The End of Gameplay

That was a lot of work to ultimately say something pretty mundane. I guess for me, I'm looking for my art to not just be a communication of vulnerability, but to say something interesting. Hacking down the 4th wall to say the walls are fake and the common structures of the medium are fabricated just doesn't hit with me. Especially when, if the thesis statement (near as I can tell from looking at Droqen's words online combined with playing this all the way through) is that the use of gameplay has been unartistic in many games, then I question the extent to which this also applies to this game? To what purpose do we jump and slide and roll climb up the walls. It isn't any more meaningful or artistically honest than anything else, it lends itself no credence to its own purpose. None of this is to say that I generally disagree with Droqen's (seeming) broader point. Lots of video games are unartistic in so far as they fail communicate a greater point or a reflection of the creator's vulnerabilities and flawed perspectives (especially when they are made by too many people to function under a true unified vision), and that the gameplay of a video game is frequently an outside entity to the larger point of the game. But I just can't look at this and think to myself "this is the direction for games." Maybe I'm just dumb or a philistine, but I honestly recommend reading Droqen's tweets and their rants than playing this. They are more interesting.

droqen kills gameplay, and it immediately grows back from its ashes. Wherever spike meets block, gameplay will grow in the seam. One jump is physics, two jumps is gameplay. If the game only has one button and that button is "quit", gameplay is there. Gameplay is dead. Long live gameplay.

One of the most interesting game developers in the history of the entire medium makes an inscrutable collection of platforming vignettes. Incredibly novel/rich/interesting Sylvie-esque "jumping and bumping" movement mechanics meets contemplative poetry (tbh I find it incredibly hard to read text in games, my thumbs are too impatient to give my brain any more bandwidth ;-; ). I feel like indie videogames have been "post-gameplay" for a very long time already, at least since Dear Esther. But that was cynical hack nonsense with no respect for the audience or the culture. Finally someone who knows what they're doing explores a somewhat similar space (lyrical, evocative, gameplay-in-the-back-seat (and yet that movement is too damn interesting!)), in a way that can't be reduced to a .pdf. It's frustrating that this work will probably not reach as many people as your average visual novel. It's depressing that indie games have been a stagnant morass of creatively-bereft commercially-minded lifers trying to build a career out giving people what they think they want, instead of helping to communally explore a wildly unexplored possibility space together with each other and the audience. It's sad that anyone who cares about really contributing to the conversation these days does so by scratching notes in the margins for other like-minded explorers. Sylvie, droqen, Michael Brough, etc. deserve to be superstars. I guess they already are really, it's just that the audience, the press, the marketplace, and the culture in general are too ignorant, trapped in a morass of vapid faff, to notice. Or maybe it's just that no one has the energy, in this exhausting post-capitalist hellscape world. Anyway, I enjoyed this. <3

nice meditation on the subject matter presented by the title. feels somewhere between a notebook and a poem collection (more audience-facing than the former, more tentative and ongoing than the latter) i don't mean this in a "and yet you participate in society" way but i found it interesting that the entire thing is built on a 2d platformer with just enough friction to prevent you from losing focus on it at any time. there's a part early on where a score counter shows up to bring you into the territory of "gameplay", but i was unsure if the doublejumping & wall bouncing before that wasn't "gameplay" either. it's fine, though, since this game is "the end of", not "what comes after"

First of all I am not a maker and I don't know about art. I also write this as my first review of a game. I played it despite not being very familiar with platformers. Before playing I expect it would be helpful to get familiar with who droqen is, although certainly one way to do this is to play this game. Having read some of what droqen has put online has helped me frame what this is, in particular what we mean by the term "gameplay". The game itself is a collection of vignettes; an anthology of ideas, of poems. I like how the game changes and evolves through its constituent stages. The stages are themselves raw and messy, in a beautiful way. In a way that I’m sure a perfectionist would struggle to call finished. Each idea is fleeting, touched on briefly, and I am left wanting to explore more deeply. It may not fit your idea of what a game is, and that's OK. This game asks what it is to be a maker and to deal with the decisions of what to make others do. I would say it is a work; it was created as a piece of art, as an act of expression, maybe even rebellion and should be treated as such. It calls to be engaged with seriously. In much the same way as you might come away from a modern art exhibit and say to yourself "well I'm not really sure what that was all about" - I had moments when I am left feeling like this is too high brow for me or that I didn't really get it, like it went over my head, like I'm not the intended target of it. I am likely overthinking. By “act of expression” here I mean that the creator is pouring themselves into the game, what I believe droqen would call "blood". You can feel it when you play it. Not only do you get the feeling of droqen's emotion, you get the feeling that it was emotional to make; that it was emotionally cathartic to make. It makes me want to know how it feels to make games. It is this expression at its core that makes me want to play more and through playing learn more about the maker, to empathise with them. Maybe droqen and I both feel really weird about towers, for example. This game should help you challenge the notion of what a game is or what a game should be. It certainly plays with the boundaries of what you can and can't do. In many ways the game is satire. It challenges the ethics of game making, games that subvert the player to do work, make the number go up, hijacking their brain. "jump, read, and explore the world until you win!" I still felt compelled to complete each level. At times this was genuinely tedious and unpleasant. Which I think is at odds with the rebuke of games that force players to do unpleasant things. That being said, it remains interesting throughout. In terms of the experience, smaller details like the animations when you fall over are delightful. The music explores interesting ideas and took me to interesting places. I am left with the feeling that droqen is breaking the player. At times the game is shocking, overwhelming, stressful, claustrophobic. At other times it is meditative and blissful. In the end you have to let go to enjoy the ride. I’m overall left with the feeling that it was fun to make and it makes me want to make too. This game has left a deep impression on me. Thanks for a cool time.

