Life – Page 2 – Brian Crick

Jam is a Sometimes Food

So there was another game jam this weekend, and I didn’t participate this time around. And there’s a jam coming up in January, and I’m not sure I’m going to go.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy game jams; they’re fun and intense and I learn things I’m not expecting to learn, which is the best kind of learning… but it’s a little like, I dunno, binging on chocolate. Sure, I love chocolate, but if you really love chocolate, you won’t allow yourself to be in a situation where you’ve eaten so much of it that you kind of want to throw up and never see chocolate again.

You know, like there’s a PSA in my head saying PLEASE EAT CHOCOLATE RESPONSIBLY.

Anyway. I guess I’m just not real into the jam kind of environment where you’re plugging away at one thing, to the exclusion of all else. I’d much rather, ya know, spend any given weekend with Marie or friends or whatever, and do game dev stuff when I’m home alone.

However, there’s this other thing coming up called One Game a Month, and that sounds more to my liking. I could work at my own pace, on my own terms, without having to block off a whole weekend.

* * *

You need a Twitter account to sign up for One Game a Month. I had one for a while, but kinda hated the whole Twitter experience — I think it’s fair to say I just didn’t ‘get’ it — so I killed my account entirely.

But I went ahead and signed up again. Guess it’s worth another shot.

VHS

So it was around 2000 or so, and Marie and I were living in our second apartment, and our VCR was either dead or dying. And I remember thinking to myself, this is it. This is our last VCR.

It was kind of an odd thought. Not sad or exciting; just odd. I’m not sure I could say I’d bought my last anything before that. But it made sense. Our next VCR wouldn’t be a VCR; it would be a DVD player.

Technologies come and go. Historically I’ve kind of blasé about it. But lately I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot.

* * *

I’ve been without a pen tablet for about a year now. You’d think I would have rushed out and bought a new one as soon as my latest one failed, but for some reason I didn’t. All the Scopa cards I’ve been posting, the Girl Wonder submission, those were all done with a mouse.

Maybe the pen tablet will be replaced with a tablet computer, maybe not. Drawing directly on screen would be awesome, but I can’t say I’ve really warmed up to tablets yet.

* * *

I haven’t updated my Adobe products in four years. Photoshop,Illustrator, Flash — I’m several versions out of date now.

I may never buy another Photoshop or Illustrator.

Ever.

This thought kind of scares me. I’ve been using Photoshop since around 1992. I’ve invested a lot of energy into learning to use these programs as efficiently as possible, and would probably take a pretty big productivity hit if I switched products. I can open things I haven’t touched in a decade and start working on them without missing a beat.

But I don’t do freelancing anymore, and Adobe’s flagship products are expensive. There’s also a lot I don’t like about these products, not that I’ve tried anything else lately.

* * *

This wouldn’t be that much of an issue, except that from what I’ve read, my versions of Adobe’s products won’t run on the newest version of Windows. When my current laptop dies — and from the looks of things, that’s going to be pretty soon — I’m going to have a bit of a problem.

My strategy right now is to continue working on my own illustration program, and just keep my development tools up to date, which is relatively inexpensive.

We’ll see how sick I get of development after a while I guess. 🙂

Much Ado About Purple

So I made this game a little while ago called Green & Purple, for a game-making contest. You’re a green ball, trying to make contact with a purple ball, and live happily ever after together.

I actually spent a lot of time going back and forth on the colors. I wanted pastels; I wanted two colors that were contrasting, of course; I didn’t want your usual red vs. blue selection.

But most importantly, I didn’t want pink & blue. I didn’t want players to immediately see this boy/girl dichotomy there. Even in an abstract, hastily constructed game, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t reinforcing any of those save-the-princess type sentiments out there. It’s a pet cause of mine. So I went with green and a sort of bluish purple, which I figured were reasonably neutral colors.

Despite that, hearing people talk about the game, many referred to the purple ball as ‘she’ and the green one as ‘he’.

Trouble is, you’ve only got so many options. With sufficiently contrasty colors, one color is probably going to be warm — fiery reds and yellows — and the other bluer, cooler. In the absence of any other context, I suspect people are going to see the warm color as more feminine.

Near the end of the project, I worried that I was possibly falling into some gender stereotypes despite my best efforts to keep things neutral; the cool colored ball was the one you were controlling, the one with some agency; the warmer ball was completely passive, waiting to be rescued. I considered switching the colors, but didn’t have time to do it before the contest deadline came up.

But you know what? It wouldn’t have mattered. Because this is not about color choices or thinking that people who read too much into color choices are sexist. It’s about the biases we all carry.

Had I switched the colors, and had people read the purple player as female and the green object of its affection as male, you could say it was a gender-role reinforcing game design, to play a female character whose only goal is to find a mate.

Had I started with those colors — a purple player and a green companion — there’s a good chance I would have worried about that… and wanted to switch the colors.

Because I’m biased.

