Because, looking back, I’ve been thinking about contingency a lot over the last half year. The place where this appeared most strongly in its abstract glory was the way my fascination with Ascension has played out: as I said at the time, “always, always be aware of the web of possibilities”, and that’s a web that I’ve been feeling as an almost physical presence around me for months now.

That web has manifested itself in many ways. My mind has been focused on sex more than normal recently; the specific direction in which it’s been probing the most, though, has centered on my identifying as bi more than two decades ago. Within quite short order after that, my life went in a direction that means that I’m not actively exploring the ways and extent to which I am attracted to men (or at least not actively physically exploring that!); how would that aspect of my life be different if I hadn’t gone in that direction twenty years ago? I have not the faintest idea. This is a mostly abstract question for me, but the one thing that prevents it from being a completely abstract question is my being told the summer before last by a friend of mine that he ended up being quite surprised by what he learned about his own sexuality a few years back (when he was noticeably older than I am now); I certainly don’t expect that to happen to me, but it’s a reminder of the possibilities that surround us, possibilities that in many cases we’re not really aware of.

Then there’s last year’s job search. Any job search is going to lead to you being confronted with possibility after possibility, and this one, despite its short length, was no exception. Fortunately, the possibilities in question were quite happy, and I ended up having a choice between either staying in a job that I basically enjoyed or selecting from multiple new possibilities that all seemed quite interesting. But: the job offer that I accepted was with a company that I didn’t even have my first interview at until I had an offer in hand from another rather attractive company; if my current employer been even a single day slower in that process, I would be working somewhere else, doing completely different programming, with a different number of quite different coworkers, taking the train to work every day instead of walking to work every day.

And certainly many of the details about why I enjoy my current company aren’t at all what I expected: again, surprises, possibilities that I wasn’t even aware of. In particular, my coworkers are reminding me of the power of contingency, of futures unfolding: as I get older and stay in the tech industry, I spend more and more time with people who are younger than me; and the fact that Miranda was born when I was 28, while not making me anything like a young father in historical norms, does mean (given the mating habits of the circles I move in) that my kid is noticeably older than the kids of most people my age. Being an active video game blogger also means that I spend a lot of time interacting with and being aware of the lives of people who are quite a bit younger than me; though it’s almost certainly not a coincidence that a couple of the bloggers I feel closest to are my age or a bit older.

Actually, many of my current coworkers are fairly close to me in age. But, of the two coworkers whom I’ve spent the most time with socially, one is five-eights of my age and hence has (from my point of view) basically all of the interesting parts of her life ahead of her (including events that I have no reason to think about in the context of my own future); and the other, while quite close to me in age (younger but, from my point of view, within the margin of error), has had some changes in her life over the last few years which make one (make me, certainly!) unusually aware of how paths can diverge, how one’s life can play out.

It’s not just this job change, though: whenever I think about job searches, I remember my last academic job search. At one point, I had a job offer in hand for a school that I would have enjoyed working at, an offer that I was going to accept: that school pressured me a bit more than I wanted, though, and a few other schools wanted to fly me out for interviews, one of which seemed like a better fit for me and sent signals that they thought I would be a good fit for them as well. That plus a non-academic job possibility that seemed interesting gave me the courage to turn down that first job; eventually, though, none of those jobs panned out.

Which I am extremely grateful for: there were some unpleasant aspects of that experience at the time (unsuccessful job searches are never fun), but even in the short term it worked out fine, and in the long term I’ve had zero reasons to regret that sequence of events and many reasons to be actively grateful for it. Still: things could have been quite different. And I’m not at all sure why things turned out the way they did, and in particular why I didn’t end up getting offered the job that seemed like a better fit: I didn’t have the courage to really probe that failure at the time, but my best guess is that my subconscious was dubious enough about me continuing with academia to sabotage my performance in that interview. A fortuitous series of events, even if I’m not sure why things happened the way they did or just how much chance was involved.

Contingency is one half of where my brain has been focused over the last year; the other half is narrative. Again, returning to Ascension: when I play that game, when I’m doing well in it, it’s because I can tell stories about how the game has gone so far and will go in future turns. (Not traditional stories about characters and what not: stories about the gameplay events and ways in which cards’ powers relate to each other.) The same goes for how I’ve been playing other board games; and the worlds created by my obsession from the first half of the year, Minecraft, are all about starting from contingency and crafting a narrative out of what you’re presented with.

