Building the Wonder, One Interaction at a Time

"Theories Behind Journey" - Jenova Chen, creator of Journey

- Build games around desired emotional experience and allow game play to arise from that.
- Visceral/social feedback as an incentive for action within a game. Tailor game play to deincentivize anything that will detract from the emotional experience that your are seeking to recreate.
- Three act system: build up, backward turn/twist, huge rise in emotional intensity
- Hero's journey is about transformation (stories are about combinations of small transformations, both for the characters and the reader)
- Emotional arc - craft setting based on experience that you want to create.
- "People hated the game" - huge iterations based on playtesting
- "By the end, when we shipped Journey, we actually went bankrupt." - Be ready to sacrifice.

Chen and his colleagues used an emotional arc to conceptualize and plot out
 Journey on both a metaphorical and a physical sense. The story, aesthetic, and
landscape were all crafted to convey specific emotional interactions and states.

I think the most interesting notion Chen put forward was that game mechanics don't necessarily have to take precedence over theme or story. So often, we look at games from a single perspective, insisting that core mechanics must come first and theme should arise from game play. Chen, in contrast, suggests that game play ought to arise from the core emotional experience and should be tailored specifically to reinforce that idea or feeling. It was neat to see that even in terms of physical landscape, Chen had used the emotional arc as the foundation for the entire game. This notion is, I think, going to be very important for me, especially in light of my current aspirations with regard to narrative. In any case, this will be really helpful in terms of my writing and game design.

A Thing Called Summer

So this crazy thing happened to me recently. I think they call it summer, but it lasted too long for it to have been only 4 months, and it passed too quickly for it to have been roughly a third of a year. In any case, summer is drawing to its end, and while I've been up to a lot of fun things this summer, I haven't been writing or really documenting any of it, so for those few benevolent souls who are interested in the goings-on of my life, I've prepared a brief (if you know me at all, you know that to be a baldfaced lie) recap of whatever comes to mind of the past four months.

So, this happened. Also, just as a side note, I'm almost
perpetually pale, so if you think the sickly pallor is the
unfortunate result of cool lighting or something like that,
rest assured that it is actually just my pasty self in all its wonder.

So there was graduation. That was a thing. Then I kind of stared the wall for like five days, and then I filled out job applications for a month or so while learning Javascript and reading in my free time. So many good books this summer: Faust, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Hafiz, Oscar Wao, No Country for Old Men, as well as an epic fantasy trilogy of which I've grown less fond with each subsequent novel. Alas, I digress. As you might have noticed, I said that I filled out job applications for a month. I should have said "for two months," but I wanted to break it up into separate segments so it would sound less pitiful. I still had (and have) my job at the missionary training center, and while it pays very well, it only gives me like 5 hours a week. So, I filled my days moving infinity friends to new homes/apartments, devising herb bread recipes with my roommate Ben (who is apparently a connoisseur of artisan breads and all things African), and working on my First. Video. Game. Ever.

Turpentine

He carved me from the canvas—
sharp, graphite bones, and watercolors
bleeding into penciled skin.
Then thick oil paints, layer
on layer, coat after coat
of red on red on red, gently—
tender caresses on my hips,
my legs, my chest. He paints
my breasts, and I,
his cheeks with scarlet.

Still, I offer him no sigh
of my stolen breaths, no whisper
of my purloined syllables.
My iron brow and carbon clavicles
defy his affectation.
This buried heart will never seek him,
for I am the Delilah of his desolation.
Scarlet of cochineal upon my lips
is the shattered hulls of female insects,
my fat, the rendered fat of calves.
The shadowed pigment of my skin?
Carbon. “Amorphous Carbon Produced
by Charring Animal Bones.” Herein
is my spirit, bones upon bones.

Your angled razor on
my cracked mosaic skin
cannot defile; I shed this tabernacle
gladly. With each fiery drop
of your indignation, I grow thinner.
Thinner, I will not melt away;
I am more than these pigments,
these gesso ligaments,
I am eternal Shiva,
I am annihilation.
I am the echo of your solitude, and
I fear no turpentine:
I drink destruction laughing.

Seek - Revising, Revamping, Figuring It Out

So, first off, I've decided that I want to present Seek in third person. This is for a number of reasons, but in short, I think it will force me to get better at dialogue, and that's something I really need to work on.

The new setting (only slightly new) is that of a corporate metropolis. Essentially, corporations their own nation-states.