While I’d love the gender roles in the world to up and disappear, I certainly can’t say I believe they’ve already done so. I expect everything I see to express gender stereotypes; I expect to be annoyed by said stereotypes. Because I am biased, I will desperately try to pull my experiences in line with my expectations, spinning said experiences as needed. I will spin my perceptions of any game I play to fit in this world view, seeing sexism where there may be none — because thoughtless, sexist characterization is what I expect to see in most games.

And that applies to my perception of my own work. I will fight to keep my work egalitarian, but my biases will have me seeing depressingly overt sexism in everything I make. In a less abstract game, in a game with recognizable human characters, I will be wont to complain that I have failed to make such-and-such a female character sufficiently stereotype-breaking. I will graft a perception bias onto a character who may very well be, in an objective sense, portrayed in a perfectly respectful way. I will likely post a journal entry about it, wondering how I can do better. In my post, I will describe said character in terms of a stereotype that is an oversimplification of who the character actually is; and in doing so I will reinforce the very stereotypes I seek to avoid.

Fighting bias is a skill. Wanting to be less biased does not immediately grant you this skill. Wanting to produce works with an egalitarian world view does not immediately grant you this skill. I know I say that a lot, such-and-such-a-thing is a learnable skill, not a part of your core being. But having bias, being prejudiced or bigoted or whatever… it’s very, very tempting to think of acting upon bias as a failure of conscience, rather than a failure of skill.

I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Friction

The thing about my whole ‘throw things at the wall and see what sticks’ approach to improving my productivity is, you have to take time to see what’s sticking and what’s not. And I think I’ve just realized something here isn’t as sticky as I thought.

* * *

My pet project management thingie has, just within the last week or so, gotten into a mostly usable state. It still needs a lot of work, but I can reliably use it to manage my projects.

It’s basically just a tree. You can add things to the tree, change the order of things, move things up or down in the tree, and select whether individual nodes will open in a new pane or just expand like, you know, a regular tree control.

I was keeping all this information in a simple text file, but a couple months ago I decided it would be a good idea to ditch the text file and start using my still-buggy homemade software. I figured if I forced myself to use it, I would then be more motivated to fix the bugs.

I was wrong.

Instead of using my software and trying to fix it, I just abandoned project management entirely. And there was a massive hit to my productivity because of that.

It’s a little too easy to abandon my pet projects, even though I know that doing so is bad for my mental health. You can have all the motivation in the world, but sometimes it’s not about motivation. For something like this, sometimes you have to look at the other end of things and reduce the friction that’s stopping you from moving.

So I dropped everything and got this app usable, and that’s a big part of why I’m now getting everything back on track.

* * *

My Adobe Creative Suite software — Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash; that sort of stuff — is a couple versions and a few years out of date.

Adobe has moved to a subscription based service for their software, and I’m finding it hard to justify the cost, given that I don’t do any freelancing anymore. In fact, it’s entirely possible that I will never get a new version of Photoshop the same way I will never buy a new desktop computer. It just doesn’t seem to make sense anymore.

* * *

I’d like to get moving on that comic with Marie, and haven’t decided yet if I’m going to do it in Illustrator or my own custom paint program that I write a while ago, just for this sort of thing.

Illustrator is a known quantity, but it has trouble with files with lots of filters, which I use extensively. Getting a new computer won’t help; the problem is that, because it’s old software, it can’t take advantage of all the memory present in new machines.

On the other hand, my custom paint thing has some potential, but is also very buggy and needs to be updated quite a bit before I’d really say it’s usable.

I’d say I should just go ahead and declare that I’m going to use my own program and that will motivate me to clean it up… but I’m coming to the conclusion that that strategy is never going to work. Which is not to say I’ll never get the paint program usable. I think I just have to do it for its own sake.

I can’t think of it as a quick fix for the hole left by an outdated Creative Suite; it will never get done that way… I have to think of it as worth the investment instead.

Mail Order Epiphany

Barely two days after it started, my service as a juror for Cuyahoga County has ended. And by ‘service’ I mean working from the juror waiting room and watching juror selection, having not actually been on a case.

I’m relieved that this will make it that much easier to get back to my usual routine — I could use any help I can get — but I’m also bummed I didn’t get to participate in the system for real. I’m dying to know what it’s like. What real attorneys are like, how an expert witness engages with their audiences, how the one particularly casual judge I met would have handled the proceedings.

For me, just being who I am, with my general shyness and poor verbal comprehension skills, it would have been monumentally difficult to listen to days of testimony and process it and then feel comfortable discussing it with a bunch of people I’d never met.

I was looking forward to that challenge. I felt like that was a challenge I needed to overcome.

But if this needs to happen, it needs to happen, and there are, of course, many ways of getting challenges to come my way that don’t involve waiting two years for another summons to appear in my mailbox.

A Jury of Your Peers

As I write this, I’m sitting in a waiting room in the Cuyahoga County Justice Center, waiting for my name to be called, to serve on a jury. I’ve never done this before. I’m pretty excited, though from the sound of things there’s a good chance my service will just consist of coming to sit in this waiting room for a few days, and then getting sent home.

