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

[the game is over when you say it is]

if 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'.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.