Last Seen Blogs
seasonscythe
* LEADER !
mordredscrown
Mordred's Crown
holgerkolbien
DAS HOLGER KOLBIEN PROJEKT VISUAL ART SAMPLES
ainxis
Sidekicks and legacy heroes enjoyer
dawikalume
Untitled
Text
incremental video game...
interesting genre but not something I found engaging to play. The concept of incremental growth, return on investment, a fantasy of accruing great power through logical steps laid bare... is something I can recognize the appeal of. I've gotten pleasure from management of systems and the incremental improvement of these systems in Minecraft. I loved farming in that game. I liked the mods that automated farming (everything from wheat and sugar to copper and cobblestone) through industrial machinery or magic rituals. I've gradually lost any sense of accomplishment from menial labor resulting in inventions for optimizing itself. I think this is because I've developed such a mental resistance to menial labor in general (at least when it's mental work). Developing video games has been similar. For me, programming started with taking solutions to other people's problems and roughly fitting them into my own scenarios. This led me to learn enough to create my own solutions, making them more efficient for future efforts. This led to refactoring, thinking ahead enough to create solutions that would be malleable and broadly applicable for my future needs. Programming a new game idea is a self-optimizing, incremental learning process.
Maybe the reason why I can't find pleasure in incremental games is that I'm burned out on the process. The paperclip game seems to lead somewhere interesting but I don't have room in my attention span for clicking buttons and interpreting these numbers and words as something aesthetically meaningful. I really don't fault the game and I wouldn't discourage someone from making an incremental game on the account that they're boring... I just bounced off this genre so completely that I have very little insight on it.
For me a video game is sentimentally about an image you can move through. The only solace I find in a video game these days is something with a visually represented environment that encourages curiosity in the person traversing it. The environment encases narrative information with unresolved intentions. There's a mystery, or something in the distance, a hypnotizing light or silhouetted figure. You move forward because you couldn't stand exiting the game and not knowing the point of it all, or what's around the corner, or what's at the end of the tunnel. This needs to be visually represented in some form beyond a slideshow to really exemplify a video game with transcendent or transportive qualities. I know it's kind of single-minded, but it's the only way I'm able to engage with video games right now.
So I'm not able to relate to putting a lot of time into incremental games and then having some kind of gamer’s remorse… I do think about the issue though, of putting time into something you later feel was unmemorable or unhelpful. I spend a lot of time on Instagram and Twitter feeds. Once in a while I’ll learn something and feel informed. Or see something and feel inspired. It’s sort of a continuous gamble, where as I scroll and pass things that awaken nothing in me, I’m anticipating the next thing to be exciting enough to satisfy my craving. I imagine addictive games are similar. Once you expect dopamine from something, it doesn’t matter that you find the process boring on a conscious level. These games are well-structured in a way that, once you give them a chance, you’ll learn at a subconscious level that enough idling will reward you. It’s a very stable source of satisfaction given the measured pacing of rewards between a simulation of work. I don’t think people should play incremental/management games like Factorio unless they’re at a retirement stage of their life, personally.
0 notes
Text
To "love" commercial culture can be to maim yourself by internalising its limitations, to "hate" it can mean severing yourself from your own history of experience in ways that can leave you reeling, obsessively circling the wound.
0 notes
Text
im a rapscallion who knows french and dutch. i spent my wandering years tricking people and getting into fights, and now i work at the abbey writing manuscripts and working on my paintings at night. i went to school and specialized in logic/math and occult studies
majored in theology
0 notes
Text
A Charlie Brown Christmas
I like the way the snowflakes are drawn. At this point, I was dozing off. I remembered playing some kind of ice hockey on a frozen lake near my house on Young street. It was a beautiful time and I started thinking, this is a beautiful movie. Now I wish I could unravel everything, all the knots built up over time. Too much introspection... I've tied myself up in these looping, obsessive patterns of introspection. They all lead to something negative, which itself, to me, is a moral failing. To dwell on the negative is such a morbid weakness. I remember a time when my outlook was more generally neutral to positive. It's because my brain was like a loose rope
0 notes