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Hello, sorry you are/were in a bad mood. 

I'm mostly going to be using your comment as a jumping off point do some vamping/complaining/doing a post mortem so you can likewise ignore as you see fit. I don't think I will even get around to addressing your points by the end so feel free to bail immediately, in fact.

I think the last place I mentioned this piece was when I was talking with someone on mastodon somewhere about health potions and I was like "oh yeah, I wrote about health in video games, I wonder what happened to that piece"and then remembered "oh yeah, it turns into a very adversarial comment section every time it Breaks Containment from the original context of a bunch of folks saying that skeletons shouldn't wear armor etc." I'm glad I wrote it using a throwaway, to be honest. Like I know you preface your comment with an apology of sorts, but no need: you are being extremely polite and generous compared to what I've read when this ended up on a TTRPG forum (where I think the duration from "posted by somebody" to "me, specifically, being called a slur" was like four posts) or on a LessWrong-a-verse subreddit (somehow) .

I mean, not for no reason, right, the piece is written intentionally tendentiously. I used these references in another comment somewhere (maybe they are even used in the overall jam description as well?) but I was thinking of the call to action in this piece similarly to something like a cross between the Dogme 95 manifesto or a (okay, hopefully way less fascist) Futurist manifesto: suggesting something rotten in the state of the world, and then introducing a set of constraints with the goal of making people think intentionally about what they are creating, which you then sign on to (maybe just for one game! Or for none!). Which means that the manifesto is not really about utility or aesthetics or a totalizing Theory of Games. To keep up with the Dogme example, it would be absolutely wild to say that there's no value to stationary cameras or non-diegetic music, or that a Dogme movie is an inherently more natural way of making a movie, or even that a Dogme movie is inherently aesthetically better than a non-Dogme one. 

Which is also why I'm less bummed when people say that they aren't convinced. That's okay, it would be a very boring world if everybody followed the same motivations and constraints in making games, and a very facile one if people's attitudes towards games were so weakly held that a couple barely-edited paragraphs produced in a short period of time by a pseudonymous rando were enough to irrevocably alter them. But for me at least, I started seeing HP everywhere. It makes itself felt even in its absence. I was a little disappointed by the ways that HP can constrain how games are designed or played, and wondered what the full space of HP-free or HP-lite games would/could/should/does look like. I saw things like Halo 1 going from "HP bar + regenerating shield" to Halo 2's more pure regeneration as an example of  designers hitting the limitations of tradition conceptions of HP as a concept and trying to work around it (how do we encourage players to avoid getting hit but not make them have to boringly backtrack to scrounge around finding medkits, say), with varying levels of success.

The rhetorical trick I play here, which you picked up on, is that I start small with a notion of what HP is and then intentionally grow it bigger. As you say, HP in this manifesto can be one or more of:

a) "HP as game over": a specific way of creating failure states (which I agree with you are pretty foundational to how we normally think of games, pace Wittgenstein), although I don't think HP or HP-like failure states are the only way of creating failure states even within the confines of the piece: like solitaire is clearly a game but the failure state is when there are no more moves, which I don't think of as very HP-like (kind of interestingly, the thing that is most like HP, the number of cards left in the draw pile, is both progress to the goal but also a limiting factor in that as the number of cards decreases, so does the number of potential cards you can play).

b) "HP as a model": a system for modeling the world (like the damage points in stuff like Gygax/Arneson's "Don't Give Up the Ship" and the war games proceeding it that ended up in the DNA of D&D). I mention this in another comment but the nuance I'd add to this one is that just because game-relevant information is stored as a number somewhere doesn't inherently mean that it is communicated or conceptualized as a number to the player. I'm less jazzed about this analogy than when I wrote it, but I'll stick with "just because your computer shows things as pixels, it doesn't mean all graphics are pixel art."

c) "HP as carrot/stick": a general system for rewarding/punishing players by incrementing or decrementing abstract values (in which case even stuff like points in Tetris are kind of "HP-y", and certainly the stereotypical EuroGame victory points). As with b), the fact that, yeah, your game state is ultimately saved as numbers in the code somewhere is not really as strong of a "gotcha" as it could be. I think the call is to either explore other ways of communicating with players, or ways that are less abstract (and maybe even more visceral).

