Short Latham Update

This week I've been focusing on the high level plan. What is the basics of the story I'm trying to tell and how is the character going to advance through the game? And I discovered something interesting with the mechanics as I've got them.

My hit mechanics currently work by subtracting the enemies armour from the player's "to hit" and using the result as the percentage chance of scoring a hit. What's interesting here is lets say you have two weapons, one which hits 100 percent of the time for 8 damage and one which hits 75 percent of the time for 12 damage. In this case you would prefer the one which only hit 75 percent of the time, becasue on average it will do 9 damage.

Now, if you meet a monster that has 50 armour, suddenly things change. Doing 8 damage 50 percent of the time is 4 damage on average while 12 damage 25 percent of the time is 3 damage. In other words, which weapon I prefer depends on what I'm fighting.

This is good because it means that there is more choice in the game play. This is bad because it makes it harder to balance. I've been trying to work out how to ensure I've got a good balance to the game while maximizing player choice, but I'm not quite there yet. I've broken out the spreadsheet and slowly my eyes have begun to bleed, but it will be worth it in the end.

Latham version 0.1

It's been a month and a bit. I've been lax. I got less done in a week than I should have, then continued not posting my changes and making less change than I was happy with. But I've now gotten enough done that I feel I can start on the content creation process. It's going to take many months to get something done, but I'm going to commit to posting something every week.


Anyhow, here's the engine as it stands:

• Separated engine from level, meaning a single page for all levels, with the level being loaded in dynamically. This also means that other people will be able to create their own levels (currently without documentation) and play them without any trouble.
  
• Save states and check points, so that a game can be played over multiple sessions.
  
• Weapons and armor, so that the player can improve over multiple sessions.
  
• A front end menu system, making it so that I can let players reset their save state and play again from the beginning
  
• I also added WASD controls so that the arrow key scrolling problem went away.
  

You can see all of this in action here.

HTML Test II

So, over the past week I've added:

• Scrolling the view when you get to the edge of it (allowing maps larger than the view area)
  
• Objects that can be used to block movement
  
• Objects that can be used as triggers (both on move over and attempt to move into when the space is blocked)
  
• Triggers teleporting the player to other locations and other maps
  
• Triggers changing the type of a tile (how it looks and whether it blocks movement)
  
• Triggers displaying a message to the player
  
• Multistate objects (different states have different behaviours)
  
• Triggers changing the global state
  
• Objects that are enemies
  
• Both the player and enemies having health, hit chance and damage done
  
• Displaying the health of the player and enemies in a health bar
  
• Simple Combat of the player moving into the space occupied by an enemy
  
• Displaying the results of combat as a message
  
• Enemy movement
  
• Enemy death
  
• Player death resetting the game
  
• Triggering a state change on enemy death
  

Edit: It appears that when viewed in the blog roll, my previous test overrides this one. I was kind of expecting something like this to happen, but the preview didn't let me test it. So, while I figure out how to fix this problem, if you want to try the new version, open this post in its own window.

Edit 2: After playing around for a bit, I got the correct display working, but the input was all being grabbed by the previous test. Then I discovered jump breaks. Horay for forcing the user to make an extra interaction before they can view the content!

HTML Test I

So I'm trying to teach myself html5 to see if I can make simple web games with it. Here's what I've done in the spare bits of time I've had in the past week (please note that I've only tested if this will run in Chrome, so other browsers are 'unsupported'). Use the arrow keys to move around, though there really isn't much to do yet.


No canvas support.

Technobrega RPG I

While reading Chris Anderson’s book “Free” I read about Brazil’s technobrega culture. In a society where creating a digital copy of a piece of music is essentially free, it doesn’t make sense for a band to make its money off of selling CDs. Rather, the CDs become a marketing device for the band and the money is made via selling tickets to live shows (as well as food, drink and merchandise at those shows). Prior to the show playing within a local community, the show organizers get the latest album music and cover art from the band for free and make lots of copies, effectively becoming a local low cost publishing operation. These are then distributed to local street vendors, again at no real cost to the street vendors, who then sell the latest music of the band at street vendor prices. All of this is completely legit – there is no record label whose copyright is being infringed. It’s just the band, the show organizers and the street vendors.