"Jonah, this isn't child's play," Simeon said.
"I'm done."
"You can't just be done. This isn't some game you can play."
"You know, I don't think you're really the one to be talking to me about games. You've been playing Jael the whole time. You've been using me to do your dirty work while you've been thinking up more ways to kill people."
"Kid, I can't answer for my past, but this is something bigger than you and me, and you've gotta get over yourself if we're going to try to make things right."
"I already told you, I'm not going. I won't be a part of it."
Simeon storms off
Kara enters
"I overheard your conversation from the hall."
"Yeah, how 'bout that? He's got some gall, doesn't he, coming in here like that?"
"Jonah, I'm actually with him on this one..."
"Oh yeah, I'm sure you--"
"--I'm not kidding. I think he's right."
"Well this I don't understand then. I don't get how after everything you've seen--after Shibboleth and the caravans and Secra--"
"You--leave--Secra--out of this. You have no right--"
"After everything you've seen, you still want more death, more violence."
"That's not true. I don't know how you can be so blind sometimes. All this talk of the ideal world and philosophy and paradise, and still you don't understand--won't understand. You still can't see that Khaios and Rai are opposites, that while Khaios stands, there can never be a Rai--not in Secra, not in Shibboleth, nowhere! How many cities have to burn before you see that? /How many people have to die--" She broke into a sob, and Jonah rushed forward, putting his arms around her as she cried.  (Jael was killed in the attack)
"Kar... I'm sorry. I guess I didn't really think about it that way. I guess I didn't want to think about that it way..."
-----------------------------

Strangers to ourselves again
Living out these summer nights in solitude and silence
*Writers, artists, sculptors working ot rediscover the old truths--the symbols, the watchwords, the tokens, the unities
Runes, gestures, watchwords
To love is to feel as though we are giving away nothing when in fact we have put aside all else for the one within our heart.
War is the child of fear. Everyone is secretly a coward.
Forests shrouded in memory
The quiet of snowfall
Kids' river stones = jewels and quartz
Clay swallows' nests
Sand to glass because of fires--shards of sunlight shimmering in the sand.
Flesh has little argument against an iron blade
Staves, scepters, amulets, etc. --> Simeon decides gloves are cooler
Lights in abandoned skyscrapers
City like a charcoal drawing sketched across the horizon
Dreams that call you from your solitude, back to the bourne of infinity and oblivion
Lost/forgotten sun
Sparks rush upward into the endless night and fade into the darkness
"The ones who knew God have fled."
Ash flowing through the furrows on the wind
*Bathe in the river and dress in new garments, wash off his old self, old ways
--He cupped the cold water and laved it onto his body to try to acclimatize himself to the chill
--Robed in nothing but the warm breeze
One step at a time in the dark until you see the light
perfect night
Sand racing the wind as it rushed by them, off into the blinding sky
A moon hidden somewhere beyond the clouds
Beach at night, black swells; a fine mist rolling across the blackness.

Simeon doesn't die? Jonah gone now?
Telling it in the future: And then his eyes will grow large, and the girl will gasp, then I will (use technis arm to blow up reactor/whatever). And then I will lay down and rest with the Founders, my knowledge and their buried at last.
War chooses us / Love chooses us / Life chooses some.
So far away, so long ago, that it might have been a drea.

How can the world ever change/be renewed if we do not question it, if we are enamored with it as it is now?

World erased in the white of a winter's night
Coaxing gargoyles from granite stones

*Finding our stories

*Dream: running through a golden field, something calling. A flash of red between the tress and then footsteps pounding off into the jungle. Chase. A laugh up ahead, and for some reason I thought of Kara, and then there was a feather on the path--a crimson feather that turned silver-gray before his eyes.

The longing of youth.

Seek 8: Return to Khaios

Walking and talking, waxing philosophical. Suddenly they hear the shriek of a couatl behind them. They run, but they know they can't outrun couatls. They pass a tree that has been struck by lightning or something, has a huge fissure down the center of it. They climb into the hollow, and Jonah uses the bios shard to close the tree around them. Cracking, popping, little puffs of dust with each snap before darkness surrounded them and they could see only a sliver of light--a single mote-- shining through from a gap in their covering. Hidden in the womb of the tree, robed in perfect night though daylight surrounded them on every side. They clasp hands in the dark, their breath coming in stifled gasps. Patrol comes searching. "We know you're here somewhere. You might as well just come out now, because if you go wasting our time, we might just have to tell our officers that we found you dead in the woods." Tear illuminated on Kara's cheek as