So the point of the manifesto is to think about what extent a)-c) are limiting, what extent they are somewhat corrosive to some humanistic goals (telling more "human stories", say, or encouraging people to treat each other better or less abstractly, in video games or just in general). This is all prefaced on the assumption that a)-c) aren't load-bearing in games, and by now there are lots of examples that I can draw on. I mean, the other point was for me to have fun, but, you know.

But I will say I wish I had done some things differently in this piece.

The first is that a couple people really got hung up on the background as though I were laying out a complete history of games, or suggesting that there was a single teleological historical line from arcade -> TTRPG -> video game, all of which inherently have HP, which is of course nonsense in several ways. I mean "playing house"/playing with dolls is a game (that maybe predates/transcends our species?) where people play roles and it doesn't have anything much like HP in it unless you count your sibling ruining your doll by drawing all over it with markers. And likewise I don't think Gygax and Arneson were thinking "ah ha, we'll make people have to insert quarters whenever their cleric dies but they want to play again, just like ski ball!" But my point in bringing those historical examples up was that HP in at least one the guises I laid out is baked into a lot of types of games, was baked into them early on, and has influences in how games are designed or played today that may not be immediately obvious. Even the absence of HP is often done with an intentionality to it (more on this later), due to how pervasive the concept is, especially in video game design. HP is a really influential concept, and is maybe inescapable to at least think about when designing games these days, even if the decision is ultimately not to include it. It's often a default or fallback. And I think there's an underestimation of the way that historical design decisions can calcify or negatively influence their successors. Like I could be convinced (I'm not currently) that there are games today doing interesting things with old-school lives systems (maybe Rogue Legacy, where each new life has a potential to cause you to switch play styles or otherwise? Or likewise Sifu, with the conceit of death = aging and so new move sets? Although I guess that's more about about doing interesting things with a game over rather than necessarily doing something interesting with having a discrete count of attempts after which you have to quit or restart), but I don't think you'll be able to convince me that, say, Mario 64's lives system is anything more than vestigial. It's not enough for stuff to be functional, I want it to be fun or at least interesting. 

I also think I could have been more concrete in placing things in context to existing games (yes, yes, I know that's not very manifesto-y, but..).

Untitled Goose Game is one great example (to the extent that if it were around when I wrote this, I'd just have said "let's build a new, goose-driven era of gaming" or something and it would be more clear that I was Doing A Bit even without the context of the jam). No HP, just the fail state of being driven off and having objects replaced (with or without incremental progress to a goal). Lots of numbers somewhere (detection radii and so on), but there's not much that's very HP-like presented to the player.

Howling Dogs is another (frankly inexcusable) omission that came up when I was chatting about this on mastodon: things break down over the course of a story in a way that's connected to an internal numeric variable, but the last thing you'd be worried about I think is the HP of your trash chute. Porpentine (who was certainly on my mind during the writing of this piece so no idea why she's not directly called out) in general I think has games with tons of body horror, trauma, and emotional affect that, just by virtue of what she surfaces through Twine, are not very HP-like. In general I think IF gets short shrift in this piece. There are lots of good IF examples of ways of creating progress/feedback that aren't about incrementing or decrementing a number (I'm thinking of the Lucas Arts adventure game credo to not have fail states, and what kind of gameplay, for good or bad, that creates).

Back to TTRPGs, while of course you're right that there are lots and lots of TTRPGs that don't have HP (a murder mystery party! social deception games!), some examples that I would have included have been the spate of viral one-page RPGs (you know, stuff like "Trapped in a Cabin with Byron") that just throw a different adjective on their HP in a way that makes things less interesting. I think an HP-less RPG where the player is trapped with Byron would be a lot of fun (like maybe everybody has to actually try to write something with dedicated Scandalous Distractors, like a sort of gamefied writing jam), but often the admittedly engaging premises of some of these one-pagers boil down to "reading the humorous prompts once or twice, chuckling, but then just sort of ticking down boxes", because of how limiting the HP concept is, even if it's given a funny alternative title (this is not true of all one-pagers of course, some of which are quite RP/improv-heavy).

The lack of examples in the original piece also creates the temptation (as you did) to think "aha, look at all of these games without HP" as though it's a "gotcha." I don't think it's a "gotcha." I think it's an example of both how a designer sometimes needs to think creatively to pull the conceit of the manifesto off, but also how it's possible to create fun/exciting interesting/notable games without HP, which is more evidence against thinking of HP as a "default" or integral part of games. Like, the call to action of the piece is "remove HP from video games", so the response to "here are some fun games that don't have HP" is "good, great, that's what I wanted."