Brian Crick

Symbols

Last night I uninstalled a bunch of games from my computer. I hadn’t been playing any of them in a while and had pretty much decided I wasn’t having much fun with them; it wasn’t really a spur of the moment move to make me more productive or anything.

And yet, I felt an immense sense of relief. It’s symbolic, and symbols can have real weight.

I’m usually good about changing my habits when necessary, but there are a few specific things I’m not really making progress on. So I’m wondering to myself what sorts of symbolic gestures could help me there.

A good symbol should be highly visible, have a design or form that immediately reminds you of its meaning, and maintaining the symbol must not become and end unto itself. With that in mind:

having real fun

Since I don’t tend to have much fun playing video games, I’ve already started looking for ways to truly unwind — and the roller coaster thing mentioned yesterday is part of that.

I’ve made a map tracking our progress, and that’s sort of a symbol. It will be important to keep that up, though the goal is, of course, to have fun — not to fill in the map or obsess over numbers like percentage of U.S. roller coasters ridden.

diary

Posting journal entries helps me think, and I’ve been neglecting that lately.

In the interests of getting me posting more, maybe I could designate different days for different types of content. Music Mondays. Coding Tuesday. Stuff like that.

Not that I’d post every day, but limiting my options on any given day could actually get me to organize my thoughts better because there would be less flailing about finding post subjects.

diet

I’d like to reduce my soda intake, and increase my homemade food and veggie consumption… though I’m not doing a very good job lately. I’m not sure what a good symbolic gesture is there.

Though going with the journal subject days, it would make sense to make Thursdays about cooking, since I’m trying to do more Wednesday game night cooking, and those sorts of things are high-stress, experimental endeavors that are frequently worth doing postmortems on.

However, regularly doing large scale cooking isn’t necessarily going to encourage me to do more ordinary cooking. It’s getting into symbol-for-its-own-sake territory.

Going with the ‘highly visible’ definition of a good symbol, it might help to have my crock pot stored in a more visible place (right now it’s at the bottom of a pantry that’s not even visible from the kitchen proper.

I keep forgetting simple meals are an option. Yeah. I like that.

A friend of mine posted this thing about using a simple calendar to develop good habits, and I may try that too.

Roller Coaster Rankings

This has been a bit of an unusual summer. For no particular reason, my wife Marie and I have decided to ride every roller coaster we can.

While the goal is, of course, to have fun, I’m finding the experience strangely educational.

By my estimation, we’ve already been on 4 percent of the operational, non-kiddie coasters in the United States. Still a long way to go. When my 20 year high school reunion comes up three years from now, we’re seriously considering doing a big road trip from my current home of Cleveland to my childhood home of Tulsa, hitting all the parks we can along the way.

Of course, said road trip is dependent, among other things, on how sick we are of roller coasters by 2015.

I don’t see that as too much of an issue; in fact, if anything, this summer has made me like roller coasters of all kinds more.

Part of it is the mindset I’m in when I enter a park. If I get to pick what coasters I’m going to ride, I start trying to evaluate them in terms of this one-dimensional scale of I’ll hate it / I’ll love it before even getting in line.

Case in point: up until this year, I hated wooden roller coasters. I didn’t like how bumpy they were. I liked the smoothness of steel coasters, the openness, the sensation of flying.

If I go in trying to evaluate a wooden coaster on a scale from bumpy to frictionless, it will get a low score every time. And because I’ve been concentrating on just that one scale, I’ve missed things that are uniquely appealing about wooden coasters: the way landscape and trees can be part of the ride design; the way all those wooden supports create this interesting volume through which you travel; trying to wrap my head around the idea that almost a hundred years ago, people were riding these.

On a scale of short to tall, steel coasters will usually beat wooden ones. On a scale of slow to fast, steel probably wins again. Every modern wooden roller coaster has exactly zero inversions.

On any of these scales that I am used to thinking about, either because of personal experience or because theme park marketing fluff likes to harp on the biggest, fastest, steepest coasters, wooden coasters don’t measure up.

But if I’ve already decided to I’m going to ride everything at least once, my mindset is a little different. I forget about the scales. It’s easier to just go in with an empty mind, free of preconceptions or that laundry list of specific things I and copy writers like and do not like about rides.

It’s easier to just absorb the experience for what it is. And that’s a skill that’s worth practicing.

Understanding Not Required

I was playing this card game last night called Cards Against Humanity. It’s like Apples to Apples a bit. There’s a deck of question cards and a deck of answer cards. Players have a hand of answer cards, and each turn, one player draws a question card, reads it aloud, and every other player submits an answer card that they think fits the question. The player who played the funniest answer gets a point.