a collection of poems as a cute platformer about one person's struggles with making games. will eat away at you for a while and a while longer if it does not bounce off you completely. thats probably a good enough tl;dr for people that dont care to read i don't really know how much i should talk about in this steam review. i dont even really like steam reviews that much? it feels very reflective of, how we view games. as a product that you should or should not buy - and obviously, they are by virtue of existing as a product of labour in a capitalistic society, but there is something about these sorts of reviews specifically that put me off a little in some part of me. of course on one hand it is good to have a collection of different people's opinions so you can have an idea of if you should spend your hard earned cash on a luxury (and this is what video games are, luxuries) but on the other hand it feels. i dont know. it's reducing games down to 'is this something you should spend your money on or is it not'. viewing art like that feels wrong. a lot of the end of gameplay is kind of about that, not exactly about that but more about, asking yourself (you as in, a general you referring to game makers overall, but also you as in the player of the end of gameplay, and also you as the author), "why? why make games? why make games like these? why put these features in? why focus on fun? on replayability? on challenge? on learning mechanics? on death?" its something i've been mulling over a lot. ive been struggling a little myself with this with a lot of games, modern or not, indie or not. games that are fun, games that are challenging, games that have nothing to say for themselves. games that are distractions. that's most games, really. sometimes it feels like that's a lot of art too. i would prefer if the art i consumed said something about the world, about life, about politics maybe. i'm not expecting capital by karl marx from it (if i did, i would actually read that instead of playing some random person i dont know's real time strategy tower defense games or what have you) but i'd prefer if i could get at least some insight into other peoples psyche by experiencing the art they create instead of just feeling like it's something that could have made by basically anyone that decided to study gameplay loops and "good" design practices. wow look at you you made a game that says nothing and that is fun and addictive to play. good job! truly. this tells me nothing about the type of person you are and it fills me with nothing but ephemeral joy that i will forget the moment i close the game down. im realizing im sounding a little spiteful as i write this? i probably am. i think spite is an important emotion when making art. maybe one of my greatest personal motivators myself! i'm not writing this review entirely out of spite though. i'm realizing i havent talked directly about the end of gameplay that much. i'm not spiteful at the game, these are things i've been thinking about myself quite a lot although this work makes me think about them more the more i focus on it. what does it mean to even make a game? why would you even make a game? for money? for fame? because you have a fun idea? is that really enough? maybe sometimes it is. maybe for you it doesnt have to be anything else. but it also doesnt hurt to try and push a little deeper. try to ask yourself- why am i playing this? is there anything better i could be doing? why was this piece of art made? why have i made these things? is it saying anything? am i saying anything? is there anything i could say? i dont know. i think i said something in this big mess. i hope you can get something out of it. at least i know why i wrote it. i havent said enough but i could keep going forever. why listen to me when you can play this instead. its vent art and its the best work of art i have seen in a while and its a cute little platformer. take care - a machine lover

thanks droqen

A dense museum of interactive poems that challenges the rock solid foundations of the games industry. If you've played Star Seed Pilgrim, droqen's most popular game which became a small indie hit in the early indie boom of the 2010s, this game could be considered an antithesis of it. I think this quote from droqen [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH45Q2jiguQ]in a recent video he released a few days ago discussing this game[/url] offers a brief glimpse of why this game exists and what you may get out of it that feels right to share to all of you here: [quote=droqen] I found that focusing on the phrase "kill gameplay" is one of the best tuning forks for getting me away from the stuff that isn't bloody. To take me away from things that are on the surface compelling, but not meaningful to me as a maker. It's obviously fun to make something fun [like Starseed Pilgrim], to make a little jumpy control scheme in a platformer and to jump around for hours. I could do it for hours. Basic platformer controller, randomly fill a screen with blocks...I love that ♥♥♥♥. But that's not the stuff that helps me explore what it means to exist in the world. It's just a distraction. I don't know about you viewer - friend - but I don't need more distractions. There's so much in this world that I could be paying attention to. I'm not going to pay attention to it all. I have to pick and choose. Is having fun with a video game one of the things I will spend my time on? Kill gameplay. [/quote]

my dream game that i have yet to understand. still trying not to hate myself for that :|

"Kill gameplay" manifests the necessity of recentering games as a way to "authorial expression", something that I feel has been missing from the videogame spotlight for a long time. The way I understand it, "Kill gameplay" is in its simplest, reductionist, purest form, about abandoning any design - or should I say "over-design" - that surrounds any artistic work that is there to justify itself as a videogame and hinders, complicates and creates superfluous friction, unnecesary to express the author's ideas. It's about peeling off anything that is not contributing to its true "raison d'être". The End of Gameplay is an anthology of poems/vignettes that helps us both understand what "kill gameplay" is about and puts us behind its author's psyche to contextualize that idea and understand his approach to the medium as a way of self-expression to cathartic effect. I really liked The End of Gameplay, both as an anthology in itself (I love some of its poems) and as a way to understand a philosophy that, even if not applied in its purest form in a broad way, it really should be thought and talked about and applied to various degrees in an attempt to recenter a medium that has alientaed a lot of people during, at the very least, the last decade.