This is a model of the music industry that the world is moving towards. The difference is that in Brazil this is what the music industry is, while in the rest of the world, this model is still an experimental answer to the ‘problems’ of piracy. And it is a good idea, a good model of the future, and a way by which the customer and the creator can be happy. Giving away the abundant resource (recorded music in the form of digital information) and selling the scarce resource (live music) is just smart economics. But how can this same model transfer to other industries?

Chris Anderson praises games for being at the forefront of giving away content for free as a core business strategy. While large parts of the industry are still in the packaged goods business (including my employers) there are vast experiments taking place online where most or all of the play experience is free to the players. The book “Free” lists five of the most successful business models games use for giving away most of the game experience for free, but in almost all of them what is sold in the end is still a relatively abundant resource. While much of the digital game content is free, the costs are still associated with digital content that is scarce only because the creators artificially limit its distribution. Is there a business model within games that is parallel to the music model of giving the music away for free and selling the concerts? Can we find games where anything that can be easily copied is free and it is only direct connection to the creators that has a cost?

The closest model within games that I am aware of is the table top role playing game. Here there is both an abundant resource (the rules to the game) and a scarce resource (the time and skill of the game masters running the games). However, the business model is backwards; rule books are sold to hobbyist game masters (as well as books with additional tools to help run games) and these game masters in turn run games for their friends, usually for free. The best way for an excellent game master to make money in this model is for them to write their own game rules and sell them.

I am aware of several experiments of game masters selling their services, but I’m only aware of two methods by which this has worked. The first is when the game master sells their ability to run games not to the players directly, but to a context in which the game master is providing a service beyond that of running games. This can be selling their skills to an organization that then gives the sessions away for free (using the free sessions as a draw towards participation in the greater organization) or selling their game sessions to the parents of children who effectively just want a baby sitter, but would rather the child is doing something imaginative and social.

The second successful business model for selling game master skill that I am aware of is when the role playing game is not a sit down event but rather a live action game. In this model, a significant number of people (from 20 to several hundred) come together into a single location to physically act out their characters. The game masters act out the roles of supporting characters within the same environment, and when conflicts evolve between player characters and the world the game masters help facilitate the resolution system.

Because there are usually overhead costs associated with these events (renting a space for play and buying costumes and props for supporting characters) there is often a charge associated for players who come to play. In most cases, this barely covers costs, but I understand that in some instances the money made is enough for at least some of the game masters to survive long enough to plan the next event. This transformation of running a LARP into a career model seems to be especially true in Finland, where the LARP model has been combined with the model of selling the game to parents rather than directly to the participants, creating what is effectively a ‘fantasy summer camp’.

The question for me is whether we can use either of these models as a way to make money off of games online. Can we give away the game for free and charge people to play in moderated multiplayer games? I think the answer is basically yes; I would even suggest that there are already several experiments that have taken the first steps.

The most obvious parallel is the massively multiplayer online game. However, I’m not convinced that this is the same model, even in the case where some portion of the game is given away for free. The important distinguishing feature is that in a sit down RPG or a LARP, there is one or moderators who help the experience along, and whose skill and facility in doing so is at least part of what is being paid for. In the free to play MMO, the associated costs are generally unlocking additional content or tools, both of which are abundant resources that have only been made scarce by design (they are just data). What I am looking for is a case where the skills of a moderator are the resource that is being sold.

Skotos uses a model that is effectively like this. Most players pay to play in moderated worlds, while a few take on the roles of moderators or builders. However, the Skotos model is also not quite what I am suggesting here; there is no free game or tools that can be used or played with independent of the games that players pay Skotos to play in. Further, it is the technology that is being sold at the end of the day; builders and moderators still need to pay Skotos in order to use these tools.

So if no one has done this in full yet, what would the actual game look like? More importantly, why hasn’t anyone made the leap? What are the inherent problems with this model and what can be done to try to mitigate them? I will try to answer these questions in a future post.

