bluesky threads

Here are a few bluesky threads I tweeted of game-related things on my mind that I haven’t had time to expand on. These tend to be relatively unrefined thoughts, but you may find them interesting (as did I!)

• “Inverted Earth”: Games as “Human Potential Annihilating Device”

  • A QRT on joey schutz’s post on game design and addiction (it itself a response to Addiction by Design, a great book on casinos and addiction!)

  • I’d like to write more about this at some point, but I also want to do it a bit delicately (and positively), so it’s been a process

• Game Development as the process of being a “Desire Magician”

• Balatro, Nubby and Caulkgames (“Games that fill up small gaps in free time / life”)

  • Related: “Western Devs” and “freshening up JRPGs”

• Need for a Intergenerational view amongst Game Designers

• I wish Games Had More Exciting Usages of Maps

• America’s Mystery: It created some great game design and also some really Bad Game Design

• Numberism and One-Off-ism in games

• Boba, identity and Asians and USA

• Why Are Art Styles From 80s-00s Considered Dead Ends In Games

• Why Do American Cities Have Weird Military Histories

• Is Shohei Otani a Modern Saint? Why do I see him so much in Japan?

• 1-dimensional bumpslash adventure game idea

• Calling Angeline Era “New Action”

• i played the kings field games and Man do we need more FPS games with non-point-click-shoot controls

• Can you make a fun 1st person action game without guns or being an action rpg

• dark souls…isnt a soulslike?

• mario 64… a point and click adventure?

interesting reading

• Espen Aarseth and “metachronotopes”, considering games as novels

  • Espen Aarseth - Cybertext (1997) - Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (has some writing on early text adventure games)

  • Related: Mary Ann Buckles’ "Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure’" (1985) - a thesis on Colossal Cave Adventure that also looks into why people liked it

  • Related - Thomas W. Malone’s “What Makes Things Fun To Learn? A Study of Instrinsically Motivating Computer Games” - an interesting paper (from 1980!) where the author programmed various versions of breakout missing features like score - or even the ball bouncing lol - and measured participants’ reactions. I haven’t read too much but it’s been interesting so far to see such an early (in the history of games) study

• Yuk Hui - art and cosmotechnics. I don’t understand a lot of this book, but there are some interesting moments where some stuff does click into place. There’s some discussion of Heidegger and “loops” and cybernetics that led to some of the above ideas on caulkgames

• Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (which I found via hearing about Cruelty Squad / Psycho Patrol R)

• Susan Buck-Morss’ “Dreamworld and Catastrophe” (on soviety/USA film and history and some of the theory behind that)

• “The Shortest History of China” and “24 hours in ancient china” were fun china-related reads, which are a part of a general interest in Chinese history I’ve been exploring (stemming from a general interest in the Central Asia → China transmission period for Buddhism)

• stephen gillmurphy on games - "the most basic belief in videogame spaces: that what we're doing is basically good, that everything will work out in the end. what kind of games would you make if you no longer believed this was the case?"

  • (This dovetails (I have been using this word a lot this week) with various thoughts about kill gameplay by Fellow Gamers sylvie and droqen, as well as a talk by Karina Popp at NYU, livetweeted by Naomi Clark)

  • Also llaura’s recent essay on game design

• liz ryerson on aftermath of gamergate

• em reed’s novel More bugs (set in the US suburbs!)

• the end of gameplay (droqen’s new game)

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More stuff than I could reasonably summarize, but here’s a few fun things.

• A perfume bottle museum! (Scent museum in Beppu japan). I love small-scale sculptural work, from these hypercommercial objects to stuff like mingei crafts. If you’re ever in Tokyo, be sure to see if there’s a (free!) exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum of crafts societies - always something inspiring there.

  

• weird beach near Fukuoka. It started raining pretty bad after we were a ways out on the coast LOL

• I got to go to a Kidzania (a theme park of sorts where kids roleplay having jobs. They open it to adults a few times a year. Basically a roleplaying experience! I was surprised how much wearing uniforms makes you feel certain ways.

• danchi days mascot Moro-Q at a danchi museum!

• danchi days team trip to “living relic of the Japan bubble period” Atami city!

Classical Music Recommendation

This was the original point of this post.

