I’m debating whether these meta-posts serve enough of a purpose to keep them up. It *is* only once per month, but I feel that my normal posts are self-referential enough.

I rediscovered a few hours a week by cutting down on my writing toward the end of this month. 9 posts, 15k words, this month. Maybe a meaningless metric, but I’ve been tracking it so why stop now. Most of the content was very explicitly summarizations of quotations of other people’s work.

• An introduction to totalitarianism
• Published notes/excerpts from The Democratic Surround (1, 2)
• Published notes/excerpts from Against the Smart City (1, 2, 3)
• Other people’s thoughts captured: Doctorow’s Wars, Estrada’s Organisms, and Alone’s System
• A series of thoughts on “Options“

Other Notes

• Upcoming: From Counterculture to Cyberculture, maybe Gamification (which has been mostly put off for seven months now)
• I’m done with the “Five Week Plans” because I never referred to them in my day-to-day life, and so their completion was purely incidental
• I want to further categorize my posts for easier navigation. At this point I’m pretty much willfully making my blog difficult to pick up.
• “Games Studies” podcast series idea: Got some good writing done, but we can’t converge on editing/recording. Mostly because everyone involved shelves it when other things come up, which is all the time. May have to consider pulling the plug until we can collectively prioritize it.
• I and two former college dormmates are thinking pretty seriously about a product to take to market. We’ve prototyped some stuff up, done some validation work, and got some guidance by more experienced folk. We applied to an incubator but we’ll see how things go on that front.

Fogbanking is now 6 months old, sporting a hefty 102 entries. As a supposed HCI guy, I really ought to do a better job with accessibility, but the spirit has not moved me.

I’m happy to be writing here- this little space really has given a lot of definition to what might’ve only been vague inclinations before, and has also helped to open up a lot discussion that has challenged me and clarified my thinking. When other people appreciate what I write, that’s obviously very gratifying too. In short, it’s been a good run so far and has become a relaxing hobby activity that never feels like work.

—

This month was only mildly less exhausting than last month, which did not fare well for some of my side-projects this month. I hate when that happens because I prefer to tinker with a mass of things rather than running long-distance with one thing for ages.

14 posts, 22.7k words, mostly notes on one of this month’s readings.

• Wrapped up Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (Jan: 1, 2, Feb: 3, 4)
• Plopped down some posts on basic worldview (ecological thinking, Why Delanda)
• Wrote a bit about epistemology and storytelling (unknown knowns, Law of Unrecognized Novelty, Learning from Fictions, the Sheeple problem)
• Disconnectedly stewing on topics of flows, StarCraft, and fascism (1, 2)
• Unit Operations (1,2,3,4)

Upcoming: Into early March, I do have some posts for next week on multivocality/optionality. I’ve started reading some Fred Turner, first The Democratic Surround and then from Counterculture to Cyberculture. Later in the month I will start writing about games as artifacts.

Reviewing Five Week Plan V

• Busy month! Healthcare startup is suddenly lurching forward, several local wins, and a submission to an interesting contest internal to my employer (fingers crossed).
• I’m studying up for a new game design competition that I’m entering with my girlfriend by mid-March. Looks like a tall order on a short timescale.
• After many delays, we are resuming with toying with the Game Studies series idea. Expecting a big working meeting this weekend.

Proposal: Five Week Plan VI

• By the end of the month of March, I want at least one test episode of the Games Studies animal finished.
• I want to have submitted to the game design competition mentioned above (Israeli space program stuff, really interesting)
• If we win the current round, I’ll need to refine my entry to my employer’s competition (an interactive journey map).
• If we get the green light on one of our toy products, I and two old college dormmates may submit an entry to Y Combinator.

A lot more words churned this month than I anticipated.

My new project at work consumed a lot of my schedule/thinking, but somehow the blog didn’t dry up- other projects suffered a bit, instead. February should see a re-balance.

