Don't expect coherence

Some fragments of a fragmented work

So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am working on a project on roguelikes. I want it to be a book. Not a long one, around 30k words, and knowing myself, some 300 endnotes.

The way I write is that I vomit words until I have the backbone, and then I seep through that production until it makes sense, maybe even to other people. Because I am obsessive, once I hit a stride, I have difficulty doing anything else until I feel I am done. I am not pleasant to be around when I am in that mood.

The news is that I am done vomiting. The pile is vile (see what I did there), but it exists. And I will be going through it very soon with the help of this newsletter. I plan to write summaries of the main arguments in the same order as in the final manuscript to test for sanity and to hear from potential readers (so, at the risk of being a naive internet person, please comment!).

A too-convoluted metaphor: this is a picture of the interior of the outstanding Phenomena movie theater in Barcelona before the showing of a movie. This represents (ahem) this post about writing before writing—or something so.

As part of this writing process, I will occasionally share here not the finished argument but snippets of my writing as teases. This is the first of these fragment posts, my attempt at aphorisms (I’ll see myself out).

#1 (The project is currently called Eternal Returns: A Poetic of Roguelikes. I like Nietzsche.

I am not saying that roguelike developers have read Nietzsche or are debating the long history of the doctrine of eternal recurrence in Western philosophy. But their work, their poetics understood as not the functional, market-driven approach to creating games but the aesthetic, creative part of their work, understand roguelikes as being pleasurable for the same reasons that Nietzsche found the doctrine of the eternal return terrifying and joyful. There is beauty in returning, in different ways, to what was. It is a form of affirmation of the joys of playing.

#2 I ended up writing about the roguelike as a poetic form because I miss writing about literature. But my first drafts were about roguelikes as an aesthetic virus.

Roguelike is a form, but it is also more than that. It is an infection in the dying bodies of videogames—Spelunky infected platformers. Slay the Spire is the outcome of an infected deck builder, and Hades shows what happens to narratives (and Greek mythology) after the roguelike mutation. This roguelike virus infects designs and reveals otherness in the type of videogame these genres could be.

I still like this idea and will probably explore it here and in other formats (maybe even interactive formats …).

Next time this newsletter reaches your inbox, I will start a short series on a topic I have never written before: procedurality.