Went straight to bed after the Sunday market, woke for breakfast and went back to bed, the next day i alternated between the wardrobe the the bed, and then here I am, explaining why this letter is late.
I dreamt of many things. I remember only erasers. I don’t remember what they were for. What the erasers were trying to take away. Or are they making space.
I didn’t have video games as a child. When I asked why, I was told it didn’t have them because I never asked. It is true. Clusters of moving pixels beating other clusters causing numbers to go up and down did not interest me.
Guess what I got for a Christmas surprise! I was suddenly interested, but not like that. I got interested in why I wasn’t interested.
… i wrote a pages and pages about my explorations. If I were to include my findings here, i would not send this out till a few weeks later than the 3 days this is already late for.
(Abruptly change topic, as i usually do.)
Beakies came one day many years ago.
Since, Beakies have been my friends & family, my kids, my means, my necessity.
Since exploring games, I’ve also realised beakies were my games. Games is how I survived. Survive? Games are stories we tell.
If you recall when I started 100+ letters before this, I wrote a lot about food. Every week I wrote about tweaks I made to make food easier or harder, actually to make cooking fun. It was part of growing up. To surviving meals without parents, or family, or relatives, I had to make eating, or at least the idea of food, fun enough to eat. Alone. Every. Day.
A week ago I started looking back at different beakies. How each one was a chapter of a game I wrote.
Finally something click. Finally I see what I’ve been doing all along.
So i fished out 3 little ones that i made with a clear narrative. It was so fun I played the game on 3 consecutive days.
I wrote down what I remember was going on in my head, then reverse engineered the questions I must then have asked myself. I am now testing ways to introduce some randomness and some form of countdown to bring the game to a close.
Why?
Because otherwise it’s just a craft project. Craft is good, but that was not my intention. Beakies have always been games that produce a material result, just like cooking was for me.
Now how do i end this? And, end, this shall, abruptly. marn