And the same goes from all of the other examples above. In fact, my brain latched on to the narrative aspects of job searches before it latched on to the contingent aspects of those searches; and, while I say above that I’m quite glad that I left academia when I did, I’m sure that, if matters had turned out differently, I would have crafted a narrative that led to that result being the inevitable course of events instead. (I spent more than a decade and a half crafting that narrative, after all!) It’s not at all difficult to see one of the aforementioned coworkers as an example of the wonderful power that appears when you tell your stories properly, either.

In all of these examples, then, I’m not dealing with a web of possibilities as a manifestation of chaos. That web of possibilities is instead a manifestation of unexpected possibilities of coherence, of beauty. And narrative is the way that my brain is currently choosing to express that coherence, to help me understand its existence and meaning.

Why is my brain particularly focused on these topics right now? It could, of course, be pure coincidence—one lesson this year is that brains just do weird stuff some times, sometimes quite a bit weirder than I’m entirely comfortable with!—but let’s take a lesson from the narrative side of that focus and make a story out of that sequence of events instead of treating it as unexplained randomness. I turned forty near the start of last year; round numbers are an excuse for introspection, so it’s probably not entirely by chance that I’m looking back more than usual right now.

And looking back in a certain specific way. Forty is a traditional age for people (men in particular, perhaps?) to have a mid-life crisis; my guess is that the above is how my brain is choosing to express some of those symptoms. It’s a natural time for me to be looking back at what’s happened; being around young coworkers encourages that, and having a daughter who is going through major transitions of her own, forming certain mental habits in ways that I expect will strongly influence her life over the next years (decades?) is quite something to behold. (I didn’t expect middle school to be as much of a phase change as it has been, and I certainly didn’t expect the details of how it’s playing out.)

Also, Zippy’s decline and death happened this year (his decline started earlier, but it made itself year much more strongly this year than last year), so I’ve been getting hit by age as well as youth. And what both Miranda and Zippy have in common is: I’m realizing that we only have six more years living with Miranda (and she’s already much much more independent than she had been), and all of a sudden we don’t have any dogs to look after. So Liesl and I right now have quite a bit more freedom than we had over the last twelve years, and a dog-free window of opportunity to experiment with the even greater freedom that we’ll have in the quite near future when Miranda leaves. (Six years once seemed like a long time to me, but no more; compare that in particular to the twelve years that we’ve had with Miranda so far.)

Side note: one funny thing about looking at my mental state through a mid-life crisis lens is how unlike a traditional mid-life crisis it is in many ways. I’m wondering about different possibilities, and even wondering about possibilities of an explicitly sexual nature: the truth is, though, that my brain doesn’t even seriously consider any possibilities that wouldn’t have led to my spending decades with Liesl in the past and continuing to do so in the future. If I think about it intellectually, I can point to the unlikeliness of the coincidences that led to our meeting and falling in love, in the same way that I point to coincidences that led to me having the job that I have; but it’s a purely academic exercise, my brain is essentially unable to take seriously possible past histories that wouldn’t have led to us spending the last two decades together or spending the next four decades together. (The same thing goes for Miranda: an important part of what makes her her is formed out of 46 coin flips, so there’s a lot of room for randomness to manifest itself, but I am completely unable to imagine what it would be like to have a child who is not Miranda.)

Another traditional aspect of mid-life crises: looking back with some amount of regret. That I am also completely lacking in: there have, of course, been negative surprises over the last four decades as well as positive surprises, experiences that I didn’t enjoy at all at the time; not so many of them, though, and my brain is happy enough to not worry about them in retrospect, to see them more as sources of information and curiosity than anything else. And I don’t see any reason to think that my best years are in any sense behind me: I’ve had a good run so far, but very little that I did in the first two decades of my life had an impact beyond my immediate friends and family, and while I’m happy enough with what I’ve done over the more recent two decades, I don’t see any reason to believe that I can’t do a lot better over the next several. My life may be half over: but having four decades ahead of me is a long, long time!

My lack of regret doesn’t mean that I want to be blase about the future, however. As I said above: let’s make a story out of the random events in my past, and then let’s extend that story to see where my life might gracefully go next. I would be perfectly happy if my brain could spend the next year churning away on that issue, coming up with a grand plan going forward. Not a plan for the rest of my life, certainly, or anything even approaching that, but maybe a broad sketch for the next decade that will help me have an impact in ways that I haven’t so far?