I was making bagels and listening to some music and it gave me the idea to write about some of my early encounters with classical music. I know some people enjoy hearing about my OSTs’ influences, but I rarely draw attention to classical music which I think underlies everything I write. I like music and sound a lot and I guess always have.

One of my favorite childhood hobbies - which I realize I never really shared with ANY friends outside of at home with my sister - was poring over Noteworthy Player transcriptions of vgmusic.com midi files. Here’s the only video of a NoteWorthy Player song playback I could find (lol).

Many MIDI files at the time were weirdly transcribed and could end up garbled, so there was a frustration if the playback didn’t sound quite right… a weird piecing together of what the song ought to sound like.

I also liked printing out game sheet music, trying to play them on the piano, or looking at the ‘read-along’ scores on music- scores.com, a website where you could find songs by instrument, or composer, or skill level. There was a similar enjoyment to looking at the “hardest songs”, as the fun of perusing the Really Hard Songs in Dance Dance Revolution).

Classical music, as an “Object” is interesting. The Classical Music that I tend to like (roughly from the 1800s on) feels a lot more like paintings, murals, or picture books... (see: 1800s Program Music) you listen through it and certain things stick out or catch your attention. The structure of a Classical piece (that I like) is kind of freeform. Most songs do stick to a set of ideas enough that each idea recognizably feels like part of the song, but unlike more common song structures today (verse-chorus, etc), classical music tends to meander more, repeat sections a lot, and sections don’t have as many conventions for length. I like this image-like quality to the music, whether or not the song was intentionally trying to describe e.g. a story. Classical music is probably part of what forms my base skepticism in production-heavy, clarity-and-loudness-focused polish in pop music. Those things are tools, for sure, but not really goals, for me, at least.

It may come from how the quality of what makes a classical piece interesting comes down to the emotional and physical qualities of how the song is interpreted by the performer. Keep in mind that there’s no canonical ‘studio version’ of any classical song, since it’s all based on interpretation of sheet music by the performer!

Anyways, I thought it could be an interesting exercise to discuss some of my favorite classical pieces from childhood, with some personal historical context to them. These pieces aren’t particularly obscure but I figured a good number of readers probably haven’t heard of them, so let’s begin!

Liszt - Mephisto Waltz No. 3 (1883)

(In case it goes down, this is a video of Mephisto Waltz 3, played by France Clidat)

Wow, I didn’t know this one was written so late in his life? Liszt (1811-1886) is a composer who, in the memey way, was known as a playboy and showoff with Big Hands… My friends would mention how you need Big Hands to play his music. Whether this was in college or elementary school. I was very in to trying to play Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, although it was beyond my skill level, there’s a lot of fun to be had in slowly playing segments of passages.

In middle school or something, one talented friend was playing Mephisto Waltz No. 1. In times before and after class or after school, or during a lunch break, sometimes we’d be hanging out in the music room and ask friends to play some of a piece they knew or were working on learning. Mephisto Waltz 1 was so interesting that it got me to looking up the score of the song, and somehow running into what must have been a midi file (or mp3) of Mephisto Waltz 3.

As the name suggests, according to Wikipedia, Mephisto Waltz (at least the first) is based on the 1836 verse drama Faust: here’s a note from the score of Mephisto Waltz 1:

There is a wedding feast in progress in the village inn, with music, dancing, carousing. Mephistopheles and Faust pass by, and Mephistopheles induces Faust to enter and take part in the festivities. Mephistopheles snatches the fiddle from the hands of a lethargic fiddler and draws from it indescribably seductive and intoxicating strains. The amorous Faust whirls about with a full-blooded village beauty in a wild dance; they waltz in mad, abandon out of the room, into the open, away into the woods. The sounds of the fiddle grow softer and softer, and the nightingale warbles his love-laden song.

Mephisto Waltz 3 came some decades later. Why do I like the song? I could get into the weeds with particular music theory-based analyses, but I’ll keep it Readable. There’s a real playfulness to it, and whimsy in its emotional qualities. Certain melodies reoccur in the song but in different contexts - sometimes as a really light, dainty staccato (e.g. 0:28, short, quick notes), other times as a very dreamy and loud legato (smooth, connected notes). So it gives this airy, fairy-like feel. Intoxicating and seductive (5:15), as the above passage indicates. Sometimes grand (4:38), sometimes mysterious (5:55). And there’s plenty of unusual sonic textures, like the fluttery passage at 2:40. I like hearing instruments pushed to strange places through methods of articulation (how the note is played, physically, which translates to emotional qualities). There’s moments that feel like realizations (7:00), questioning…

It also kind of reads like a romantic love-esque song to me The song has a lot of recurring melodies but pushes them to all sorts of emotional situations, and the resulting complexity parallels the ups and downs of life and the real world.

