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Collaboration & Communication in Game Design

2010-04-30T11:33:00.003-04:00

Hey. Long time no see. Anyway...

Earlier this year, I gave a talk on collaborative design for a couple of conferences. One of them, Game Forum Germany, was kind enough to videotape all of the sessions, and host the videos on their site. Check out my talk here.

Some post-watching-myself-on-video thoughts:

Game Forum Germany is an awesome conference. If you ever have the chance to attend or speak there, I highly recommend it.
Thanks yet again to the people at Harmonix who suggested ideas for this talk. They helped guide and flesh out my ideas nicely.
I guess it's hard to talk about my job without seeming extremely egotistical. (And while I probably have an overly full opinion of myself in some contexts, I usually try to keep it to myself.)
I sincerely hope I did right by all the other people involved in the various anecdotes I tell. I tried to present things as honestly as I could, based on how I recalled them, and the need to present things as concisely as possible. (If you think I failed, let me know!)
I gave the wrong number of QA members who are on the Beatles vocal harmony strike team! Sorry Matt or Mike!

-- ChrisF

2009-06-21T21:30:00.005-04:00

So.
It's been at least five months since I last blogged about anything significant. Let me use my last day of vacation to do some catching up.

First off, Ian is a great, great baby. He's happy, and healthy, and a cute little troublemaker. He's generally sleeping well (though we might be at the start of an expected sleep regression, and getting all three of his seemingly required naps to happen is a challenge on any given day), and he can get to sleep on his own, which has improved the quality of all of our lives. He's pulling up on everything, and occasionally cruises along things about a foot at a time. He's mostly army-crawling, though occasionally does short, deliberate stretches of full crawling.

Work-wise, I've finished my work on The Beatles: Rock Band, and I'm extremely proud of the game. New projects are starting up, and I'm sorting out how exactly I'll be involved in them. Harmonix is a great place to work, and I'm lucky to be there.

Beyond that, um, I'll just show some baby pictures.

Designer E-mail #2 is Up.

2009-06-19T09:38:00.002-04:00

Dan has compiled another set of designer thoughts on designer things. There's some commenting going on in the post on Dan's blog, so instead of copying it here, I'm going to send you there.

E3!

2009-06-01T10:55:00.002-04:00

Hey --

DanT, fellow designer and Harmonix rabble-rouser, has gotten a bunch of the HMX designers (myself included) to do a design roundtable.

You can find it here.

P.S. I promise there'll be more baby stories and pictures soon. As my co-workers can attest, there are plenty to go around.

I should write something.

2009-01-04T22:28:00.003-05:00

It's been a pretty good holiday season, more tiring for all the Ian-wrangling, but more mellow in many respects. We traveled and did less this year, and Ian was charming and relatively meltdown-free during all this time.

This is the time for profound thoughts as one year ends and the next begins, but I seem to be in short supply. I can't wait for next year, when Ian will be a lot more invested in the holiday proceedings.

Take care, all.

Merry Christmas.

2008-12-25T12:04:00.000-05:00

Not so much of an update.

2008-12-13T13:08:00.005-05:00

We're busy, Ian's cute as hell but he's still having some trouble sleeping enough. But Kim is dilligently working on various strategies to improve things, while under self-imposed pressure and far too little sleep. She won't accept the compliments, but I'm really impressed and proud of her.

In the meantime, here's a set of pictures from a couple of weeks ago.

(I know you all mainly tune in for the pictures.)

This Just In.

2008-11-20T12:52:00.003-05:00

Ian really likes our ceiling fan.

I repeat: IAN REALLY LIKES OUR CEILING FAN.

That is all.

Update.

2008-11-16T20:59:00.003-05:00

I haven't written much, mainly because this has been a hard week. Apparently, you can get your baby so tired that it can get overtired, which means they are effectively too tired to go to sleep.

Wow.

So, we've been dealing with that this week, and this weekend we reclaimed some ground in the getting-to-sleep department, but it's in no way clear if that will make it easier to keep Ian topped off with Z's.