Or maybe my brain will learn something from responding to the rolls of dice, the draws of cards in board games (the unfolding of moves in go!) and step beyond that narrative crutch. The way you can go isn’t the real way, the name you can say isn’t the real name; if I can move from being the ever-wanting soul who sees only what it wants and turn to being the unwanting soul who sees what’s hidden, I’d be happy with that as well. Mystery of all mysteries indeed.

Part of that was because I was dubious about playing it on the iPhone; the iPad is a much more pleasant gaming platform however, and fortunately his studio released an iPad version of the game. But I was too busy playing Minecraft until recently to dive into other games (at least most other games, I somehow found time to play a fair amount of Flight Control HD), but now that that addiction has abated, I’ve been finding more time for smaller games. (It didn’t hurt that my dog has been waking me up in the middle of the night recently, leaving me with some chunks of time that are well suited for non-narrative games on handheld devices.)

And I was optimistic that Spider might fit in with some of my current theoretical concerns. Playing lots of Minecraft, Rock Band 3, and board games over the last year has gotten me away from thinking of video games as narrative devices by default, and given me a lot more respect for focusing on a small set of mechanics. (Which can, of course, lead to quite a rich narrative in its own way!) I love Flight Control HD, and a big part of that is how well the mechanics work on the device; drawing spiderwebs sounds like it has the potential for the same sort of mechanical goodness. And if you combine that with rather lovely artwork and hints of a story to puzzle out, what’s not to like?

But I just couldn’t get into it. The web-drawing mechanic is okay, but not something I enjoyed enough to want to focus on mastering it; also, there’s just enough distance between you and the controls for it not to feel seamless the way Flight Control HD does. I like the game’s artwork, but when I was going through it the first time, I was focused on making it through the levels instead of taking the time to try to figure out what was going on, and I’m not motivated enough to go through the levels a second time with story in mind. Smith likes achievements as a vehicle to promote depth on demand, and the achievements did get me to try some goals and play styles that I might not have otherwise attempted; I enjoyed that, but not enough to keep on trying different techniques once I’d gone through the levels once. I dipped briefly into the other game modes, but my heart just wasn’t in it, so I put them aside quite quickly.

Which all left me a bit sad: I wanted to like the game more than I did, and the mechanics and story are good enough that I can imagine willing myself into liking them. (The art I don’t have to will myself into liking, it is quite nice.) At first I thought I might not have given it a fair shake by playing much of it while sleep-deprived at night; for the last couple of nights, though, I’ve been playing Puzzle Quest 2, and I’ve been loving that. And that’s another game focused on mechanics with a thinner (though more explicit) narrative veneer available; the difference, though, is that I’m really enjoying the mechanics, figuring out how to mix the details of gem combat with spell usage. And I’ve been playing a good amount of Ascension as well; no narrative there, but I’m enjoying the mechanics.

Still, I’m happy to have played Spider, and I’m happy to be quickly going through a game instead of being mired in the same games for month. On to something else now, though, a bit earlier than I expected!

But I have met the criteria for writing a summary post here. What to say, though? I’ve written about it quite a bit in my diaries on my other blog, and I’ve written a couple of posts here about it that I’m rather fond of; the Playable Characters folks were even kind enough to let me blather on about the game on their podcast. Given all of that, I’m not sure what I have left to say about the game?

I suppose one answer is to talk about why I’m stopping playing the game, and how I feel about that. And how I feel about that is: conflicted. Minecraft is a wonderful, wonderful game, no doubt about it. I’m looking at a wall full of video games, and it’s helped me tap into my creativity in a way that none of the rest of them have; it has a lovely, wistful aesthetic; it’s quite well balanced; and I will very much miss planning out the next steps in my design with my daughter and look forward to continuing to talk to her about the (much more elaborate!) designs that she continues to create in the game.

In fact, I have nothing negative to say about the game. But: to those of us who have drunk its nectar, it’s not so much a game as a lifestyle. Even that would be fine, indeed wonderful, were it not for the fact that the other game I’m playing right now, Rock Band 3, is also a lifestyle. I’ve been playing both of them for months now, which means that, for those same months, I have had time to do very little other game playing. And, while I have zero complaints about how I’ve spent those months, it is time to move on to something else. And I’ve recently come to the end of a project in Minecraft, while my current project in Rock Band 3 still has months, even years to go (not so crazy when you realize I’ve been playing one Rock Band game or another for about three and a half years straight!), and could in its own way end up even more rewarding than Minecraft has been.