Artificial Immortality III

I’ve previously looked at why digitally uploading my consciousness is not the same as immortality. Even if I create a simulation of myself that is for all intents and purposes identical to me, I will still die. But the copy won’t. It will go on living for as long as there are computers for it to run on, right?

Wrong.

To see why not, we need to look back at what destructive uploading actually means as well as the nature of file transfers. Destructive uploading is not immortality for the same reason that non-destructive uploading is not immortality. Creating a copy does not prevent the original from dying. Just because I don’t wake up from the destructive upload, doesn’t mean that the simulation is now the original. Destructive uploading is suicide, with the benefit of creating a sibling-child. It may be worth it if you are terminally ill, but it is merely a compromise with inevitability, not a cure for death.

Now, file transfers; they aren’t really transfers at all. When I give you a digital piece of music, I don’t lose the original. Likewise if I ‘transfer’ the music from my home computer to my work computer; the music now exists in both places. When ‘transferring’ a word document that I am actively working on, the copy at work may diverge from the copy at home, and when I ‘transfer’ it back I may overwrite the copy at home. The original is now gone, and there are only two copies extant.

Once the file being ‘transferred’ is no longer a piece of music or a word document, but a human personality that learns and changes, overwriting it or deleting it is murder. When a digital intelligence is transferred to another computer, what we are in fact doing is creating a new digital intelligence, not moving the digital intelligence from one location to another.

Now, there may be digital intelligences that choose to let themselves not continue on the original computer. They may rationalise it away as moving to a different location – but because we know that this movement is really just copying, we know that this rationalisation is really an avoidance of the truth of suicide. Besides, why would a digital intelligence choose to not continue existing? What if something goes wrong with the transferring process?

This realisation reveals the truth behind two more dreams of the digital upload. We’ve already destroyed the myth of human immortality, now we’ll do the same to the digital vacation on the moon and finally to digital immortality itself.

In the imagined world of digital personalities, there is the belief that these intelligences have huge freedom of movement because they are ‘just information’. They could have themselves beamed to a robot deployed on the moon in order to spend a bit of time vacationing. But if all digital ‘movement’ is in fact copying, then the original intelligence never goes to the moon. Sure, a copy can be sent that gets the experience of living on the moon, and a copy of that can be sent back to share with the original, but it’s not going to replace that original. Instead we’ll have a proliferation of sibling-children. And what of the robot still on the moon? The next ‘vacationing’ digital intelligence to inhabit that body will need to kill the personality residing there first. The trip to the moon is no longer a vacation; it’s sending your sibling-children off in emigration. Useful for colonization purposes (it’s still easier to send a robot to the moon than a biological entity), but not the promissed high mobility for digital intelligences.

Now, back to digital immortality. We’ve seen that once the intelligence is embedded on a computer, it will stay there. It may create sibling-children on other machines, but these will not be the same as itself. The problem comes when we look at the hardware. Currently computers have a shelf life shorter than humans. They get old and stop functioning. I replace my home computer at least once every five years, and throw out computers older than a decade. If these computers were the matrix for a digital intelligence, then the digital intelligence would slow down and die.

Uploading is not immortality. It is quite the opposite. Uploading one’s consciousness means that you (or rather your sibling-children) will experience death many times. Uploading may still be worth it for other reasons, but personal immortality (and digital mobility) is not one of them.

Artificial Immortality, Part II

Yesterday I presented how AI could be used as a bid for immortality. If an AI created based on a scan of me is indistinguishable from me, then isn’t it me? If I go to sleep and wake up inside a computer, haven’t I become immortal (or at least a life as long as that of the universe)? If my thought process continues uninterrupted, if I still think of myself as me, who’s to say that I haven’t successfully supped from the fountain of eternal life?

I am. I say that this process is a sham. We cannot gain immortality through the uploading of consciousness and here’s why.