On the positive side, today we had a full-on, fully mobile baby adventure. The whole family went to Brookline for our latest meat pickup, then navigated through the Barnes and Noble with a stroller for the first time. Then Kim fed Ian "on the road" for the first time, and we had lunch (expensive but tasty falafel) in the car. Heading back we pushed our luck further with a trip to Target, which entailed our first in-car changing (no stained upholstery!). Taking things one step too far, Ian started a minor meltdown while I picked up coffee at Dunkin' Donuts, but once the car was moving again, he calmed down. Successful travel!

In any case, some days it's easy to look at Ian as the enemy -- but overall he's a cute bastard.

I think we'll keep him.

(I think we lost the receipt in any case.)

Bathtime.

2008-11-13T19:50:00.000-05:00

The future is before us.

2008-11-05T00:39:00.002-05:00

And it is hopeful.

May it be all that we dream it can be.

May Ian know a better country and a better world than I have known.

This one's for Grace...

2008-11-02T20:23:00.003-05:00

... because she threatened to punch me if I didn't dress my child up like a vegetable.

Waiting for the Great Pumpkin.

2008-10-31T11:53:00.005-04:00

Happy Halloween.

More baby pictures.

2008-10-30T16:51:00.001-04:00

Oh, hey.

2008-10-30T10:40:00.000-04:00

My new secret game project finally got announced.

A Scene from Breakfast.

2008-10-26T10:44:00.003-04:00

(Chris prepares breakfast, slicing half a ball of mozzarella with Kim's chef's knife.* Kim enters, carrying Ian in one hand and his bouncy chair in another. She drops it and starts kicking it into place facing the breakfast nook.**)

CHRIS: I know you're busy, but this knife really needs sharpening. If you love me... if you love your knives...

KIM: (pauses) I DO love my knives...

* The complete breakfast was: coffee, buttered toasted Armenian sweetbread (NOT sweetbreads), sliced fresh mozzarella, and, um, chocolate-covered raisins leftover from the snacks-for-the-hospital pile.

** "It" in this case is the bouncy chair, not Ian.

Swaddling Is Awesome.

2008-10-25T17:18:00.007-04:00

Before:

After:

I rest my case.

Starbucks Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate Is Tasty.

2008-10-21T16:28:00.003-04:00

We had our first road trip today, to the pediatrician's, where Ian checked out great, and we got some advice for tuning our breastfeeding strategy. Ian complains up a storm when being put in the chair, but is totally quiet when being carried around and during the entire drive. On the way back we treated ourselves to drinks at Starbucks, and Ian remained calm and/or disinterested as we brought him in while we ordered. No one managed to hock phlegm or aspirate other vital fluids while we were in the shop, so we hope there'll be no lasting damage.

So, what have we learned over these first five days, and two days home? Here's a partial list:

Sleep has been relatively managable since we got home. We're still operating on less than normal - particularly Kim - but aside from occasionally slumping solemnly and silently over Ian, trying to hold our arms in the few positions that work for finger-feeding and syringe-suspending, things remain fairly under control.
That said, when relatively sleep deprived, apparently math skills are the first thing to go out the window. Both Kim and I have spent upwards of fifteen seconds attempting to do such complex calculations as subtracting and adding single digits.
It seems totally possible that when we try to move Ian towards more proper breastfeeding, then this delicate balance of sleeping-just-enough-to-stay-sane-but-arithmetically-impaired will collapse. So, um, we have that to look forward to.
So far, Kim and I are both maintaining legitimate efforts at personal hygiene. That's nice.
Where the hell did I learn to do diapers well, and relatively quickly? That makes no sense. (Maybe it was all those childhood years learning to operate Transformers toys without breaking them?)
I went twenty-seven whole hours -- in a row -- without getting peed on in mid-diaper change. It was so cute that I thought I'd last longer than that.
I'm not surprised that I got over the whole "pee and poo are gross" concept, since all evidence suggests that every new dad ends up being alarming comfy with being up to their (and/or their baby's) armpits in the stuff. But I am pleasantly surprised at how it happened. From the first diaper change, I didn't have even a moment to react for myself; my first impulse was to "get this stuff off of my child so he will be clean and happy and preferably not urinating-comepetitively-for-distance." The complete replacement of personal reaction with concern for Ian feels pretty cool.
What's maybe strangest is how, overall, it doesn't feel like "everything's changed." Ian has slotted into our home lives in a way that feels alarmingly normal, naturally and comfortably taking top priorities in my life, but not completely eliminating my ability to take care of minor duties around the house. I won't speak for Kim here, since she's definitely doing the heavier lifting overall, and I have a knack for being oblivious to some of the more challenging aspects of my days. And I also know that things will get harder as we go forward: there's a really great safety net provided by family and friends right now, and I won't have to try balancing work and home-with-baby for nearly another week. But right now it feels totally natural to be websurfing and typing with a baby on my lap. (Our cat Tasha doesn't consider it so damned normal, but she's coping okay.)

