there is an architecture book called "A Pattern Language." this book contains 253 patterns ranging roughly from largest to smallest and roughly in order of when to consider each pattern in the process. you can't design a windowsill without a house to put it in, so the pattern for a windowsill would come after the pattern for a house. roughly.
so. the two hundred and fifty third pattern, the very last one, is called "Things From Your Life."
lately, i've been thinking a lot about expression, about memory, kind of jealously considering the amount of personal human experience that goes into writing a story or a poem. (the grass is always greener on the other side.) how can games be as expressive? how can they be as expressive for me? so i tried making some personal games, and i have to say, some of that has been very successful and satisfying. see this game, a polaroid of space.
but other times it is much easier to make little toy systems, videogamey videogames where mostly you push a little object and stuff happens and you figure out how to push little objects better, how to make stuff happen better, how to make different stuff happen. and it was bothering me, integrating these two practices. surely i ought to be able to make games where the little objects are meaningful to me, and not just one or two of them, but all of them? it presented a problem.
...
i was taking a shower and thinking to myself and i remembered this pattern in this architecture book and how when i skimmed the book long ago i noticed that Things From Your Life was the very last pattern. there's something that one of the authors of A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, said in another book of his, about the artist's expression. suffice to say he was not really a fan.
it was a diagram that went something like "artist puts feeling in the work: not interesting // the work gives me feeling: necessary".
i think i am developing a better understanding of how and when to put feeling in the games i'm working on. it doesn't belong at the front. actually, this is more of a practical concern: it just does not WORK WELL when i put it at the front. it's much easier to start making a game about an abstract videogame structure than it is to start making a game about a human feeling, unless the game is very small and very short. even then, it is necessary to have a structure, an idea for the context that will surround the feeling.
Things From Your Life is the very last pattern. that doesn't mean it is the least important. if it was not important we wouldn't even speak of it. but a videogame that says something... i must admit that i like it best when i uncover that feeling right down in its core. when i cut the machine and finally discover that it bleeds.
there are a great number of videogames that do not bleed for me, ever. these come as great disappointments to me every time. i want to put Things From [My] Life in my videogames because i don't want to make things that would take up my time and leave me with nothing but a thin sense of self-satisfaction, were i a player.
but, they are found at the end of the book. the end of the process.
". . . lastly, when you have taken care of everything, and you start living in the places you have made, you may wonder what kinds of things to pin up on the walls."
things from your life.