very recently someone said they were enjoying starseed pilgrim. not that they liked it in the past but that they liked it now, today, for the first time. that made me think about the reason i made starseed pilgrim in the first place: it was a damn fun game.
earlier today i was watching an episode of Only Murders In The Building where one of the characters was talking about the "heart" of a work, how you could have all the [bullshit] you wanted as long as under all the [bullshit] there was a "heart", in this one case it was likened to the other character's "vulnerability", but it was a very human sort of thing, this "heart". here i decrypt or encrypt the "heart" to be a human thing, a timeless thing. a timeless heart.
when you have a timeless heart you can get away with all the [bullshit] you want.
often in a game the timeless heart takes the form of some kind of fun, some kind of timeless fun, some kind of stupid pure childish kind of fun. and i guess i resisted that for a long time, once i started being aware of Artistic Value, but i'm learning to wear down my own resistance and becoming ok with fun, slowly. you can split up fun into pieces or aesthetics or whatever you like (Fantasy, Mastery, Killing, Winning, Accomplishment, Exploration, Challenge) but the key thing is that these are all some kind of timeless heart, just a thing that people will forever in some form want to connect to. i'm not saying that every work must strive for this, timelessness, or that fun is the only timeless feeling (it absolutely is not), but i am noticing that i'm in the midst of negotiating a new relationship with fun.
fun is some timeless heart. fun (the timeless heart version) is not addiction, compulsion, soul-sucking slot machine shit; it's childish joy, foolish pleasure, stupid ignorance (as in ignorance-is-bliss)
if there is a child's pleasure at the heart of a work then maybe someone will discover it a century from now and still understand it, and i like that. and then, truly connecting with the work's timeless heart, a connection with the rest of the work may blossom, howevefr complicated.
i think that's nice.
p.s. please don't forget the [bullshit] though
it's like the rind of the lemon
sure you can juice the lemon and discard the rind but what would life be without biting into the whole lemon, rind and all