—

14 posts published this month, ~24k words (and 2k in the wings, to-be-published). (Last month: 16 posts ~17k, November: 21 posts, 22.4k)

• 6ish posts on Game Studies, mostly from an anthro POV, which is alien to most people I think. Notes on Huizinga, Caillois, and Walton (via Bateman).
• 2 posts mulling on the idea of scenes and scenius, although I’m only satisfied with scraps of them.
• ~3 posts on Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Deleuze’s DeLanda. I’m keeping an ear out for more on this. The book will ultimately get four posts.
• I began slipping on the Devblog, because I have to write them basically when it’s time to post them. I don’t get the buffer that I get with my non-devblog posts, and that kills me. Gonna have to experiment with how to make that work.

Upcoming: Wrapping up Intensive Science for note-taking. Would like to hit Bogost’s Unit Operations, tying some flat ontology/object technology/game studies threads. Currently about 1/3 through The Second Machine Age (not eye-opening, but fun).

Reviewing Five Week Plan IV

• Build a minigame in Unity. [Done. May discuss this later- still under wraps.]
• Provide a plan to expand Emily’s art business (products and services) by at least 1 additional client in January. [Failed/Deemed Implausible- she’s booked by herself!]
• Have a playable scenario ready in ShamanGame (even if it’s simple/ugly). [Hunting, to be polished up this weekend].
• Test a podcast recording/editing. [Pushed back- we’re script writing. First round of scripts due in a little more than a week.]
  
• Provide a plan to make at least $1000 additional (outside of work payment) for January. [Fell short of $1k. I guess money doesn’t grow on trees.]

Proposal: Five Week Plan V

• No outside goals. I’m committing to pushing my dev projects forward along their respective timelines.

My weekly progress post, to help keep me focused and honest. It’s later than it should be but I need to keep posting or else the purpose for doing it is subverted.

I’m on a new project at work, and the first week demanded a lot of time/energy, including on this past weekend. Despite that, I’ve assembled some posts for the week- one more on games studies and two unrelated ones are likely to publish this week. I’d also like to dig more into flat organization stuff, but I haven’t found a great resource that really appeals to me. On the plane I got a chapter into Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, and I almost think that I get it (!) so maybe I’ll farm that for notes.

Tomorrow’s my birthday!

Game Studies Series

The Huizinga, Caillois, Bateman, Bogost, and other readings that have leaked here came from this program. There’s still some supplementary reading to be done but my heavy-lift was reasonably successful.

There will be a call with my other partners on this project on Tuesday. We’re going to talk about calcifying this information and what shape we want that calcification to take, exactly. My contributions to our private project wiki are selective in a different direction than my summary posts here, but there’s a lot of overlap.

ShamanGame

This project suffered as a result of my new project at work, which killed my free time in the past week. In the next few weeks, I hope to start building the game through a series of scenarios that I want the game to be able to enable. This week I’m going to invent hunting. I will be able to maneuver my shaman and warrior units, track an animal, and kill it by moving, attacking, and dodging. In fiddling with it, hopefully I’ll discover a feel that is unique and could potentially be replicated for simple war-making scenarios. Probably won’t get to do this until late this week.

Digital Magazine

People are writing and articles are being published! The quality isn’t Nobel-prize winning, but that was never my main concern. Now I want to see if I can maintain the social momentum with it. Will not share links here because it’s silly.

Other events this month:

• This is traditionally the month of Global Game Jam, a weekend for making games. I might use it to either work on Shamangame, or to cram together something from scratch in a weekend-stretch.
• My employer is hosting a contest that I joined a team for. I hope to contribute to constructing a demo, getting recognized, and winning the prize of getting to see some cool stuff. We’ll see!
• I’m making a test minigame in Unity this week, to get a better feel for Unity. Probably the whole of it will be built Tues/Wed. Unity isn’t that hard, but I do come home awfully tired.

A day late. Bad form.

I, uh, spent all of yesterday watching American Horror Story with Emily. Now I feel bad writing this, because I usually get a solid chunk of work done on Saturdays. I think this week work will be low-stress and maybe I can make up that time in the evenings. I’m taking this shame as evidence that writing here will potentially help my work ethic? That’s probably an assumption too far.

