Could you have meant 'positive aludology', by the way?

True, I wouldn't consider it a virtue to hide the message under layers of confusing words unless we're talking poetry.

"Good" old times when I had to spend 15 minutes on understanding two sentences written in my mother tongue by some "enlightened" mind of postmodernism are thankfully GONE.

Learning some vocabulary won't kill you. It enables you, actually. The dictionary is a great companion.

What got me about Tanaka's is the suggestion that all we do in so many games can be boiled down to wandering around, collecting things. This time it's distilled to the very essence, the roots of philately and bug collecting. And in doing so, it creates a rather charming experience--not one that I'd play for very long, though.

[Funtertaingames.]

Funtertaingames. A neologistic portmanteau of fun, entertainment, and games: the trifecta of evil.

Sorry that this one ain't new for you.

^ It looks indeed fantastic.

I'd like to know where the hell you got that from.

West syde negative aludology represent.

edit: To make myself clear: I think that it's a pretty crazy concept, and I'd like to understand the context.

edit2: Not that the concept itself is not in practice right now.

Heh, cool. It instantly reminded me of Silent Hill 2's hospital. Not that they share that much in common other than being extraordinary hospitals.

[Knytt]

Knytt: It's the game that brought indie games to my attention. I loved it for being such an uncompromising aesthetic experience. You are very literally dropped on a world full of unknown and wonderful scenes, and left to explore with a goal that all it means is the end of your journey. If you approach it as a game, it sucks--the people who I've shown it to just don't like it, they either think it's 'too difficult' or 'too easy' (depending on who the person is). At that point I realized that video games were not considered to be expressive by most people, they were enabling, and when players were denied their expectations, they would be upset.

I find it difficult to distill what exactly I learned from what games. I'm sure I've gotten much of worth from many games.

(If I want to be taught, I want an academic context, I want it to be dry, hardcore, focussed. Not playful.)

Pardon the language, but you're fucking boring.

This is a motto of mine: "Games should have more of everything else, and everything else should have more of games."

Then, the words could probably be 'mystery' for the vertical, 'curiosity' for the horizontal. How's that?

Actually, it makes no sense. Curiosity is not independent from mystery. I know: 'mystery' and 'knowledge'. The higher the knowledge, the higher the levels of mystery there needs to be in order to keep curiosity in flow. I think that this is pretty much how TV series Lost works.

I don't think so. 'Challenge' is a property offered by the game, whereas the other three are of the player, and the point of that diagram is that flow lies when one is just able to precisely parry what the game is throwing at you, while still keeping you on your toes. This means tension between game and player.

Yeah, that meaning was probably not the best of formulations as it is quite vague. But cannot one say that meaning could be atmosphere/aesthetics as well? I always thought that for instance David Lynch had a sort of atmosphere as the core meaning.

Perhaps, but if so, I wouldn't use the word 'meaning' to describe it. In fact, I wouldn't even use that word for what I underlined exclusively, as it suggests that it's necessarily a conscious effort, whereas I would suggest that this 'meaning' could be the result of an unconscious process, for instance. 'Intent' is a bit better; it suggests informing the resulting experience rather than describing it.

But the important thing here is that I consider both to be very different. Aesthetic is (basically) the form, whereas your post is about the content shaping the form. "What lies in the depths of the human soul", as the main conceit (content), could be translated to "a scary and disturbing atmosphere" as its aesthetic, is what I'm saying.

I think we need a deeper knowledge of psychology in order to satisfy this question. At least I know I do. There are clearly many things that motivate people, of which challenge is only one, of course; there's curiosity, fulfillment, ambition. I guess one could investigate to see if there's any literature on the subject.

I can imagine a work in which, at some point, the player is left totally bereft, where the player feels abandoned by the work, where the work rejects the player, and maybe picks up again later, or maybe does not.  Absolute rejection might be a fitting end to an extended period of engagement.

I think the older games all had a bit of this, at least. With time, game designers learned all sorts of tricks in order to seduce the player. I remember a point in my life at which playing Alien 3 (NES) was completely depressing me. I've discussed this feeling once or twice with a friend, so I know I'm not the only one who has experienced it.

I believe you have two things confused here. One is the 'meaning', and the other is the general aesthetic. "A scary and disturbing atmosphere" is clearly an aesthetic goal. Another thing would be if you made it your goal to make a game that conveys "what lies in the deepest and darkest corners of the human soul", for instance.

I think you are very persuasive. I was already in agreement with most of your points since before I read the text, but it feels like you have put your thoughts forward in a very accessible way, so, good job.