I really value that kind of complexity and ambiguity in music, which is why the collective whole of game OSTs are valuable to me. I like making music because it’s so easy to capture a complex set of emotions or feelings and just put it into sound, and as it turns out this works great in the context of games!

One song that I think shows some of the classical influence is Angeline Era’s overworld theme. Angeline Era is very much a game that feels breezy, cheery, and playful, but with dark and serious plot developments that slowly come to the surface. To me this song captures a lot of that - there’s just a touch of anxiety and seriousness to the song (0:40), but it feels very heroic and jubilant, relaxed and reflective at other times. You could call much of the song “laid-back”, but actually each section and how it approaches and showcases this “laid-backness” feels quite different.

When I'm not working on games, one of my hobbies is walking around Tokyo in my free time. Sometimes I'm alone, but for the most part I prefer chatting with someone, so I'm usually walking with someone else. This hobby is called "Sanpo" (meaning walking) in the context of Japan, and it’s basically taking a walk. Sanpo is a great hobby especially in the large Japanese cities because of how dense they are and how plentiful public transport can be. I didn’t do this much living in America, but I wonder if I would be motivated to try it out e.g. with the many forest preserves around the Chicago suburbs.

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For walking, in Tokyo, generally speaking I always have a rough starting point in mind! But it's not necessarily anything fancy, what usually works best is picking a train station I've been interested in and going from there. Whenever someone visits Japan, I try to recommend just walking around between stations and trying to read about the neighborhood.

Anyways, I wanted to document a few of the walks I did last year. If you ever visit Tokyo, maybe you can try visiting one of these places. (A bunch of people have visited the Site of Reversible Destiny since I wrote about it in 2023, and people love it!)

Turns out I have too many walks for one post, so I'll just do January through May. This is also excluding a lot of walks so it’s just the highlights.

January: Hikarigaoka Park (Tokyo)

Ease of access from Tokyo: EASY

One fun way to get walking ideas is to visit the areas where your friends live near, which is how we decided to visit Hikarigaoka Park. Going to that place feels fun because you can imagine your friend living there or being around there.

January in Tokyo is a time where you still get the beautiful, low winter light, and the rich array of earthy tones and olive colors, but with almost all fall foliage gone. It's a bit calmer in the city, because the Christmas advertising is over, too. Hikarigaoka is home to a couple of danchi (Japanese mass housing), which is a common motivation for me to visit places. By chance, Hikarigaoka it happens to be the setting of the Digimon movie (I think...), but I didn't see any Digimon...

Hikarigaoka Park is quite large, in part as it’s somewhat on the border of inner and outer Tokyo with its more open spaces. The park is a wide-open field lined with trees around the edges, and with all the fallen leaves and winter lighting it reminded me a little of the forest preserves around Illinois. I wasn’t a hugely outdoorsy kid, but the environments do remind me of home a bit, so sometimes these walks have a nostalgia factor.

Despite the colder weather, there were still folks playing Shogi in the park, and people like me crouched in the bushes taking photos of grass. At the end a cold wind picked up and it began to snow: perfect weather for pasta from an italian family restaurant.

February: North from Heiwadai Station (Tokyo)

Ease of access from Tokyo: EASY

Often on walks there will be something that forms the highlight of my walk that I didn’t necessarily expect beforehand. In this case, this walk was from a random station, and the highlight was stumbling upon a large Aeon Mall. Aeon’s one of the largest grocery and mall operators around Tokyo. For Americans like myself, the word mall conjures anything from imagined ‘90s nostalgia, to awkward ‘00s teenage memories, to vaporwave compilations and found-footage-style YouTube horror. In Tokyo, they are honestly quite cozy. There’s something comfortingly familiar to their layouts, which range from a mixture of “big box store” to food court, to the big-american-mall style where multiple storefronts open up to an interior walkway.