Kara, you have to understand some things about Khaios before we get there. I don't want you to be confused or hurt or anything, because there, people act differently than in Shibboleth or Secra. They're going to treat you differently.
I mean, I think I can handle it. If it's about skin, then I've seen it before, both in Secra and in Shibboleth.
The thing is, in Khaios, they're not going to treat you the same as they treat me. They're going to assume things about you, and most of them won't take the time to find out if those things are true. They're going to think you're something less than you really are, and they're going to hate you for being different than their expectations. I mean, I guess you've seen how the Uppers respond, but people like you--your own people, essentially--are going to hate you for being different and for not wanting to be the same as them. They're going to say things. They're going to call you things, and I don't want it to get to you.
(Maybe here is a good place to have the bird come through the bushes)
There was silence for a moment as the two walk. She thanks him.
Khaios comes into view through the trees. Kara takes off running "Woah! It goes on forever! Why didn't you tell me it was this amazing?"
"Wait, you mean you've never seen Khaios before?"
"No, of course not! We weren't ever supposed to go near it."
"So when I was leaving Khaios--"
"--I was trying to sneak a glimpse, yeah."
"I guess I just don't get how you could have lived so close to it all your life and never seen it."
"Well you of course had an extraordinary knowledge of Secra, even though you apparently lived farther from Secra than the people of Secra did from Khaios."
Jonah's face lit up with a laugh. "I guess you're right. I hadn't really thought about it that way before. I've always kind of seen Khaios as the center of everything, but I guess in the end, whatever world you live in, that's the one that really exists for you."

Seek 7: Randomness

As if he might drown out the clamor of his mind/the silence of his mind

At some point, we have to throw out some dreams to fit the foundations of other aspirations within our minds.

I don't know that I know how to be loved

Oh cursed me! Do I now forget the song that filled my boyish soul? How can I now recall that sacral song that graces me alone in heavy sleep, when Morpheus his works in me has wrought?

Include as little about he govt structure/politics as possible. This is supposed to be about the human heart, the line through the soul.

Ambiguity

Sometimes, there is beauty in confusion

And sometimes poets say the things they say

Simply because they hope the critics will find out what it all really means

So they can move on and live a normal life,

One unencumbered by those emotions and thoughts that make for good poetry--

The depression, the doubt, the loneliness,

The crippling fear that you might just write something

That would change the world.

If we thought we were good at what we are doing, we wouldn't be going to school.

The Lord will cleave the rocks of your wilderness and cause that sweet water shall flow forth from them

Firestorms over the slums, Jonah on the wall overlooking it, his arms reaching up into the infernal heavens, wondering why

Your sympathy for sale

gossamer

Wild landscapes--heath/wilderness, blackened trees, belly of the earth

Jonah and Mara go at one point to a place by the sea. "Can we come back here some day?" / "I don't know if we will ever come back. I don't want to promise anything I can't be sure of." / "I would very much like to come back."

That could be where they go in the end. House upon the cliffs where the winds whisper and the tides crawl up the shore and sink back into the mists.

How am I to navigate these waters dark

To understand htis unintelligible world.

Say, prophesy! Who is it that struck thee?

How am I to hear once more the songs of innocence

Over the clamor of my mind?

How am I to find grace in a graceless, faceless world

Everyone has a past.

"We used to come here to collect wildflowers when we were kids, back before..."

(Someone injured talking to Scout---Simeon or Jonah) "You won't understand this, but you feel like you're just not enough--like there's a part of you missing

-Irony in the fact that that's how she feels all the time b/c of her gender issues

Jonah always calls Scout pal, sport, bud just to annoy him (her).

gods trapped in a mortal shell: stay your hand, Prometheus--here is the fire.

I choose to live in a world of ideas, distilled from reality.

It was as though I thought that by being cold, the vapors of truth might condense upon my being/heart/mind

Pulling everything to it as oxygen to the firestorms over the slums

Red wildflowers charging from the dark earth, springing up form the cracks in the ebony clay

Device allows Simeon to listen in on govt. "Isn't that like, wrong or something?"

"Do you really think that they're not doing the same thing to us right now?"

Fire on the horizon brushed shadow onto the canvas of the sky

The river glowed beneath a starless sky.

Swallowed in the sunbeams

Our long forgotten infancy

Here in my purgatory beneath a copper sun

Sometimes I wish that I could just disappear, be swallowed up in the earth, fade into he gray of twilight--if only I could hide from my inadequacies. Consciousness and conscience are a purgatory.

Rage against the hatred and the un-love.

People listening, all day drowning in their noise

Write about people you don't understand from the point of view of people whom you don't like or understand.

Do you already have life so figured out that you've stopped looking? I can't comprehend your happiness, your peace that passeth all understanding--are you damned all, or am I? Or are both of us? Is your ignorance bliss or is my knowledge sorrow? Or is my sorrow ignorance?

Do I now awake, and dost thou yet slumber? OR do both in Morpheus's embrace now lie, one to rest and one to wander and to wonder? Do dreams dance before my wild eyes, or...

