notes dump 2026

what i want from vgames is very faint, very hard to put my finger on, it's a desire, but i'm not sure for what. and this thing i want from games seems to be hidden inside the format: it's not whatever games imagine they're about. so to see it you have to sift for it, through all the other stuff - the layers the format drapes around itself to make sure anyone who wants to see what it has to first spend as much time as possible getting there. startup logo, engine logo, title, create a save slot, intro movie, tutorial village, ice level, fire level...

i want to make shallow games: i want to take whatever effects i find delving into the game engine and bring them as close to the surface as possible. that you could trip across them even just moving your gaze across the screen, or ineptly pressing buttons. there's surely a place for demanding art, for deliberate ritual and boredom. but to be frank: i don't trust fucking videogame developers, of all people, to know what that place is.

the idea of a "save button" has been sealed, 1000 miles below the surface of the earth. to be allowed to see it you must prove that you know about death.

i'm attracted to something like the opposite of late style - de chirico's reversion from the great metaphysical paintings to stodgy neoclassicim, alex chilton going from his crazed 70s work into something that could disconcertingly sound like cruise ship music. something appealling and mysterious about this even when it feels aesthetically like a downgrade. yes we know we SAID we wanted negation of the negation but... but... not like this!!

i would like to keep making art for so long that i become unintelligible to myself, i would like to follow my desires until i no longer know what they are or what they represent, until i wrap around into some horrible mirror image of whatever it is i think is good. the desire to be turned inside out.

everyone is a cautionary tale for someone else. we have the meaning of our lives printed on the backs of our heads where everyone but us can read it clearly, we spend our time haplessly orbiting around it, spinning.

if i complain about professionalism it's because it excludes people, flattens out the space, imposes industrial best practices as neutral norms, etc. but to be clear it's also because i, personally, am a lazy person. i don't like working on anything more than two hours a day (which is the amount of time fourier says we can tolerate any one activity; hence his odd, courtly utopias in which we are constantly rotated between carpentry, masked balls, flower husbandry, music, romance...) - if i have to spend more than this time i'd rather it be on something i don't care about, where at least it won't depress me when i lapse into bad work. i don't believe i've ever heard someone who managed to make a living from art say "yeah its easy. i just fart around all the time." but farting is important to me.......

whatever i make is built around my butterfly tendencies, they are excuses for variation - where to make a game is to tinker on computer, or draw and play with art supplies, think of jokes, dream, walk around, read that book i've been meaning to read in the name of "research"... the implicit goal being to have a project that uses up every part of myself: one where whatever i find myself doing is instantly redeemed thru proximity to a project (which makes it.... good??)

yes yes yes. but why shouldn't lazy people, or delusional ones, get to make art anyway. those who don't have any excuse, any external barrier they can point to, those who just don't want to work. we regard those people with disdain, as children unwilling to put in the work of self-discipline - even as we announce our new, professionally funded project is "lovecraftian", perhaps "kafkaesque", that is to say as commercial work is constantly ornamented and expanded thru reference to the noncommercial, to those people who if not lazy found themselves through some quirk of sensibility totally incapable of knuckling under and adapting to the market norms.

where do these people come from, how do we have more of them? how many have we already lost, pushed out so that we can enjoy assuring each other that we're all working very hard?

risk in videogames is exciting and empowering, risk as we encounter it in real life is often a humiliation. disempowering - that what we have or are can be swept away so easily, that even catastrophe avoided might only be deferred. there's obviously no comparison between the gamelike risks we adopt voluntarily and those imposed on us from without, with stakes we'd rather not play for. but it's interesting to me that even the shadow of this other kind of risk seems so totally missing from videogames, as though it belonged to a completely different world.

videogames are never about the things that they're about. a game may be "about" choice, systems, agency, risk and so on - - but they never seem to have any actual thoughts about these things, to make any discoveries about them, or have any interest in testing those discoveries against what the people making these things may think of and experience as real. the "good risk" of videogames is often made by people taking the "bad risk" of imposed arbitrary layoffs, expensive accreditation coming to naught, etc - this "bad risk" is often the consequence of a different kind of "good risk", the exciting, empowering risks taken by investors and executives carefully insulated from the cost of their decisions. bet it all on saudi investment - you either win big or laugh, shrug, at consequences befalling someone on a screen. hey, you may as well be playing a videogame.

sometimes it feels like videogames as a medium exist as a way not to think about things - that literalising these things into bland mechanisms is a way not to have to deal with the pain caused by their presence, or their absence.