In particular I’m a big fan of food courts, simply because they represent an ideal of dining. You can sit anywhere you want, and can stay almost as long as you want. Each person in a group can order what their preferences and allergies need. There’s nothing wrong with transitioning to use the table for something like homework, waiting, or a meeting, as many people here do — even if they don’t order food! I’ve always felt restaurants imply a sense of time pressure. Cafes are extremely transactional, essentially demanding you rent a space for an hour or two through a drink purchase. On the other hand, food courts have kind of a utopian feel to how they accommodate mixed uses and you’re allowed to exist there. And, one of the most overworked demographics — stay-at-home moms with young children — can find a place to rest AND seat their child here.

Perhaps malls cannot be free from criticism, but I would easily choose the humble charm of a standardized food court, over the glitz and glamor of a fancy, benchless Minato-ku mall. One of my favorite meals is to order the ebi (shrimp) chili from the chinese restaurant, with a side of crunchy egg rolls, before a dessert of Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream.

February: Around Inage Station (Inage, Chiba Prefecture)

Ease of access from Tokyo: MEDIUM

After hearing a friend was moving here, we immediately set off to visit and see what it was like. By coincidence, it’s also near a (closed-to-the-public) university, home of a professor whose work sandy powder (of Danchi Days) was reading. Outside of Tokyo is always much quieter and reminiscent of suburban life in the USA, which, for all its problems, still has a rhythm and volume of life that I prefer a bit more over Tokyo’s day-to-day density and chaos.

The day just had very nice weather, there were some nice slopes to enjoy with their little parks, and the giant tracks cutting through the town allowed for surprising sites like a student practicing lacrosse by throwing the ball at one of the road’s concrete support beams. There’s nothing like being tired in the middle of a walk and zoning out in a random park’s chair, before heading off to a family restaurant and maybe a Book Off to peruse used games. I was also able to discuss some early Danchi Days ideas with sandy powder which ended up manifesting themselves through DD’s Sense Games.

February: Ikuta Ryokuchi (Kawasaki, Kanagawa)

Ease of access from Tokyo: NORMAL

On a weirdly warm February day, we took advantage of the weather and went off to a random acquaintance’s neighborhood. Little did we know it was right next to Ikuta Ryokuchi, a huge park on a small mountain. Since it was a weekday, it was mostly groups of elementary-aged students walking around with their chaperones while the other occasional adults looked on.

It had quite a lot of nice hilly trails, but more impressive was it was (by chance!) home to the Minka-en, an open-air museum on a large plot of land that holds preserved Japanese homes from peasants to aristocrats. Some homes have tall, steep and heavily thatched roofs to fight off the deep, mountainous snows. It’s fun to walk around these homes and imagine living back then. There’s a variety of textures that we don’t quite get to enjoy living in standardized apartments (tatami, uneven wood floors… dirt floors) but perhaps that’s what we trade for the benefit of insulation and central AC, ha ha. And snow not crushing our roofs.

The hilly trails are worth hiking around, but I think the real star was this museum.

March: Wakabadai Danchi (Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture)

Ease of access from Tokyo: NORMAL

Although in March of 2024 we had not yet officially decided to start work on Danchi Days, co-dev sandy powder and I visited a number of danchis around Japan for fun. One of the most interesting ones was Wakabadai Danchi, located near Tokyo. Located amongst hills, planted forests, it’s one of those “has it all” types of places with a gym, grocery stores and even a bookstore. It feels a bit like the Japanese version of a suburb where I grew up, where everything’s relatively ‘within distance’ of your home (although in my case I had to drive…). On one hand, there’s a similar sense of being ‘closed in’ that you feel in the suburbs. Everything you need is right outside your door, so why leave? The difference, of course, is you don’t need a car living here. You can walk or bike!

The bookstore in Wakabadai Danchi was particularly interesting. Previously, an old bookstore was in this danchi, but it closed down. A younger owner (with bookstore experience) came and opened up a community center/bookstore in its place. It seemed to be doing well and had a nice selection of books - I hope it’s still open!

I was particularly a fan of “HUNGRY TIGER”, a family-restaurant-style steakhouse nearby. I am not a big red meat guy but I was charmed by the open layout.

