malvasia bianca

The Friday talks. Bringing a fine GDC to an end; this is the first year where I haven’t gone to a single talk that I felt was a mistake for me to attend, and several were excellent. And powerful: two or three of this year’s talks brought me to tears.

• 10:00am: Turning Comedy of Manners into Gameplay: Versu Postmortem, Emily Short
• 11:30am: Mad as Hell: Hothead Developers Rant Back, Anna Anthropy, Naomi Clark, Jason Della Rocca, Mitu Khandaker, Anna Marsh, Margaret Robertson, Kellee Santiago, Karen Sideman, Eric Zimmerman
• 2:30pm: Rethinking How We Build Games and Why: The Papo & Yo Story, Vander Caballero

10:00am: Turning Comedy of Manners into Gameplay: Versu Postmortem, Emily Short

The initial slide renamed the talk: Versu Post(partum). “We’re going to be raising this kid and putting it through college for a while.”

Versu superficially looks like a Choose Your Own Adventure game. But the state space in Versu is much larger. Versu offers options based on a social simulation: in a given context, you have various options, as do the AI characters. (Some options are more expected, some are less expected.)

This all adds up to a “social physics” system: it models states and behaviors, and doesn’t require the designer to map out paths and choices in advance. This lets the player take relationships in the game in directions which the author didn’t envision. (A story about a player’s experience flirting with a footman during a dinner party; then, the other guests moved to another room, she was left alone with the footman, realized she didn’t really want to pursue a relationship with the footman, and awkwardly left. That awkwardness is quite possibly how this would play out in real life…)

(An example from a dinner party game, showing different interactions between your character and other players in the party, and even allowing you to choose to play it through from multiple points of view.)

She showed an earlier version that played out in real time: NPCs would keep on acting even if you don’t do anything. That emphasizes the autonomy of the other characters; in fact, one of the playtesters of that version thought that the game was multiplayer!

They wanted to give players context for the choices, which means exposing state to some extent. There are images of the NPC’s, which change according to the mood of the characters, but the player often didn’t see that because they were watching the text; so they moved the images to the bottom of the screen, which is near where the player’s eyes were.

They also used to embed the action choices in links in the text itself. But that meant that players were constantly scanning for links making sure that they didn’t miss things; that got players thinking about the wrong sorts of things, and also further obscured the underlying systems. (And the fact that the prototype was advancing on its own during this time raised the stress level.)

So they moved to a stepwise turn-by-turn setup; you can still choose not to take an action, letting the NPCs continue to act, but it’s an active choice.

Moral: scrolling interactive text is hard to get right.

Narrative design and the simulator:

Not a lot of prior art. (She mentioned games called Prom Week and Facade.) They divided the content into episode files and character files. The character files talk about how people behave and evaluate others (e.g. they don’t mind being around unintelligent people but wouldn’t hire them), dialogue lines that they’ll use in multiple contexts, and story arc info for that character.

The episode files contain information about extrinsic events that matter for everybody in the story. The basic premise, the scene structure, the transitions between scenes.

They started with a set of gates and keys, albeit with many options for how to make it past the gate, and in a more social context. E.g. find evidence by making friends with a suspect or helping a fellow guest stop crying or searching the victim’s papers directly. (Each of which can lead to further subproblems, e.g. the host might confront you if you decide to search.)

She found that, whenever people took an option that allowed the player’s character to go off by themself (e.g. searching papers), then the fun level dropped dramatically. So she avoids doing that: if you’re alone for an emotionally fraught reason, that can be effective, but in general don’t do that.

You want to allow players to express themselves in the choice of a solution: e.g. maybe you don’t like one of the other NPCs, so you decide to antagonize that character. That’s good; as an author, try to not only allow multiple solutions but also don’t make judgments on whether the player found the “right” solution.

Also, people may make the same choice for different reasons: unlock a given choice in multiple ways, and have the payoff support those motivations.

Austeniana:

They spent a lot of time digging into Jane Austen. In particular, they would take scenes from her work, chop it up into sections, and mark it up in terms of motivation that might cause a mythical AI to react that way. That helped point out ways to expand the system: is it powerful enough to model these interactions and responses through underlying motivations?

They have a testbed where they throw together characters over a game of Whist, including characters from different stories. So she gave an example where a character from an aristocratic story and a character from an office comedy were playing together; the former told a veiled off-color story, and the latter responded by saying that it was work-inappropriate, please don’t make him tell HR. Which is great: that expresses understanding about the situation and aspects of personality (e.g. prudishness) that transfer across centuries, while expressing it in a locally grounded manner.

They want to expand the system to allow more authors and more contexts, moving in a UGC direction. And that example gives hope that it will work.

Her final point: this GDC is about authenticity; and there’s something critical about game design, namely whether or not you are telling a truth. Austen was useful for her in grounding this: she would spend some time trying to get a funny interaction work, say, but then she would return to thinking about Austen to make sure that that interaction was coming from somewhere real.

11:30am: Mad as Hell: Hothead Developers Rant Back, Anna Anthropy, Naomi Clark, Jason Della Rocca, Mitu Khandaker, Anna Marsh, Margaret Robertson, Kellee Santiago, Karen Sideman, Eric Zimmerman

The most solid rant session I’ve seen: not a weak one in the bunch, and several were excellent.

Karen Sideman: I’m not really a psychopath, but I play one in my favorite games.

In games, you’re manipulating game pieces. These days, there’s frequently a lot of narrative overlay there, but still, you’re manipulating NPCs as pieces. If you were doing this in other contexts, you would be labeled as a psychopath. Let’s raise an army! (as though they were our children)

Anna Marsh: You don’t have to work 18 hour days sleep under the desk and shit in the corner to make games.

Long hours are not productive. Managers who rely on crunch are incompetent. But: is it just the management’s fault? Lots of this comes from a lack of planning, which we don’t like. Where’s the pre-production? Other creative industries do a lot of it. We have this myth that the only way to make good games is to be 100% committed to games, and that we have to express that in our work practices.

The raw material for our creativity is our experience; if we spend all our time immersing ourselves in games, we’ll get more and more incestuous. Artists in other fields don’t shut themselves out from experiences that aren’t part of their craft. Work efficiently, not obsessively, and you’ll make a better game.

Mitu Khandaker: Everybody deserves to be treated equally! It doesn’t matter if you are black or yellow or brown or normal!

She’d originally wanted to rant about something other than race; but, while thinking about that, something race-related came up, she thought “I don’t want to be the angry minority talking about race”, and that thought made her angry. So here she is, being angry, talking about race.

A couple of years ago, she thought that race representation in games wasn’t much of a problem. You can identify with people who don’t look like you. But: she grew up having to do that over and over again, while white male friends didn’t have to do that.

As creators of content, we are the ones who get do define what normal is. Excellent rant about the concept of political correctness; I didn’t get all of it, but: IT’S ALL FUCKING POLITICAL. If you’re afraid of making missteps, ask questions.

Kellee Santiago:

A myth: as a developer, you can have a great idea, work hard, sacrifice everything, and at the end you’ll have success and be rich! Didn’t happen for the folks who worked on Journey; didn’t happen for lots of people. There are a lot of distribution option and funding options, but still: people with money want retreads, all too often your only choice is working on nothing but dreams.

But: we sit on the precipice of an exciting time, if only we handle it properly. A few indie developers have worked for nothing but a dream, and have lots of money. So right now a few people have money who also have a vision beyond doing more of the same.

Consider the Renaissance. A lot of traders in Italy suddenly were rich, and spent their money as being patrons of art. Patronage is a dirty word, but without it, a lot of important art wouldn’t exist. Maybe this model doesn’t resonate with you; but a revolution is possible that can lead somewhere different and better. Porpentine: it’s not that better and different games aren’t being made every day, it’s that they aren’t being covered.

So: once you’ve shipped your amazing game, remember the people who get back to work.

The Duct Tape Award: awarded to Scott Jon Siegel, last year’s Duct Tape Award winner!

Last year: less talk, more rock. But, sadly: 2012 was less talk, but he didn’t ship a single game for almost all of the year. The stakes felt too high, he felt he was failing everyone. A critical voice in his head was taking too much of a toll; so he decided to start making bad games. And he made 16 games in December 2012!

We make games for ourselves as much as for others. I hope we can make bad games together.

Chris Hecker: Fair Use

A video montage, with Chris not speaking at all; he put it up on his website.

Anna Anthropy:

Read out a version of Cara Ellison’s Romero’s Wives. Here’s the video.

Naomi Clark: (Bring Back) Cinema Envy

New Hollywood (1967-1982). Major directors and studios made films addressing major social issues. The Spook in the Door: this is the sort of thing you want to get in trouble for, not for being potty-mouthed pre-teens obsessed with boobs.

Violence can be problematic – this is only “edgy” in games.

“Washing one’s hand of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” – Paolo Freire

We need more angles on how to approach political issues in games. One suggestions: Games from anger. 1) Look around the world, get pissed off. 2) Organize, get pissed off together. 3) Deconstruct the systems. 4) Shape systems into a compelling experience of meaningful choices. (Game design!) (I missed steps 5-7)

Margaret Robertson: I Hate People

I Hate You. I hate each of you. You are everywhere, an infection, a disease, leeching and creeping into my game. I don’t want you there. Fuck you Game Center. Fuck you Xbox Live. Fuck you Ascension noise.

I Hate GDC. That was going to be my rant, but you people ruined my rant, saying brave, intelligent, expressive things. Now I have to do the same thing or I’m an asshole. You guys are impossible!

I react so strongly to multiplayer games because they’re so so powerful, so emotionally revealing. In front of people, I’m going to have to lose or win or let myself down; they’re there with their unpredictable meat brains. And games make me do stuff with their systems and mechanics.

That means that the whole rest of my identity is this constructed, mediated thing; the whole rest of my identity gets revealed when playing games. I love making games, but there’s something weird in my head that stops me from accessing them.

2:30pm: Rethinking How We Build Games and Why: The Papo & Yo Story, Vander Caballero

This looked like a great talk: Papo & Yo is a great game, Vander Caballero is clearly a thoughtful guy, and he had a wonderful presentation style where he edited pre-existing sketches on Paper on an iPad in real time. Unfortunately, my sleeping habits caught up with me: normally I fall asleep during one talk a day, and while I’d been doing surprisingly well on that front this year, I couldn’t quite make it through the whole conference…

35 years old, had a good job at EA, a family; but not happy. He wanted to make a game to help struggling kids; an indie game that could compete with big ones.

This problem has been solved before, in movies. E.g. movies approaching war: big studios approach it from a perspective of heroism, independents look at it from a human point of view.

He compared movies in terms of budget, box office, Oscars. Big movie costs $80M, makes $280M; indie costs $15M, makes $50M. (Similar profit ratio.) And the indie movie wins more Oscars. So: being indie is potentially a profitable business.

So: quit the job and form your studio! Forming a studio seems complicated, with a lot of stuff to do. (Find people, develop, market + publish, pay people, business development, HR and retention, legal.) Think of this like a strategy game: people are troops, development is time, payment is wood, HR is barracks, legal is walls, etc.

When you leave a big company, you’re risky, it’s hard to get money. There are lots of sources of money; and money needs you as much as you need money. You can get money either with a business plan or a product pitch; he went with the latter. He needed to put the tiger on the table: make a prototype! But an alcoholic father would freak out investors, so he needed to work on metaphors. (Metaphors are especially important in the North American market, he says.)

So: his alcoholic father becomes a monster addicted to frogs. Partners loved the product: got their wallet and brains. Also, there’s a fund in Canada that can help with independent art works, so asked them, too. And some from publishers. Getting money from multiple sources spreads the risk; it’s a useful technique from movies.

Games are good at fear, ecstasy, rage; movies are good at love, grief. Love and grief depend on empathy; games suck at empathy.

(And here I drifted off…)

The talks I attended on Thursday; all were good, but the Walking Dead one was particularly enlightening.

• 10:00am: Our Games, Our People, Our Community: What Do We Owe Each Other?, Dustin Clingman
• 11:30am: Saving Doug: Empathy, Character, and Choice in The Walking Dead, Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman
• 2:30pm: Sex in Video Games, David Gaider
• 4:00pm: Designing Journey, Jenova Chen

10:00am: Our Games, Our People, Our Community: What Do We Owe Each Other?, Dustin Clingman

10 people in the audience as the talk kicks off.

This talk is the result of a conversation with himself. (He tends to win most of those arguments!) And it’s the result of years of frustration and disappointment within the industry.

We join our story after a crazy couple of years. Established franchises aren’t doing well, over a hundred studios have been shuttered in the last five years, social gaming didn’t turn out so well, piracy, etc. And there’s new hotness on the horizon. But of course this is all part of a cycle, we’ve seen this before.

And a big part of this cycle involves mistreatment. (I didn’t copy down the examples, but he had good ones.) So: why is this a cycle? Because the developers remain, we persist, we’ll ALWAYS be here, we ALWAYS TAKE IT. (Caps in the original.)

Aspects of this are like the worst relationship you can imagine. You always tell yourself that you’ll leave, but you don’t. Because when it’s great, it’s great, but the awful keeps on coming back.