So for example, one of the question cards is

After the earthquake, Sean Penn brought __________ to the people of Haiti.

I tend to find absurd answers the funniest. There’s a Sean Penn answer card — you could say Sean Penn brought Sean Penn to the people of Haiti.

But in many ways, the point of the game is to be as gross or offensive as possible. This is, after all, “a party game for horrible people” according to the game’s box. So you could say Sean Penn brought pretending to care, or friendly fire, or even man meat; those are all answer cards you could play, things Sean Penn could bring to Haiti.

And those are pretty tame answers.

There are answer cards I won’t mention here, and there are many, many answer cards referencing things or acts I’m unfamiliar with, except to say I suspect they’re probably fairly naughty.

So last night was the second time I’d played this game, and I did somewhat better than the first, despite not knowing what many of the cards meant and not exactly being adept at making dirty jokes.

And I realized — it doesn’t matter whether or not I get the dirty jokes being made during the game, or whether or not I get what makes a dirty joke funny, because getting it isn’t strictly necessary for doing well. What’s necessary is a good sense of pattern matching.

* * *

Recently, some people at Google wrote some software to look at random images and try to identify and categorize important features within each images, without being told what was important or what was worth looking for. Evidently, the software decided that cats were important. I find this quote particularly interesting:

We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat’… It basically invented the concept of a cat.

It’s easy to read an article like this and think about how we would think about this, about recognizing pointy ears and slit-shaped eyes and fur and all those things about a cat that make a cat not look like a person, but this is a pretty low-level thing going on here. The Google software does not know what a cat is. It presumably knows that, in many images, this recurring pattern appears, a pattern we would recognize as a cat, but which the software has no name for.

* * *

I rather like learning new skills starting with nothing but pattern matching, but unlike the Google thing, I want to be given some instruction as to what I’m looking for. Take music, for example. I didn’t start by learning music theory. I’m not sure you can say I listened to a wide variety of works and decided on my own what sounded best. I started by listening, over and over, to works that other people have defined as good. Famous symphonies, Oscar-nominated movie scores.

The trick here is to take it on faith that what people say is good, is in fact good. And of course tastes vary, but I’d argue that you at least have to start by taking these things on faith, if you’re going to learn anything.

Sure, I’ve studied a bit of music theory in the last couple of years, but I still have trouble defining what makes these works good; they are, by definition, good. You could say I don’t know what good composition is any more than that Google software knows what cats are. I just know some patterns, and I’m not even doing that much concept invention the way Google’s thing realized that cats were a thing. What sorts of musical things are out there, that I haven’t even categorized, much less studied?

* * *

This approach only gets you so far. If you want to teach, it will be difficult. If you want to do something that’s novel but still appealing, you’ll have a hard time. And it gets frustrating sometimes, being able to do things like draw or compose or code without really understanding what you’re doing.

But it’s a good place to start, and the nice thing about this approach is, I’ve gotten ‘so far’ on a wide variety of things this way.

Speaking of which, I should probably check out YouTube videos of commonly accepted ‘good’ running form. I’m sure they’re out there.

Postmortem: 5k

Saturday morning, I found myself at a 5k run in Parma — oddly enough, at the same field where Marie plays football.

I’d been planning on doing a 5k for a while but just didn’t really plan on going to this particular one until Friday.

Like I said in my last post, I’ve already been in postmortem mode for some time, but having actually been to a formal 5k, I had a few more thoughts on the subject.

* * *

ok so it wasn’t that formal

I was sort of expecting a lot of orientation and herding, but mostly you just filled out a little form, pinned a number to your belly, and waited around for someone to say it was time to go. No ID required, no lining up by estimated minutes-per-mile.

I don’t particularly mind, though I probably showed up way earlier than was strictly necessary.

* * *

running with water

During my practice runs, I’ve never carried water with me. I’ve never hydrated during a run; I’ve only done it afterwards, and, on rare occasion, just before.

But they had a water stop halfway through the race, so I figured it would be good to grab some. I felt a little weird drinking it while walking, and even weirder just throwing my empty cup on the street when I was done, but apparently that’s what you’re supposed to do.

* * *

frame of reference

I was going somewhat faster than usual my first mile and a half. During practice runs lately, my first mile has usually been 10 or 11 minutes/mile, but I completed my first mile’s worth of race in 9:44 — even though I thought I was going slow.

I guess, running in a crowd, since everyone’s moving with you it doesn’t feel so much like you’re going fast, and it’s harder to judge your own speed.

