More on meaning and commitment. In Deep instinctive changes I said:

"One important effect games have is to change your body at an instinctive rather than at a conscious level. You do something so many times and for so long that it changes you at a deeper level than what most other media can achieve."

"Active media such as games changes you bottom up, from instinctive body to conscious brain. You repeat repeat repeat and it nudges your body more in the direction of whatever action you're repeating, which eventually changes your perception more in that direction and creates a loop."

In Son of a Serpent I said:

"The only thing that is real, the only thing you actually have, what is actually you, is your will (or free will). The choices you make and how they shape your soul are what you actually are, everything else is temporary."

"It doesn't matter what you were born with, what matters is what you do with what you were given... Consistent virtuous actions are the only things that matter."

On X garfieldbot said:

Gambling is sinful because it makes a mockery of, in the final calculation, love. It makes a mockery of what we call today "commitment". When you love, you commit to the world, and you are always "risking" something. These ard the wrong words, it's understanding it backwards, but we were all born backwards in this age. When you love, the world comes alive and is filled with meaning, "because you are risking something", to put it in a crude and low way. And gambling simulates this process as a crude mockery, by simulating "meaning" "stakes", through a simulated "risk". Like a video game simulates achievement, gambling simulates risk, and provides a poor substitute for the real thing. The optimal way to channel this process is love, romantic as well as charitable religious love, as one can be a doorway to the other, and it's a degredation of one's capacity for love to indulge in a mockery of it

On X Aeneas said:

"Irony and infinite choice preserve optionality, but leave one adrift, wondering why he has never found a home. The answer is simple: he has never made a decision and forced himself to live with it. He is battered by the wind and the waves, never finding peace; all it takes for a modicum of stability is to put an anchor down but the anchor prevents him from searching any further, and this the modern man cannot abide."

"Just as dating apps and Instagram keep one from being locked into a certain partner, just as constant consumerist slop keeps one focused on upgrading, so irony preserves the distance from conviction that allows a man to be hyper-mobile in his opinions and actions."

"The mechanism for anything worth doing in life is pretty simple: evaluate options for a brief period of time, make your decision, and make it the correct one. This rule applies across employment, love, hobbies, etc. It is not our job to find the perfect garden; our job is to take a garden and make it perfect through our dedication to it, through our earnest and honest commitment to it."

In Son of a Serpent I also mentioned how most roguelites have distributed power distribution (choose 1 out of 3 or equivalents throughout the run), and how one angle I'd like to explore is that of frontloaded power distribution, or at least frontloaded power choice via something like a draft. It occurs to me now after thinking about all these quotes in unison why I like the draft idea so much at a more fundamental level.

The problem with choose 1 out of 3 is that they're non-committal choices. You can usually force any build you want, you have rerolls, ways to freeze the shop, etc, all of it makes each individual choice kind of meaningless. To the degree that games actually train people's bodies, this is training a muscle that's something like the infinite choice and infinite optionality that Aeneas argues against. It's also what I argued against previously regarding short-form content and how that format makes its way into games.

By contrast, a draft has a different arc. When you play a draft, you start with full optionality, but at some point you have to commit to something. And once you commit, you're locked in. If you try to go back and keep your optionality high, you'll usually draft poorly and get a weaker deck than if you committed early. More importantly, you are in control of the draft, you author it. The choose 1 out of 3 happens to you instead. So the draft is actually the arc of growing up, of becoming an adult, of becoming itself. You start at a young age with full optionality, but eventually you have to commit to something. You have to actively make the choice. I committed to becoming a game developer at say, age 22, and then I committed harder with a full lifelong (internal) commitment at age 28 again. Everyone has to do this in their 20s, right?

And so I like the arc of the draft because it's this mirror. You have to choose to become something specific, and you have to place an anchor, you have to choose to stop exploring aimlessly and to focus on your garden and tend to it. Games will always be a lesser substitute of the real thing, but I want to do the best I can, and so to the degree my games are affecting young people by changing their bodies, those changes should skew positive rather than negative, towards commitment and thus meaning, rather than towards optionality and infinite choice.

I ended up meeting with a lot of <25 year olds over the years for reasons that should be clear if you're reading what I'm writing, but one thing I notice, which is echoed by others, is how... flaky? younger people can be. Flaky is not the right word. Incompetent is also not the right word. Aimless? Lost? Dysfunctional? In a sense it's perhaps some word that doesn't exist that is a mix of all these things. Like the twink who couldn't manage his allowance and had to call his dad for money every time. I have so many stories of incredible types of dysfunctions with younger people, and there are so many work-related stories I hear from others both in real life and online, about how zoomers don't show up to their workplaces, don't really work that hard and are just quiet quitting, in Brazil specially there are many stories of zoomers who do the bare minimum and then when they're fired they sue employer for some easy money, like, this is all over, right?

And I see all this reflected in the younger people I do meet. It's just a complete lack of commitment towards anything. Pure and total annihilation of meaning, complete optionality at all times. I don't know how much of this is a function of younger people in general, regardless of generation, vs. a specific malaise of our current times. In a sense you could say that they can't be blamed, because the institutions are so bad and everything is crumbling and so on and so forth, and that's largely true. But in my own domain this has always been kind of a cope. We had "indiepocalypse" as the popular narrative for years even when it was obvious to anyone with eyes that Valve was doing absolutely stellar work and people were just crying for no reason. So I tend to think a lot of it is actually self-inflicted damage. You even have this same kind of cope now about AI, like, most indie developers have convinced themselves to not use it at all, right?

But yea, either way, some of it must be related to the specifics of the current times in regards to media, to short-form content, to the internet, to games themselves, and how they change people's behaviors. And so when I look at all of this, and I look at what I'll put out into the world in the future, I know that I don't want to contribute to it. I think analyzing mechanics from this optionality/commitment spectrum is probably useful, and it's why I intuitively liked the frontloaded power/draft idea all along.