[-empyre-] TEZ, the Temporary Entertainment Zones verisimilitudes

[Christian McCrea]

I think one excellent piece of game history is the roguelike (Nethack,
ADOM, Ragnarok) the culture and tenor of which has a lot of roots in
the masquerade, the grand guignol, the commedia dell-arte. These games
were and are little simulators of the capriciousness of everyday life
raised to high drama, and relied less on communicating rules than
communication the brutality of chance. Or to put it another way, you'd
turn a corner and whammo, twenty thousand hit points damage.

In a way, they 'faded'. If you died, the game would delete your
save-file to make sure you were really dead. Then your corpse would be
a ghost for the next incarnation to deal with. The more you lost, the
harder the game got until two or three hours of mistakes would make
any of them unplayable - swarming graveyards of gaming logic past.

-Christian McCrea

>  perhaps a TEZ system could have 'fadeable' game logics such that games
>  could be mixed from one to the next. in this way there would never be a
>  total return to 'the world' as the negative space of play, the field of
>  unreliable theories of action.