Who Could Want Gameplay? With Alexander Clair Tseu Martin (a.k.a. Droqen) Everybody's Talking At Once podcast

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Who Could Want Gameplay? with Alexander Clair Tseu Martin (a.k.a. droqen)

8d ago

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ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 184.

The one and only droqen puzzle-platforms on over to discuss his latest game The End of Gameplay, and how it responds to the stubbornly present, all-too-alive gameplay in his game Starseed Pilgrim. This requires a provisional definition of gameplay. Whether the conversation’s other tributaries are required or not is a question for the listener.
You can get The End of Gameplay on Steam and Itch.io.
You can learn more about droqen’s work on his website, and you can check out his Bluesky for the latest on the impending death of gameplay.
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• Here’s droqen’s rant at Bonus Stage, on the subject of killing gameplay.

• Here’s Richard Terrell’s A Defense of Gameplay, and his two–part appearance on the show.

• And here’s Richard’s curation project about Starseed Pilgrim (his among others), the Starseed Observatory. The project’s Wall of Quotes includes a piece Drew wrote about the game.

• Drew misquoted William Blake, as one does. The actual line, from Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, is: “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

• Mutual Aid is available for free online. It’s also probably in your local bookstore, and your local bookstore would even more probably order it for you, in the quite likely event that your local bookstore is cool.

• David Graeber wrote about consensus a lot, but this is probably the single-best entry point.

• We did get to have Arvi Teikari on to talk all about Baba Is You a few years back.

• As droqen says, Brendan Keogh’s The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist is a great way to reframe “the videogame industry” as one part (and probably not even the most important part) of the larger cultural field of videogames.

• Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order is a tricky work track down (because not just any library or bookstore will have it on hand, and also because it exists in multiple volumes, each fairly voluminous).

• droqen’s notebook/forum has some notes on those Agnes Martin and Don Potts interviews (both of which are linked in full from said notes pages).

• The morning this dropped, droqen posted this video, connecting The End of Gameplay with his series of #droqevers, which themselves refer to this unusually useful definition of games:

What is a game? Professor M. Mouse of Texas, America claims that the word game denotes “the historical process by which the term game has been characterised and understood”.
Easy for you to say, Professor!!
Those of us with a more down-home approach to codifying the various aspects of a nebulous and unbearable human condition prefer to go by a simpler definition, thus.
A game is some combination of the following indivisable elements:
– skeleton
– red key
– score thing
– magic door
If you see something that looks like a videogame but isn’t, you should notify the Police.

• droqen also posted some notes on this episode in his “forum-shaped notebook.” Infinite recursion.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“romantic,” “gameplay (forever),” and “machine lover,” from The End of Gameplay (new moon OST) by droqen.

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