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Appendix X_a

Playing With Walls:

The Wall Game’s focus on adopting a perspective and contributing to a collaborative fiction aligns well with the rotating viewpoint and collective storytelling nature of a contextual co-creative agency.

Conceptualizing agency as feeling around firn constraints and possibilities maps cleanly onto The Wall Game’s defined rules, rooms, and structures. Expressing autonomy within a system fits the alternating phases of individual authorship and responding to others’ contributions. The process of questioning and refining the agency concept to align with RPG co-creativity unfurls within this specific game’s mode of play.

Our agency does fail to encompass the meta-level choices around opting into certain emotional experiences that this game’s subject matter involves. Accounting for that conscious risk-taking is an area to expand this agency. There are moments where the procedures clash with player creative agenda; our agency framing doesn’t address resisting or renegotiating the “rules” once play has begun.

While functional here, our concept may be overly fitted to this game’s quirks. Applying it to a game like MAYBE ONE DAY, IT’LL BE ENOUGH, whose RPG style lay more akin to digital rage games, will reveal further gaps. Overall situational “agency” is largely sufficient for this game, with some notes for improvement regarding meta-level choices and pushing back against procedures.

Using an individualistic or intuitive conception of “agency” as individual free will and heroic capability to analyze any second session of this collaborative stucture-narrative game, would see a number of differences emerge in how it fails to meet the goals of roleplaying compared to a situated or relational agency. Framing agency as each player controlling a claimed avatar clashes with the shifting perspective and collective fiction. It promotes thinking in terms of “my wall” rather than exploring a shared building.

Focusing on overcoming challenges limits engagement with the more complex, introspective emotional spaces this game facilitates. Assuming singular heroes on progression arcs doesn’t align with a branching, multi-phase polychronic structure of play. Conceptual brittleness around binary notions of freedom, determinism, superego/infra-id makes navigating the game’s constraints more frustrating. And intuitive agency lacks a systemic context as relationality promotes thinking inward rather than meeting with the interconnected prompts in ritual sharing.

The individualistic, challenge-oriented assumptions readily made (be it in ball courts, on tabletops, legal courts, stovetops…) around traditional notions of agency repeatedly clashes with The Wall Game’s intrinsically collaborative nature, whereas a situated, relational agency aligns with The Wall Game’s priorities.

Shelves' Schwa89 days ago

Appendix X_b

Playthroughs

Playthrough 1 (situated agency):

"Adopting a perspective" frame enables freely exploring different emotional spaces each room suggests
"Possibilities within constraints" matches the tension between rooms and creative contributions
"Reshaping the systemic context" empowers renegotiating rooms by adding new furnishments.

Playthrough 2 (individualistic agency):

Player resists shifting perspectives to meet others contributions, deeming some "out of character"
Constraints of rooms breed frustration rather than creative navigation
Declining emotional spaces room are seen as GM restricting autonomy
Trying to "fight" another's reading strains credulity anchors

Playthrough 3 (relational agency):

"Expressing autonomy in a interdependence system" 
Allows developing personal story arcs for the rooms while maintaining coherence

Playthrough 4 (intuitive agency):

Ignoring other players' contributions in favor of lone protagonist mode
Chafing at game structure limits for heroic narrative fantasy

Shelves' Schwa89 days ago

Appendix X_c

Teardown:

Teasing apart the complex interconnected webs spanning ethics, physics, emotion, society will cause every field of knowledge — the fundamental building blocks of understanding — to undergo hurricanes of de-individualizing. Toppled assumptions, reshaped perceptions, destructive and creative forces locked in fierce embrace dying there like mountain chains.

A vast swirling storm of human cognition, animalizing endlessl— spinning off charged revelatory fursonas. Bolts of inspiration travel, gravel channels of ball lightning rumble next to other play surfaces, clustered in clinging idk camps. Feverish memers raging behind walled tenured enclaves guarded by anthropomorphized passenger trains. Roving thought renegade cells taste dangerous memetic weapons in _†_forums of conceptual wastes.

A reader might emerge from the tempest decades older, a tired mind living out it’s last thought over and over, reliving the Spin, a tired language living out is langspan. So nimble, now, spring, a forging in the fires as memer, raked over coals. Or the Metal Mountain claims them: new computational Titans come to take these Walls, make them plastic, pour in them the psychotropic intelligence as personal and assistanceverode away to become their terms, setting the doors of dialogue out of reach where fling open the doors of perception. Hunger for us. As strange beings we might birth, feed on our mother-flesh. Outpace this, stillness.

Amidst their quickening, we adapt in fitful starts to widen the slug-trails of conceptual fractures. “Reality drift” claims some desperate discord clinging to textbooks of measurements never to calibrate, lost in a baseline long receded. Entire populations choose exodus to New Thought Zones rather than abide relentless static histories. Quietest moths beat inward, assasinating the bedrock of now in turbulent consciousness: utopias fracture; dystopias erode, each starry death a terrarium of setting — elements.

We unleash, we unmake: our cornerstones. We widen the gyre of recursive self-revision (neither halting nor see halted since the mind first met the empty room and saw itself). A vision but glimmers an accelerated churn, a grip on rods of concept reactor cores, a demand they finally split. As new elements transmute to remain unknown, I suspect they yield to play.

Reach out your hand, and see.

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