Game Studies Series

A little more on this project:

This pursuit is between me and two friends from college, Luke and Aaron. A few years ago (wow, I can say that?), I had won an “undergraduate research fellowship” and the three of us had earned some grants from Carnegie Mellon for a project on games and learning. Our usual setup was that Luke acted as the psychology/methodology expert, Aaron acted as the technical expert, and I worked in the HCI space and handled administrative stuff (dealing with advisors, the IRB, volunteers, etc.). The results of the actual research ended up being sketchy, which is par for the course- but it was a great learning experience, scheduling, building, and testing. I had been on many game development teams before, but experiments required a heavy administrative and social element. Herding people was hard (which was news to me at the time!)

Since then, we’ve gone separate ways physically- Aaron’s in Pittsburgh pursuing research/advanced degrees, Luke’s in Boston working for a media research firm, and I’m in New York doing what I do. We’ve still kept in touch and decided that attempting this new project would be fun to do and also accomplish some common goals we have in consuming the corpus and sharing our view of a stricter, more ludological approach to deconstructing games and related media (our position is a minority view in the circles we ran in).

Our first phase is to pass through the curriculum we constructed, and take relevant notes that we’ll condense into scripts. We have a definite common direction in mind. We’re using the built-in wiki for Bitbucket to organize these notes. We’re setting up a go/no-go test to determine whether we can reliably produce an episode of this thing in a reasonable amount of time/effort. Each of us is tasked with generating a new wiki stub everyday (as an average- skipping days is permitted). There will not be much to update in this area until January.

ShamanGame

I built out the “energy” system.

All units, when it’s their turn, project a circle around them indicating how far they can travel before expending all of their energy. I also intend for non-moving actions to also suggest how much energy they expend. The game is not built on a grid, so for the player there will still be some approximation about how much they can do with each unit each turn. I wanted this feel: I didn’t want the game to be chess-like, instead I expect that situations will develop where the player has to make judgment calls and get a “feel” for how much a unit can do before their energy limit is reached. Sometimes he may be wrong.

There are RPG’s that have innovated with mechanics like this before: I’ve seen turn-based RPG battle engines where each unit gets an allotted amount of time (say, 7 seconds apiece) and anything the player can do in real time is doable. So when it’s a unit’s turn, the player moves them around and presses attack buttons to cause as much damage or get a particular action done (ex. get in range and heal friendly units) before time runs out. A sense of MP/energy/magic limits are missing in this system: instead, high-performance actions take more time and skill just to pull off before the unit’s turn is over.

The game will be designed so that units are non-fungible. I intend to accomplish this by drastically changing units based on their experience. So, a brave who kills certain things will develop specific benefits. No two units will necessarily have the same stats. The player may learn to develop his units with a strategy in mind.

Aside from the Enemy player, there will be wild units (wildmen, and animals). Wildmen can be converted or coerced into joining either the Player or the Enemy team. Animals, if hunted, will yield bonus stats that are different depending on the species of animal. A player may mounting hunting or other expeditions in order to train units before engaging the enemy (this is basically “grinding”). There are also mythical creatures in fixed places that play a “Roshan“-like role (an optional, expensive fight against a very powerful unit that gives up valued prizes), in that when they die they give the victor’s Shaman a new ability.

Before dealing with the complexities of multiplayer (which I might attempt later), I expect for the game to take place in a few levels, each of which take ~15 minutes to complete. Hopefully I can keep the code simple enough that implementing multiplayer later will be only a chore, instead of torture. I wouldn’t bet on it.

Digital Magazine

I got the site hosted (I use Laughingsquid.us) and built a Wordpress site. We looked into Wix and Ghost as publishers, but there’s not much going on with either of them yet. I’ve got a few people who are writing. We’re looking for a New Year’s Day launch date. There won’t be any fanfare since it’s not really a burgeoning media empire or anything, just a fun writing exercise in a different voice than what’s going on here (and also an opportunity to pull some writing out of some friends that I think can/should be writing but currently aren’t). If it looks like it’s floating, I’ll invite some others to scribble something out for it. The first submissions will be in soon, so I don’t even know what attitude our opening articles will have yet.