Ian Sucks.

2008-10-19T17:59:00.002-04:00

Ian's requiring some special training for breastfeeding, at least until Kim's onboard supplies are fully up and running, so we're doing "finger feeding" of formula from syringes and tubes, every three hours.

It's a two-person job -- one-and-a-quarter-people, really -- so we're both involved with every major feeding right now. It's tiring, and sometimes frustrating when Ian isn't making progress, for both of us. But it's cool to do this together, even more than the expected "I'll change him you'll feed him" sharing we're preparing for.

Also, while I'm posting, here's our first group photo from Saturday.

Home Now.

2008-10-19T14:12:00.002-04:00

Ian is a clever boy.

2008-10-17T20:18:00.004-04:00

Ian is a clever boy with a hypothesis.

His hypothesis: this breastfeeding stuff is a load of crap.

We endeavor to challenge the logical fallacies in his theorem, but he seems more than willing to maintain the courage of his convictions.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to finish up the PowerPoint deck that will illustrate our argument using a compelling mix of incontrovertible statistics, dramatic slide transitions and black-and-white pictures of duckies.

And now... a glimpse of the future?

2008-10-17T11:19:00.004-04:00

(Except that Ian isn't adopted, this is pretty much accurate.)

Thanks, SuperDickery.com.

Now that THAT's out of the way...

2008-10-17T11:09:00.005-04:00

Born October 16, 2008, 8:38pm.

7 lb. 8.2 oz., 20 in. long.

Cute as hell. (Moreso after some post-birth clean-up and natural de-smushing.)

Loved deeply.

Last (Pre-baby) Meals

2008-10-16T07:24:00.003-04:00

Dinner: Pizza from Armando's; martini for me, water (which I wish I'd poured in a martini glass) for Kim; french fries and ketchup; chocolate ice cream.

Breakfast: pancakes and maple syrup; coffee for me; orange juice + seltzer for both of us.

Okay. Here we go.

The Homestretch

2008-10-15T09:09:00.002-04:00

Looks like they will be inducing tomorrow -- though Kim's starting to progress towards labor more quickly than she was a few days before.

It seems unlikely that things will happen any sooner than tomorrow, but you never know.

I think I'm calmer having a final, finite moment to focus on. We'll be getting up, packing our last things, and checking in for what I'm thinking of as the most bizarre vacation anyone could possibly imagine.

We'll be sure to send postcards.

Home Again

2008-10-13T20:37:00.003-04:00

In retrospect, it should have been no surprise that driving ninety minutes away from our hospital on the spur of the moment could cause some anxiety, but after a sit-down dessert-fest at a coffeehouse (with a bathroom) all was well again and we had a great time wandering around Portsmouth. It's a place that we've not visited in years, after wearing a deep, tiring rut in the place on many annual Christmas gift-shopping trips. For dinner, we gorged on french fries done up like potato skins -- a decent antidote to my own sudden poutine cravings -- and ended up bringing most of our BBQ entrees home for tomorrow's lunches.

This bonus weekend in particular has been great for us. We alternate between relaxing at the added time and stressing over the ongoing uncertainty of When It All Finally Begins, but having the time together, doing normal things that soon won't be anything like normal, has been a sweet denouement to our soon-to-be-formerly easy lives. Bring on the baby!

(But maybe please wait until Thursday like we've planned.)