Summon the notes from the ether, bind the chaos of human emotion into lilt and motion, make the soul into a song

But what of the forgotten, the hidden ones, the worn out wanderers, reanimated at the call of dusk to endure a frenzied purgatory, to live out their life sentence ever in the twilight of humanity?

When the night streets are yours and yours alone, and the whole world is yours because no one else showed up

Oh, please pity the dreams--those who long fro sleep but seldom find it: those who even in rare slumber know not how to rest. Envy them their worlds, perhaps, but pity their knowledge and their pain. Look upon the hands raw and blistered by the sun as they pled to the heavens, their knees bruised and bloodied as they bent on the stony ground.

Hall of monuments --corridor of Founders' statues as Jonah walks up to courtroom

Fata Morgana

This world is only a passage to another world (a wandered in a strange land)

Capitalists still can't wrap their heads around the idea that people can be something else and still be happy or even proud.

You cannot contemplate the things of God without some distance from the world.

Science has now known sin

there is love enough is this world for everybody, if people will just look

Pure research--no goal in mind, no better filter, no new formula to cut costs--just discovery

Crystal seeding - crystal fibers grown, recrystallized, scratch glass and crystals form (flossy). Add stabilizers, weave into fractal cloth

Fields of oily stalks with flowers peeking up. easy to spot above the uniformity of the rest. Workers pulling them out, piling them and burning. Symbol of dreamers, "not good for anything." Striving upward, toward the empty sky.

Park with world in bricks used as intro to different continents. "And we would sit on the world and talk of paradise."

Seeding technis crystals to make fractal sails

Death is a forgetting

Man subdued by the mundane elements that he has subdued

Commercila/market district

Wealther merchants live on inner wall

big, broad street through market dist. at night, empty, patrolled by guards (Enforcers?). No permanent residents really.

tribal priests use technis/chakra to convince people of Great Spirit--Jonah sees through this but comes to find God in the end. First denies it. "It's like everything else--fake." Then acknowledges there is something higher, a God, but doesn't know how to perceive it or describe it.

Livestock pens for men (Mara to Jonah)

Why not live outside? There is space enough here for millions and millions beyond those that fester within the walls.

Eyes dull and empty, almost animal likebut with less of a will to sruvive

***Creative literature is too delayerd--it needs an outlet. Self publication, biweekly? Chapbooks?

We can't live in art.

-------------------------------

I quest outside but twice a day

To chase my wintry pale away

And then, with sun kissed cheeks, inside,

To taste the world--in reading, hide.

Popeye's on Tuesday, Kane's Wednesday, Thursday Buffalo Wild Wings

Chicken and lips shining with grease  (Larry from the battery warehouse)

Tempura tempting me, unagi wriggling between wooden spears, before sliding down my gullet. Eel sauce and spicy mayonnaise are  swirl of color on Da Vinci's canvas on the plate,

A starry night where Pisces shies from showing his fins

And the twin dragon sleeps upon the mountainside

The human experience is the poetry of poetry. Good poetry, then, must stir us to remember the joys and beauties that we have lived to experience.

How am I to speak my soul when it is severed from sensation? My cup runneth empty, so how is my soul to overflow, to spill out onto the pages of my shame and solitude?

" all that dreary intercourse of daily life"  Wordsworth

It was time that thought was added to your reason: heart to your charity, soul to your religion.

Modern media blunts the human mind

Poetry is what disrupts the daily doldrums of reality--the flecks of silver/gold scattered in the coal dust

Vulnerability of a new professor: mind still empty and full of dreams at the same time

Seek: 5 - Jonah visualized

Jonah - tall, in good shape but still lean; curly, sandy-colored hair, brown eyes with flecks of gold, bushy brown eyebrows, tanned (white) skin

I had never really thought about my appearance much before we arrived in the village, Secra. When I was younger, the other kids at school had made fun of my "Seeker eyes," because I guess the flecks of gold weren't the most common of characteristics for an average kid growing up in the Middle Districts, but as a whole, I was pretty much like everyone else. In Secra, though, my eyes were the least of our differences. I stood a full head taller than most of them, and I could feel their gazes stumbling over my features in a mix of curiosity and fear. My summer's tan was pale in comparison with the dark/antique copper of their skin, and as I would later find out, many of them had never before seen curly hair. There was a boy standing at the edge of the village with his mother, their tattered clothes hanging loosely off of thin, tired frames, and immediately my thoughts went back to a boy and his mother from a picture that had hung in the hallway back at home. The mother's hand rested gently on a head of honeyed curls, and their eyes were full of longing. That was before the boy had been admitted to the academy, back before his frame had grown tall and strong on academy rations, back before his limbs had become corded with muscle from the drills that he and the other Legion initiates had run each morning at the first light of day.