This being Emily Short has its pluses and downsides: Emily Short is good at this sort of this, but the historical themes zie focuses on in hir games is probably the one I hate the most -- victorian society, upperclass blabla. Anyway, looking forward to it since nothing much happened with Varytale since Emily Short published hir gamenovel "Bee" there.

Skip all that crap of picking up ammo, looting and other stuff in games that only detracts from the "artsy" parts!

Interesting text here:

http://postplay.tumblr.com/post/39114433775/misenabyme

Reminds me of this:

http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=1605

Me, I'm kind of interested in the opposite of what could be called simple or clean design, what Blow and Bosch speak of here:

http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2011/10/little-nuggets-of-truth.html

This seems to be my style, if I could call it that, something that follows from my ideas for certain games which I am designing in my mind right now. Away from core mechanics and in to nesting, twisting ad-hocs, exceptions, temporary states, etc. But it is not additive design, as I do not have a core gameplay to begin with and then add onto it, but rather because I have ideas and emotions and it just so happens to be that they can be expressed best this way, that this form is what makes sense for me.

That cog reminds me of the enthymeme as described in this post:

http://nightmaremode.net/2012/04/how-you-got-videogames-wrong-and-film-and-music-and-literature-etc-17658/

Thoughts:

Check out the book "Religion for atheists".

We cannot both believe that games can change stuff and also not believe that they can be dangerous.

Organized religion seems to be declining, while spirituality in the form of new-age, self-help, etc, seems to be on the rise.

We are all heroes that are all made of the same decaying gray matter, as someone from fight club would have put it.

Also, speaking of addiction, I think in general even if auntie pixelante describes it as a parable on working-class alcoholism:

http://arcaica-pfp.blogspot.com.br/2012/04/anestesia.html

Me, I'm addicted to scientific inquiry, and writing philosophy. No seriously, you can take anything that is beautiful and good and destroy it because you become so absorbed in it that the joy disappears, that you neglect your surroundings, or your future you, etc.

YES. I hate Mass Effect 3 right now. Because I've been playing it for 30 hours, and all the combat and sub par side missions have drained me completely. I just want it to end now, and in a bad way.

Apparently I'm 100% competitive, and least physical and exploratory! I think this test sucked and makes sense in the MMORPG context... or at least more sense there than for me, here. It is not the test which I remember, or another version of it.

Well that settles it then!

I would describe my playing open world games as "running out of patience"! Interesting. I can't seem to find it, but there was a homepage that had a test where you tested for what type of player you are, and it had results from like thousands of people. It would be interesting what kind of player most notgamers, on this forum, are. Do you know which research project I'm thinking of?

Know what, think it was the Bartle Test! Know any other?

http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/

I'm not sure if we have the same experience here, or talk of the same things. Immersion, I'm not sure, and yes, physical controls often leads to less immersion (me trying to figure out twilight sword and being utterly frustrated, breaking all flow).

The gym is a good thing to talk about though, perhaps. Perhaps it's difficult to make paradigms dissolving right and left through more physical gaming, since I have an easier to doing "straight thinking" when doing nothing with the body at all, so to speak. But for example when in the gym, music I don't listen to suddenly becomes totally awesome and emotionally riveting, due to it being in a context, due to me being able to explore this with other people, yet in solitude. And because my hormones are running high. If you imagine this cannot be used to some advantage in gaming, whatsoever, then I do believe it is your imagination that is lacking, not the fault of the idea as such! And perhaps the approach of straight thinking is wrong when it comes to dissolving paradigms while running. Perhaps it would feel better to actually see dualistic concepts on screen dissolving to the beat of ones heart while one runs, instead of just running outside and getting a sense of presence/mindfulness. Different strokes, different effects.

Yes, the button is very "ultimate" as such, but what about tactile games? The painstation for example? Will the thought of you getting an electric shock not make your heart rate jump faster, and thus when the game is about keeping calm, will this not make an excellence exercise in zen-flow, an experience which would be utterly different (worse?) if you just had to hold the controller still while it rumbles, or even less, just press two buttons right and left and try to keep a meter steady?