So: Rock Band 3 stays, Minecraft goes. And, in the short term, I’ll probably binge a bit on other recent(ish) games: right now Ghost Trick, perhaps next Catherine, Sword and Sworcery, Bastion, From Dust, Child of Eden (paired with Rez HD?), Dragon Age 2, Okamiden, Portal 2. Or, if I go a bit older: Spider HD, BioShock 2, the Half Life 2 episodes, World of Goo.

I certainly won’t play through all of those; I’ll play through some, though, until I feel more sated. I should find more time to play board games, too: last year we’d gotten into a nice habit of playing them regularly on weekends, and while we’ve fallen out of that, it’s a habit that I miss. And maybe a carefully selected non-gaming project or two: it’s been a little while since I’ve done substantial non-work programming, for example.

Good times. Looking back, it seems that I’ve been playing Minecraft since at least the beginning of 2011; and quite a year it’s been.

In particular, we’ve taken care of a ridiculous amount of house stuff. Earlier this year, we got the only major bit of planned house work taken care of, namely fixing our front door / steps. (And that was before the GTD implementation changes.) But there were a lot of small items to take care of, too, items that had been bugging me for months (some of them for years, actually).

So, when I looked at those items, I decided that yes, they really were high enough priority for me to keep them on my Next Action list. The result was that, within half a week, I’d made a phone call to kick off getting non-plumbing house items taken care of; and as soon as that was done, I made another phone call to start dealing with the plumbing. The upshot:

• Our dryer is no longer blowing lint into our crawl space.
• We are no longer being driven crazy by flickering lights in the kitchen.
• Two towel racks and a rag hook are now firmly attached to the wall.
• Two sinks have working drain catches.
• The showers are all regulating their heat properly.
• The upstairs toilet doesn’t drip. (I can’t take (almost) any credit for that one, though, it was all Liesl’s doing.)

Which is great! And the best thing is: it was really easy. All I had to do was decide that these tasks were important: I actually already had phone numbers for people to call. In one of the cases (the non-plumbing case, I’d already used the plumber in question twice before), I wasn’t sure that he was the right person for the job, but that worked out great. Which means that it will be even easier for us to take care of this sort of thing in the future: in particular, in a couple of years we’re probably going to do some kitchen work, and now we know whom to call when we decide to think seriously about that. Obviously it would have been harder if I hadn’t already had an idea of whom to call, but still, the same principal applies: decide that something’s important, figure out the next step to make progress towards it, and do it.

So, with the house work out of the way, what next? I’m actually working on a few too many things right now: each of Rock Band 3 and Minecraft is taking up rather more time than I’m used to spending on a single video game, I’m going through a book on iOS programming, and I’m reading about CoffeeScript and using it to write a bare-bones game framework for a project that Miranda and I are vaguely working on. And those are all substantial enough that it’s hard to make progress on all of them.

So I should wind them down. Rock Band 3 is far too rewarding for me to want to stop it now—I’m just getting to where I’m actually learning to play guitar!—so I think I’ll keep going with in for the indefinite future. (And, honestly, given that I’ve been playing one Rock Band game or another for three and a half years straight, why stop now?) And the game project with Miranda is the most potentially rewarding of anything on the list, so I’ll keep on going with that.

I don’t have as much active energy to write iOS software now as I did two or three months ago, however; so, while I plan to finish going through that book, I probably won’t actually do anything concrete with that knowledge in the short term. And, as much as I love Minecraft, I may be starting to reach a point of diminishing rewards, so it may be the case that, after finishing my train stations, I’ll give that game a pause, too.

Or maybe not! Who knows, maybe at some point over the summer somebody will come up with a great iPad game proposal to work on with me, and I’ll dive into that; or maybe the Minecraft railroad work will suggest further projects that I have to build. I suppose it’s even possible that I’ll get frustrated with Rock Band Pro Guitar and give up on it in a month or two. All I’m committing to is what I’m doing in the short term, and I’m planning to keep all four of those strands going for the next few weeks; after that, all bets are off.

At any rate: yay for limiting (and being honest about!) work in progress.

I appeared on the CDC podcast talking about GDC. A very pleasant conversation, I quite enjoyed chatting with the other guests, and Eric did a great job editing the audio for this one.

And I appeared on Playable Character, talking about Minecraft. You should subscribe to this podcast whether or not you have any interest in hearing my less-than-dulcet tones, because it’s the most interesting video game podcast that I’m aware of since A Life Well Wasted. It’s run by the First Wall Rebate folks, but rather than taking the conversational format that dominates the genre, they interview people, encouraging them to monologue, and edit down the resulting audio to get at the heart of what the guests were saying. I certainly enjoyed being part of it, and Shane did a great job of taking most of an hour of me blathering away and picking out interesting bits.

