Admittedly, nobody seems to have a very good handle on what counts as innovation in games (which has gotten some people understandably cheesed). It seems as though that ought to bother me, but it doesn’t. Paint It Back takes an existing rule set for creating puzzles and just churns out more, rather than making any contribution to formal game design. Another example: Paint It Back is just nicely-presented picross, with a surprising amount of personality in its pixels. The story the program told was that formal logic was intuitive, easy to grasp, and enjoyable. When I first worked through the exercises in Hyperproof***, I was astonished by how thoughtfully the puzzles were chosen–a careful reader who did every exercise would gradually be brought to a very high degree of skill in generating proofs, without tedious repetition or major spikes in difficulty. At the highest level, we can think of this as dramaturgy**. Similarly, even when two puzzle games have a structure which allows the presentation of functionally identical puzzles, differences in interface and which puzzles are presented in which order can massively alter what it’s like to play them. But the experience of using two Turing-complete languages to perform the same task is often wildly different. So, in terms of their capabilities, the only relevant limits have to do with memory and speed. Lots of programming languages can perform all computable functions (they’re called “Turing-complete”), they just give users different methods of telling the computer how to go about it. That got me thinking about the underlying structure of programming. 3846×2414 1.12 MB It’s weird how happy it makes me to know that I don’t NEED subtraction, given how loath I would be to actually do math without it. But, here, it’s largely interface and puzzle selection, rather than the underlying structure of the puzzles. With Human Resource Machine, I’d told myself that it was mostly presentation–the addition of characters who looked like they’d be at home in The Numberlys seemed like an important step toward making such games appealing to a broader audience. So, as a recovering metaphysician, I adored the abovementioned puzzle from Silicon Zeroes, and it left me in a philosophical mood as I pondered why I was so happy with a game which was, in its basic structure, so similar to existing programming games. Of those two men, it’s hard not to be surprised at which one gave his name to a modern word). That’s basically what the most historically popular formulation of Ockham’s Razor comes down to: “Do not multiply entities without necessity” ( that formulation apparently comes from John Punch’s commentary on Duns Scotus, opponents of whom gave us the modern meaning of the word “dunce”. Accepting the existence of something which cannot be explained in terms of anything else exacts a terrible toll on the mind of a metaphysician–we don’t actually want to explain much of anything anyone cares about, admittedly, but we like demonstrating that we could explain everything if we wanted to. What enchanted me about this level is that metaphysicians (whom my physician wife insists ought to be called “metaphysicists”) friggin’ love demonstrating that something you thought you needed to just accept can be understood as a combination of other stuff. Though you might have different intuitions, we’ll at least be able to disagree more specifically. Months later, I think I have an idea of how to understand the intellectual product which makes games distinct from other art forms, and which tracks my intuitions about intellectual property. But it also includes the level in question: a problem in which you’re briefly denied access to one of the functions you’ve been using (subtraction), and have to build something to accomplish the same goal. SZ does so more comfortably than most, with an easily-grasped interface and helpful features like the ability to bundle a code segment into a reusable chunk. But SZ deserves at least a brief overview: if you’re familiar with Human Resource Machine or TIS-100P, you’ve seen the basic idea before: simple programming tasks are basically just puzzles, anyway, so folks have started turning them into puzzle games. I tried to do a brief look at Silicon Zeroes, the easy chair of the programming game mini-genre, but, like Proust’s madeleine biscuit*, a single level touched off a bunch of related thoughts I needed to address. In which the author addresses the greatest philosophical problems in gaming
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