Some short updates on the tiny projects that flood the gaps of my free time.

Probably most weeks will be focused on one or two projects at a time.

ShamanGame

That’s my working title system- [theme]game. It’s the working title for the strategy game my girlfriend and I are working on a little bit on the weekends. Describing a game with metaphors to other games is a common-enough shorthand: Thematically ShamanGame takes a hint from Populous. Mechanically, from Fire Emblem and DotA.

The object of the game is to destroy the enemy’s obelisks before they destroy yours. Every unit gets a turn every round to do as many actions as their energy limit allows: to move, to attack, or to perform a special action. The most important unit is the Shaman, of which both teams gets only one. The shaman can perform offensive magic, can heal or buff units, and can convert wild nature units into playable units. All other units are based on the brave, a fundamental unit that can upgrade into specialist units.

Current progress: I built a turn-based system an a test unit. I have a few walking and attack sprites. The weekend we’ll get some other fundamental elements together and maybe we’ll draw up some HUD stuff.

A Series on Game Studies 

Last week we built a prospective curriculum and contacted some folks who are more qualified “experts” to consult on this project opportunity (a podcast on Game Studies). A lot of reading is necessary to work our way through this curriculum. We’ll probably build a wiki and start an organized trek through that stuff. I fully expect those readings to leak heavily into the Fogbanking main blog. The first reading I’m going to reacquaint myself with is Rules of Play by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen. Even before we work our way ahead of the topics we’d cover, we’re also working on a production plan to see if the actual output we plan is feasible. Only way to know is to test it.

The upside here is the developed (and hopefully demonstrated) expertise that I’d like to carry into some other projects on the backburner.

Digital Magazine

I launched a private Facebook group this week to bring together some writers I wanted to try this digital magazine project with. At worst, it’ll be a juvenile rag with a short shelf-life that I spent a small sum on building, and at best it’ll be an interesting exercise in dealing with a much larger project group than I’m used to for a longer amount of time than I’m used to. More details later as things materialize (or don’t- we’ll see).

Employer Project

There’s a competition within the organization that I hope to create a game for as an entry- depending on the amount of time I have. That depends a lot on the other groups I’m working with and how much pushing I have to do to move things forward, or if they have enough momentum that I can devote a few hours a week to this one. I can’t speak to it much at this time.

I have a few projects I’m working on.

Apologies for the secrecy- for most of my personal projects it’s unwarranted but I don’t think I really like my effort being too apparent in the things that I do. It’s an odd behavioral tick that was rewarded in college.

Anyway, in the immediate future I’ll be posting about the following projects:

• My girlfriend and I just started developing a sort of strategy game. We have put a larger cinematic platformer (think: old Prince of Persia) on hiatus because I thought this strategy game could produce some quick wins sooner, being easier to animate for and having more recyclable assets.
• I’m working with some colleagues to assemble materials and do a test run for a podcast/video series on Game Studies. We came up with this idea for a few reasons: For one, there isn’t much accessible stuff out there on serious game studies. There are a few series about game criticism or game design, and even they tend to be more about the craft and the culture. There’s a lot of academic literature out there, though, and it’s mostly poorly publicized and understood. Second, it seems like a great niche to dig into and develop some expertise (and ideally attract some attention to that expertise)- we’re all interested in that side of things. Third, for me anyway, a deeper exploration into the field could inform my work and reading in my usual blog topics- the intersection between people behavior and system behavior.
• I will probably not talk much about my actual job, or the healthcare startup I’m driving. I don’t think that’s terribly appropriate.
• I have many friends also doing interesting work. With their permission I might scribble on lessons I learned from their adventures.
• Maybe I’ll be more granular about my progress on my Five Week Plans that I set out dictatorially at the end of every month.

I think that this part of the site will be distinct in tone and theme from my other blog, probably, although my daily goings-on obviously will feed into both. I’ll see how this goes as I do it, and later I’ll evaluate how I’m doing with this, or if it’s necessary, or if it should feed back into the main blog.