for it at all, and the strong arguments that there are no good places where adding gameplay would have served anything. by that thought, including an 'absence' seems antithetical. i do have a picture in mind of what this would look and feel like, but in a lot of ways it feels far more 'finger wagging' whereas TEOG was very clearly demonstrative instead, showing that you can start from the context of game, but build out in another direction