I haven’t played enough FarmVille to be able to really back up that claim: my beliefs about that game mostly come from looking at others’ farms, and the impression of care and crafting that they give me. So I’m going to shift focus slightly and instead talk about Social City: it was another quite successful 2010 Facebook game, based on city construction rather than farm construction, and I played it (as well as its successor, City of Wonder) quite a bit last year. My guess is that a lot of what FarmVille players find attractive is similar to what I’m going to talk about in regards to Social City, but I could be off-base.

Social City

Social City is, as the name suggests, a city construction game. You’re given an isometric grid to build on; from the construction tab in the game, you can choose streets to form the networks of your city, buildings (residential, commercial, industrial) to lay along those streets, and decorations (trees, parks, etc.) to place between and behind those buildings.

That’s the “construction” part of “guided construction game”: as to “guided”, the game isn’t a complete sandbox. At a most basic level, the buildings come fully constructed: this isn’t Lego, you can’t create brick by brick. You also don’t begin with a blank slate: instead, the game gives you a starter town with a few streets and buildings already constructed, and while you can choose to tear it down completely if you desire, you’re more likely to use it as a base of your city’s growth, pruning and editing it as necessary. In addition, not all buildings are available at all times: the game has a level-up mechanic, so you start off with access to a relatively small set of buildings, gaining access to more and more as you progress. And you don’t necessarily have access to all the buildings that you have unlocked: industrial buildings become available by growing your town’s population, which you do with a mix of residential and commercial buildings, while residential buildings require money to purchase, which you earn from your industrial buildings. (There are also buildings that are available by spending real money and buildings you receive as gifts from other players.)

And, equally important, the buildings have character: again, Lego bricks they aren’t. The game presents a unified aesthetic, and a rather charming one at that. And it’s not a static city: the buildings come with animations (kids playing in yards, conveyor belts moving in factories), and pedestrians and cars move along your streets.

The result is a game that both Miranda and I thoroughly enjoyed. We started with the default town layout, and at first built out from it somewhat haphazardly. But fairly soon the different areas of our city took on different characters, so we moved buildings and placed buildings to emphasize those roles. We’d generally level up about once per week, so each weekend we’d have a handful of new buildings to consider, deciding where they’d best fit into our city, how they suggested we should evolve our city next. I gave a tour of my city on my other blog; we really enjoyed evolving the city to get it to that point.

Minecraft

That’s Social City; now, to Minecraft. Like Social City, you’re given a relatively coarse mesh to build on, this time made out of large 3D blocks rather than a two-dimensional grid. Like Social City, you have quite a bit of freedom as to what to do with that grid, but you are also presented with a starting layout (albeit a large-scale procedurally generated one) that strongly influences your construction. Like Social City, you have access to a relatively small collection of objects with which to build; furthermore, your choice of construction is influenced not only by aesthetic considerations but also by in-game mechanics (the ability to earn coins in Social City, to defend against mobs in Minecraft), albeit not to an overwhelming degree. And, in both cases, you have to earn your building material through menial tasks (clicking on buildings, mining): they both have a strong component of what Naomi Clark and Eric Zimmerman call “The Fantasy of Labor”.

And, again, the game has its own very strong aesthetic: the blocky pixel art style that forms the world, the (at times stunningly beautiful) landscapes that the game’s algorithm generates, the animals that wander through the world, the sunsets and sunrises, the music. This aesthetic very much influences the choices that I make when building in the game.

So, as with Social City, you end up with a game that both Miranda and I have sunk countless hours into, figuring out how we want to shape our respective worlds, starting from the canvas that the game gives us and putting more and more of our decisions into it. (Incidentally, if you’d like to join us, the VGHVI plays Minecraft together on the last Thursday of every month!)

A Continuum of Construction

I do not want to pretend that Social City and Minecraft are somehow the same game underneath: there are significant and substantial differences in the world-building that the two games enable. (In particular, Minecraft provides a vastly larger canvas to work upon.) There are many many people who enjoy one of those games without having the slightest desire to play the other one, and I would never want to second-guess their decisions. But when I look into why I enjoy both games, my motivations to play each of them have a lot in common.