"why this had to be a game", had to be a movie, a comic, etc, the fearfulness of concealing volition as necessity - no, don't worry, it's not that they simply wanted to do such and such a thing, it's that they had to do it, they had no choice, which makes it better. sometimes you just want something and other people look at the wreckage of your miserable desires and relate to it or not. necessity in art discourse is those little bumper rails they put down at kids bowling.

consciousness is not reformist, is not satisfied by the compromises and half-measures we might call reasonable, the most we can expect. we think we've made our peace with limitations, settle down to live our lives inside some little patch of carved off autonomy, and then wonder why we still find ourselves banging our elbows into the walls. there's a tendency to look at previous generations and say, let's not go crazy. we just want what they had: the steady job, home ownership - the other stuff, the grand abstractions, we can drop, if we have these. and then we go back to inhabiting a world already poisonous with the rage and denial of those same generations, the intricate systems of punishment and delusion they constructed in the effort to convince themselves that the trade off they'd made against the possibility of something better had been worthwhile. old machinery still hammering away, minus whatever it was constructed to protect. is all we ask for to inherit the machine?

we inhabit both official and unofficial economies, and there is often need for exchange between them. the artist, organizer, activist who starts a fundraiser may have a personal emergency that demands they try to convert some of the time and energy they've contributed to some collective project back into individual cash terms. conversely these collective projects tend to rely on people redirecting whatever surplus time, energy, money they have back out of the official world of paid work and into whatever it is they actually care about.

on paper it's a cycle, in practice the demands of the working world tend to take extreme priority. and it's complicated too by the fact that some people are allowed into the official world, others pushed into the unofficial one: the official economy is in part a system of credentials, buy-ins, expectations around behavior, appearance, the story of one's life. someone might have time and energy to spare but be precluded from putting it in commercial terms because for whatever reason they can't get hired. work put in by people relegated to the unofficial economy - queer people, disabled people, caretakers etc - can often only be paid out again to people in the official economy. lowpoly horror games might have started with the work of people like kitty horrorshow, lilith zone and zoe sparks, etc, but the actual commercial dividends tend to be paid out to people who can navigate the world of pitch decks and investment capital, with the various expectations and types of background this tends to imply.

to me the description of indie games in terms of the enclosure of the commons (op cit. missing, something lana polansky said) is hard to improve upon. but creative work is not finite in the way land is, so if we wanted to modify it, we could think of the same process as: the dynamic between two official and unofficial economies. what is the exchange rate between them, what are the exit fees involved in moving from one economy to another? (ex: platform fees, transfer fees, loan interest). to me a recurring problem in indie games is that once money enters the official economy, it never comes back out. say i make a million dollars selling my game (lol), a game made with the help and context of discord channels, forums, engine tutorials, invisible lineages of influence etc etc. i decide to make game 2 with my new money, and start hiring new people to expand the team. the people i will look to hire are professionals - people who already meet the invisible qualifications for performance, training etc that qualifies them to do creative work for hire. this is not to say they are necessarily privileged, that they might not also a paycheck away from homelessness. they might have other projects, noncommercial ones; they might, in the year 2026, struggle to have either time, energy or money to spare to put into that other work. the unofficial economy relies on trickle down, on the residue left over from official work; the official economy on the other hand relies on constant expansion, trying to find new ways to absorb any work or money not in official circulation.