Thinking about this more: the common thread in all of this is himself. What can he do to extract himself from these loops? Where to begin? He saw two paths: a personal/cultural path, and a community path.

Personal/Cultural:

Game developers come out of nerd culture, which is a fringe culture. This, in turn, leads to an abdication of responsibility: bad stuff is happening, but it’s not our fault, it’s stuff that other things are doing to us. In other words, blame culture: you’re part of a large organization, but you don’t feel obligated to do anything, instead you suffer and go along with it.

You might go along with it while loudly complaining, pointing out the dysfunctions around you. But that’s still blame culture, that’s abdicating responsibility. (Hmm, I wonder if Dustin is familiar with Christopher Avery’s way of thinking? I asked him about that afterwards, and the answer is no.) So: don’t use “it’s my job” as an excuse for going along with something bad. It’s unhealthy, and you’ll burn out after a few years anyways if you do. If things are so bad, don’t bitch and moan, do something about it. (Which quite possibly involves “go fucking find another job”.)

Triple Town / Yeti Town cloning example. This is bad for so many reasons. But also: what are they saying about you when asking you to clone a game? They’re showing a complete lack of respect for your own creative abilities. And it’s well below any reasonable ethical threshold.

Work against passive aggression. Where did we forget that being honest is actually something that we can do? One of the rules of his studio that you don’t talk about people that aren’t there: that tamps down on passive aggression, and leads to developing a skillset that lets you be honest without being an asshole.

Community:

There is a determinedly irresponsible perspective of game developers about their role in the community. We need to stop waiting for someone else to stand up for us. The ESA does not represent developers. We are not as protected in the US as we might think. Are we going to be the next medium to be smooshed into a box, to be forced to be plain vanilla? Stop being a punching bag, blamed for society’s ills.

What can you do? Be vigilant on the local laws that impact your area. Go on record at public meetings to discuss the benefits of games to entertainment and education. Don’t expect someone else to do it. And also: understand how the game is played. It’s not fair that money and connections influence politics, but wishing won’t make that go away. Get involved in local school; mentor; donate to charities.

And leave things better than they were when you found them. Organize: creative people are not necessarily good business people, you need to work together. Yay unions; would an organized labor union work in this industry? (The IGDA is a trade organization, it’s not a union.)

Founding a union is not easy: you’ll be blacklisted, you’ll be pushed away, you’ll be made to feel like you’ll never work in the industry again. Up above, he said: if you’re asked to clone a game, you should quit. Are these costs worth it? Also, are game developer attitudes compatible with union bureaucracy? He doesn’t know if we can do this, but it’s a question worth asking.

The game you’re working on might be your last game. Who takes care of people who have been driven out? (E.g. by health issues, carpal tunnel.) Should we?

Nothing is normal right now. For a few years, it has felt like something is wrong, but he’s excited: we’re about to reinvent ourselves in a very serious way. So let’s do that in a thoughtful way, and leave the industry in better shape than we found it.

(Audience question about young game developers who already feel shut out. Dustin says: maybe the indie game movement is a union, of sorts.)

11:30am: Saving Doug: Empathy, Character, and Choice in The Walking Dead, Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman

The Walking Dead is an adventure game, but one that focuses on dialogue and choices, not on inventory-style puzzles. (The inventory-style puzzles are some of the easiest in the studio’s history.) They took a lot of the traditional game elements out; what’s left? In The Walking Dead, game design is character design.

How do you play a story? Here, character and story are the actual game. Are games at a disadvantage here compared to movies?

A question that motivated The Walking Dead: what does a person do with the time they have? This led to lots of choices. And, to make the choices matter, the game never gives you qualitative feedback about your choices: no light/dark meter, etc. “The game players played in their heads was more dynamic than any system we could have built.”

In most games, you poke at the game, to see what effect your actions have. The Walking Dead has a much more limited set of systems, so it ends up flipping this around: the game pokes you.

Proaction versus Reaction. Minecraft is an example of the former: the player has access to a huge toolbox that lets the player make stories happen. (And who the characters are is almost irrelevant.) Spec Ops is an example of the latter: you have a predefined story that happens to you. The Walking Dead is also on the reactive end of the spectrum; to help players react, context is important. What is happening, whom is it happening to?

What is happening?

They needed to give people time to absorb the context. So they left a lot of space before the important choices happen. This took a while to learn: in particular, more branching choices does not equal more meaningful choices. In an initial version of Episode 2, they had tons of choices in the first half of the story. But it didn’t work with The Walking Dead: all of those choices meant that the meaning actually fell away. Instead, what’s important is spending enough time with the world and characters until you feel that you know them well; only then do you add choices into the mix.

They prioritize emotional outcomes over victory states. And players generate their own meaning and their own emotional goals. There’s a context / reflection loop going on here.

They knew they wanted a big choice in the first episode; having somebody die seemed like a good candidate for that. So: Doug and Carley. You meet them in the drugstore; the idea was to get to know them both as people, and then be forced to choose. Carley is a very competent journalist; good with guns, but she also knows stuff, in particular Lee’s back story. Doug is a web developer, more of a tinkerer type, who had already saved Carley.

You work with both of them: with Carley to go to the lodge on a rescue mission, with Doug to get keys to break into the pharmacy. So you get to know both of them. But what turns out is: 75% of people saved Carley, and this felt off-kilter.

On surface: Carley is an attractive girl with a gun, while Doug is a dorky guy who knows controls to remote controls? This seems like a pretty obvious choice.

Going in deeper, though: they’re both people. As developers, they liked both of those characters as people. Maybe that didn’t come out?

When you first meet Carley, she risks her life to say a boy. Later on, she tells you she knows your secret and will keep quiet. And the two of you talk about keeping a child alive in an apocalypse. Also, she has your back in a mission; at the end of that mission, you share a horrific experience (the woman in the motel who was bitten and wants to kill herself), and talk about its effect on both of you.

Doug, in contrast, is a passive observer during the initial rescue of you and your friends. Then you make a plan to get the keys; but it’s predicated on you passively lying to Doug, because otherwise he’d know you’re a murderer. And there’s very little shared context with Doug beyond that.

So, regardless of the details between the two, there are many fewer opportunities for context building with Doug; given that, players will naturally gravitate towards Carley. The experiences the player has with other characters in the story is what shapes the choices they make.

Who is it happening to?

Who is our player character? A blank canvas, they needed to put some stakes in the ground. Not the camp leader: that nullifies too much of the potential tension. (You’d be making decisions instead of asking why a decision is correct.) He’s old enough to want a family but not have one. (They weren’t prepared as designers to make you care about a pre-existing family in a way that a parent would.) He’s physically able but not imposing. And he has a difficult past the player could build their own relationship with. Someone you root for, but who has major personal flaws.

Lee’s race is not on that list of attributes. It’s informed by the social facts of the region they’re in, though. White is the default choice for video game characters; that creates a context, and they needed to figure out what they wanted to do with that context. Also, because of the number of mechanics that they stripped out, everything about the context has outsized weight. (A phrase they use when thinking about new characters: “what rocks do they have in their backpack?”)

With Clementine, you pick up a fair amount of context before really meeting her. The treehouse, her family’s house, the fact that she was staying with a babysitter.

A basic question that she helps with is: why don’t you leave this group of assholes? Because, without Clementine, it might be a lot more natural for Lee to want to leave the group. But with Clementine there, staying with the group seems more natural.

In general, being around tense/annoying people is stressful. So they needed a way to manage that in a way that helped the player to stick with the game. Their main tool was empathy: helping you feel other people’s experience at a conscious and subconscious level. So they needed to build empathy, even towards people who are acting like assholes at a given moment.

E.g. Larry. He never says a nice thing about Lee in the game; most players did not like him at all. Players don’t really end up empathizing with him too strongly, but at least they can see Larry and Lilly’s relationship as a mirror of Lee’s and Clementine’s.

Players get frustrated with the nature of their relationship with Larry (there are no good solutions for players in the game, really), but this doesn’t get frustrated with their progress towards game goals.

Graph of food: 42% of people feed Larry, which is fourth on the list, behind the two kids (96% and 95%) and Mark (58%, a new character in episode 2). So people are more likely to feed Larry than any adult you knew from episode 1.

The job of the game: empower as many different player stories as possible. Lee can’t decide to negate the player’s story, though re-examination and re-articulation is okay.

If games can expand how we feel about other people and do good business, that could mean something pretty special to us as an industry.

2:30pm: Sex in Video Games, David Gaider

He’s actually not talking about sex: he’s talking about how BioWare, in its approach to romance, has had to approach questions of sex and sexuality. They first approached romance in Baldur’s Gate 2 – at the time the idea of romancing your party members and embedding that into the plot was new. (He wrote three of the four romanceable characters.) Only one of the four romanceable characters was male; female players complained that this was unfair.

At the time, he thought that those complaints were unreasonable – romance options are expensive to implement, they didn’t think they had many female players. Still, he had that in mind. For their next game, Neverwinter Nights, he’d gotten tagged as the romance guy; he wanted to write a male romanceable character, but wasn’t sure how to do that best. He went to one forum that was home to many female BioWare fans; by Knights of the Old Republic, Carth was relatively successful, and BioWare was known for their romances.

Jade Empire had a same-sex romance (and apparently there was one hinted at in KotOR, I didn’t catch the details?); he didn’t work on that game, but his next game, Dragon Age: Origins, had four romance options, two of whom could be romanced by players of either gender, and included the first BioWare sex scene between two men.

For Dragon Age 2, all four romance options could be romanced by either gender. After all, why not? Each romance option was relatively expensive (lots of dialogue), but once you’ve gone to that expense, having the option romanceable by either gender is cheap. There was a surprising number of people who were bothered by this, but also a lot of people who greatly appreciated this.

So that’s where we are: BioWare has sex in its games, they’re not the only company who does that. What’s the problem?

Well, people who don’t play games think: games are for children. And, sadly, the industry itself thinks that games are for men ages 18-25, or maybe a bit lower. Both of those are very out of date: these days, the gender split is close to 50-50, and the average age is 30. You can hypothesize that the older, female players are playing “casual” games; in Dragon Age, their metrics suggest that 30% of the players are female, and that, depending on the character, up to 24% of the romances are same-sex.

One reaction to this: great! Lots of women playing games, lots of women playing our games, we don’t have do to anything! But development costs keep on rising, so we need more and more sales. Is there an untapped market out there? Quite possibly: the industry isn’t actively trying to appeal to large swathes of the market; women, adults, minorities still play, but maybe they’d play more.

Sexy may be good; but sexy isn’t the same as sexualized. And there’s a lot of bad sexualization out there. BioWare isn’t immune to this: you can make a good argument for Isabella being positive sexuality, but even there there’s room for both sides, and moving over to Mass Effect, Miranda’s ass shows up in ways that aren’t so defensible.

And, honestly, what the “right” answer is isn’t the point: we’re coming under increased scrutiny, we’re a maturing industry, and people are going to form opinions about us based on what we see.

So why isn’t this a bigger deal? One claim you hear: “This is what sells.” Which conflicts with the earlier desire to appeal to untapped markets; but conventional marketing wisdom is that proven techniques are what matters. But there are so few big-label titles out there with female protagonists, and no clear bar to overcome here. And conventional industry wisdom has been wrong over and over again.

Conventional wisdom is a manifestation of privilege. If you’re part of a group that has always been catered to, then this catering is fine and is unnoticed. For people outside that group, though, it’s not so great.

And when some people see their privilege exposed, they get really annoyed. Because some straight male fans really didn’t like it that Anders made a mild pass at their characters. They still have the same number of romance options, but the fact that other people now got as many romance options as straight men really bothered them. And those fans aren’t alone: see the abuse that Anita Sarkeesian had to put up with. The game industry is complicit in this.

So what is he suggesting we do about it? As a first step, don’t even worry about attracting women: worry about not actively repelling women. And worry about the influence you currently have: the game industry’s choices has an effect on how people think.

Ask yourself: could this character be female, black, gay? If they already are, how are you using them: are they awesome on their own, or are they there only for the male fan, to forward a male-centric plot?

If you don’t know how to make female characters awesome, or just not male-centric, then ask for help. Maybe through consultants, but also hire people with different backgrounds on your team, and listen to what they say! The Dragon Age writing team is majority female; even so, the men on the team have blind spots. He brought up a specific example from a discussion among their writing team, of content that was offensive in a way that wasn’t intended by the person who wrote it; offense by itself isn’t inherently bad, but if you’re going to do that, do it intentionally, for an artistic purpose.

Different viewpoints on a team are an asset. When you’re hiring, assets are what you want; this is one to keep in mind.

4:00pm: Designing Journey, Jenova Chen

What parts of the emotional palette do games explore? Early games, arcade-style, explored achievement. Then games for teenagers explored empowerment: sports, action, shooting, driving. More recent games: social aspects: Sims, Wii Sports, Rock Band.

In college, he played a lot of World of Warcraft. But players he encountered on it were interested in different things from him, so that made him feel lonelier. He wanted a game without violence, and where everybody is the same (no distinctions of age, gender).