That’s perhaps clearest when I contrast them to Lego. We have a big vat of Lego blocks sitting in the house; I never have a desire to pick them up and play with them. It’s just too much of a sandbox for me: I need the aesthetic structure that Social City and Minecraft provide to give me something to work with and to base my decisions around, I even prefer the gating effect that both games’ fantasy of labor restrictions provides to having all the building blocks available at hand. (Miranda frequently plays in multiplayer mode with block creation powers available, while I only do that on VGHVI nights; I can imagine eventually switching over to preferring that mode as I get more comfortable with my designs, but I’m not there yet.) We actually have also done quite a bit of Lego construction this year, but that was done entirely within the context of a prebuilt kit of the Taj Mahal: that was fabulous, but perhaps a bit too far in the prescriptive direction for me. (Or perhaps not, I really enjoyed it!)

Returning to FarmVille: video game blogs spent a lot of time bashing it last year, bashing both the game itself and the players who play the game. If you’re tempted to do that, and if you’re a Minecraft fan, though, ask yourself first: are you sure that your motivations are so different from those of FarmVille players? We all love the story of the indie making it big, and Minecraft is a phenomenal accomplishment in many ways; but there are many routes to the pleasures of creation that it affords.

For another take on the guided sandbox that Minecraft provides, I recommend “How Minecraft taught me to dream”, from the blog Reflections.

Much of that is due to how new my work setup is: my Playdom Next Action list got to be significantly longer over my time there than my Sumo Logic one currently is. And part of it is the nature of the tasks: at work, I generally have one large project that I’m focusing on at any given time (which I break up into multiple tasks, of course), with only a few side tasks, while at home, there are a bunch of different areas that I want to be working on.

Still, I like the feel of my Next Action list at work much much more than the feel of my home list. And I’m clearly misusing my home Someday/Maybe list: the age of several of my Next Action items strongly suggests that I’m not treating them as next actions, that I’m in fact treating them as someday items, just someday items that I wish I could wave a magic wand at and have them be done. Also, I’m pretty sure that the rarity with which I move something from my Someday/Maybe list onto my Next Action list is another sign that I’m doing things wrong.

Another piece of the puzzle is Kanban. (In its software development form, as developed by David Anderson, not its manufacturing form.) I’ve been following the kanbandev mailing list for the last year or so and read the book earlier this year, and while I need to get more hands-on experience with the methodology (which I hope will happen at work soon), it makes enough sense to me that it’s my default way of thinking about organizing software production. And, viewed in a Kanban light, I’m clearly managing my personal tasks wrong: I don’t have a pretense of Work in Progress limits, and I have no control over my cycle time.

And it’s not like there aren’t new things that I’d like to do but that haven’t made it onto my Next Action list, either: in fact, right now, my brain seems to be particularly good at thinking of new programming projects to undertake! But there’s no point in doing a half-hearted stab at a bunch of projects: that won’t make me feel any better.

Which means I need to get things under control. Part of that means looking at my Next Action list, and moving some of the stuff there to Someday/Maybe. And part of that means recognizing that a lot of the stuff there is things that is genuinely important to do but that I don’t enjoy doing, and I just have to suck it up and do it. For example, I haven’t done a weeding of financial records for more than a two years; the drawers are getting full, that stuff isn’t going to go away if I don’t spend time on it.

So I’m trying to spend more time driving the list down. Once I’ve done that, I’ll consider putting a work in progress limit in place, but right now I’m just trying to remove items more quickly than I add them for a bit. And it’s not that hard to do so once I put my mind to it: for example, I can easily knock off an hour-long item every evening if I just get it out of the way before reading blogs instead of reading blogs and noting that it’s 9:45 and I’ll be getting ready to go to bed in half an hour or so, and putzing away the remaining time.

I would warn that all this means that I may well not end up blogging as much here for the next couple of months. Honestly, though, that seems unlikely: doubtless going through those backlog items will turn into blog posts, too (and, indeed, several of the current backlog items are to write posts on various topics). And I’ve written ten posts here in the last two weeks even though I’ve been nibbling away at my Next Action list, which is noticeably higher than my average. The contents might change somewhat, though: in particular, I’m not planning to start any new video games for a little while. (But I’ll keep on playing Minecraft and Rock Band 3, and both of those will certainly lead to posts on my other blog and probably here as well.)

I don’t blog here nearly as often about organization stuff as I used to, but that’s not a sign that I don’t think it’s a good idea: it’s more a sign that I’ve internalized a lot of the ideas. For the record, then:

• Agile: still awesome.
• Lean: still awesome.
• GTD: still awesome.
• Inbox Zero: still awesome.
• Checklists / Standard Work: still awesome.
• Kanban: looks awesome.
• Pomodoro Technique: Has a few good ideas that I’ve brought into my practice, and I occasionally turn on my pomodoro timer when I need extra help focusing, but I don’t follow it in general.

