iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

alright after several messages, i think this thread probably was not nearly specific enough

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(also when I say narratively legible, I don't mean all tools should be as simple as football - I'm talking about the way I'm constructing meaning about the stuff I'm doing)

This is really well put. "You can have everything you want, without becoming anything you could be" is an actual devil from actual hell's bargain. I think the act of having to *justify* and *defend* doing things that demand us to change is like, deeply spiritually humiliating.

I wanna evolve my understanding of the world of the thing I'm making, and have my relationship with it change me, in ways that testing endurance (or just mess-untangling) doesn't alone

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Even just as a participant, as a way to spend time- totally, the pure stress-friction of interfacing issues, and missing trivia, is way thinner material than the problem-solving space of "retooling some parts you deeply understand to form new wholes" you're comparing to the Apollo scene

I like the UNIX comparison a lot Wish I drew a clearer line between the 'pure' and commercial-angle-subtweeting-S&box in the base thread, because the "what makes a constraint narratively legible" question is way more interesting (and imo important) than "how do you advertise"

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this is a really really really good thread

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Yeah, and that's exactly where I've ended up - like in the split thread, this is where I go "how do you codify what makes working in a medium interesting, when the world doesn't require that of you?" And I think this is getting polluted with the stunts/marketing angle

That doesn't mean everything has to be stunts, unless you're going back to the commercial conversation - where if you're specifically doing marketing, this probably gets pushed in the direction of stunts

And I'd advocate for it in the face of, what happens if something can make most of those "natural" problems go away? How do we codify the things we find valuable in working with a medium when they're not required to get to a result?

> deliberately choosing a process with friction that's there as a deliberate constraint To be clear this is the thing I'd advocate hard for

This is a wide net to cast, but it's the same question when you lose one constraint and something else happens. And I don't view AI as different than that principally - it's just, in promise, kind of the most insanely nuclear version of it

When I think about the play-experience of creativity, VSTs are to playing a violin, similar to what something like Unity is to 3D graphics. It's a swap-in of one constraint, for something else - and then we have to ask what the replacement means? And how does that affect the way we value the result?

It sounds like you're treating AI as something categorically different than other tools, which it is in many ways, but I actually don't treat it like that from this specific perspective-

I'm praying this doesn't come off like a gotcha question because for all my bluster about creativity as a sport I'm earnestly unresolved about the answer: I'm curious how you take the oil painting comparison then - do you see that as imposing friction for the sake of friction?

Oh yeah, please don't mistake me for thinking all (or even the best) friction should be inherently marketable - this thread starts with me thinking about how platforms like S&box appeal to Consumers commercially, that's where that comes from

I do worry about trying to prevent that from feeling inherently lesser than like, exploring the frontier. I've definitely been thinking about the end of the heroic age of exploration as an analog for this

So while PICO-8 is tiny scale, I don't think choosing starting constraints removes ingenuity, I think it creates a foundation for it. And if we really careen into this space where that foundation isn't provided for us, we'll kinda have to create it.

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Which is part of where, in the face of a tech that promises to lift all constraint, I think it becomes important to impose base grounding constraints I think this is also uniquely weird in digital art, like this is kind of similar to how mediums evolve - like oil paint exists as a specific medium

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When you say "part of the interest in stories about game development is what friction you created *by accident*, and where you put in extra work to remove friction and how you did so." I think that's SUPER true - and in my head, that's someone responding to their past responses to their environment

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me rewriting things 300 times because i keep hitting a post hotkey But I agree, also that series would be extremely rad I really value problems and solutions that come from the environment, but if your environment becomes too frictionless, does imposing basic frictions have to compromise that?

sorry for the 3000 message blast, you're raising good points

to build a roblox-like, you're triple fucked on that, because without a process incentive, you're just gonna be inundated with slop

i'm still someone who wants to make the big things the hard way, not PICO-8 scale, and i'm excited by finding ways to inject interesting and tactile process friction into a game built on a tool like Godot or Unity but "what makes the process interesting" is an active question, and if you're trying-

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the resurgence of early-00s DV camcorders as a way to ground indie film, and rising cultural value of stop motion, is something i'd point to as an example of this

yeah you got it completely i think tools like unity's north star being maximized leverage, if by a miracle from hell they get there, would change the way people relate to it, what people want to make, and how and people will gravitate towards higher-friction processes

i think my pushback to that is, we have to get more intentional about defining what 'unwanted' friction is, because AI tools have been sanding away frictions we currently see as 'inherent', without necessarily replacing them with anything more interesting or worthwhile

you see it constantly in challenge videos pre-2023, "we have to wait for this to render" is a classic that said it's also relatively cheap and not super propulsive compared to the other stuff they're doing

right - i've pushed back on that as a tool design thing, but never a storytelling thing. it's the ticking time bomb narrative device, you're up against a deadline, and you're suddenly disempowered, progress is entirely in the hands of god

i don't think UI juice is the problem with godot, or unity - like, the ways unity resists you isn't necessarily super interesting or tactile

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i think you do want friction in the process tho

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seems like most AI use cases are best-suited to the world where the tech doesn't exist

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it's found an intersection between all these influences that isn't least-common-denominator shit, but feels sharp and specific and tactile very excited that it exists

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I'm now a believer It's making me want to reprioritize my projects in extremely inadvisable ways

i understand the impulse to recognize one of its many obvious inspirations and go "oh ok, it's using that as a crutch, and it's just gonna be worse that." but you have it totally backwards it's so fucking good that it doesn't feel any need to bury its influences to stand itself up

this game makes me want to make poor choices

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and when i'm not playing it, i'm going to be thinking about it. really unfortunate situation

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