A vision of standing next to somebody on a bridge, overlooking a waterfall. Another vision of standing quietly with people in a snowy field, with colossal figures walking around, trying to avoid their attention. (He’d just finished playing Shadow of the Colossus.)

They formed thatgamecompany, with Sony’s help, and made Flow and Flower. He felt it was time to try online gaming now. Social games were on the scene, but they were about numbers going up, more like arcade games than his social vision.

He met many astronauts; they felt that being on the moon makes you mystical. On the moon, there’s nothing, and the earth is so small that you can cover it up with your thumb. So: why are we here?

These days, they’re so much we can do, we’re so empowered. And games reflect this concern with empowerment. So, if in a game, you have power, then rather than being about survival or connection, the game is about power. (In Left 4 Dead, he only feels a connection when somebody is patching him up.)

So: reverse the relation between the player and the world. Make the player less powerful, the monster more powerful. Or, in multiplayer, make the other player more powerful, more important to you, the monster and world less important. (I missed some of the argument here, so some of the above is probably wrong.)

How can we keep the focus on other people? Get rid of noise; get rid of weapons. So that’s like in a lobby waiting around. To heighten the focus shrink down to two people, in a hazardous environment: if you’re in a desert, a lone person on the horizon is very interesting to you.

That’s the emotion he’s trying to evoke; how do we get there? There aren’t a lot of example to look at, after all.

So prototype; they started with music. He showed a concept trailer they made four months in; the music is there.

But there were problem; the trailer is the only thing that worked well! He showed a rope-based prototype; it only worked in multiplayer, though. Also, their 2D prototypes ended up not translating to 3D – e.g. a 2D prototype that depended on trails and on strategic movement/collaboration didn’t work nearly as well with 3D cameras.

They think of graphics as gameplay. The distance of the mountain posed a problem with that; so they added trails and dunes for local variations, and then sliding down dunes to make that traversal more fun.

How will the mechanics of setting up multiplayer work? Usernames take you out of the world. Voice chat adds its own set of problems. Sony recommended friend invites; but playing with friends whom you can’t chat with is frustrating, while allowing chat interferes with the integrity of the game. So: no friend invites, and usernames only show up in the list at the end.

They also experimented with four-player groups; but that set up 2 vs 2 and 3 vs 1 narratives. (A single player who wanted to explore slowly caused particular problems.)

Flow for collaboration: too much me is alienation, too much we is conformity, flow is “coliberation”. Give the player a choice for how to navigate that; the result is Journey‘s seamless online lobbies. The first few people you match up with might not work, but eventually you’ll find somebody who is a good fit, and you’ll have a stronger connection.

What about resource consumption? At first, they had the player taking resources, but dropping the ones they’ve used behind them. Psychologically, this feels like somebody else taking advantage of you: stalking behind you, picking up your stuff. So, to eliminate this problem, they got rid of possession: infinite resources, everybody can pick up from that pool, but limited pocket size.

The next question is physics. They wanted to let people help each other; but the physics necessary for that had darker uses. (“For quite a while, I was disappointed by humanity.”) Morality doesn’t carry over to game worlds, and players want feedback: killing somebody gives much stronger feedback than helping them over a rock. So eventually they gave up on collision, but standing next to the other player gives them money. That removes feedback for trying to harm people, increases feedback for being together and helping.

Once the mechanics are figured out, the next step is: pushing for catharsis. For Journey, they’re pushing for feelings of awe and mystery; he read some Joseph Campbell to give him ideas about how to heighten this. He liked this, so he created areas that mapped to Campbell’s monomyth.

When working with musicians or visual artists, it’s easy to talk about emotions like sadness; but we don’t have experience mapping that to mechanics. At the end of the first year, they actually had the world mapped out, but the emotions were flat.

By the end of the second year, it was working a lot better: they thought they were matching the emotion curve pretty well. But playtesters didn’t like it, they said the game was bad. In particular, they didn’t like the end, and recommended cutting it. (That’s where the emotion curve didn’t match what was desired.) There was one interesting experience, though: a game crashed, the playtester didn’t realize what was going on, and spent a couple of minutes staring at a white screen figuring out what was going on.

So they worked on the last level, to heighten the effect there. There’s a wind requiring struggling, the scarf can freeze, monsters seek you out and can crush structures. They added a rest area, a fortress wind area, and the walk of death; the player’s movement slows down more and more there. (Finding the right length for that walk was a challenge.)

And then the summit: you have to make it much more exhilarating. Initially, the final area looked great but was on rails; they opened that up a lot more, and added a surfing area to make it more fun. The final area was very free; even at the end, walking into the light is your choice.

At the end of the third year, three out of twenty-five playtesters had tears in their eyes. That’s a success. (Playtesting for emotion, not just usability, is crucial, but you don’t get it until the very end.)

He was nervous about the launch. But in the forum, he saw people thanking and apologizing to each other; he couldn’t imagine a Call of Duty player doing that, but it’s the same person!

Fan art reflects the most intense emotion: he saw drawing hearts at the end of the game, the joy of surfing, the fear of being hunted, and struggling together through the snow. And the fan mail: they knew they’d changed peoples lives for the better.

My notes for the Wednesday GDC 2013 sessions:

• Ideas per Second: How Double Fine Optimizes for Human Performance, Nathan Martz
• Empowering the Player in a Story-Rich World: Co-Directing Dishonored, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio
• #1ReasonToBe, Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Elizabeth Sampat, Mattie Brice, Leigh Alexander, and Kim McAuliffe
• Strange Love: Game Theory vs. Game Design, Frank Lantz

11:00am: Ideas per Second: How Double Fine Optimizes for Human Performance, Nathan Martz

This is probably the talk that I’m going to this year that will be the most relevant to my day job. Seems like good advice, though I’m not sure there’s anything here that was much of a revelation to me.

He says agility is important, where by ‘agility’ he means: exploring the ideas you care about as quickly as possible, and the ability to change quickly when things don’t work out.

Double Fine went from producing 2-3 hours of gameplay a year (during the years when Psychonauts and Brutal Legend were in development) to 16.

Goal of the talk: discuss simple, practical ways to explore the ideas you care about more effectively and more sustainably.

The Team:

A formative experience for him: being part of a dysfunctional programming team, where that dysfunction showed up every day, every meeting. Their fundamental (mistaken) belief was that there’s One True Way to write software.

A good team is: any team that works well together. How do we do that?

• Unifying vision

• Hiring is the most important decision you’ll ever make

Never hire unless you’re really confident that they’re the right person. (Double Fine believes in long-term “career hires”.) Don’t hire jerks. Candidates interview with the entire department, plus a cross-section of related disciplines, and Tim. Group discussion after the interview.

Personal(ized) interviews: equal parts fit and ability. Ask about problems, not puzzles. Tailor the interview to the candidate. Questions should demonstrate the intelligence of the applicant, not the interviewer.

Scaling for larger orgs: meet with entire (sub)team; schedule cross-functional interviews; discuss afterwards as a group. And provide a basic level of interview training.

• Code ownership

Very powerful; very dangerous. Leads to pride of ownership and continuity of vision; downsides are territoriality, needless drama, and concentrating risk.

To get pride without selfishness, think of the codebase as a communal garden. It belongs to everyone, but most people focus on a few plots they like. And ask before digging up something you didn’t plant.

• Architecture and improv

It’s always hard to know when to go big or keep it simple. The goal should always be the simplest software that solves the problem. A heuristic they use: go for big plans when you have clearly defined goals, but iterate and keep it simple when you don’t.

The Technology:

Their codebase optimizes for human productivity. So how can we make everyone more effective?

Focus on the interesting problems. Iterate as quickly as possible. Leverage your past investments.

For their native (C++) toolbox, they’ve invested in: templatized containers; a reflection/introspections system; componentized entities; a task/threading framework; multiplatform abstraction; an aggressive focus on physical dependencies.

Their main approach to memory and dynamic allocation: don’t let allocation stop iteration. (They are “memory libertines”.) They only optimize reactively, in areas that prove to be performance/memory bottlenecks (and they do have stricter standards for low-level systems); don’t be so cavalier that you crash, but don’t worry too much in advance. Also, the majority of memory in games is used by assets, not the engine.

They rely a lot on dynamic languages: Lua for gameplay, Python for tools and build system. Finding the right balance is tricky: Psychonauts was 70% Lua, which turned out to be too much for that game (partly because that was their first game, so less good tooling). Brutal Legend was 10% Lua, that was too far in the other direction. Modern games in their Buddha engine: 10% – 25% Lua; in their Moai engine, 50% Lua.

They learned a lot from Moai/Lua: C++ code is services for Lua. Make it easy to move code back and forth. Co-routines are very important, as are debugging tools.

Continuous integration, yay. Which requires a good build infrastructure; that’s been one of their best investments, and has been critical for multi-project development.

Tools are also important in content development; a constant struggle to do them well. Investments are precious; make them count. Put them in game whenever possible. Make them everyone’s responsibility.

(Later, in response to an audience question, he said that hot reloading of assets was very important for them when iterating.)

Middleware: they can be a huge accelerator, but they can end up owning you. So: know your core competencies; and check out open source libraries.

Reap what you sow. Software is electronic knowledge; throwing away software is throwing away knowledge. In particular, stick with a common set of frameworks/languages, don’t chase the flavor of the year.

Sustainability:

This is vitally important. We want to build great organizations with repeatable successes; we want lifelong careers, we want to like our jobs. (And if we’re managers, we want our employees to like theirs!)

Double Fine made big mistakes with this when developing Psychonauts. (During the peak of its crunch, almost 40% of the code was checked in between 8pm and 8am.) Significantly better since then, even as they’re doing more checkins in total.

What does “sustainable” mean? From a personal level: I can do this job my entire life, even with kids, without living at work. And from a company: I can stay in business indefinitely, remaining profitable while preserving your core values.

To do this: prioritize focus and intensity, not hours. Overtime must be elective. Let individuals contribute in ways and at times that make sense for them. Use overtime to take the game from great to exceptional.

Think about the bus factor. This is a major cause of stress for everybody: for the manager, but also for individual contributors. So prioritize generalists over specialists: you don’t want concentrated knowledge. And document and disseminate your knowledge. (Hire people who like each other!)

Play the whole team. Don’t lean on the same high performers for everything. (This is hard, because high performers volunteer too often.) Force yourself to find opportunities for other people to contribute.

2:00pm: Empowering the Player in a Story-Rich World: Co-Directing Dishonored, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio

I haven’t played Dishonored, but they seemed to be thinking interesting things from a systems point of view, so I figured I’d give the talk a try. And I enjoyed it, and now I’m a bit more likely to play Dishonored.

Here are the speakers’ slides.

They want to enable player improvisation in a story-rich environment: balance player creativity versus narrative constraints. Guide/attract instead of dictating the player’s path. Pull-based narrative.

General Purpose Systems:

Entities influence each other though an input/output system. E.g. a grenade puts out a certain kind of damage, and a door listens for a certain kind of damage, so if a grenade happens to land near a door, the door will blow open. So game mechanics listen to each other. Or arrows send a “pierce” stimulus, candles send a “fire” stimulus, fire arrows send both, and different objects (guards, barrels, oil barrels, oil slicks) respond to one or both of those stimuli.

Downsides: sometimes there are non-dramatic moments; players are responsible for creating fun, but can instead get lost. You need enough entities with relationships, and you can get bugs.

Process:

1. Plan general purpose rules
2. Implement
3. Play for a while
4. Add specific rules

Take note of 3: let systems live together for a while even if they feel unfinished. Specific rules might support interesting interactions (“possession fall”) or fix bugs (“wall of light” exploit – wall of light killing 1 NPC following you is okay, but killing 10 following you doesn’t make sense).

Avoid excessive map markup: e.g. don’t mark climbable walls explicitly, instead have the game figure that out dynamically. And design entities with multiple input/output relationships: rat swarm + guards, corpses, possession, rat tunnels, escape combat.

The Play-Path Matrix:

Multiple gameplay tools / approaches, complemented by multiple adjacent pathways. So, the player can choose: which tool to use, the tactical approach, how to interpret it morally, and the pathway to take. That lets them own more of the experience.

Support key play styles everywhere; do it consistently but not predictably. Also, randomize the goals / mission objectives: not only does this help replay, it means that level designers can’t overscript. Feels more dynamic, not like a “Jerry Bruckheimer moment”. And leave space for player-driven goals, too: e.g. where on the stealth/slaughter continuum you want to fall, the pace of play, the story/action balance. (The “Heart” tool helps giving access to optional story and goals.)

3:30pm: #1ReasonToBe, Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Elizabeth Sampat, Mattie Brice, Leigh Alexander, and Kim McAuliffe

Update: This is available to watch for free in the GDC Vault.

This panel was stunning, a real emotional gut-punch. My notes here are awful: it really didn’t lend itself to good note taking. But this session by itself may be enough to get me to want to come to GDC again next year.

Robin Hunicke:

A curious kid who did lots of things when growing up; didn’t want to choose one of them in college. Did an interdisciplinary major involving too many categories for me to type here; still had no idea what to do when she graduated. So: grad school! (In AI.) Started considering being a game designer.