On a related note, perhaps there are ways of making the players using their bodies more, so as to highten or immerse them within something. Just to keep them going, so to speak. Instead of making them going for coins, make them go for their pulse. As a form of distraction, as a hook, or something. More physicality. More hormones. They could affect the experience with a game or notgame. On the other side of this spectrum (?), there is soon to be a game called Nevermind, which tries to make the player to handle their stress levels by making their heart rate affect their player-character. This is an interesting turn, and is something similar to what happens in Amnesia: when you don't see enemies, you get scared because you want control, but one of the main mechanics make it so that you lose sanity (and "the game") if you look at enemies for too long. Careful now!

Nevermind, and amnesia.

http://www.indiegogo.com/NevermindGame

From Palahniuks: Survivor, about the Stairmaster to heaven:

This is why I’m going nowhere at the rate of seven hundred calories an hour.
Around the eightieth floor, my bladder feels nested between the top of my legs. When you pull plastic wrap off something in the microwave and the steam sunburns your fingers in an instant, my breath is that hot.
You’re going up and up and up and not getting anywhere. It’s the illusion of progress. What you want to think is your salvation.
What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.
It’s not as if the great coyote spirit comes to you, but around the eighty-first floor, these random thoughts from out of the ozone just catch in your head. Silly things the agent told you, now they add up. The way you feel when you’re scrubbing with pure ammonia fumes and right then while you’re scrubbing chicken skin off the barbecue grill, every stupid thing in the world, decaffeinated coffee, alcohol, free beer, StairMasters, makes perfect sense, not because you’re any smarter, but because the smart part of your brain’s on vacation. It’s that kind of faux wisdom. That kind of Chinese food enlightenment where you know that ten minutes after your head clears, you’ll forget it all.
Those clear plastic bags you get a single serving of honey-roasted peanuts in on a plane instead of a real meal, that’s how small my lungs feel. After eighty-five floors, the air feels that thin. Your arms pumping, your feet jam down on every next step. At this point, your every thought is so profound.
The way bubbles form in a pan of water before it comes to a boil, these new insights just appear.
Around the ninetieth floor, every thought is an epiphany.
Paradigms are dissolving right and left.
Everything ordinary turns into a powerful metaphor.
The deeper meaning of everything is right there in your face.
And it’s all so significant.
It’s all so deep.
So real.

Catharsis through running?

Do you like the idea of having the freedom of going places and doing things in a non-linear fashion, and then play the game kind of linear somehow? Like do you do the missions city by city, theme by theme, or something, or just walk around wherever you may want to go that specific moment, ie do not have a system that you are aware of?

For me, this game has too many different missions stacked on top of each other. I'm having around 20 right now active, cluttering my journal, making it hard to get head or tail from it. Add to this that the info on the different missions have become more streamlined than before, meaning that there is less info on the missions, and only on the current part of the mission. On some missions, the journal doesn't even register progress until you complete the whole mission. Now, streamlining sounds good, less complications, but in this particular topic, it confuses me very much and makes me get less out of the experience. Yet I feel inclined to activate these missions (by approaching npcs standing around, most of the time), because I have this compulsive feeling of wanting to do it, and because I'm afraid of missing out on something. The mission hub (citadel) throws down new missions on you when you return there after completing other missions, and so I dare not wait to activate these missions first when I'm done with all the outside citadel ones, afraid to never reach the "end" of certain branching missions. I also find it very time consuming to do one mission at a time, returning to areas 10 times over to get new ones.

But damn it, there's too much! I'm already immersed in Angel, Dr Who, Äkta Människor (tv series), watch some movies, read comics, books, have school, jobs, friends, politics, etc. I forget stuff. I want more linearity in my RPGs people! I get less emotional resonance and the missions become less important when I cannot focus on them, because I forget details, things that matter.

Does anyone else have this problem?