Convenes to talk about the cool jankiness of video games that exist and new principles from the ground up for ones that don't

Why are you not allowed to jump over this fence? Why can't you go to the scenery in the background? Does this flavour text actually mean anything? Can you really make a living game world just by adding a bunch of realistic mechanics? 

Reading/watching/playing/... list

Core

Pseudo-Hermes Huvanistagg-Ludistagg (David Kanaga) - "Structure & Alchemy in New Fractal Playspaces" (Book)

Comprehensive and tone-setting utopian study of video games with a liberatory all-encompassing process philosophy approach which covers many, many topics that will most likely resonate with group members

Sam Sorensen - "New Simulationism" (Article)

Short manifesto on games which strive for total simulation i.e. have worlds that are completely diegetically self-contained so everything is explainable with recourse to the game world, but not to the detriment of players

TL;DR - Try for as few situations as possible where you have to say "because the dev said so"

M. D. Schmalzer - "Janky Controls and Embodied Play: Disrupting the Cybernetic Gameplay Circuit" (Paper)

Cybernetic framing of the different ways that game controls might disrupt player immersion intentionally or by accident and how that opens up new and unconventional gameplay possibilities

pannekoek2012 - "SM64 - Watch for Rolling Rocks - 0.5x A Presses (Commentated)" (Video excerpt)

Explains how a certain glitch in Super Mario 64 is actually exploiting a divergence between ways the game tracks where you are to put you into a "parallel universe" mirror of the game world

Nickies - "The Bizarre Void Past Oblivion's Playable Map" (Video)

Exploration of how going an unfathomable distance out of bounds with speed hacks in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion tears your game character apart in a freaky way, then makes you omnipresent once the distance value becomes too large for the game engine to handle

Stuffed Wombat - "Mosa Lina" (Game)

Small game with randomly generated levels and selection of tools to beat them, subverting the "lock and key" trope of game progression gated by single-use progression items. Because generation is completely random, nothing has a specific use apart from what it does, and it's on the player to figure out if a level is actually possible to complete with what they've been given

Akshon - "The World's Most Technical Third-Person Shooter - Rise And Fall Of Gunz" (Video)

Paragon example of jank from a buggy game accidentally leading to very different and extremely deep gameplay

Maybe

Jaron Lanier - "2006: What Is Your Dangerous idea?" (Article)

While working on early VR, Lanier and his colleagues accidentally discover that the human body schema is surprisingly malleable and can even support extra limbs, coins the term "homuncular flexibility"

Mitchell Whitelaw - "After the Screen: Array Aesthetics and Transmateriality" (Paper)

Review of "post-screen" works which break down the digital screen's general-purpose and self-effacing qualities by creating an array of elements duplicating the screen's grid logic or by projecting and extruding the screen, in such a way as to highlight the screen's specific and material presence

Eryk Salvaggio - "What does it mean to break a system?" (Article)

Author's self-reflection on breaking generative AI systems to reveal their internal limits and grain and what breakage means socially, technically and aesthetically

Ulillillia - "My Script, 'The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters' - What is the first act of your script like?" (Script excerpt)

Part of a play later turned book with a unique scriptwriting style where the mechanics of a world the author runs in his head to write are verbosely laid out in the content of the work

Shmuplations.com - "Hellsinker – 2019 Developer Interview" (Article)

Interview with the developer of a notoriously esoteric Japanese shoot 'em up game with a very holistic and meta approach to game design that pulls a lot of the context of the game, player interaction, and the expectations of the genre into the scope of gameplay, even the way players would read its instruction manual

Shine Solutions Group - "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names - With Examples"

List of bizarre edge cases of names that you have to contend with to handle names robustly in code as system breaking inspiration

Potential activities

While reading Structure & Alchemy, doodle in an infinite sketchpad app since that's what Kanaga recommends

Come up with a game from a set of changes drawn from complicated games with funny patch notes

Unsorted topics