For some reason, I find myself thinking of this kerfuffle involving a movie star accused of shoplifting, and the prosecutor said of the defendant,

I find [her] to be very nice. This was never about her character, only her conduct.

That quote really stuck with me.

* * *

Last weekend I participated in a 48 hour game jam. I thought it was over, but in many ways it’s just starting.

I didn’t realize this going in, but apparently after you finish your game, there’s a three-week voting period where people play your game and you play other people’s games and rate them. I was assuming there would be some small, pre-selected panel rating things… not the actual programmers doing the ratings.

I have mixed feelings about this. I like the idea of everybody who participated in the contest being a judge and developing this sense community… but I don’t see myself as particularly impartial judge of games, and rating these things feels like this heavy, serious responsibility.

I’d also specifically want the opinions of non-programmers for my own stuff. Not that I’m sure how you’d get such people on board. This contest is structured in such a way that if you want feedback, you have to rate other people’s stuff. There’s a lot of motivation to go out there and rate things and comment on them.

It’s silly, but now I’m imagining this multi-disiplinary jam where game programmers rate 48-hour novellas, the novella writers rate 48-hour symphonies, and the composers rate the games. 😉

* * *

I have occasionally had people comment on how non-judgmental I am. And while I’ll take those sort of statements as the compliments they’re generally intended to be, it also gives me pause.

Like all things, tracing the source of a problem to a specific person is a skill. It is a skill I would not necessarily say I possess.

If there’s some work or social event I’m helping manage and something blows up, I think it’s fair to say I’m not quick to assign blame — both because I choose not to be too judgmental and because I couldn’t accurately pinpoint a culprit if I wanted to.

This lack of perception has been a problem occasionally, and there is, I hate to admit, value in knowing if the blame for a problem really does lie with a specific person. Having this information can only help you and your team or your friends or whatever make things better. You don’t have to be accusatory or mean about it; I think it important to remember that whole conduct vs. character thing — but I’m all for finding new ways to make things better.

This is how you click a button.

I spent much of Saturday night teaching an unmedicated schizophrenic how to use a new computer she’d just bought.

This was, in many ways, the high point of my day. I like teaching. Teaching is especially nice if you have every reason not to like the person you’re dealing with, or just can’t connect with them on any kind of personal level. All of that fades away into a comfortingly neutral set of canned interactions.

I also like teaching because the less your student knows, the more open you are to looking at a skill or an experience from a fresh point of view.

And this was a person who didn’t know how to click, or what a blinking text caret was, so my mind was pretty empty just a few minutes into this. It was a unique opportunity to look at the typical conventions of computer UIs — scrolling, push buttons, tabs, file trees — and ask yourself how much sense these things really make.

We had no common experience of computers at all. In fact, it’s probably safe to say our experiences of reality don’t overlap that much either. And while it can be immensely frustrating talking to a person with problems like that, it kinda gets you thinking, about the way you think about things.

* * *

Earlier in that day, we went shopping for said computer, and the first question we had was, tablet or laptop?

The computer was going to be used mostly for email, web browsing, music and movie watching. The obvious choice was a tablet.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit biased. I do not like tablets. Or more precisely, I do not like the idea of tablets. From what I’ve seen, they’re mostly geared at consuming things… and, if that’s true, I’d rather see people get a machine that at least has the potential to allow them to create interesting things.

I don’t want everyone on earth to be a computer nerd. We all have different skills, different interests. However, the cheapest laptops at the store we went to cost the same as the tablets. So I figured, why not go with the laptop? I’d like to believe that anybody could get a lot out of this, if they so desired. Even an unmedicated shizophrenic.

I don’t want to underestimate anyone. It doesn’t matter whether I like or dislike them; it doesn’t matter how functional I think they’ll ever be; I don’t want to start off by thinking of someone as beneath me.

I’m not convinced the tablet would have been easier to user for someone totally new to computers anyway, and it all comes down to one thing: affordances. Affordances are visual cues that tell you how you can interact with an object or user interface. Most tablet user interfaces I’ve seen are utterly lacking in these. If you want to scroll, you can flick along the screen, but there are no scrollbars telling you you can do this. There are no hover states on buttons because the tablet can’t detect a hover.

Don’t get me wrong, some tablet interfaces are beautiful and elegant and there’s certainly potential here. But I would hesitate to throw a technology so young at a new user.

* * *

Several days later, I’m still repeating many basic computer concepts. That’s ok. It will take a while for everything to sink in. Overall, I’m surprised by how much actually is sticking.

Being around the mentally ill is s funny thing. You could just think to yourself, gosh, I’m glad I’m sane.

But I prefer to look at it this way: if I weren’t sane, I wouldn’t know. We could all have an over-developed sense of how rational we are, and we wouldn’t know.

I’m just lucky that I can make the choice to try to improve how rational a being I am.

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.