Month: April 2014

And, as had hap­pened so many times before dur­ing the design of Zen­do, once I’d final­ly opened myself up to an idea I’d resist­ed for so long, I real­ized that my pre­vi­ous fears about it were total­ly unfounded.

This is all relat­ed to one of my core aes­thet­ic goals of the game, name­ly forc­ing con­se­quen­tial deci­sions with par­tial infor­ma­tion, which I’ve always thought of as pri­mar­i­ly occur­ring on the Sniper side, but it real­ly does hap­pen on both sides. As the Spy, you have to decide to do some­thing (accom­plish mis­sions), and then what to do (which mis­sion), even though you don’t real­ly know if you’re a sus­pect or not. How you go about this “doing” is obvi­ous­ly very impor­tant, but just the act of over­com­ing your con­fir­ma­tion bias and start­ing at all is some­thing you can feel when playing.2 This is one of the parts of the game that I’m most hap­py with, because I think this con­cept of embrac­ing uncer­tain­ty and mak­ing deci­sions even when you’re not sure is very au courant, in that most big deci­sions in mod­ern life are made with only par­tial infor­ma­tion, but you still have to make them to the best of your ability.

Some would say this— that the shared use-word is decep­tive— that play­ing music and play­ing games mean total­ly dif­fer­ent things. & I do think there’s some­thing inter­est­ing to tun­nel into here, name­ly the dif­fer­ence between aes­thet­ic play with its unspo­ken Many goals which may con­verge into an unspo­ken One— and game play with its explic­it­ly spo­ken One goal, which may be par­ti­tioned & micro­man­aged in terms of a man­age­able Many… […] This is part of why SHIFTING pos­si­bil­i­ty spaces are used in con­trast to straight up “pos­si­bil­i­ty spaces” — as long as the space is for­ev­er shift­ing, the par­tic­u­lar instance of it that we are expe­ri­enc­ing right now can­not be count­ed as a mere rep­e­ti­tion, and is always a unique nat­ur­al occurence. We must tune into the play expe­ri­ence, to expe­ri­ence even the same com­pu­ta­tion­al “game state” as two total­ly dif­fer­ent things when we encounter it at two dif­fer­ent times in our life… Allow our body to be the medi­um… […] Shift­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty spaces draw on the already very pop­u­lar “pos­si­bil­i­ty space” con­cept— but where­as pos­si­bil­i­ty spaces appear too often from the ‘glob­al’ (design­er) point of view, which deals with the Uni­ver­sal Set of the sit­u­a­tion, or the “space of all pos­si­ble _____ “, SPS can deal with the imme­di­ate sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty at play in the envi­ron­ment. A pos­si­bil­i­ty space is ful­ly spa­tial­ized. A shift­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty space allows for the imma­nent flow of time to enter its descrip­tion. […] All these prac­tices involv­ing free move­ment — PLAYSPACES — the ques­tion is to find the prac­tices that we LOVE and VALUE the most, and to NOT lim­it these to videogames— and to immerse our­selves in these prac­tices, to learn from them what we can, and the pos­si­bly, if we feel the desire to do so, to bring back our love of these things to games. To count aspects of the process­es in such a way that they can be com­put­ed with— but to not dis­re­spect that thing we came to love in the first place.. Not to gam­i­fy it, but rather to learn from it what a game actu­al­ly is, to learn its pat­tens of move­ment, the parts of the body and social milieu that it engages, et etc.

Real­ly a lot of the rea­son I’ve stuck with iOS for a while is the mul­ti­play­er games. This is what got me into this in the first place, it’s some­thing I got real­ly excit­ed about for a while, it’s so per­fect for them but there are very few and they don’t do well. I think a lot of peo­ple just don’t realise that they’re car­ry­ing around mul­ti­play­er con­soles every­where they go? Culture.