Joined EA in 2005 (Sims 2, MySims, Boom Blox), then Journey.

Cab driver calling her the hottest nerd he’d ever seen. Which she is tired of: she’s a curious person, but doesn’t want to be a curiosity.

Embrace the global reach that we (games) have, create a global community. Either actively work to broaden our community or you’re in the way.

Evangelize; and don’t just talk about juggernauts. Consider building a game yourself, maybe start with something small about a personal experience you’ve had.

Leigh Alexander:

She’s in the media: relatively big megaphone and high visibility. Something about gamer culture. Empathy hard to learn, but important.

Even people who aren’t jerks don’t always understand the point of feminism. Sexist jerks don’t exist in a vacuum; and they don’t think they themselves are sexist jerks, either. So we need to keep up conversations. Not about policing sex and appearance but … (I missed details here).

In her work: practice what she wants to see in others. Try not to always be on a soapbox: take feedback from others, learn how to help them.

(too much good stuff going past too fast with bad audio quality…) (Great bit about tone policing.)

Kim McAuliffe:

Backstory. Then things that bother her:

“What about female players?” Sims 2 DS: female players had many fewer desirable flirting options than male players did.

Being the “girl game designer”.

Imposter complex. Felt uncomfortable working on games where you shoot other humans. Wanted to work on areas outside of what is currently labeled as “core”. Minecraft helped a lot: the gaming audience is a lot more diverse than we think it is.

Positive experiences: her most recent game, Kinect Nat Geo TV, is her favorite. Not a conventional game; traveled to lots of places (“exotic Montana”) to film; actors, animals. But, most exciting, watching kids play it for the first time.

Looking forward: the assumption that players are male makes female players feel like they’re on the fringes, and makes female developers feel like that. But they’re not, they’re part of the core. Make girls expected as players: then they’ll naturally grow up to be part of the industry.

Elizabeth Sampat:

Back story: wrote huge amounts of SEO spam for almost no money while writing pencil-and-paper RPGs in her spare time. Then moved into digital games.

Ridiculous, contradictory, sexist expectations presented in advice articles. (Very funny rant here, I won’t pretend to do it justice.)

The costs of assertiveness: men telling you to fight back don’t see the backlash, the hate mail, the death threats, the shunning.

She could make it in here, but she’s “kind of fucking crazy”.

If women who love game haven’t made a game, it’s probably because it’s never occurred to them. Invite them.

Mattie Brice:

Back story. Then: systems! “Life is a game”; so what are the rules? Assumptions about who gamers are, what a game is, what games writing is mediate our experiences. Non-gamers react in a much more open/inspired/affected manner to Mainichi than gamers did – the latter generally just saw how it didn’t fit into their expectations.

(Imagine how different our industry would be if every shooter were replaced by a Sims spinoff.)

Vision: be adamantly inclusive. Remove traditional gamekeepers. Be an ally.

Brenda Romero:

Got into the industry while smoking a cigarette in a high school bathroom. Wow.

E3: way too many booth babes. Felt like walking through a construction site. Went to GDC dressed in “the closest thing to a burqa” she has. Thought: “Why am I doing this? I founded this fucking industry.” Behavior she experienced at E3 would be sexual harassment in any other industry.

(Lovely male eye candy slides.)

E3 has refused to change their policy despite public complaints.

(Making me cry again. This time with something about her daughter.)

5:00pm: Strange Love: Game Theory vs. Game Design, Frank Lantz

This talk was full of pleasant enough math stuff, but not really for me as it turned out.

By “game theory”, he means the branch of mathematics. Not that useful in the day-to-day work of most game designers. So not a lot of overlap between the two fields on the surface, but he thinks there’s something interesting behind the scenes.

Game theory: the mathematical analysis of situations where multiple parties are making choices, and the outcome of those choices is dependent on the choices made by the other parties. E.g. picking a costume at a party: how striking yours is depends on what costumes other people choose.

Simple example: cutting a cake with two players, one person cuts, one person chooses. For the chooser, the strategy is obvious: pick the larger piece. So the cutter can assume the chooser will take that strategy and act accordingly. In fact, every two-player zero sum game has a solution like this, the “minimax”. (Might be a mixed strategy, where you pick different options based on probability.)

Applied to economics, biology, foreign relations, philosophy, not always with zero-sum games. (E.g. chicken.) There, visibly limiting your options can improve your outcome: throwing your steering wheel out of the car means that you will win in chicken, because the other person will swerve. Seems to happen in international relations. Does it happen in biology? Are some irrational involuntary reactions actually rational responses to games?

Prisoner’s dilemma. Game theory experts: both defect. Game theory ignoramuses: both cooperate. So the ignoramuses get a better outcome; whoops.

It got more serious with nuclear weapons: John von Neumann and Bertrand Russell thought that we should nuke Russia before they would nuke us. RAND came up with a different solution; maybe setting up Mutually Assured Destruction was the right approach? (“Maybe poker saved the world.”)

You get different solutions if you assume that you’re iterating a game. So Axelrod set up “iterated prisoner’s dilemma” tournaments. The most successful was “tit for tat”: cooperate in first round, then imitate your opponent after that. Though recently, Press + Dyson discovered a larger family of strategies that tit for tat fits into that lets you set your opponent’s payoff. The only solution to that is to always defect; but to do that, you need to recognize that your opponent is behaving in an extortionate fashion.

That starts leading towards a theory of mind – you need to model and recognize something about your opponent’s approach.

Applications to Game Design:

Legacy: this branch of math/science arose out of thinking about poker. Probability, computations, information theory also all have their roots in the study of games.

Formal analysis: in multiplayer competitive games, try to avoid allowing dominated strategies into your games, strategies that are strictly worse than other strategies in all contexts. Moving beyond that, there are questions of greed and negotiation that appear in both fields.

Inspiration: game theory has a lot of games that are thought experiments, maybe we can bring them over. Paradoxes give examples of scenarios that are simple but not trivial.

Reconciliation: explore the relationship between different aspects of game design that are traditionally seen as opposed.

Final thought: The rational is not incompatible with the sublime.

Here’s my best guess at my GDC 2013 schedule; I’m sure I’ll end up at some talks not on the list (am I really going to skip the microtalks this year?), but it’s a start. In general, I’m pretty free for lunches and dinners, so get in touch or grab me at the conference if you want to get together.

Wednesday

• 11:00am: Ideas per Second: How Double Fine Optimizes for Human Performance, Nathan Martz
• Lunch: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Ferelden, Heidi McDonald (poster)
• 2:00pm: Empowering the Player in a Story-Rich World: Co-Directing Dishonored, Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio
• 3:30pm: #1ReasonToBe, Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Elizabeth Sampat, Mattie Brice, Leigh Alexander, and Kim McAuliffe
• 5:00pm: Strange Love: Game Theory vs. Game Design, Frank Lantz

Thursday

• 10:00am: Our Games, Our People, Our Community: What Do We Owe Each Other?, Dustin Clingman
• 11:30am: Saving Doug: Empathy, Character, and Choice in The Walking Dead, Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman
• 2:30pm: Sex in Video Games, David Gaider
• 4:00pm: Designing Journey, Jenova Chen
• 5:30pm (30 minutes): Why Virtual Reality Is Hard (And Where It Might Be Going), Michael Abrash

Friday

• 10:00am: Turning Comedy of Manners into Gameplay: Versu Postmortem, Emily Short
• 11:30am: Mad as Hell: Hothead Developers Rant Back, Anna Anthropy, Naomi Clark, Jason Della Rocca, Mitu Khandaker, Anna Marsh, Margaret Robertson, Kellee Santiago, Karen Sideman, Eric Zimmerman
• 2:30pm: Rethinking How We Build Games and Why: The Papo & Yo Story, Vander Caballero
• And then stop by the second half of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop

On a couple of instances, most recently on his thousandth blog post, Jordan has brought up some advice that I gave him when he was starting his blog: that you should have low standards. Jordan phrased that advice more articulately than I did at the time, I’m sure:

What he meant: to blog you have to be willing to to write things that are inarticulate, or not fully-thought-through, or which still have pieces missing; otherwise blog entries (like some math papers!) end up languishing, invisible and unfinished, forever.

The funny thing is that I don’t actually remember giving this advice, and if one were to ask me today what the secret is to writing a blog that sticks around for a while, that probably isn’t the first thing that would come to my mind! Though I do still think that low standards are a good idea: the fact that Jordan’s blog has been going on for almost six years and has over a thousand posts gives anecdotal empirical support for that claim (not that Jordan’s blog isn’t wonderful, but if he has found the advice useful, I’m not going to argue with him), and this very post is evidence that my own standards continue to remain low.

Still, if that isn’t the first answer that I would give, what answer would I give? First, I will freely admit: there is absolutely no reason why anybody should want a blog like mine. This blog is extremely self-absorbed and doesn’t have particularly high readership (high in volume, that is, my readership is wonderfully high in quality), it really exists largely to get ideas out of my head so I can start thinking about something else. But if you, too, are in the situation of wanting to get ideas out of your head and onto a blog, then this is my best guess as to what has been helpful in allowing me to continue to do that:

Develop at least one trigger that will cause you to write a blog post.

For me, the trigger is: every time I finish a video game that isn’t a short flash game, I write a blog post about it. I don’t write the blog post before I start the next game—I frequently need a little bit of time to come to terms with the game, and I usually start playing my next game while that happens—but I definitely avoid starting a new game if I have two games that I’ve finished that I haven’t blogged about. Games aren’t, of course, the only thing I blog about, but they serve a useful role by regularly leading to content here.

From a queuing theory / networking theory point of view, this is a backpressure mechanism, and it leads to:

Don’t let too many blog posts be floating around in your head at once.

There are usually two or three topics that I’m thinking about writing a blog post about: maybe something about a specific game, maybe something more general about games, maybe something about work (related to organization or programming), maybe something about how I run my own life, maybe something a little more random. (Once I’ve gotten this post finished, my list will consist of “Blog re aspiration in games” and “Blog re Grow Maze“.) Two blog posts that I’m thinking about is a good number, and three or even four is perfectly fine; but, for me, five is a bad number. So if the list gets too long, then I’ll write a blog post during the next evening when I have enough energy to write.

Don’t let a blog post float around in your head for too long.

If you have an idea for a blog post, then write that blog post. Not that day, not even necessarily that week, but that month. The longer blog posts sit in your head, the farther you get from the initial spark that motivated it: for me, at any rate, letting ideas bake will start hurting more than it helps after a couple of weeks, sometimes sooner. And even if a blog post never bakes fully, I find that I far prefer writing it in a half-baked form than either waiting indefinitely for it to bake or pretending that I’ve forgotten about it and moving on to other things. (When I do the latter, I find that my brain generally doesn’t move on to other things, with the result that I don’t blog at all until I’ve gotten that half-baked post out.)

Always have at least one blog post floating around in your head.

This is one of the harder rules here: what are you supposed to do if you don’t have anything to write about? And it’s true: I can’t just sit down at a computer and force inspiration upon myself. But what I’ve gotten a lot better at over the years is noticing when something about an idea catches my brain’s fancy: if that happens, onto the list it goes. (I actually do keep a real list, but a mental list is okay, too, as long as you keep it short and drain it regularly; I don’t usually write down details on my list, just topics, though I have a notebook for writing drafts on the extremely rare occasions when I feel that would be useful.) And then my brain will chip at it a little bit in the background, and I’ll be able to produce a blog post on it at some point soon.

Try to write at least one blog post a week.

This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule: if a week goes buy when I’m just too busy or nothing has quite come together, it’s not the end of the world. But if a week has gone by without me writing a blog post, it is at least a sign that I should ask myself what’s going on. Am I just too busy or too tired? Am I not listening enough to the ideas that are in my head? Am I letting a half-baked blog post block me? (It’s usually that last one.)

This recommendation is different from trying to keep on a regular schedule: some people recommend that, but I personally do not. Instead, it’s a diagnostic tool to detect inappropriate blockages and keep things moving.

Rereading the above, I’m coming too understand why Jordan went out of his way to point out the importance of low standards, because that’s really a prerequisite for all of those suggestions. Without low standards, it’s hard to develop a trigger for regularly writing about a topic: there are tons of games that I had nothing interesting to say about, but I wrote about them anyways because that’s what I do, and by doing that I improved my ability to occasionally find something interesting to say. Without low standards, more and more blog posts will float around in your head, because you won’t let enough of them escape. Without low standards, a blog post will float in your head for too long, because you’ll want to polish it too much or not accept that you’re unlikely to be able to polish it well. Without low standards, you’ll find yourself without any ideas floating around in your head, because you won’t pay attention to ideas that strike your fancy but that you don’t feel like you really have anything special to say about. And without low standards, you definitely won’t write at least one blog post a week, because I can guarantee that you have weeks where there’s nothing that you think of that you’re proud of.

With low standards, though, you just might find yourself looking back at your blog five or ten years later, a thousand posts later, and being glad that you’ve taken that journey.

The Experience Points folks suggested replaying Journey on the anniversary of its release; I did that, and I enjoyed the experience enough to return to it again a few days later.