But my GTD practice is definitely a bit chipped and tarnished (and should be better informed by Kanban); time to sharpen it up a bit.

Eventually, though, I got bored (or perhaps overwhelmed) with those underground caves, so I decided to work on a house. I didn’t head outside to do that, however: the opening of my mine was at the base of a fairly large hill, so I decided to hollow out the space above the entrance into a room.

Since I was working above ground, I hit the side of the hill fairly soon, so I put in a window. And, as I continued to enlarge that room, I hit another side of the hill; following my Christopher Alexander fetish, I recognized this as Light on Two Sides of Every Room.

One of Christopher’s Alexander’s main points is that you shouldn’t design buildings in isolation, you shouldn’t design them abstractly: you should design them in context, you should design each building so that the area around it is made richer by the presence of that building. And one of the wonderful aspects of Minecraft is that it’s a building game that encourages such an approach. Yes, if you want, you can build in Minecraft as if you were working with Legos, assembling the blocks that you have at hand into whatever shapes you find pleasing. But one of the most amazing aspects of the game is the terrain that it generates: and a building that fits into that terrain and finds a way to fill a gap that is missing is much more powerful than a building that’s plunked down into a plain that you’ve artificially leveled.

Indeed, going through Alexander’s fifteen properties, we see many that have echoes in Minecraft. The walls of the house that you build to survive your first night are an excellent example of Boundaries. The wonderful overworld combined with the importance of mining (and with natural caves bringing space to the interior of the earth!) provide Deep Interlock and Ambiguity and Positive Space in a context of Contrast. The large blocks, in their own way, provide Roughness; the terrain is full of Good Shape, and not infrequently I turn a corner and am struck by a wonderful waterfall (or lavafall!), a single tree in just the right place, or a forest of trees filling a valley, any of which makes a Strong Center indeed. And the range from single blocks to trees to hills to mountains to the span from bedrock to the top of the sky has room for several Levels of Scale.

Which isn’t to say that it’s a perfect Alexandrian space. There is room for several levels of scale, but the size of the blocks imposes a limit: the world may stretch on forever horizontally, but you only have 256 blocks of height to play with. And the context that Alexander wants you to place your buildings into isn’t defined only by the pre-existing shapes that are present: it’s the context of the people who will be using those buildings, people who are (pace the pleasures of multiplayer servers) almost entirely absent in Minecraft. Nonetheless, as much as I’ve enjoyed other construction games recently (Social City being the most prominent example), Minecraft does a much better job of providing context.

And it certainly does a good enough job of providing context to make me realize that I’m pretty bad at architecture! Take that picture above: one of the windows in question is at an angle (so it’s perhaps more light on one-and-a-half sides rather than two sides of a room), and the wall between the two is a much weaker center than a corner would be at that location. In retrospect, I was much too deferential to the existing shape of the hill when I hollowed out that room: I should have taken a slightly firmer touch in places, reshaping the walls to make the interior space more usable while not harming its outside appearance. I tried to do that some on the third floor, but that also led to problems: I ended up extending past the sides of the hill in a few areas, with the result that there are overhangs above the windows on the second floor, meaning that they didn’t provide as much light as they should have. And one side of the hill in question led into a natural arch; a wonderfully strong center in its own right, but again windows facing that arch didn’t provide enough light to make the adjacent rooms really livable.

Still, I got better at creating and enhancing centers as I proceeded up the hill. I’m rather fond of the way the third floor balcony turned out: the Deep Interlock and Ambiguity that it provides as a Boundary between the interior and exterior, the Level of Scale that it provides in relation to the larger interior room, and that sunset view is hard to beat. The stairs going up the outside of the hill from that balcony also provide a nice accent to the existing shape of the hill, and, going further up, there’s a turning set of stairs inside a large glass enclosure that provides an even bigger boundary area between inside and outside than the balcony did, while solving a somewhat thorny problem posed by the pre-existing geometry of the hillside and my third floor room. Up on the roof, I originally planted five trees before chopping down all but one of them, since its power as a Strong Center would more than make up for the absence of the other four.