* * *

slope

I had a lot of trouble with some of the gently sloping roads here. It wasn’t what I’d call hilly, but I’ve been practicing on a nearly flat loop at home. I should alter my routine to include some hills; there are some good ones not far from my house.

* * *

stretching

I always stretch after running, but I have noticed a tendency for my Achilles tendon area to be particularly sore after running lately. Marie showed me a good stretch for that, and we think it may have something to do with my propensity to walk without having my heels touch the ground much of the time.

* * *

results

As I suspected, I came in last in my group, which is ok. It was my first run, and I’m just glad I showed up and did it. It seems there’s a race nearly every summer weekend, and I’m looking forward to continuing my training, and doing more races before the season is out.

And next year, there’s always the Cedar Point 5k. 😉

Random Thoughts on Running

About a year ago, I started trying to run regularly. I’m kinda sorta trying to lose weight, though that’s just a nice-to-have; mostly I’m in it for the general health benefits, having noticed several mornings in a row that my resting heart rate was well over 100 bpm.

I was going to run my first race, a 5k, this Sunday, but a spur-of-the-moment trip to Cedar Point is going to be taking its place instead. Still, I’ve been in postmortem mode just thinking about this race, so here goes with the babbling.

* * *

tipping point

I tried to do some regular exercise with Wii Fit and EA Sports Active, and while those workouts can be fun and intense — and, most importantly to me, measurable, the running-in-place aspect always felt a bit wonky.

(I suppose I could, on my non-running days, do upper body workouts with EA Sports Active, though we do have a real weight bench now for that sort of thing.)

What really got me doing this regularly was getting my first smartphone and a RunKeeper account — so I could go out running, have the phone’s GPS track me, and view my progress on the RunKeeper site.

I can track my elliptical training there too. I highly recommend RunKeeper.

RunKeeper can tell you your pace, speed, total distance, etc, at regular intervals if you want while you’re running. I tried that a couple times, listening to little progress reports every minute over earbuds. It was kind of cool, but ultimately, I think it’s more useful to just develop a feel for that sort of thing while running.

Which brings me to my next blurb.

* * *

listening

When I started, a friend pointed me at this couch-to-5k training schedule. I appreciate the help, but in the end I sort of ignored it.

Learning how to make good decisions about how far I can push myself is just as important to me as actually making forward progress. It’s about listening to my body; knowing when to take a break from jogging and just walk a bit; being honest about when it’s really time to for the break to end.

* * *

last place

Looking at last year’s race results, if I went to this race with my current best case, 10-11 minute mile, I’d most likely come in pretty close to last in my age & gender group.

Part of the point of doing this was that I don’t generally enter contests unless I think I can at least make runner up or honorable mention of some sort.

While I do lots of things just to do them, and babble about my progress here, I’m skittish about being overly vocal about it until I’m particularly good. (In my head, this here blog is in this weird space where I’m fooling myself it’s private but it’s actually public.)

I’m trying to get over that skittishness, and just enter more contests, not to see how I rate, but as more motivation to do good work.

* * *

pacing

I still don’t have a great sense of pacing. If I run fast and take long breaks, it still feels faster than jogging slow with short breaks… but that’s totally not the case. I need to work on that.

* * *

food

Nothing is more important, it seems, than eating properly before I go running. Pasta is good. Burgers are bad. I’m getting better about picking the right meals before I go.

Beverages, though, are a bit confusing. I’m trying to drink less soda pop, but I get the vague feeling the lack of sugar is hurting me both in terms of performance and the willpower necessary to push myself harder.

There are, of course, better ways to get sugar I suppose.

Pasta with Porcini Cream Sauce

Been cooking a lot of porcini cream sauces lately. I had some in a restaurant somewhere in like December, and have been obsessively trying to perfect on my own.

I made it for some friends yesterday, even though it was stupidly hot in our a/c-less house… probably not the best timing there, but I thought I’d share, since that batch came out about as good as I think this is going to get.

I hardly measure anything and rarely use recipes, so this is a bit rough.

* * *

Serves 3-4.

3 cups heavy cream
2 cups grated parmesan cheese
3 cloves garlic
dash of thyme
olive oil
1-2 oz dried porcini mushrooms
bow tie pasta

Put heavy cream and mushrooms in a pot. You want as many mushrooms as will fit in the cream and still be submerged, and more cream than you think you’ll need, since much of it will be absorbed by the mushrooms.

Heat on low, being careful not to let the cream boil. Stir often and squish the mushrooms with a potato masher every now and then — use the kind of potato masher that’s flat with holes, not the skinny grill kind. You want to squeeze the juice out of the mushrooms, not cut them up.

After about 30 minutes of this, strain the cream into a new pot.