Journey is a wonderful game for many reasons, of course, and its short length lends itself very well to this sort of return. I continued to enjoy just being in the world, I had some lovely interactions with my companions, and there’s something viscerally joyful about the experience of jumping and flying in that game. But it’s also a game that I’ve played few enough times to still be experiencing it in different ways each time I play.

Or maybe it’s that I’ve changed since the last time I played it: because while I love flying around in the game, I have a lot more appreciation for the simple act of walking than I used to. I did my first playthrough in a relatively normal fashion; for my second playthrough, though, I tried to avoid getting scarf segments (it turns out that the game will give you one little bit of scarf whether you try to get it or not), and I stayed on the ground whenever possible.

That isn’t something that I’ll necessary make a habit of in the future, but I’m glad I did it once. It felt more solitary: when other players came by, I would chirp at them a bit if they seemed like they wanted to be friendly, but I was also content to let them soar on away from me if that’s what they wanted. (Which they almost always did!) But it wasn’t solitary in a lonely way: it just turned the experience into something that was mostly about me and the environment; or about me and acceptance; or about introversion; or something. (Journey has never been the sort of game that projects a singular meaning, after all!) I didn’t stop and linger, I didn’t rush; I just kept on going.

Now I’m wondering what other experiences there are for me in the game. If I wanted a traditional gamey experience, I could finish my trophy collection. Alternatively, I could go out of my way to try to think about and stitch together the narratives that the game gives us. And I’m sure there are interactions with my companions that I could try to foster.

Who knows; I’m in no rush. I’ll come back next year; maybe I’ll try out one of those approaches, maybe the 2014 version of myself will have a new set of ideas that he wants to reflect upon with the game.

I am not into stealth games. In fact, before its recent resurrection, the only Vintage Game Club game that I didn’t finish was Thief. I was excited to play that game, but when it actually came down to it, the experience was just too much for me. Some of that has to do with personal issues that have nothing to do with the genre (let alone that specific game); but I also have personal issues that do hit at the genre. I don’t, in general, like waiting around in games (at least when I have a plan in mind); and I’m also extremely loathe to use limited resources. That latter meant that, rather than being creative about using water arrows (for example), I’d hope that a more straightforward plan involving sneaking and knocking out guards would work, and I’d spend a lot of time boring myself either waiting for guards to be in the right place or retrying.

So: my dislike is totally self-inflicted, my default assumption is still that Thief is a great game, and maybe I’ll even come back to it at some point in the future. But it wasn’t a great game for me then. And, in general, I’ve been staying away from the genre. Nonetheless, when Mark of the Ninja came out, I figured I had to play it given Nels Anderson‘s and Chris Dahlen‘s involvement.

And, actually, I was somewhat glad to have the excuse. For one thing, I don’t like writing off entire genres. For another thing, the game was quite well-received, including some amount of comments from people who enjoyed it even though they think of themselves as not liking stealth games. And, for a third thing, some of Nels’s comments in podcast interviews made me take notice (and my apologies for not including links to those podcasts: he was on a bunch, and I didn’t keep track of where he said what on them): I remember some interesting comments about 2D environments being more readable than 3D environments in a way that helped stealth gameplay (particularly relevant since the specific thing that pushed me over the edge on Thief was my failure to notice an aspect of an environment for something ridiculous like two hours), the explicitness of the information the game gives you seems like it would help in terms of making it more a game about playing around with systems than a game of trial-and-error retries, and it didn’t sound like it leaned too heavily on resource limitation. Plus, it’s an XBLA game, with the brevity that generally comes with that: it’s not like I gave up on Thief immediately, I went through several levels, and if that game had been more of an XBLA length, I probably would have finished it.

So I gave Mark of the Ninja a try. And I’m glad I did! Not only did I finish the game, but I was curious enough about the systems to want to dip into it again, so I started a New Game Plus, and ended up going through it a second time. I doubt I would have finished my second playthrough if it hadn’t been for some achievements that seemed in reach; but I’m happy enough to have finished the second playthrough, and as it turns out the game became the only Xbox 360 game that I’ve actually gotten all the achievements on. (Admittedly, that’s not much of an accomplishment: XBLA games have fewer achievements, and none of this game’s achievements are all that hard.)

I’m still not at all converted into a stealth game fan, but I think I have more of an appreciation for the genre now, and I certainly appreciate Mark of the Ninja for not getting into my way. Being in 2D doubtless helps read what’s going on, as does the clarity of detection radii and darkness and what-not; and checkpoints are frequent and restarts are fast. And many of your abilities are unlimited use; some aren’t, but the ammo limits for those are generous enough not to be too much of a problem, even for people with my psychological quirks. There were bits of the game that I liked that didn’t have much to do with the stealth gameplay, too, e.g. the puzzle rooms or the existence of the haiku.

And there is one aspect of stealth gameplay that I actively like, namely the concept of ghosting. I’m more and more tired of killing in games these days; so it’s nice to have games that are explicitly designed to allow you (or even reward you, assuming you care about points and the like) for not doing that. In fact, in a funny way, my only complaint is that they almost made that too easy: you get a teleport ability towards the end of the game that becomes available throughout the game on a replay, and doing that allows you to bypass a fair number of problems. (Not enough to make the game boring, though, don’t get me wrong.)

I tried to be good about exploring the systems in the game, since my understanding is that that’s a big part of what stealth game is about. Having said that, I didn’t go into the systems as deeply as I could have: on my replay, I generally played through each level twice, once in a straightforward way and once in a teleport-heavy ghost way. Maybe I should have experimented with more options; I’m actually not sure I did a full level in most of the “paths” that the game gives you. (I particularly wonder if I should go back and experiment more with the terror path, having frightened guards seems like it opened up interesting interactions.)

So, really, a somewhat tentative approach. And I’m not yet sold on stealth: I like the idea of exploring interactive systems in theory, but in practice there remain aspects of the genre that aren’t a good fit for me, so I’d rather spend my systems exploration time on, say, Android: Netrunner right now. (I’ll bring my decks to GDC if anybody is up for a game!) As to the aspects of the game other than its stealth nature: the game turned out to be a surprising outlier in that regard. In past years, I wouldn’t have thought twice about a game that’s full of violence and adolescent rebellion / daddy issues—that’s what video games are like, right?—but looking at the games I’ve played over the last year, I’ve been dialing down on that a lot recently, so seeing that in Mark of the Ninja was a little more jarring than I expected. But not in an actively unpleasant way; certainly I’m glad that I played Mark of the Ninja, for multiple reasons.

My guitar playing—my relationship to/with my guitar, really—has continued to change over the last few months. A lot of that is a steady drip of improvement, but my feelings towards bending strings have been a bit more of a state change.

Bending strings was probably the most significant technique that Rock Band 3 didn’t model but Rocksmith did: some of Rock Band 3‘s behavior made a lot more sense once I understood why what I was listening didn’t seem to match what I saw on screen. It took me a while to get used to bends in Rocksmith, too; part of that was that the guitar I was using at the time actively fought string bending, but I suspect that part of that is the novelty of the technique compared to other instruments I’d played. There’s nothing like it on a piano; it would perhaps be possible to some extent on a violin (though I’m not convinced that a violin’s strings could take the abuse), but, vibrato aside, it’s not something people actually do on a violin. And it’s not something I’d seen in other instruments I’ve dabbled with.

Rocksmith‘s modeling of the technique is surprisingly distant, too. They show you a sustained note, and tell you to bend it; they have a hidden requirement for a minimum amount to bend it, but they don’t actually show you what that minimum amount is, and they don’t care when in the sustained note you do your bending. This all combined to leave me in a quite uncertain state: I didn’t know how much to bend, I didn’t know when to bend, I didn’t really know how to bend, and I was afraid that I’d break the string if I went too far.

After a month or so, though I started to calm down: I got a guitar that wasn’t fighting me, and I got used to the idea that yes, moving strings sideways was a reasonable thing to do. So I got less and less shy about shoving the strings around; this helped me be more successful score-wise when playing the game. Still, there was something missing: I could do what the game was asking me to do, but the game honestly wasn’t asking me to do very much.

Two songs in particular helped me get over that hump. One was a version of The Star-Spangled Banner: in one bit, one of the notes in the tune was missing. I assumed for a while that that was simply something that they left out in the easier difficulty levels and that the extra note would appear as it got harder, but they kept on not adding that note. And then I realized that the string bend in that section wasn’t for emphasis: it was a larger bend (a full step) that was there to serve as part of the tune. The other song was Are You Gonna Go My Way: it has a very distinctive riff that it plays over and over again, one that includes a string bend followed by a pull-off. At first, I just played it however I wanted; but listening to the song more, I realized that the notes and timing involved in that combo are very distinct and very precise. (I’m still not good at playing it accurately, but at least now I know what I’m listening for!)

So, with those, I started to appreciate string bending more: it’s not just a flourish, it can work well to carry the melody. I’m listening a lot more to the music: figuring out what notes they’re playing, and what the timing is for the bends. But I don’t want to be ruled by that, either: I want to acknowledge the fact that this is a string bend, not a hammer on or a pull off or two distinct strums.

The upshot is that I have license to play around: to go with what sounds good, and to go with what feels good. (One of Rock Band 3‘s surprisingly strong reminders is how important the physical and tactile aspects are of making music; here’s yet another example of that.) At first, I was a little frustrated that Rocksmith had an idea of how far it wanted me to bend but wouldn’t show me; now part of me is glad of that, because the game is explicitly constructing a safe space were I have to play around a bit on my own.

It’s a very small safe space, of course. But it hints at the existence of a much larger realm of possibility.

This is going to a hard post to write. Normally, I play a game, finish it, and write about it here; but I’ve been playing Rock Band 3 for more than two years, and I’ve been playing one game in the series or another constantly since the first game came out back in 2007. So it doesn’t feel so much like I’ve finished playing the game as that I’ve broken up with the game. Fortunately, the break-up is amicable (and, as it turns out, mutual), but still.

And, to make matters worse: I’ve written quite a lot about the game over the years. So I don’t know if I have anything to say about the game (or the series) that I haven’t already said multiple times before!

Nonetheless, I have a tradition to uphold. So: once more unto the breach, dear friends. (Or: I come to bury Rock Band, but also to praise it in all of its ambition.)

One of my favorite bits of Rock Band 3 wasn’t part of the game itself but rather one of its pieces of DLC, namely the album London Calling. I’ve only listened to rock radio (or any sort of pop radio) for approximately three or four years of my life; this has given me an extremely spotty pop music background. My musical background is relatively strong in other ways, but still: it’s a gap, and one that I don’t actively want to be there.

So one of the things that I’ve always appreciated about the Rock Band series is having an extremely well-curated selection of music; generally the older half of the music on the disc is stuff I’m reasonably familiar with, the newer half is stuff I haven’t listened to, and I’m glad both halves are there. And that curation continues with the DLC, of course.

But, while the biggest gaps in my education start in the 90’s (I’ve never listened to Nevermind, for example), there are significant holes earlier as well: if it wasn’t being played on Cleveland-area radio stations in the late 80’s, chances are I haven’t heard it. And it turns out that London Calling is an example of that.

London Calling is a staggeringly good album, of course. But the nice thing about coming to it first via Rock Band is the way in which I got to experience it. I actually first listened to it while playing through it in a VGHVI gaming session, and going through it with friends is a wonderful way to be introduced to the music. Liesl and I played through it that weekend as well.

Listening to music has always been (at least optionally) a social experience, of course. But still: Rock Band is one sweet spot in that regard. I don’t want to minimize the joys of experiencing a concert with hundreds or thousands of other people, but there’s something nice about doing something with one or two or three other people. And with Rock Band, while you’re not directly focused on your fellow participants, the activeness of your interaction with the music (and with your specific role in that interaction with the music) reflects back into interactions with the people you’re playing the game with. It’s not as tight an interaction as, say, playing chamber music together (or playing in an actual rock band together, I would imagine), or as playing a two-to-four player competitive game together, but it’s more of an interaction than sitting around in a room listening to music together. And, at its best, it can really be something; going through London Calling with friends and loved ones was Rock Band at its communal best.

But London Calling showed off Rock Band at its solo best as well. When playing it with the VGHVI folks, I ended up on drums; I don’t normally play that instrument, but I really enjoyed it, it turns out that London Calling on hard drums is a great level for me, keeping me engaged and (on many of the songs) feeling like I’m overcoming a challenge without ever sliding into frustration. Then, when playing through the album with Liesl, I took the guitar; later, I went through it by myself on bass and on vocals.

And I really appreciated having all of those lenses to approach the album through. It’s a great album through any of those lenses: I’m glad I tried instruments that aren’t in my standard comfort zone. (Something similar happened with The Beatles: Rock Band: I didn’t appreciate Paul McCartney’s bass lines until I played that game. Though I liked London Calling‘s drum parts more than Ringo’s…)

That’s not the only way in which the game combined strong social experiences with new ways to appreciate music. Vocal harmonies, in particular, stand out in that regard: it’s one thing to be playing fake plastic instruments sitting next to somebody, but it’s a significant step up to be sitting next to somebody singing together. And not singing the same part (which is fun enough!): singing different parts, forcing you to figure out how you relate to each other and to the rest of the music. At first, we couldn’t hit the harmonies most of the time; but when we succeeded, it felt great.