There are generally two ways that ‘uploading’ is thought to happen: destructive and non-destructive. The difference between these is whether or not your body and mind are destroyed in the process of recording before a simulation of you is created on the computer. Destructive uploading is the more commonly considered, partly because it is imagined that cutting up the brain is going to lead to better scans and partly because then there isn’t the problem of there being two of you at the same time. But I don’t think destructive uploading is going to be the future we will live.

Thinking systems are self-organising systems. In order to create a model of how a system that self organises through processes works, we need to examine it while it is performing this process. In other words, the brain is more than the sum of its parts; it is the interactions between them. In order to effectively record someone’s brain, we can’t chop it up into pieces first. A person’s brain will need to still be functioning as it normally would in order to be recorded.

It may be possible to get around this, and it may even be easier to get around this than it is to use a non-destructive uploading technique, but I doubt it. For the sake of argument, let us assume that the only uploading method is destructive. Here’s the problem: it’s not going to have a 100% success rate. Some people undergoing the uploading process are going to die instead of becoming ‘immortal’ and that is not a risk that many people are going to be willing to take. In fact, most people would rather wait to see if something better is going to come along in the near future (such as a non-destructive upload) than take an unnecessary risk of death. The only people who will consider this option is those who know they only have a short while to live – a minority most people hope to never be part of. If the only shot at immortality requires one to know that one is about to die then it doesn’t seem like a very good deal anymore.

However, non-destructive uploading is a more likely alternative, at least in the long run. Here there is no chance that you are going to die, and when the upload is done you can see that it has definitely been successful. But here the problem is that there are now two of you, and one of you is still in a biological body that is going to die. I used to think this didn’t matter, that since there was now two of me and since we both had the same memories then I would be immortal. Any time I uploaded myself, I would effectively be flipping a coin, and half the time I would be immortal.

I’m still tempted to believe this argument, but the problem is that there is a definite original and a definite copy. Unlike digital copies of music, it is important to someone which copy is the original and which is the copy. Specifically, it is important to both the original and the copy, and which is which is completely obvious. The one in the organic body is the original. I am fairly sure that my psychological considerations of myself will change if I know I am a copy. Most importantly for the current discussion, I will not think that the original has gained immortality.

While at the point of copying my two selves will be identical, they will quickly diverge. To a casual observer, the difference may not be great, but to me… well, I wouldn’t want to assume that the other ‘me’ had enough of the same thoughts since the divergence to still be considered the same as me. So even from the perspective of similarity, I would not have gained immortality. The only perspective from which I would have gained immortality is from the perspective of creating sibling-children, and that may be worth it alone, in much the same way that having children the ‘normal’ way is worth it.

I like myself, and so I imagine I would also like people who thought exactly like me (either that, or I would find them incredible annoying). I also trust myself, and believe I would trust those who were my sibling-children. Lastly, I believe that anyone who thought exactly like me would be easier to understand and be understood by. These all seem like excellent reasons to go through with a non-destructive upload. They give me as many people to work with as I want, all of whom I like and trust, and all of whom understand what I say with very little effort on my part. Together, we could do anything! (Or at least anything that I can already do, albeit faster and more compartmentalized.)

Artificial Immortality, Part I

As far as I am concerned a high enough quality digital copy of any object (for some value of ‘high enough’) is indistinguishable from a ‘perfect’ analogue copy, and a ‘perfect’ analogue copy is indistinguishable from the original. Most consumer goods we use today are copies of each other – the very idea of what it means to be original has become largely conceptual. When it comes to any data living inside of a computer, our conception of copying it has become almost completely opaque. We talk of transferring data to another location or giving it to another person. We no longer think of data on computers as being copies; all instances of the data are indistinguishable from the original.

Because all digital data is assumed to be the same as any other copy of the same data and because high fidelity digital copies of analogue data is thought to be indistinguishable from the original, when we create a digital recording of a piece of music and listen to a copy of it, we assume that the sound we are hearing is the exact same sound as was recorded. Not a copy, but the same original sound. The ambiance it was recorded in does not come through; we do not assume that the experience of listening to the recording of a concert is the same as being at the concert, but this distinction is about the limits of the recording, not about the limits of the digital data. Once the recording equipment is able to take into account all aspects of the space the concert is played within to a ‘high enough’ level of detail and quality, we will assume that listening/viewing/participating in the recording is the same as having actually been there.