Bonus Grown-up Weekends

2008-10-13T12:42:00.004-04:00

So we're at one-point-something weeks past Li'l Squirmy's due date, which means we've been gifted with two weekends clear of any non-baby obligations. We're trying to make the most of them, although some of that takes the form (for me at least) of lazing around in a way that will be pretty much impossible in a few days.

Saturday we bummed around the house while I compiled our separate musical selections into a single bed-time CD -- a time-consuming rathole that I happily burrowed into -- then went picking pumpkins in Ipswich, followed by an oversized dinner at a nice Mexican restaurant in Newburyport. Sunday we had a lot of fun at the Harvard Square Harvest Festival, which was overtaken by the Honk! Festival making it much more fun than any street festival I can recall, followed by Kim roasting one of our chickens from the meat CSA, which was very very tasty.

Right now we're off to Portsmouth for what most definitely -- next week we're inducing come hell or high-and-unbroken water -- be our last impromptu husband-wife road trip for a very long time. Hopefully we'll not be too neurotic about not squandering our Last Day Of Freedom.

Before and After

2008-09-27T18:05:00.003-04:00

Hello.

I never publicized this blog before now, mostly because I was never sure if I was going fully take to blogging. It seemed more than possible that I would post for a few weeks, then find something else to occupy my time.

This is what has happened.

But now, life is about to get a hell of a lot more interesting. We (my wife Kim and I) are roughly a week away from having our first child, and friends have shown that blogging can be a great way to keep friends and family informed as to all the latest baby-related events in your life. I guess I've been a little inspired, and think a blog might be a useful tool for us as well.

So I'm going to take a shot at blogging here about life, and possibly also about work as was the original intention. In the nearly two years since I last posted, I helped program a real video game for the first time, became the design director for my company, and somehow ended up as the singer and guitarist for what is now regularly mistaken for a band. Some or all of this may become fodder for the blog, or I may just occupy myself with fascinating discussions about baby poop.

We shall see.

Long Time No Write.

2006-09-30T11:43:00.000-04:00

I've been busy. Work has been going well, for me and the company. This blog dropped in priority a bit as I ramped up on my second project, and finished the bulk of my work on my first project.

I also got a chance to do some minor programming on the second project, which is an awesome opportunity, but one that sucks out some of the energies I might use to write here.

We'll see if I get back to this page -- maybe soon, maybe not-so-soon -- but in the meantime I've gone through and edited the worst grammataclysms from my old posts.

As you were.

Workin' for the Weekday

2006-07-09T23:08:00.000-04:00

I don't know if this is getting old, getting tired, or getting priorities, but I am no longer enjoying working on specs on the weekends.

Actually, I think it's just that I'm working on a spec that isn't super-fun. It's not discovering something new about a design, or delving into the details of an interesting problem; it's just reporting on decisions we've made.

One of the aspects of this job with which I haven't fully made my peace is how emotional state affects my productivity. There are design tasks that I can't wait to finish writing, and others that I can't wait long enough before I start writing them. Sometimes I'm just waiting for the first idea that lets others start to fall into place. Sometimes I'm just resentful that I've set myself up for weekend work (usually late on Sunday night), when I could have knuckled down sooner and been done days ago.

Sometimes, I think it's a healthy part of the process. If I kind of sneak up on the work sideways, it ends up flowing out of me easily when I finally decide to do it. The first draft of the venue effects doc I discussed earlier was one of those times.

This time, I'm just dragging my heels, and haven't figured out why.

Puzzles and Pieces: The Review

2006-07-06T21:08:00.000-04:00

So, I turned in the venue effects spec I made, and it went over well. I sat down with the project's creative director, and we discussed areas where we might simplify it, and noted some bits that could be added, or that I'd just missed outright. A few minutes of edits and the spec was ready for a forthcoming meeting where a larger group gets to kibitz on it. That will likely result in more changes.

This is pretty much par for the course; when writing a design spec like this, I'm not expecting to nail everything down perfectly. The practical goal for the first draft of a spec is to produce a "straw man" version of the design, so that other team members can review it and suggest changes.

This suits me fine. With a good team, you'll get better ideas from open collaboration than if you throw specs "over the wall" to be implemented as written. (Though it does boost my ego whenever one of "my" ideas survives all the way through implementation.)