Great from a social point of view (I assume harmonies the mode that Liesl and I will be most likely to return to in the future), but great from a musical understanding point of view as well. Which points at another area in which Rock Band 3 has showed me something about myself, in my approach to systems.

One frequent complaint about the Rock Band series is that it doesn’t let you go off script: you can try to throw in extra beats while playing the drums, say, but not only will the game not let you hear those extra beats, it will actively punish you for doing that. I can see where these complaints are coming from, and ultimately I share them to some extent (I was surprised how much of a relief it was to have Rocksmith not chastise me for playing extra notes), but in general I’m much less bothered by that than many people.

The more I thought about that, the odder it seemed: comparing it not just to performing music on real instruments but to other video games, Rock Band is very prescriptive indeed. I generally think of myself as liking to have choices; why am I so happy to have so few in this context?

Part of that is my classical music background, I think: I’m used to sitting in front of a piano, looking at a score, and trying to figure out how to play those notes when I’m supposed to. There is, of course, a lot more to performing classical music than just playing the right notes at the right time, but that remains a key aspect of classical music performance, and one which I’m happy to accept as an unquestioning default.

But that’s not the only thing that’s going on in my psychology with respect to the game: it’s also revealing something about my approach to complex systems. I like complex systems, at least if they’re elegant enough, in fact I can get rather obsessed with them. This shows up in my love of games, but it’s also why I ended up getting a Ph.D. in mathematics. And music is, of course, a gloriously rich, complex, elegant system.

Different people have different approaches to complex systems; my approach is often one that’s focused on learning and appreciating them. I can frequently get a visceral understanding of the guts of a complex system much faster than most people; but the joy of that understanding is the main thing that drives me, I’m less strongly moved by a desire to go off and extend it further. You can see this in my math career, for example: I could pick up math very quickly, but I didn’t end up putting in the effort to be a really good researcher. My current career has put me in an interesting sweet spot: programming by itself involves enough complex systems that being good at learning those gives me a significant leg up, but working effectively in a startup ends up throwing several more interesting complex systems into the mix, e.g. ones involving interpersonal relationships and business goals, and the combination of all of those turns out to be super fun to explore and try to deepen my understanding of.

Returning to music: I’m happy enough listening to music, but actually playing music lets me see more of the underlying systems, as does breaking apart the different strands of the music. Rock Band has always done some of the latter (though Rock Band 3 improves on its ability to let you see different strands, with vocal harmonies and keyboards); it’s been somewhat weaker on the actual “playing” side of things, but with pro keys and pro guitar the gap there has narrowed significantly.

Pro guitar, in particular, was a huge advance over anything else the series had allowed in terms of systems appreciation. In some sense, it’s only going from a 5-button controller to a 132-button controller; but that increased numbers of buttons allows a vastly richer view of the systems that are present within the music that I’m listening to. Especially because those 132 buttons are arranged in a meaningful way: the physicality of playing Rock Band 3 surprised my in many aspects, but none more than what my hands were telling me as they moved along the fretboard.

So yeah: I can’t make whatever music I want within the context of the game, I can’t even do much to chose my approach to that music. But I can see the music that the game is presenting to me in so many different ways than I could before; that is a tradeoff that I was happy to take for two years solid.

I could keep on going; but this is probably as good a stopping point as any; instead, I’ll just link some of my favorite posts on the series. And I will conclude by saying: to those of you who read this who have worked on Rock Band 3, or any of the other games in my series, I offer you heartfelt thanks. You have done good work; you have done important work.

• the beatles, rock band, and genre
• bohemian rhapsody as video game
• my gay avatars
• the psychosexuality of rock band vocals
• the tactile experience of rock band
• i love reifying relationships
• rock band driven development
• games and guitar learning

It has been clear for a while that I would benefit from Japanese lessons: I’ve been getting a lot out of self-study (with assistance from books and JapanesePod101), but that self study means that I’ve never been in a situation where I actually had to produce Japanese. Which isn’t the end of the world—there’s nothing at all wrong with focusing on reading, and you can certainly make a case that I’ll find myself more frequently in situations where I want to read or listen to Japanese than situations where I want to speak it. Still, it is a lack, and a lack that I’d been feeling more and more.

The obvious solution to this lack is to take Japanese lessons. I hadn’t done that for two reasons: one is that it costs money, and the other is that it takes time. (Japanese in general is taking up more and more of my time, and not always in productive ways: over the last few months, I’ve been spending too much time reviewing vocabulary, to the extent that I’m now thinking that, in retrospect, adding a bit of Chinese to the mix was a mistake.) But with the upcoming trip to Japan, I now have a concrete situation where being able to speak Japanese would be useful and where I can’t fool myself that reviewing vocabulary alone is a good idea; so I asked around, found a teacher, and now I’m taking Japanese lessons on Saturday mornings.

It’s only been three weeks so far, but my initial reaction is: this was clearly a good idea. I wasn’t fooling myself that I really have learned a fair amount over the years; but that learning isn’t always showing itself in ways that are productive when it comes to speaking. Over and over again, my teacher would ask me something, and I would know that it’s a word that I would recognize if I saw it in Japanese, but I couldn’t come up with it myself. (My memorization practice has almost exclusively gone in the Japanese-to-English direction rather than the English-to-Japanese direction.) And the same thing would happen with grammar.

So I have a lot of learning to do. (And I also have to get over my own fear of saying the wrong thing, but that at least I am conscious of and can deal with.) But I think the learning is coming along reasonably quickly: my teacher seems to think that I’m doing a good job, and I can feel the words and knowledge shaking loose in my brain and rearranging themselves in more productive ways. Who knows how well I’ll be able to speak Japanese in April, and it will certainly be a completely different (and much less comfortable) experience than traveling to France or Germany, but we’ll be able to do well enough.

It is still a time cost, and one that’s more noticeable given how much time I’m wanting to spend on guitar during the weekends these days. So right now I’m not committing to continuing to take lessons after I get back from Japan. Having said that, I’m tentatively thinking that I’ll stick with the lessons for a while, quite possibly a long while: I’m getting benefits that way that I’m not going to get any other way. (Unless I do something like move to Japan for a few months!) It will help my reading, too, I’m fairly sure: as I move beyond bilingual editions or comics that I have English-language copies of, I imagine it will be useful to have somebody whom I can ask questions to about phrases that confuse me. And speaking practice will potentially give me access to better understanding of written Japanese, because I’ll be able to see more of the choices involved in crafting a sentence.

So, for now, I’m taking this as a sign that I should get more serious about studying Japanese, and that I should shift the balance of how I’m studying. I’m adding in lessons, and a greater amount of English-to-Japanese practice; I’m dialing down memorization practice, being more comfortable with looking up words but not adding them to the list to memorize. (On which note, I’ve finally finished memorizing the 1981 version of the Joyo Kanji list, though it will be a little over half a year before I’ve learned the extra 196 characters that were added in the 2010 revision.) And I should spend more time reading—for now, I’m freeing up a bit of time on weekends by moving one bit of reading practice (Hikaru no Go) from weekends to Wednesdays, except that I enjoy reading that enough that I’m still reading it on weekends, I’m just now reading two chapters a week! (I also discovered last week that there’s a new edition of Hikaru no Go which is much nicer to read: larger pages, better quality paper and printing, and occasional sections are even in color.)

And I’m also getting comfortable with thinking that there’s a good chance that Japanese is the last language I’m going to seriously study. One reason why I started studying Japanese is that I wanted to show that I could still learn languages; not that I was worried, but, well, it had been maybe 15 years at the time since the last time I’d started learning a language. Now, though, I really don’t spend much time at all thinking about that sort of thing: I’m confident that I can learn things (languages, instruments, whatever) if I spend the time on them, but I also have a quite good idea of what that time cost is, and of what the tradeoffs are when compromising on that learning.

So, for me right now: the tradeoffs are such that I’d rather dive in more deeply, and do it right. And one aspect of getting older and having a good number of self-directed multi-year learning projects under my belt is that I’m comfortable with the thought that doing it right is potentially not just a multi-year process but a multi-decade process. (At least given that I’m not throwing myself into this completely: I’m still a dilettante, I’m just, well, a committed dilettante.) I’m not wedded to that thought, and it wouldn’t shock me if, a decade from now, I decided that, say, focusing on Chinese was the right thing to do. (Heck, maybe I’ll even get religious as I get older and go back to Pali!) But I’m also quite comfortable with a possibility space where my current interests carry forward for quite some time.

The Vintage Game Club has been dormant for a while now, but the recent release of System Shock 2 on Good Old Games was too much for Michael to resist, so he’s organizing a playthrough! So, if you’re thinking of giving the game a try yourself, please consider playing along with the VGC.

When I saw that Kris had a “Cat Games” tier on her GoFundMe campaign, promising that she would “encourage Jason to write a Twine game about your generosity (it may be a string of “jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjkkkkkkkkaaaaa”)”, I just couldn’t resist.

And I am very pleased to see that Jason has, indeed delivered. It is a true existential masterpiece; I am honored indeed to have played some small part in coming into being.

Every so often, I get somewhat dissatisfied with an aspect of how I’m spending my time; these days, it generally involves rethinking the way small actions fill time. I’m in the middle of one of those periods right now; it was kicked off by me running into a thought-provoking article about (temporarily) quitting Twitter right before I was about to have rather more free time than I was used to because of a hiatus I took from work.

I didn’t follow the article’s advice, but I’ve been thinking about what it said, because I think it’s pointing out something true and relevant to me that I wasn’t aware of before. It starts in a relatively familiar place, that

Twitter has done a lot of really great things for me. I’ve met a huge number of people I care about because of it, and a good number of those have become coworkers and colleagues—even closest friends. In fact, I’d say that outside of my family, most of “my people” in real life are folks I met on Twitter.

Which is a little stronger than I would phrase it myself, but at the core I agree with that point: Twitter leads to real friendships, real connections. It then moves on to a discussion of empathy:

The level of candor people often share on Twitter, particularly over time, has given me a strong sense of who some of the people I follow are, how they think, and what they value. I end up including many of the people on my Twitter list in the somewhat fuzzy set of people I empathize with.

As a result, I’ve actually been able to predict with frightening accuracy how well I’d get along and work with people I’ve followed on Twitter longer than a few months.

And that’s great, it really is. But the article then points out something that I hadn’t thought about as much:

But the problem that occurs is that it can be a huge mental lease we’re signing when we invite a few hundred people into our Twitter life. To some degree, it is choosing to subject ourselves to thousands of ads throughout the day, but ones that come from trusted sources we care about, so they’re actually impactful.

Even if the people we know aren’t explicitly selling things (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or Promoting their Personal Brand™ (there is everything wrong with that), we’re still choosing to accept their stream of one-second ads with *some* kind of message all day.

We’ve surrendered a massive amount of mental and emotional energy without making the explicit choice to do so—it’s simply imposed on us by subscribing to the channel and checking it.

This is also true. I need to care about people, I do care about people. But that doesn’t mean that I need to care about hundreds of people on an hour-by-hour basis, or that it’s healthy for me to do so.

The author of that article recommends taking an extended break from Twitter. I thought about doing that, and I still might do that; his reasons for that seem pretty good. But I have too many friends where I want to know what and how they’re doing on a week-by-week basis (if not necessarily an hour-basis), and where I won’t learn that any way other than Twitter. And Twitter serves an information role similar to blogs for me as well. I didn’t want to give either of those up; but I did want to acknowledge that spreading my empathy too thin was arguably unhealthy, and that while my life improves by having random input from interesting people, that doesn’t mean that it keeps on improving as much or, indeed, at all if I continue to add more interesting people into the bucket.

So I started unfollowing people. At first, that was easy enough, once I’d accepted the basic premise that the mere fact that somebody is nice isn’t enough of a connection. Basically, I unfollowed people whom I hadn’t met in person or had conversations through other mediums (e-mail, voice chat), whom I didn’t have regular conversations with over Twitter, and who didn’t have blogs that caused me to think enough to get me curious about what they said in other mediums. Nice people all, I’m sure, and people whom I would be happy to meet in person; but I hadn’t.

That seemed like an improvement, and I appreciated the small but noticeable time savings it gave me. (For better or for worse, I’m a “read your entire feed” kind of person, in both my Twitter consumption and my blog consumption.) What I wasn’t expecting was what this revealed about the tweeting habits of other people I followed: with my Twitter traffic cut approximately in half, that gave a lot more room for more prolific tweeters to make their presence felt. (And more prolific retweeters—this noticeably increased the density of retweets in my feed, though I got that back under control by turning off retweets from a few people.)

This is where things got painful: there were several people who unquestionably fell in the bucket of “interesting people whom I’ve met in person, whom I care about, and who I wanted to see how they were doing on a week-by-week basis”. The problem is: some such people tweet on a minute-by-minute basis. And they’re at the center of conversations, which means that by seeing them I also see replies to them from other people I follow.