the question is, how could unofficial life be funded more directly? there are various forms of "indie fund" that implicitly or explicitly are built around the expectation of a commercial product, rather than more time spent aimlessly tinkering. there are charities and art funds, depending on location, but these can have a depressingly similar set of priorities - and such emphasis on means testing, "qualification", that applying for grants can be full time labour in itself (again, one tending to elevate those who know how to speak the language and play the game). there are the larger economic solutions, that better pay, organization membership, less hours and more autonomy for commercial workers would expand the energy that could go into noncommercial work: this is 100% true. but i think even so it might be useful to consider how to move from the horse-race of funding this or that promising work to the funding of a commons, a thing which potentially has no visible uses or payouts at all, or at least none that will be visible to the present.

a thing i keep coming back to with money is: the gulf between the quantitative and the non-quantitive. people in the early artgame era used to earnestly wonder how much a tiny yet moving game was worth, how much a sunrise might be "worth". but even the lowest forms of quantity (the dreaded 100 hours of gameplay) have an absolute advantage over the totally non-quantitative, which are famously the things money can't buy. shall we introduce still more vague proxies for the "worth" of art, meaning etc, and then watch once again as those proxies cover and suffocate the thing they're meant to be about? it seems to me the only way to get away from this is to move away from the idea of exchange and into that of sacrifice: the willed destruction of money by dumping it arbitrarily back into the black hole that is the mass existence of other people, with as little distinction or qualification as possible. an acceptance of the place of the non-quantiative, the thing nobody can predict. accept no arts budget that has no line item for self annihilation.

i guess if there's something i support, it is: the reintroduction of sensibility into game design, the sense of someone making choices according to their own incrutable or inchoate sense of "what works" "what's interesting" rather than "this is how the machine is built". and i think as interest recognizes no boundaries or distinctions aside from those it discovers within itself, an interest-based game design is one which cannot prioritize any one aspect of videogames in advance; it's to take the risk of permanent distraction, to say that at any time the focus of our attention might become the wallpaper, the carpet, a music track, a space. a character gesture, a picture on the wall. that any of these things might enlarge the medium, if we take the chance that they might swallow it, instead.

in games i have a working self and a dreaming self. the dreaming self plans, schemes, comes up with jokes that might be funny or images that might be cool; lists the overall plan of work, the steps involved, the assets that have to be produced. the working self is what actually sits in front of the computer - confronted immediately with all those decisions too granular or too stupid to be acknowledged by the dreaming self. should i put the trees in this map HERE or HERE? if i put them here it looks better but i might need to run the path around. this textbox is too busy so i'll need to chop it in two and then come up with some filler for each part so it doesn't look too shorn. obstacles and areas changed on the fly, made shorter, longer. things my dreaming self thought would be funny or cool that fall flat - the working self tries them, shrugs, has to chop and change them without throwing the shape of the whole too out of whack. new effects are discovered and unplanned trips are made to explore them. the dreaming self is there too, looking at these changes, running them back into the fantasy machine. the working self dreams and the dreaming self works.

i assume that's how it is for everybody. what i find interesting about specifically being a hobbyist dev is this: all of a sudden one self has much less force over the other. the working self gets restless without a plan, the dreaming self can't do anything unless it gets the other one to work. in a commercial context various new sticks and carrots are available - budgets, incentives, deadlines, goads to work, to hit the milestones and follow the plan. without these things, the working self now has an absolute veto. if i don't like the plan, if the planning self has left the working one too many chores, left all the juicy moments of invention and discovery for itself, the rest of me reserves the right to down tools.

many game design works seem written to assume an audience of managers. they establish terminology, workflow, best practice - they want to streamline the flow of commands so that the course laid down in planning can be followed as closely as possible, without risk of communication. i can't weigh in on how useful that might be in a commercial context, but in a noncommercial one, trying to follow those same practices would be absurd. it would be to redefine the split in my own practice into a division between manager and labourer, the manager with no authority, the labourer not being paid. if i focus on writing about hobbyism it's because i'm interested in other ways of thinking about the relationship between these two people, who after all seem to have so little in common.