Here's one way to think of it: only part of the goal of writing a design document is to answer questions. The other part is to define the questions more clearly, so that others can help find even better answers.

It requires a certain lack of ego -- or "aggressive humility," as I've called it before -- but seems to result in better designs. And it doesn't just apply to working as a designer working under a creative lead. Even if I was leading a project, I'd still be listening closely to my team for ideas that can improve the concepts I originally brought to the table.

Oh craps.

2006-07-06T21:06:00.000-04:00

Someone's reading this. Or at least looked at part of this.

Um. Hi.

Puzzles and Pieces: Done!

2006-07-04T23:11:00.000-04:00

Happily, that didn't take so long. The trickiest part was in deciding what WASN'T needed in the big table. In this case, I built a table centered around what changes based on player performance, and only made notes in specific entries where something was more complicated. For example, in the cells showing how lighting changes for each level of player performance, I noted that it also varies with the verse/chorus structure of a song. This made more sense than adding more columns for the table for "verse/chorus/solo," since most effects aren't affected by song structure.

Once I took that approach, the table sorted itself out fairly quickly; then I decided to color-code it to illustrate patterns in the table that would take too long to explain in text. Colors also make the spec more fun to read, when they're actually informative.

(It's critical when writing specs to find ways to help the reader make it through pages of documentation without their eyes glazing over from boredom. Bullet-points, color-coding, tasteful use of boldface and italics, and lots of whitespace are your friends here.)

Puzzles and Pieces: Game Design Inaction

2006-07-04T14:52:00.000-04:00

There are certain types of design tasks that I find really difficult to begin. I usually leap on any other opportunity, work-related or otherwise, to fill the time while I alternately procrastinate and attempt to identify which edge of the problem to address first. This usually ends up dragging out the work into the weekend, or in this case, a holiday. Whee.

In many cases, I usually get unblocked by talking to someone about the problem; during the conversation, I get distracted from the anxieties that are clouding the issue, and the pieces start falling into place by themselves.

One of the benefits I hope for from this blog is that I can use it to have these conversations by myself, and in doing so, find my way through this period of worklessness quickly and without all that dreaded social interaction. I hope this also proves to be an entertaining way to present some of the work I do as a designer.

A little background first. I'm working right now at Harmonix Music Systems, the developers of Guitar Hero and other music games before them. They're an incredibly smart, extremely creative company working on a number of tightly focused projects, and it is definitely a boost to my fluttering ego that they consider me worthy of joining them on a pair of unannounced projects. (And as the projects are unannounced, I'm going to have to be a little vague on specifics.)

The task before me lies on the border between design and art, as do many design specs (short for specifications). For the sake of not getting fired I'll describe the challenge in terms of a game you hopefully already know about: Guitar Hero.

Guitar Hero has a number of venues – stages where your band performs. Each venue uses unique art, animations and sound to create an exciting environment; but in addition to looking cool, those sound and art assets fulfill a design role by reflecting the player's performance. When you do well, the audience gets larger and starts cheering; large stage props might open and animate (like a nuclear reactor that deploys a large mushroom cloud); lighting might become more dramatic, and band members might pose more dramatically. In addition, some assets might be used to change the mood of a stage between the verse and chorus of a song. Others might be used to make the venue look different for different songs.

The task I have right now to list out all the elements of a venue like this, and assign them to all these different "triggers." We already have a list of various assets we might use, and various triggers we might assign them to; the goal here is to turn all these half-baked ideas into a structure that we can use to generate schedules of specific art and scripting tasks.

There's a metaphor I like to use when describing game design: it's like trying to put together a puzzle when you're not sure what the pieces are. When you're done, everything should feel like it all fits together, with no missing or extra pieces lying around; but when you start out, you have a bunch of random stuff that may or may not apply to the task at hand.