For better or for worse, I don’t have a good way to control that volume. (Maybe I should switch to a list-centric Twitter client?) Instead, though, I unfollowed a few more people. This time, it hurt—I can think of three people in particular whom I miss in my Twitter feed, I just don’t miss them quite enough to want my phone to be filled with page after page of their tweets. (So, to anybody who goes from this article to check whether I’m following them on Twitter and discovers to their surprise that I’m not anymore: that doubtless means that you’re one of those three people, and I miss you!)

I’m mostly over that hump; the gradual weeding-down continues, though. Results will vary, but: I’m happy both with my choice of following fewer people on Twitter and my choice to not take a vacation from Twitter. No promises that either of those will continue, but for now they seem like a reasonable place to be.

That’s Twitter; can/should I apply those lessons elsewhere? Blogs and podcasts are two potential analogues; and, in both places, I’ve been trying to reduce my volume of consumption as well.

Though those two play out differently, from each other and from Twitter. I’d already pared down my blog reading enough that I don’t have to carve out time to read blogs every day. Or at least I don’t have to catch up every day: I group my blogs into lists, and two of those lists I do catch up on most days. Those lists are short, though, and I haven’t particularly pruned them.

But I have pruned outside of them: ideally, I’d like my blog subscriptions to be at a level where I can read them one or two evenings a week and be caught up. (There’s certainly likely to be one or two evenings a week when I’m too tired to write here or concentrate on a game, and blogs can be good for that, though I will have to save a few of the more thoughtful pieces to read on a day when I’m less tired.) I ended up unsubscribing from a few prolific, generally more newsy feeds, and that’s brought the blogs relatively under control.

Podcasts are different: for a while, I’ve had the list of podcasts that I subscribe to in order to listen to every episode at a manageable level. But I find myself more and more often adding single episodes of podcasts that catch my eye somewhere to the queue, and that list is building up.

Contrary to my normal habits, though, I’m relatively comfortable with letting those build up. I’ve flagged those individual episodes as potentially interesting, but my brain seems relatively comfortable not treating that flagging as a commitment to listen to those episodes, so they sit in my podcast client for a while. And eventually I do listen to them or I delete them; I’m treating their volume as feedback that I should slightly raise my bar for what to save, but it’s not a big deal.

There is one thing that’s going on with my brain and podcasts that I’m not entirely comfortable with and that comes back to the empathy issue I mentioned above: the number of podcasts that I listen to that are by people who I generally consider interesting people but whom I don’t have an active reason to really feel I’m learning huge amounts from. I’m actually pretty good at not listening to every episode of such podcasts, but still: I’ll dip into episodes when they talk about something that catches my interest.

In particular, I do this with several of the shows on the 5by5 podcast network. (Or shows by people who used to be on it but aren’t any more, like John Gruber.) And what I’m realizing by observing myself is that I’m giving them access to an hour or two of my attention every week, and by doing that causing myself to care about things that, honestly, I don’t really want to care about. So I’m trying to be more careful about that now; I’m still listening to Horace Dediu regularly, because he talks about stuff that I really do want to think about, but I’m trying to raise my bar with other shows from that circle.

So, that’s Twitter, blogs, and podcasts: in all three, I’m slimming down, driven in part by time limitations and in part by a desire to not cede my choice in attention to other people. Which raises two questions: 1) What is the balance of those two drives? 2) What about other ways in which I’m spending my time?

Fortunately, I had a good test case for both of those questions recently: I had an unplanned vacation from work for a little more than a week of December. So I ended up having free time during the days, and asking the question of: how do I want to fill it?

The answer turned out not to be: by reading Twitter and blogs more. Instead, the single thing that I wanted to do the most was practice guitar; second on the list was catching up on blog posts; and the other two things that I spent significant amounts of time doing were programming and singing. (Playing games would doubtless have been on that list if I hadn’t been starting a Rocksmith binge and winding down a Rock Band 3 binge.)

Which is a list that I’m pretty comfortable with: if I run a thought experiment of what I would do if I were taking a year or two off of work instead of a week or two off, that’s still a plausible guess as to what I would do. Though I think I would try to make room for a larger-scale creative project in that situation; something that I’m open to now, actually, I’d be happy to carve out time for game development with the right collaborators.

I certainly wouldn’t try to find time to, say, listen to more podcasts—I was, in fact, going to say that I’d probably listen to fewer podcasts, but that’s probably not true, because I would still carve out time to walk, and I’d listen to podcasts during that time. (Or at least during some of that time: I should probably spend more of my walking time listening to music than I currently do.) I’m actually going to have another related experiment soon, when my employer moves to Redwood City: that will add a train commute to my day, and I think I’m going to fill that time with reading books instead of with podcasts.

(Side note that I’ll bring up now since I’m slipping into making lists: GTD, when done right, is not about having your life ruled by lists: it’s about feeling that, at any moment, you’re doing what you’ll find most satisfying. The lists, instead, are for two purposes: one is to provide a place for your long-term satisfaction and short-term satisfaction to negotiate with each other; and the other is to get you to take commitments seriously, so if you’re not sure if you want to do something, you don’t put it on your Next Actions list, you put it on your Someday/Maybe list. As I get better with GTD, my Next Actions list gets shorter, and I get more and more comfortable with doing whatever catches my fancy without worrying that I’m missing anything by doing that.)

(Side note two: if I had more free time, I quite possible would carve out more of it to play board games. Which I’m actually doing frequently at work over lunch, but that puts a cap on how long a game can be: I’d like to play longer games and play games more often with a wider group of people. Not that I don’t enjoy playing games with my coworkers, they’re a great group of people, but my family and non-coworkers friends are also great people!)

The other thing that I’m spending a lot of time on is learning Japanese. During the weekdays, that mostly consists of going through memory review (and that’s at the edge of taking noticeable amounts of time); and my weekends are getting more and more Japanese projects in them. (The current list is lessons with a teacher (about which I’ll blog soon), reading a children’s magazine, reading Hikaru no Go, and reading a grammar book.)

This is a little out of whack. Having said that, what is not out of whack is that I’m spending significant amounts of time learning Japanese: it’s still something I want to do, and I want to do well.

But the balance is off. I’m spending too much time memorizing stuff, both in terms of percentage and total volume. For the latter, it’s arguably a mistake that I started listening to Chinese-language podcasts; maybe I should stop adding new Chinese vocabulary words, maybe I should even delete existing ones from my memorization program. And for the former, I should spend more time reading and talking Japanese; aside from that being the ultimate goal of what I’m doing, I bet it will help my memorization (as long as I don’t get too uptight about entering new words), because I’ll have run into a lot more words in other contexts, so I’ll be more likely to remember them and hence my program will throw them at me less often. And I should try to carve out some reading time outside of weekends, too, so my weekend Japanese practice doesn’t start to feel like a chore.

So, that’s where things are. I want to keep on writing on this blog; I want to keep on playing guitar; I want to keep on programming (but work gives me a good amount of that); I want to spend an hour or so most days walking. I want to spend a little more time studying Japanese; I want to spend a little more time reading books, and a change in commute will make that easier. I want to continue playing games, but I’m okay with Rocksmith taking a fair amount (but certainly not all) of my video game playing time; I would like to have a little more of that time spent on board games. I want to immerse myself fairly deeply into the activities I’ve listed above, and that involves a real time commitment; that tradeoff means spending less time reading blogs and Twitter.

That seems like a pretty good plan for 2013.

We’re visiting Japan for a couple of weeks in April; does anybody have any recommendations as to where we should go? It’s our first time there, we don’t have even the basic outlines of the trip planned yet, let alone any details.

Papo & Yo is, I suspect, an important game. But it is also a game that my history doesn’t equip me particularly well to talk about. This, given its subject matter, is extremely fortunate for me personally; it does handicap me as a blogger in this instance, however.

But still: I have to say something about the game. Both because, well, that’s what I do when I’m finished with a game; but also because maybe Papo & Yo can teach me something about linking game mechanics and meaning?

Ever since it appeared last September, my brain has been in a constant dialogue with that Puzzle Box article. And Papo & Yo approaches that question from a different direction. It sets Monster up as a puzzle to be solved, where if you do the right sort of thing you’ll unlock the relationship that you desire. A different sort of relationship from almost any other game out there, but still: the pattern is there.

Except that it isn’t: at the end of the game, you have to accept that you can’t save Monster, you can’t get the relationship that you wanted. (Or, of course, you don’t have to accept that, but not accepting that won’t do you any good.) Which has real power, power that is amplified both by the real-world context and by the past history of this game trope (and related game tropes, in particular the protagonist as hero/savior) that this game consciously sets against you.

One more common trope that Papo & Yo sadly works with, rather than against is Women in Refrigerators. For most of the game, I suppose Alejandra has more of a feel of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl; but when she moves from the fringes and starts taking a more direct role, you just know that she’s not going to last very long; and, five minutes later, there she goes. I’m sure there’s something interesting to be said here about the gendered nature of violence, but it felt to me like a misstep on Papo & Yo‘s part, and Alejandra’s reappearance on the floating island, rather than giving more context to her character, just made that worse for me.

Narrowing my scope: the combat with Monster. You try to avoid Monster; most of the time, you succeed, but that’s hard enough that you’ll fail more than once. You’ll get knocked down, you’ll try to run away, you’ll get knocked down a couple more times before you escape or achieve what you were trying to do.

This sort of persistent, non-fatal attack is, I think, rather unusual in games. And I was surprised by how powerful I felt it to be: the lack of a health bar meant that my brain couldn’t simply slip into a game-playing mode when thinking about it, the lack of a fail state meant that I couldn’t simply give up and refuse to acknowledge the reality of the situation. This abuse is happening; there’s no easy out, there’s not even an out of giving up, I’m going to have to both confront its reality right now and the reality that I’ll experience it again in the future. I’ll think about what I could have done differently to avoid it this time, to avoid it next time; but even if I avoid it next time, I’ll slip up again at some point.

And even that way of phrasing things says something: I’m blaming myself for slipping up, but of course it’s Monster who is attacking me. I’m in a world of wonders; much of the time, he’s irrelevant to that, he’s pleasant or even helpful just enough to show how much I love him, but he always comes back to hitting me, burning me, knocking me to the ground. In almost any other game, behavior like that would just be part of the challenge, part of the environmental hazards that the game places in front of me and that I take pleasure in overcoming; in Papo & Yo, it’s certainly part of the environmental hazard, but the way in which it persists brings Monster noticeably outside of the scope of a standard challenge.

Where the game actually came together for me was right before the end, in the segment where a section of town has gotten tilted on its side and you have to find a way to climb up to get to Monster. On the one hand, this is where Papo & Yo really embraced its nature as a platformer; but, on the other hand, that change of orientation was, in its own way, one of the most perceptually disorienting sequences I’ve ever gone through in a game.

And this mirrors what Quico is going through at this time. He’s coming to terms with the fact that he can’t save Monster, and that at Monster’s hands he’s lost other people who are dear to him. He still cares about Monster, he still wishes the best for Monster, but he has to find a way to rebuild his life without Monster. His world has been turned on its side; disorienting indeed.

Merlin Mann’s Back to Work podcast recently did a five-part series on GTD (starting with episode 95); good to have an excuse to think about that again, to have my eyes opened to ways in which I can improve my GTD practice.

One thing which particularly struck me while listening to the series was the discussion of inboxes, starting about 40 minutes into episode 98. That’s something that I think I’m okay at on a personal level, but I have more trouble with at a team level. And actually, at work, I have more trouble with it at a personal level, too—bug trackers are as likely to hinder inbox clarity as help it, and work involves multiple people with different roles and different positions in the hierarchy. That makes GTD in general more delicate than my personal GTD system, and inboxes are one place where those sorts of tensions get particularly exposed.

Which maybe makes GTD ideal for work environments! Because honestly identifying and focusing on your commitments is even more important in situations involving multiple people than situations involving single people, and it’s way too easy to sweep that sort of thing under the rug. So probably GTD’s tools are particularly important: just being clear about what your inboxes are and what an inbox means (in particular, that an item being in an inbox absolutely does not equal making a commitment to it), for one, but also weekly reviews.

Thinking about a team situation, too, there is the question: what are our team inboxes versus our work inboxes, who is putting stuff into them, who is processing them? One of my pet peeves about our Jira usage is that we’re doing it in a way that encourages individual inboxes; Jira encourages individual inboxes but does not require them, so I’m trying to experiment with a team inbox there. We’ll see how that goes; the experiment has just started, so who knows how it will turn out.

I’m optimistic that we’ll come up with a good framework for thinking about these sorts of issues at work. (On which note: I’m glad I just read Clear Leadership, in particular the concept of “interpersonal mush” that it identifies seems like a useful one to have available.) And it’s not like we have to invent solutions from scratch: aside from GTD, various agile methodologies all address the issue of inboxes and commitments in their own way, and kanban in particular puts it front and center.

I think Spaceteam is a kind of amazing game, though I doubt I’ll have much to say about it. There are way too few cooperative multiplayer games out there, which is one of my favorite play styles; the game play is charming and holds up for a surprisingly long time given its basic simplicity; the pacing and challenge level is well done.

