Writing in LJ or writing text in general feels bad sometimes, because I'm going from the realm of the concrete and particular to the realm of the abstract and symbolic, and the latter isn't as real (although it's still real in a sense). I would prefer to just sit and watch cats be cats and so on. But doing that won't help me figure out what part of the body the human soul is hidden in (Fedora Spade reference if anyone gets it). But maybe the cat soul...

Speaking of Komera (mentioned last entry), something she said to me once years ago which I'm sure she's forgotten came back to me just now: I was thinking that the task I've set myself (to induce more beneficial traits in people and reduce their less beneficial traits, through games) is likely futile in the face how how difficult it is to change anyone over the age of about five (and even then). But she once said something like 'although you might do nothing of good to anyone in your life, you can provide some part of some future good that some other things could combine with to finish it, and the good will appear suddenly, even though it seems as if your efforts had no results, it was preparing the way for latter results' (she said it simpler and probably better than that, but I'm going from memory).

Jonathan Blow (the guy who made the indie game Braid) said something similar in one of his interviews: that although the individual influences of a game may be insignificant and unobservable on the individual sale, when you add up all the tiny bits of nearly negligible good that a game does on one person and multiply it by the number of people who it happens to, it becomes significant on the larger scale.

And I know both of those ways of thinking may simply be a way to trick yourself into thinking that a game (or whatever your one thing is) is doing more good than you think. It's too difficult to measure, but that doesn't mean it's unmeasurable or unfathomable.

As I was reading through the Immortal Defense forum while compiling that FAQ for it today, I was struck by how much praise the game had, just pages and pages of it. And that type of thing is fun, but it's not really what I make games for or care about, I'd be interested far more in people describing if the game has impacted their life in any way, or made them think differently about something, but just saying it's one of the best games they've played or one of the best stories they've experienced or how much they enjoyed it etc. etc. doesn't really convey much. And of course it's not fair to ask such a thing of them because most people don't know how something effects them, since the relation is too complex and indirect.

I'm also now reminded of one principle of Karma Yoga: that one should do work as well as one can and work as hard as one can but not be attached to the results of it, just accept the results that come as outside of direct control. One should always learn from and adapt to the results, but it's a bad idea to become discouraged or reject them, because results flow naturally from causes, there's no way causality can cheat you, and most of the causes aren't under your control. It's like in pinball machines, you can play really well after experience but how the ball bounces isn't predictable even then.