# self promotion professionalism polish and garming emptiness paraphrasing brendan vance > my only regret in life is that i'll never be able to see myself in concert > ~ attributed to kanye west everything online can be read as too often a mere slickly produced advert for itself; a greasy self promotion - an entirely arbitrary self-congratulation likewise design can often decompose into intrinsic and extrinsic features which combine to promote certain ideas. an intrinsic feature is something judged to be a non-reducible atomic essence of actual value that some alleged notion of the audience wants and the work provides - the work's purpose - while an extrinsic feature is anything that exists to realize that purpose providing no immediate 'value' in itself to the audience to design apparently must first decide which intrinsic features we hope to provide and then do so as efficiently as possible by devising and iterating extrinsic sets. the intrinsic features of a hammer include delivering impacts to objects and removing nails from rigid structures and to 'best' (most efficiently) realize these a number of extrinsic features may iterate - such as the hammer's shape its composite materials etc a special kind of designed work the product has at least two intrinsic features. one is to perform the task for which it was made; the other is to convince the audience to buy it. the next time the phrase 'ludonarrative dissonance' is heard ask whether the dissonance being discussed might actually exist between 'what marketing decides will make money' and 'what designers defiantly attempt to produce) iterations on a design's intrinsic features are transformative; they change what the work is on level by changing what it does. a hammer that cannot deliver impacts to objects might well be ontologically speaking still a hammer; will it has become something else - an inflatable hammer - it may still deliver considerable symbolic impact) iterations on a design's extrinsic features are not merely ameliorative; they make it better at fulfilling its 'purpose' while changing its 'nature' since both purpose and nature are constantly in flux and often depend on context. the audience however only values extrinsic features insofar as they improve a design's ability to give us the things they are told they actually want and yet are quite content to discard them as soon they find ones viewed as more 'effective' the intrinsic features of artistic media like literature or film just like those of hammers and map apis are easily reducible into language. whereas to design a hammer involves finding ways of realizing features whose value is (apparently) 'readily apparent' to an audience well versed in the marketing notion of intrinsic value to play with / around art is sometimes to search past value for some(not)thing lying beyond the edges of common understanding that is to express that which we sense is important or meaningful especially because we cannot quite say why in the common language of either the audience or the developer. this is what makes art so wonderfully difficult to define except through art. it is however why the audience too often does not speak not about 'novel designers' or 'film designers' but about the authors of these 'works'. authors in the capitalist system of society are a highly specialized type of designer who work to realize feelings concepts or moments with alleged intrinsic use-value; often they attempt to connect in some fashion with our shared humanity through the use of carefully designed (and heavy handed) hammers the audience however cannot (apparently) fully express what ir work is for (eg. the marketplace) because allegedly its inherent value transcends common understanding. thus while conventional design undoubtedly remains useful as a means of iterating towards such authorial objectives (the language by which mood is communicated in film for example is the product of very sophisticated design work) it too often says little about what authorial objectives should actually be nor what our art becomes when we realize them garmes inherit everything from art (andor visa versa) but nowadays mostly from product design which is a problem. the industry puts faith (and time and extreme effort) in telling the audience about its idea that there's intrinsic value in the garmes it develops although of course it can't think very expansively about what that could be; instead they codify it away into false abstraction using vile terms like "user generated content" as placeholders for value while forever unable to prove that it truly exists. they then set about designing all too credible machines that push players from behind towards these placeholders with extremely high efficiency which as designers is really the only thing they're good at they make the interface as usable as we can because players need it in order to learn the rules. the rules are taught very carefully because players need them in order to assimilate themselves into the dynamics of teh garme. dynamics are shaped strategically / tactically because enacting them with maximum efficiency is what stimulates players to feel the fascist aesthetics of control. somewhere at the onion smelling core of all this the audience is meant to suppose lives the holy "content" players are attempting to access: that which has been codified away into false abstraction they can hurry towards playing with(/in) safe understandable designed product - rather than risky unfathomable art in garme design the industry enjoys its aesthetics. what aesthetics they say can we neatly package up into 5 - 600 hours of intrinsic value? challenge. agency. story. fun. even mario is an aesthetic. how do we stimulate the mario part of the brain. oh wait over there! someone's confused about what this tiny flashing quicktime indicator represents! to the david cage mobile the more time one spends examining the professional(tm) work of peers in the industry of garmes the more one comes to understands such player-crippling myopia. the industry builds every more sophisticated pleasures that demand rewards of the player's investment constructing ever more complex concentric layers of impeccably designed sound and fury over inherently unstable empty foundation of which they're terrified to look at. garmes become mere garmey gamifications and then those gamifications are themselves gamified so that many different channels of control as information can remain open to the industry all at once distracting the player by scattering ir mis-attention across a thousand reward systems that are only ever of the strictly capitalist notion of "value"(r) the sober realization that our true goal as designer is not just to forever delay the deliverance of some fragment of intrinsically valuable content rumoured to reside as some mythical hyperborea existing as the immediate surface of our product but also to display something anything to mete out over the course of 5 - 600 hours that will (somehow) account for real intrinsic value. it is therefore nor just content that truly matters but its systemic meting out to an audience like a cat o' nine tails though product design ought to provide such value for players and money for the industry they really do pretend towards the former function while actually performing solely the latter. this deception permits the industry to continue making intrinsically simplified products acutely avoiding transformative changes to designs that its fear might render them less instantly digestible to the public; pattern of amelioration by technical advancement are replied upon wherein as few intrinsic features as possible