There’s so much more to do, so much more for me to learn. I’ve hollowed out perhaps a quarter of that hill: how best to acknowledge the rest of it? And then, how can I move away from the crutch of using an existing hill to form the shell of my house: how best to build houses outside in the Minecraft landscape, at first hoping only to not mar the beauty of that landscape too much, but eventually finding ways in which I can make the landscape a bit more whole? And how to reconcile that with the part of me that likes digging corridors, that would enjoy nothing more than to lay down minecart tracks in a straight line all the way to the horizon?

Quite a show. But then, when it ended, I realized: I have three personal candidates for 2010 game of the year, and yet none of them made it on that list despite its length! What’s going on with that?

One of my candidates is Minecraft, and there I think the answer is clear: the game doesn’t have a release date. I can’t remember for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they actually did talk about Minecraft in the first half of the podcast; it’s just not going to naturally show up in a chronological list, though, and you could make a case that it’s not a 2010 game at all.

Another one of my candidates is Rock Band 3. I’ll have to chalk that one up to an oversight (I know one of the podcast participants is a big Rock Band fan, though I don’t think he had input into the creation of the list): it’s a huge advance in an important gaming franchise, of course it should be on there. But your eyes glaze over when going through comprehensive lists of releases, it’s impossible not to occasionally miss something when whittling them down to a manageable size.

My final candidate is Flight Control HD. It makes my list by virtue of being an incredibly fun game, superbly matched to its system, that I cannot imagine improving: it seems to me to be a local maximum in the design space of games in the same way that Tetris is. But it wasn’t on the list. In fact, no iOS games were. (I’m not a huge Angry Birds HD fan, but a lot of other people are, and Osmos has certainly gotten its share of buzz.) Actually, did I miss an Angry Birds mention in the podcast? Christopher Williams mentions it in the comment thread, so maybe it did show up in the podcast list? Unfortunately, it’s hard to check facts about a three-hour long podcast…

And the iPad and iPhone aren’t the only platforms that were left out. I honestly can’t remember if any DS games were listed, though I suspect not: I just checked July, and Dragon Quest IX is missing, which is the first candidate off the top of my head. (I also can’t remember if any PSP games were listed, but I have no idea what games came out for that platform in 2010.) And the other missing platform is Facebook: I bet CityVille has been (is still being!) played by more people than any other game in their list, but it’s missing, as are FrontierVille, City of Wonder, Ravenwood Fair, and Cow Clicker.

Lists like the one on the podcast are always going to be incomplete; having said that, this complete omission of games on three of the current most popular platforms seems like a pretty big oversight to me. So I’ll repeat my question from above: what’s going on with that?

Eric is the only person who can answer; maybe he’ll chime in in the comments. And I don’t want to turn this into some sort of big accusation or anything: I really enjoyed the podcast, and it’s a lot of work making a list like that, so I don’t want to turn that into something that’s even more thankless than it would otherwise be. But in the meantime, I’ll speculate.

Presumably he’s not a fan of games on those platforms. That is, of course, perfectly fine: there’s no reason why he, or anybody else, should be! And one’s tastes are always going to affect the contents of lists like this that one creates.

Another contributing factor is probably the fact that it’s a Critical Distance podcast. And there just aren’t that many blog posts about games on those platforms on the sorts of blogs that Critical Distance links to. (I’ve been sadly remiss in discussing such games myself.) Or at least about any of the games I mentioned above other than Cow Clicker, but that game is enough of a special case that I can see its not being included.

And another potential contributing factor is that games on those platforms aren’t targeted at people like those who participated in the podcast. At GDC, the phrase ‘forty-three year old woman’ was bandied about a lot; as far as I know, all the podcast participants are men in their twenties. As are a lot of the authors of blog posts that Critical Distance links to, so this factor and the previous one are linked.

Christopher Hyde has been pointing out for years how much tunnel vision the “critical game blogging” community has: we (and I very much include myself in this) spend an awful lot of time playing and talking about AAA games, which seems to more or less mean games targeted at men in their twenties that are expensive to make and sell lots of copies. There is, of course, nothing wrong with talking about such games; but there are a lot of other spaces worth exploring.

I don’t expect to put longer-form material there, or even particularly analytical material: I’d like to largely confine it to experience reports. I hope that those experience reports will lead to deeper dives here, however.

It’s at scenes.malvasiabianca.org—have a look. (Or don’t!) There’s not much there yet, but my guess is that what’s there now is representative enough of what its content will look like for the next few months.

(I’ll also use this as an occasion to plug my linkblog, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

A pleasant way to spend a couple of hours when I was home sick; who knows, maybe I’ll dip into it more in the future, maybe not. I’m certainly glad that games of this weight exist, I should play them more.