Working in small batches, put some mushrooms in a bowl and squish them some more, holding the bowl sideways and letting the last of the juices drain into the new pot.

Discard the mushrooms (they’re kind of rubbery and unappetizing left in the sauce).

Put the new pot on low heat. Slowly add all but about 1/2 cup of the cheese over the next few steps, stirring often.

Start boiling some water for the pasta.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan.

Mince the garlic, and add to the frying pan. Cook until the garlic is browned and fragrant, then add the garlic to the cream.

Add thyme to the cream. Just a little bit of thyme can overpower the other flavors, so be careful not to overdo it.

Add pasta to your boiling water, and cook until tender.

Drain pasta, mix with cream sauce, and sprinkle the rest of the cheese on top.

Serve.

* * *

This tends to taste pretty robust on its own, though I frequently add some brined, broiled chicken too, and want to try this with crumbled chorizo… I think that might work well.

* * *

edit

Whoops, read the porcini label wrong. 2 oz is plenty. 😉

Rebranding!

Sometimes things just line up nicely.

(Which is to say, if you’re doing enough random stuff, the chances are higher that something you’re doing will mesh with some other random thing that comes your way.)

So I was working on this fully cooperative cyberpunk board game all about the players investigating several shady organizations vying for control of a fictionalized, future Cleveland. I’m really happy with the core concepts and many of the details, but have been dragging my feet on finishing it up and starting testing.

Enter Alderac.

Alderac is a board game publisher that’s trying to build a series of games around a shared setting called Tempest. And Alderac is looking for new and veteran game designers to make games in this setting. You can sign up, get access to a ton of Tempest literature and artwork that can be used in game prototypes, and then submit your game for consideration when you’re ready.

Tempest is a city-state in a renaissance-ish world, filled with intrigue and various shady organizations… sound familiar?

I think what I’ve got so far for my cyberpunk board game would fit well in this universe. And it might teach me a little bit about this whole world-building thing, reading about someone else’s world and trying to work within it.

Of course, I couldn’t mention all this without mentioning the whole don’t-do-spec-work thing. And while I gave that some thought, I figure this is a win-win. If the game gets picked up by Alderac, I get the full marketing muscle and brand recognition of a respected studio backing up my design. If Alderac doesn’t pick it up, I still will have gained some great experience, I will have had some great motivation to actually finish this, and I get full creative control of my final product.

I can’t share too much about the actual world or characters; there’s a sort of NDA thing going on, but I’m encouraged to babble about it on my blog, which is great since I’m not really happy working on new stuff unless I can share what I’m learning.

So expect more babbling about that, as I once again backburner all my other stuff that doesn’t involve other people to work on this more. 🙂

Mass Appeal

A while ago, I downloaded this app that lets me see how much time I’m spending playing games. I seem to get about an hour or two a week in. The most I’ve spent with any one game is Star Trek Online; I’ve played it for a total of 25 hours over the last 2 years.

Those felt like pretty big numbers to me. I showed the stats to my wife, and she was appalled that I’d given a full day of my life to this one game.

I showed those numbers to some people in the local game dev group, and later on to some other friends, and they were appalled at how low those numbers were.

It’s becoming quite clear that I don’t really have a grasp of how people who are really into this stuff engage with it.

* * *

So I started playing Mass Effect. As with most big, popular video games, I wouldn’t necessarily say I like it. But the act of playing and trying to figure out what it’s trying to do, who it’s trying to appeal to… that, I find fascinating.

It seems a lot of it is about world building. I’m really, really not at all into world building normally. Whenever people start gushing about the richness of this or that built world, it actually makes me angry. I feel like it’s a waste of time, concentrating on emotionally inert minutiae that has no real value outside the context of a narrative.

But if I’m playing this game to figure out the mindset of its target audience, a big part of that is figuring out the appeal of world building, really figuring it out without being dismissive of it.

* * *

So what is this whole world building thing about, anyway? Here are some guesses:

Historical context. Can add more layers of meaning to dialogue and events.
Suggesting unwritten scenes. I’m a big fan of this in general. Suggesting an unwritten scene can be used to gloss over something that would be boring if you actually saw it; it can create comedic how-did-they-get-here moments, or efficiently hint at where a relationship has been going. I can see something here where the more world you’ve got, the more you can suggest using the costume, iconography, etc of your world.
Sandbox. Fantasy/sci-fi worlds frequently exist just so the author can explore a what-if sort of scenario, and I suppose a good, robust world will also invite the audience to pose what-ifs of their own. At its worst, this can descend into self-indulgent wallowing in one’s favorite bits of a fantasy world, but I’ll admit there is real value in encouraging people to explore these kinds of things.
Suspension of disbelief. Some people will just get annoyed if you present them with an artificial feeling world. I don’t want to pander to those people just to get them to buy my stuff… but to look at it another way: while I’m not going to be taken out of a mass-market period movie because the costuming is inaccurate, many people will, and saying that it’s ok to be lazy about costume research because the masses as a whole aren’t that picky is making your work more insular, not less.