Often, there are interconnected issues that twist around each other and make it hard to make decisions. For example:

Maybe the most dramatic way to reflect performance is to animate a huge piece of the stage – say, by causing a giant balloon animal to rise out of a hidden container and float above the audience, with searchlights shooting red beams out of his eyes.
But these are also the most expensive assets, so for each one of these big-ticket items you do, there might be ten cheaper assets (like, small pyro explosions or a single animating spotlight) you could get done in its place.
Now, maybe five of those cheap assets, replicated and scattered around the stage, could have as almost as much impact as the one big item.
So, how do you split your time between big and small items?
Or, if you don't have time or budget (largely the same thing) to do even one big item, which small items should you choose to create the most impact?

On the project I'm working on, we've sorted out the big items, but need to generate lists of the smaller items, like patterns for the stage lights, or particle effects such as "flame-jets".

These can fulfill various functions:

Items that reflect the player's when the player is doing well, poorly
Items that reflect different sections of a song (e.g. verse vs. chorus)
Items that are deployed to punctuate a specific instant in a song
Items that make each song performed on a given venue look different from each other
Items to save for the start or end of a song

And these assets come in all different flavors:

Sound effects for the audience
Sound effects for the interface
Triggered Visual effects like pyro, animating banners
Cycling Visual effects like stage lighting
Rules for making audience members appear, disappear, or change animations
Visual effects applied to the entire screen (like motion blur)
Visual effects applied to characters on stage (like special lighting, or custom animations)
Visual effects applied to the game's interface (instead of the venue itself)
Rules for choosing specific cameras or camera movement
Rules to deploy specific character animations

-- and probably a bunch more I'm forgetting. (Remember, I'm procrastinating here, not working.)

It's fairly easy to assign broad categories of assets to specific functions (e.g. crowd density reflects performance), and lay them out in a big matrix (i.e. an Excel spreadsheet), but there some bits are trickier. For example, if you are going to get a big bunch of animations for each character on stage, maybe you assign some animations to performance, and some to specific moments in a song? And maybe some of each of those animations are restricted to specific songs as well, so "bad performance-reflecting animation #1" only appears during songs 2 and 4? And when you start subdividing assets like this, how do you communicate that within the table?

All of these are solvable problems, and no one of them is particularly difficult, but taken together, they can get intimidating. Add in the fact that some of these assets haven’t been budgeted yet, so that it's not clear how many if them are reasonable to expect, and it gets trickier still.

So you rattle all the bits together and see which ones are easier to lock in, then once those corners of the carpet is nailed down, you start looking for another batch of decisions that are easier to make now that you've answered some questions. And you keep going through that loop until everything's answered – or until you realize that one of your earlier decisions was flawed, and you pull it apart and start again.

It's exciting to get to the end of one of these specs; even more if the result is legible to anyone other than yourself. We'll see how long it takes to sort this one out.

Boris the Freakasaurus

2006-07-04T13:01:00.000-04:00

Update: Fleas are gone, and (after what appears to have been, in my wife's words, a "hairball party" last night) Boris and her sisters are all feeling fine.

Here's the little psychopathette:

Parasiticide

2006-07-03T17:42:00.000-04:00

We (my wife and I) have three cats, aged 12 years, 2 years, and 4 months respectively. The youngest, Boris, just went for his (now confirmed to be her) first checkup.

While there, he --

(tangent: I just knew that, after weeks of calling him a her by mistake, once we found out that he was a she, that I'd finally start calling her a him and not be able to stop. Grr.)

-- aaaaaaaaanyway, while there, she got two vaccinations, and a de-worming pill.

(tangent #2: If your cat starts showing signs of having a tapeworm, do not do an image search for "tapeworm" on Google anywhere near your lunch time. And under no circumstances should you click on one of the resulting tapeworm images to see all the other, not-at-all-cat-related tapeworm images that might pop up on said page. I have seen things that I sorely wish I could un-see.)

--- soooooooo, in addition to those medications, the vet gave me de-worming pills for the other cats (what with the sniffing and the licking and the glaven!), and a round of once-a-month flea medication for everyone. This stuff is hellishly powerful, and within a couple hours the fleas start crawling off, usually by the least medicated areas of the body, which apparently are the eyeholes.

So in addition to having a fever thanks to the vaccination and medication -- apparently rare but not unexpected, and now under control thanks to a return visit to the vet -- hundreds or thousands of fleas are crawling across Boris' face to get off before or as they die. Which is making her a drooling, even-more-spastic-than-normal mess.