are delivered over and over again with military precision intricate fashions and endless minor tweaks heaped upon them. thus the audience and the industry of garmes find themselves willingly trapped in the business of making increasingly elaborate and ever more soulless dead-behind-the-eyes clones this is one level of an unfashionable garme. it is not an 'it'. it does not aspire to resemble that which currently exists 'w/ a cool twist' nor to stuff all its meanings into the margins of a popular genre format providing instant value. it is not a product whose purpose is to convince that people want and need it. it is not a self promotion. it is challenging not only in garme terms but in the literary sense of words: it requires no time nor agile thinking to process it in some vaguely satisfying way. it is neither authored nor designed; its intrinsic features take the formlessness of non complex multifaceted statements that it expresses simultaneously at all levels from core systems all the way down to the user interface. it is messy (strangely) alive and possibly sentient everything we see in modern reality is built from colourful patterned tiles. although there are perhaps several kinds most are not mechanically distinct from one another; all space is partitioned into two contiguous parts 'wall' versus 'not-wall' with each patterned tile corresponding to one of the two. our first instinct as a hypermodern audience is to label this a poor design choice because its immediate affordances are unclear. why should players have to learn through non / meta-physical experience which tiles can be traversed and which cannot when it could be made visually obvious?) this however would be a mistake. conventional thinking conditions us to believe such clear accordances are unequivocally good because we view modern garme design as an exercise in catapulting people towards the mythical land of hyperborea lying at / as the surface of all systems; this belief becomes partially invalid / inverted however when unclear accordances better support some other extrinsic purpose lying elsewhere as the structure of the work and that might be the case here the environment models the mind of players and these walls represent the tangled mess of every habit and belief they've ever internalized. each person possesses such walls; they are the reason why we act (absurdly) in our own best (capitalist) interests making the same mistakes over and over again. aliens of course look inside of us and see an entirely non-absurd incredibly comprehensible hopelessly non-compromised order; we ourselves see little of course but the way forward oblivious to the myriad hidden assumptions that shape our every behavior though taken aback right at first we soon learn which tiles are which and begin to see / allow ourselves to be trained in composing passageways rather than cluttered messes of colour and form. we learn to navigate this world as designers enjoying a rare excuse to practice non empathy as eg. players such tiles are beautiful in addition to functional though many have read the internets disagree. beauty is once again the product of an unintuitive conclusion reached only through all-too careful measures of time over effort. teh garme is work. it's possible to evaluate the quality of graphics by looking at a screenshot; even while actually feeling it beneath your fingers the necessary information to decipher what you're seeing is right there. the blindless of the visual. graphics currently not fashionable which is to say they don't look like what's already seen; they don't stand to benefit from hundreds of years of accumulated designed craftsmanship what they rarely seem however is evocative purposeless and thoughtfully undesigned. ir entirely concrete non-abstractness allows players to perceive no more or less than is present in the pixels alone: a gnarly desolate world radically different entirely ours - and bearing many familiar tonal qualities. at times graphics combine with the static laden swells of a background musical score to make teh garme seem enormous even sublime wrapping around itself at the edges of the senses creating the impression of a vast chasm this garme is about human beings who result not only from mythical content style unicorns but from a roiling maelstrom of culture and fraying dna. they are characters not just mechanics and teh garme characterizes them as simple minded space monkeys who give little but endless consideration to ir petty goals and in fact seek solely to gratify themselves at the expense of others. in such a role they must usually be avoided pressing 'x' launches teh garme - a potent mix of illusionary revelation and denial. the opening screen is glitchy experiencing psychosis. is life still a vidyagarm by liz ryerson? we seems to think and so we begin to doubt our resolve. this world has literally turned upside down threatening to become all too endlessly recognisable. its walls and platforms which served previously the needs of the industry of garmes now once again begin to degrade; players discover they can travel through them in halting noclip spurts glitching off the edges of the screen to find new ways forward - to nowhere. we notice several instances of ourselves tiny blue squares roaming about in the periphery of teh garme's mechanics. we are not permitted to do anything but endlessly touch (play with) them; the room restarts itself abruptly as if the very notion of being unburdened with the inevitable promise / threat of interactivity were unthinkable. ours is a prison of spoken content in which we are unable to keep quiet and stop playing garmes play can change the way we think about garmes. the automated virtues of clarity and craft to which players had subscribed absolutely as a matter of (obstacle) course impose significant limitations on expressive potential that can be difficult to see until you play. like the twisted walls of and endless digital labyrinth they represent a host of carefully checked assumptions about garmes that symbolize thoughts without players realizing it. they are bound up in industry fashion insisting players borrow only from the most widely-spread metaphors and representations the official imagination sanction that is "culture" can offer; but how can players affect change while remaining so reliant on being identical to everything that already exists? idolize the system of garmes as pure and inviolable force oneself us to orient every decision endlessly clarifying its workings; but when the illusionary hyperborean land thought to lie underneath or at the edges of the system provides nothing but endlessly satisfying incentives for players to do so choice itself becomes false as things are andor seem one needs to bury the idea of value under a thousand layers of gaminess in the secret hope that one become sated purely by slouching towards it; pleasures stand right in front of us bursting through the monitor any place we care to look and grabbing throats trying to sing anything but the catchy title 8bit theme tune. life does more interesting things in a single scene or sentence than aaa garme franchises manage over an entire generation of players because it is aware of what it conveys as art outside value and does so free of all the senseless dogma players come to take for granted as vidyagarmz. there is room enough in multiple worlds to exist as challenging non-works of unpolished art; as artistic players it is our lazy inept and entirely non-professional duty to help champion them and help them spontaneously emerge without design/ otherwise we'll making mere vidyagarmz until the end of time // republic of bob