And everybody likes it: I wasn’t surprised that my coworkers liked it, I wasn’t surprised that Liesl and Miranda liked it (and liked it enough for Miranda to ask repeatedly to play it over the next several weeks); I wasn’t even surprised that my father enjoyed playing it when we roped him into a game over Christmas. What I wasn’t expecting was for my father to ask to play it again a couple of other times over his visit; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him ask to play a video game before.

There probably are real lessons here about project organization, too: the way people have to avoid stepping on each others’ toes, the way you negotiate priorities, the unspoken agreements you end up with to support all of that, and the ways you handle blame.

And then there are the credits.

So: a wonderful game. Just not one that I have much to say about!

Over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed myself using my iPad more and more during evenings, in situations where I would have used other devices in the past: we’ve only had one laptop for a while now, and while I used to try to grab it every other evening, more and more I’ve been letting Liesl use the laptop while I stay with my iPad.

Part of this is apps that sync better between devices. My experience with Things Cloud has been universally positive: it worked much better for syncing between my phone and my Mac than wifi sync did. (Wifi sync was fine from an accuracy point of view, it was just slow.) So I installed Things on both Macs at home (it had been on the iMac but not on the Macbook), and used it on three devices for a while; and finally I decided that my experience was good enough that I’d pick up the iPad version of Things. Which meant that I could now look at my notes for what I was planning to do on the iPad, click on links from Things while on the iPad, create Things entries with links from the iPad, etc.

My Things iPad usage actually is displacing iPhone usage as much as it’s displacing iPad usage. And the other place where I’ve been using cloud syncing recently is in Twitterrific. I’d been using Twitter almost exclusively through the official iPhone Twitter client since back in the Tweetie days (in fact, Tweetie was eye-opening to me, making it clear that the iPhone could give rise to software that was better than on full-size computers, not just shrunk-down compromises); but the official client has been getting worse and worse since Twitter acquired it, and Twitterrific 5 looked gorgeous. So I bought a copy of it, and turned on cloud syncing; all of a sudden I could read Twitter on my iPad and my iPhone instead of having to pick one device to stick with. (And all of a sudden I had an iPad Twitter client that didn’t look like crap—the official client was still okay on the iPhone, but very badly designed as iPad software.) So here even more than Things, my iPad usage is displacing the iPhone; I still like the form factor of the full-size iPad for many things, but I can imagine how I might find a smaller form factor iPad better than either device. (That’s still imagination, though—I haven’t actually bought an iPad Mini, and I don’t plan to particularly soon.)

Still, those are both side activities in the evening. The iPad had already displaced the laptop for reading e-mail and for reading blogs; but for writing e-mails of any length and writing blog posts, I prefer a real keyboard. But then I saw a few tweets recommending the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover and figured I’d give that a try.

So I got one. And I’m glad I did: it’s a quite serviceable keyboard, and it works in my preferred position (which is probably the hardest one for an iPad keyboard to manage), namely with the keyboard and iPad in my lap with the iPad in portrait mode. It’s not great as an actual cover—you can’t fold it back, and the magnetic attachment is weak—so I leave the smart cover on most of the time, but I’m glad to have it available to switch to, and I’ll certainly be glad to have it at GDC.

I’m still figuring out the best way to use the iPad to write blog posts, though. The WordPress app is okay, but it doesn’t let me edit in HTML mode (and I can’t bear the thought of not being able to distinguish between cite tags and em tags); also, it still seems to have an annoying bug about storing a publication date when you save a draft, which I have to remember to manually edit before I hit publish.

I think what I should do there is mostly write my blog posts in Notesy and save them in my Dropbox folder, only moving them over to WordPress for final publication. And I can do that final publication in the web editor rather than in the app itself (or maybe through the app’s view of the dashboard, or something). I haven’t trained myself to do that just yet, though; but I imagine in a few weeks I’ll have fairly well-engrained habits that lead to me spending most evenings exclusively on the iPad.

Or at least I would imagine that, except for one factor: Oracle. Because the reason why Liesl grabs the laptop is that there’s a Solitaire game she likes on it; and that Solitaire game is delivered as a Java applet through the web browser. It’s the only reason why we have Java applets enabled at all on the laptop; and, for the last couple of weeks, that has been an extremely unwise thing to do.

I’m quite sympathetic to Liesl in this regard—I like Solitaire, too, and the applet is well done and has a nice selection of games. Still, Solitaire a game that lends itself better to the iPad interface than to a laptop interface. So I did a bit of searching, and came up with Solitaire Plus! HD—it seemed to have a good selection of games and a good UI.

And Liesl thinks that version of Solitaire works just fine. So, as it turns out, she’s now the one exclusively using her iPad during the evenings, while I’ve gone back to using the laptop to write blog posts. (The Logitech keyboard cover is a quite good keyboard given its constraints, but the Macbook’s keyboard is better, and it’s easier to cross-reference web pages when editing posts on a laptop then on an iPad.) Still: I’m using the iPad more than I was even half a year ago, I’m using it more than I use the laptop, and a world where my laptop usage is relegated to work and specialized purposes is clearly visible.

A while back, I got around to upgrading memory (my spaced repetition memorization project) to Rails 3.0. Then Rails 3.1 hit; I upgraded to that in the sense that I was using a 3.1.x version of the Rails gems, but Rails 3.1 came with a bunch of new defaults: jQuery instead of Prototype, the asset pipeline, CoffeeScript, and SASS. And I wasn’t using any of those new defaults: I put in a couple of hours towards upgrading at the time, but I ran into trouble and I’d just let things sit. Since then, Rails 3.2 had appeared, and Rails 4 was on the horizon, so it was clearly high time for me to switch. (My unplanned switch to Ruby 1.9.3 / RVM was a factor nudging me along, too.) Conveniently, I took a hiatus from work for part of December, and while I wanted to spend much of that time playing guitar, I was happy to spend some of it getting this upgrade out of the way.

The first question, then, is sequencing the changes. Clearly switching to CoffeeScript and SASS should come after the asset pipeline, and they also felt more optional than switching to jQuery. I think that, the last time I’d tried this, I’d tried switching to the asset pipeline while leaving Prototype in place, but that ran into trouble. (One of the issues here is that my code for keyboard shortcuts had required me to tweak the existing Prototype integration.)

I thought about switching the order of those two steps, switching to jQuery first while not turning on the asset pipeline, but ultimately I decided that turning on the asset pipeline was simple enough that I would do that together with the jQuery switch. (After all, that would save me the trouble of figuring out how to get jQuery included without grabbing it via the asset pipeline.) So that was my plan of record.

First, though, I spent a little while getting a development system set up on my Mac, so that I didn’t have to do all of the testing over an ssh tunnel to a Linux box. That was a pleasant enough diversion; a few things took a little more fiddling than I expected, but not a lot, and it was good to start from a clean slate so I knew exactly what was in the environment.

Then came the basic asset pipeline / jQuery switch. Fortunately, memory is a very small program, so there wasn’t much I had to do to get it to work with jQuery: add # in a few places, call .html() instead of .update(). And the asset pipeline part of the switch was as simple as I expected. I broke the keyboard shortcuts as part of converting to jQuery, but other than that, all the functionality was there with a quite simple change.

Then I turned my attention to the keyboard shortcut. That actually turned out to be very straightforward: I had one selector that was selecting the wrong element (a form instead of a button), so it’s actually possible that all the problems I had before were self-inflicted; even if they weren’t, once I selected the button and translated to jQuery’s way of doing things, everything worked. That was a huge relief—one of the lessons of this project (along with some self-observations at work) is that I’m so immersed in the TDD way of doing things that I get physically nervous if functionality doesn’t work for as much as an hour. So getting things back to working, albeit with somewhat unstylish code, was a huge relief.

Of course, the next step was to make the code more stylish—working is good, but it’s only a start. I spent a bit of time refactoring that keyboard event handler; then, prompted by the existence of the asset pipeline, I moved it out of the .html.erb file into a separate .js file. (The rest of the project was in general structured reasonably well, but not that part of it…) I only wanted that handler on one of my pages, though; I’m not sure what the best practice is for that sort of conditional behavior in Rails, but I ended up deciding that I would have one .js file per controller, leaving it empty for all controllers other than the quiz controller.

With that, I had a JavaScript story; next, time to clean up my CSS. It had been split across two files (a legacy of the scaffold generation); I unified that. I also started looking at asset precompilation; I ran into some problems there, and for the time being I just stuck everything in my list of files to precompile.

That got the first two items checked off of the list, at least in a basic form; next came CoffeeScript and SASS. The only JavaScript I had was that event handler; I converted it to CoffeeScript, making a few stupid mistakes along the way but liking the results. I’d never used SASS before; but it also seems like a clear improvement, in particular its nesting support is an obviously good idea.

At this point, everything on my initial list was done; but a next level of improvements were on the horizon. I wanted to think about proper organization of these files (e.g. how to handle the mobile versus full versions of the site, which I’d been doing by swapping out CSS files), I wanted to make it look as much like a new Rails 3.1 project as possible instead of something that had evolved over years (looking back, I guess the initial version was Rails 2.1?), I wanted to be able to do push-button deployment from my Mac at home to my Linux server, and I wanted to bring it up to the most recent Rails 3.2 version.

I started by comparing various files in my project with those of a freshly generated single-controller Rails 3.1 project, and I copied over all the changes that made sense. (It was amusing to see that mine was so old that the default formats the controller spit out were HTML and XML instead of HTML and JSON!) I also fiddled with routing a bit, and switched over to Ruby 1.9.3 hash syntax in several places. In terms of organization, the main change that I made was sticking a class in the body element that said whether I was on the mobile or full version of the device, and then including all the CSS for both versions all the time instead of swapping out CSS files conditionally. (SASS nesting was super useful here, of course.)

Then came push-button deployment; I eventually got a script that I was quite happy with. The main issue there was figuring out where to precompile the assets (which, incidentally, is something that gave me rather more trouble than I was expecting in general; I think I even ran into some bugs on gems with the latest 3.1.x version, but I can’t remember the details, it’s all clean now at any rate); I eventually settled on a two-phase approach where I check things out in a staging directory, bundle update, run all the unit tests and precompile the assets, then rsync the assets to the deployment directory and just do a git pull in that directory without compiling any assets or running tests. That gave me an acceptably small window of time when the deployment was in a slightly inconsistent state. (And I do control when Passenger restarts, anyways, so that window isn’t a problem.)

Switching to Rails 3.2 actually ended up hitting one wrinkle: the JavaScript escaping protection ran up against some code where I was intentionally sending   from the backend, because the ampersand kept on getting transformed into & no matter what I did. Eventually I realized that I should just get over my 90’s instinct of using character entities and instead specify it as a unicode character: \u00A0 worked just fine.

So yay, things are all up to date. Which I’ve been very glad of twice over the last month—there have been two Rails security vulnerabilities that seemed fairly serious, but in both cases I could just bump a version number, do ‘bundle update’, and run the deployment script I’d spent the time to get working solidly, getting the problem fixed in maybe two minutes. It really does feel a lot better to not only be up to date on your third-party software versions but to have spent the time to switch your code over to using the latest idioms and to have firmed up your deployment infrastructure. I’m now actively looking forward to Rails 4, as an excuse to nudge things along still further; and I have some changes that I’d like to make to the memory software itself as well.

Another GDC is coming up, and as frequently happens, there’s a video game blogger who is trying to raise money to attend GDC whom I very much support in that endeavour. This year, it’s Kris Ligman, whom you probably know best through her work curating This Week in Videogame Blogging at Critical Distance each week; I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that those columns are the single most important thing bringing together the part of the video game blogosphere that I inhabit.

That work, though crucial and time consuming, is unpaid. I wish we had better funding models for that sort of thing, making it easier for people to make at least a part-time job out of it; in the absence of such models, though, I want to make sure people like Kris can continue to do their work. And I’m positive that a trip to GDC will inform her work in concrete and productive ways.

So, if you read those columns, or interact with her on Twitter, or read her blog, or read her work anywhere else, and if you can spare a few bucks: please donate to her campaign. She makes a difference; you can help her make a difference.

If you click on that link, you will find that she has already met her funding goal. But I encourage you not to stop there. Yes, she will be able to attend GDC with the money she has now; but the budget that she lists there is a bare-bones one. (Believe me, you will not eat very well in San Francisco for eight dollars a day.) And the extra expenses that she lists at the bottom are real, too. I’ll quote what she says about that:

In addition to this, I’m sure I don’t have to belabor the point that my work on Critical Distance represents a major, unpaid time commitment each week — a time commitment I increasingly cannot make, due to working 40-60 hours a week (barely) making ends meet on my basic necessities. Therefore, if you have enjoyed my roundups for Critical Distance, or any of my other articles most of which are also free to be read and shared, please consider donating a little extra to keep this work top-notch, on schedule, and free for everyone.

So, while most years, I’m happy if we just reach our goal, this year I really would like the donations to keep on for a while. The money will not go to waste.

Many thanks for whatever help you can give.