It sucks to see her suffering, but at least the little bastards are dying and she'll be rid of them soon. (And after much vacuuming and laundering, the same will hopefully be true for the house.) As long as she can keep her food down tonight, she should be back to normal soon enough.

Reason, Need and Hope

2006-07-03T12:36:00.000-04:00

Why am I blogging? As usual, I find myself doing something before having a well-considered motivation for doing so, so let me take a moment and think about this.

The inspiration for this came from seeing Wil Wheaton speak -- which I suppose earns me some geek points right there. Not only is his writing and blogging entertaining in and of himself, and not only he is admirable as a decent, sincere and passionate person; but I was inspired by something he said about splitting his efforts between acting and writing.

He quoted another actor who said that acting, writing, painting, music -- all creative efforts -- come from the same well; and that counter-intuitively, the well can run dry if you don't keep drawing from it.

I'd briefly considered blogging in the past, but lacked what felt like a solid reason for doing so; and I've searched (if infrequently and half-heartedly) for an outlet for my creativity. Wil's statement made me realize that I could use the blog to jump start my creativity in other areas, and for that I'm grateful.

That's why I've started this... but that's a separate matter from what I intend to do with it.

I think the reason I'm doing this is because I have a cool job at a very cool place; I design computer and video games. I've been doing it for years and I think the process is challenging, exciting, and probably something a lot of people would enjoy reading about.

At a more fundamental level, I think I need to work through aspects of my job and my life in writing, to sort through what I do and why I do it, and to try and find a healthier outlook on my life. I'm really, really lucky to have the life I do, and I'd like to appreciate it, and the world around me, in as healthy and balanced a manner as I can. Hopefully by sharing things and working through them here, I can experience and understand them more fully.

Also, by writing here, I hope to replenish the well of creativity from which I've only occasionally drawn. I've spent my life dabbling with a number of creative pursuits, only to shy away from each of them in turn. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that my life has contracted to intervals of work, food and sleep, and that when you feel like making time to play video games is an accomplishment, your life probably needs some rehabilitation. I've been told that I have potential as a writer, and I like some of what I've written, so this is a good place to start.

First!

2006-07-03T00:44:00.001-04:00

I never understood the desire to be the first to post a comment on a web page.

I wish "I never understood" was my way of saying "I'm not being judgmental, I'm just curious about a behavior that suggests strange impulses at work." But it's more my way of saying "I am judgmental about this, because it seems like a petty attempt to assert dominance over a crowd, or to prove one's self, but I'm uncomfortable with that critical aspect of myself, so I'll express my disdain as indirectly as possible."

Partway through writing that last paragraph, I realized another way to interpret the need to post first: it might be the same impulse that has kids run impromptu races across a playground, just for the fun of it. It could be a form of play.

Hunh. It frustrates me that it takes so long for my brain to come up with a positive spin on a behavior like that. (On the other hand, reading Internet comments is going to make that optimism hard to come by.)

I cast a lot of silent judgments on people -- in general and towards individuals -- and what they do. In so many cases, my first, inner view of others is usually negative, while the opinions I express to all but my closest friends are usually conciliatory, or downright defensive on behalf of those strangers/friends/vague-conceptions-of-imagined-people.

I think it's good to have opinions -- if anything, I wish I could find and express more of them. But the split between "what I feel inside" and "what I end up saying" is substantial.

More to the point -- and I'm fishing around in here looking for a point -- this illustrates how Who I Am Inside gets throttled by Who I Wish I Was, and the tension between the two ends up creating Who I Appear To Be.

Well. This isn't how I expected to start out my blog. I intended to use this place to write about my life and work, and all the bits of them in my present and past, and let bits of myself sneak out through that process. But apparently I needed to throw myself on the couch and start baring my dark and stinky innards before you get to know me. (Whoever "you" are.) I knew doing this would be therapeutic, in part, but maybe I should try to be entertaining as well?

In any case, this is my first post of what (at 12:44 in the a.m.) seems like the place where I'd be putting my writing for a long time. Maybe I'll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime: First!