April: Matengai Cliff, Nishinoshima (an island in the Oki Islands in Shimane Prefecture)

Ease of access from Tokyo: VERY HARD

By taking a 3 hour boat from a coast of Japan, you can go visit the Oki Islands, which is a historic fishing set of islands that also had ties to other countries. In recent years it also has a tourism industry, meaning folks like me can ride an electric bike up a mountain to get this nice view on a hilltop with some sorta-domesticated horses nearby. I wouldn’t categorize it as too demanding of a ride as the bikes are electric, but I was pretty sore afterwards… I’m not that much of an athlete nowadays, though.

The name of the cliff is “MATENGAI” (摩天崖), which suggests imagery of being at the very edge of heaven, touching the sky. Also if you just misread it it could sound like saying “DEMON/EVIL (魔) HEAVEN” cliff which is very metal.

Anyways, there’s nothing like riding a bike around an island, especially with the sea horizon in view… and with pretty much empty roads. It reminded me a little of the highways I’d see around California as a kid. It also reminded me of walking around Quest 64’s open environments.

Honestly a bit of a spooky feeling biking up there, tiptoeing past the horses, up until the point a van full of men in business suits also came out onto the hilltop to also enjoy the view.

May: Sakuragaoka (Tama, Tokyo)

Ease of access from Tokyo: NORMAL

This hilltop danchi/neighborhood near Tokyo was also the basis for Ghibli’s adaptation of Whisper of the Heart. I forget if we visited here before or after watching, but it’s a really lovely place to walk. After going up this gentle hill, you find yourself in a hilltop plaza with homes and shops. There’s also a few danchis scattered around, including Atago danchi which we visited.

I really liked this walk for all the interesting slopes and views and the general calmness. The walk has a natural narrative built in, with going up the hill, then back down the hill.

There’s also a big river nearby. Ah, it makes me want to have dachshunds again.

May: Shinjuku Gyoen (Tokyo)

Ease of access from Tokyo: EASY

Not technically a walk, but this outing is worth noting because it's where some core prototypable ideas behind one of my in-dev games Danchi Days took shape and roughly the period where the game really got started! Shinjuku Gyoen is a gigantic Japanese garden located in… Shinjuku… one of the busier areas of Tokyo. It’s on the touristy side, and not really a human-scale park IMO. Honestly I’m not a big fan of touristy parks like these (they’re so big that walking around takes forever…), and most of it has this intention of being looked at to the point it feels kind of well… non serendipitous.

May: Hikarigaoka Danchi (Tokyo)

Ease of access from Tokyo: EASY

Hey look... we're back! However, the difference this time is that it's clearly greener outside. In the January outing, we only saw the park, but this time decided to visit the danchi. Look at those trees! Filled with a lot of cute parks and named streets, certain zones of the danchi have seasonal names, too.

There was even a Rose Garden Fair featuring roses of all colors and scents. Personally, I'm more of a wildflower guy: things like roses or sakura feel a bit too planned for me… it’s like getting too much of a nice thing at once. Wildflowers are nice because they’re often not there, until they suddenly are, and it’s a nice surprise.

Can you feel the wholesome Sylvanian Family/Calico Critter vibes...? Around this time I was studiously playing those 5 heartfelt and middling adventure GB/GBA games for research. Of note is that we also went on this outing with fellow Danchi Days co-developer, mogumu, but before we decided to work together. Perhaps this was the first danchi-themed Danchi Days team outing...? It ended with a lunch at a strange Japanese-Chinese restaurant with western and renaissance decor.

Given its easy access from central Tokyo, I’d recommend Hikarigaoka at any time of year.

May: Zenpukuji River Park (Tokyo)

Ease of access from Tokyo: EASY

To wrap up the first half of 2025, I want to shout out one of my favorite walking areas found when we decided to randomly wander from the end of one of the Tokyo train lines (Marunouchi Line). The first time, we only just found this river area before it started to rain. There’s a friendly cafe nearby, Echigoya, run by two brothers who used to work at sandwich shops in the UK. They now run their cafe as it was handed down from their grandparents.

I enjoyed this walk as it reminds me a bit of some biking paths and forest preserves near where I grew up.

Well, that’s it for this post. It’s also the inaugural “Grab Bag” post. I’ll be back to writing about game stuff in the meantime.