* * *

It has always been my intention to make Tinselfly appealing to people who didn’t normally play games, or only played casual stuff. But it occurred to me the other day that the last thing I want to do is be too opinionated about what sort of audience I want to reach.

It’s about depth. Being appealing to a casual audience shouldn’t be about finding that lowest-common-denominator, simplistic presentation of Stuff That Common People Like.

I think it should be more about the union, rather than the intersection, of appealing things. It’s about having most everything that’s appealing about your product in most every scene, but also letting those things stand on their own and shine once in a while.

So if you’ve got one person who’s just into the visuals (say, me 😉 ) and one person who’s just into the snappy dialogue (totally not me), you’ve got a good chance of getting both of those people. But that’s not the important part. The important thing is that any audience member has a variety of things to latch onto at any given moment, and can experience the work on multiple levels simultaneously, if they so desire.

* * *

This new, vignette-filled structure I’ve hit upon for Tinselfly opens up some opportunities for world-building. I was gonna pepper my main plot with these little, tangential, fairy-tale style stories set in little fairy-tale style universes, but I could just as easily package these up as little bits of history, set a hundred or a thousand years before the story proper.

If there’s an organic opportunity to give world-building fans something to play with, I should probably do it. I would do well to go ahead and put real effort into those dimensions of my product that I’m not the biggest fan of, like the dialogue and the world building; as long as it doesn’t interfere with the visuals and the story structure that I want, it can only make this better.

Fun with Mashups

I was working on this UI mockup for Operetta, and it was a little like Zeus, with all these tabs for looking at your empire and ship in different ways, which I prefer to the multiple-screen approach you get in many other empire building games. So there was a research tab, and a power management tab with all these sliders — you have to have power management in spaceship games, right? — and there would have been some sort of system inspecting tab too, so you could manage the production of the planet you were currently at…

…and it was starting to feel kind of disjointed.

So I thought I’d try to unify things a bit.

I recently finished playing Stacking, and one of the stated goals was to take the inventory, verbs, and characters you find in point & click adventure games and make all those things one unified thing that was easy to manage. Conceptually, I love that sentiment, even if I thought its implementation within the game was problematic.

So the new mockup has a combined equipment/power/weapons display, consisting of a single list that the player can re-order at will. The basic idea is that every item is capable of providing this thematically related suite of passive buffs, combat effects when you press fire, and non-combat effects related to firing. The higher up something is, the more it does for you.

Say you have a tractor beam. If it’s at the bottom of your list, it does absolutely nothing. If you move it to the bottom of the Ready bucket, then you get a passive effect: power-ups and resources on screen drift towards your ship instead of sitting around waiting for you to pick them up. If you move the tractor beam higher in the Ready bucket, power-ups drift towards you quicker.

If you move the tractor beam to the Armed bucket, it’s now one of couple things that fires when you press your fire button. Any resources in the line of fire of the beam are instantly collected, and any enemy ships have to stay a fixed distance from you for a while.

If, say, you also had a mining laser armed, you could shoot an asteroid and make it explode into a shower of resource tokens, and since you’ve also got the tractor beam equipped, the resources would gravitate towards your ship and be easier to collect. Hopefully, you could combine items in interesting ways like that.

You’d be encouraged to re-order your list for different situations, and I think it could be pretty fun.

* * *

The UI font is my football font family I’ve been working on; I figured this is a good way to find out if it’s working as a family, and see what needs to be fixed.

I also need experience working with type families; it can be kind of tricky it seems.

Let Go

Random epiphany of the day (which I might have said before, but that would just mean I haven’t internalized it yet, so it deserves to be said again):

No matter what the medium, no matter what the genre, I will always, always turn any media-consuming activity into an opportunity to learn about what works and what doesn’t in said medium/genre, and approach it from the point of view of learning instead of relaxing and opening up to someone else’s work.

The only way I’m going to relax is to take frequent breaks to stop thinking so much, which means (a) neither consuming nor building anything or (b) building something using the precise application of skills well within my comfort zone, wherein you hit a mindset not so much unlike that of (a).

I should probably swap out ‘games’ in my rotating schedule with something like ‘doodle’; relaxing with games just isn’t working…