jatazak

to say reading prose is not a tentative, active, problem solving kind of task is just to say you're bad at it. and there's a sense that the odd blockedness, deadness of videogames as a format is itself aesthetic..

yes! a game that is Always Legible is a game that never trusts the player to perform meaning-making. I want reparative play to be an aesthetic with the same status afforded to flow, or immersion, or even the **** pipeline conversion rate

https://polarisgamedesign.com/2022/a-toolkit-for-encouraging-player-stories/

whatever infrastructure is still there now exists to provide networking or marketing opportunities to professionals, themselves ever more protective of their specialised domains and with ever less patience for any merely aesthetic actes gratuits that might gum up the pipes. the people i know still making weird shit seem increasingly cut off, working just for themselves and some friends, and maybe they're happier, i dunno

this problem terrifies me b/c I love my friends' weird shit but I have no patience? soon (tm) I will have the luxury of directing my networking energy toward lifting, and not just climbing. the problem is that I am tired. anyway, wasn't it the case that twenty years ago, the shittiest gatekeepers in videogames were (some of them) scene kids themselves? one of this year's incoming EGW organizers talked about it

http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-california-problem.html