Why

2025-07-22

The main reason to make this game is that there’s value in pushing along this overall project of remaking the same game over and over again from different angles.

This specific version is worth making as an exploration of extreme minimalism and the attendant challenges of making something legible.

I’m curious about:

• whether the game remains understandable at all,
• the degree to which it functions more as a reference to the original game versus conveying the myths on its own merits
• the ways that minimalism may foreground other design elements such as colour, animation, sound, instructions

2025-08-29

I am making this game because:

• It adds to the larger “portfolio” of ancient greek punishment games, serving as another point in a cohesive (but diverse) area of design space and allows for the potential further unpacking of and thought about “family resemblances” (thinking here especially about the Bowers paper on the Logic of Annotated Portfolios)

• It allows for an exploration of minimalism that goes beyond the “simplicity” of the existing games in the portfolio/series because it’s such a specifically mandated kind of minimization: the reduction of dimensions. I think this importantly allows for exploring the kinds of expression that are available in that situation, and might help to throw into relief what is particularly effective?

• At this point in development I’m now interested in the potentials of using the language of mathematics (in the sense of diagramming number lines) to express the myths, which ties this game into the work on adaptation/translation that I’m also very interested in and continually exploring.