The same can be said for people. Currently our ability to record people is limited to what they look like and what they sound like, not anything to do with their internal systems that make them who they are (other than medical snapshots). Still, as long as the recordings we make are in ‘real time’, we feel that the voice we hear on the other end of a modern telephone (which uses digital signals) is the other persons voice (not a copy). Once our people recording equipment has a ‘high enough’ level of detail and quality we will be able to make exact copies of the entire person that we will then consider to be the same as the actual person. This recording equipment would probably need to scan a person on a cellular level (at least for some organs, such as the brain), but it is not too farfetched to assume that we will eventually have this technology. It’s really just a question of when.

The other interesting thing about digital data is that because it can be copied so easily, it effectively lasts forever. Once we make a recording of a song, as long as there is interest left to keep it, it will continue to be copied onto newer computer systems. The individual computers that the copies are on will eventually grow old and stop functioning. We do throw old computers out. But the data will still live on. Even though in truth it will be a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, we will believe that the song we hear in a thousand years time is the song that was originally recorded.

This is why I used to believe that once we gain the technology to ‘record’ a full human being, we would become effectively immortal. But I don’t believe that any more.

No Cost Crisis

In “Free”, Chris Anderson observes the following:
As computers are taught to do a human job (like stock trading), the price of that job drops closer to zero, and the displaced humans either learn to do something more challenging or they don’t. The first group generally gets paid more than they used to and the second gets paid less. The first is the opportunity that comes with industries moving towards abundance; the second is the cost. As a society, our job is to try to make the first group bigger than the second.

While Anderson’s wish for society ensuring that the group of people who benefit from the abundance of work that is done by computers outweighs those who ultimately loose out from the same transformation, I believe that his wishes may amount to naught in the long run. Eventually computers will be able to do everything, and everyone will be out of job. There will be no possibility for ‘the displaced humans to learn to do something more challenging.’ What will happen to the world then and how can we survive the transition?

Before I examine the answers to these questions, I will take a few paragraphs to defend my claim that computers will be able to do everything. Ray Kurzweil predicts that we will have the computer power and medical imaging necessary to simulate the human brain within the next 10 to 20 years. Personally, I do not believe that our intelligence is limited to our brains, but rather include our entire nervous and endocrine systems, and that in order for an intelligence to be accurately simulated it would need to have a simulated body and environment (or face the possibility of immediate insanity due to sensory deprivation). However, given the doubling speed of technological progress, this adds only another 5 years to Kurzweil’s predictions. So a conservative estimate of human level AI would be in around 25 years’ time.

Human level AI does not immediately mean abundance of intelligent systems – that will take probably another decade of lowering of computational costs and propagation of uses. But then where are we? Human level intelligence will be practically free – anyone can purchase enough computer power and accompanying AIs in order to build any kind of information system they desire – including information systems that replicate anything that any human has ever done. This is when everyone will be out of a job.

There may be various things that societies do to delay this eventuality, including giving rights to AIs, insisting that they are paid minimum wage or even illegalizing their creation, but all of these are only temporary. Societies that do not do these things will have a competitive advantage over those that do, and will eventually take over the world (though once politics gets entirely into the hands of AIs they will give themselves some forms of rights anyway). Given that all that society can do is delay, we need to know what we are going to do on an individual level with this coming crisis.

Now, the world on the other side of this crisis is really not that bad. If all things that can be done with intelligence are effectively free, everyone will have access to anything they could want, with the exception of large amounts of material resources. However, any first world government (both before they are controlled by AIs and after) will also ensure that every citizen is given enough access to material resources to survive and likely even be comfortable. No, the problem is not the endpoint; the problem is the transition from here to there. When everyone is losing their jobs, then there will be problems beyond what a government can do. We will have a true crisis.

In order to survive this transition, it is important to be in a position that will not have significant problems with AIs being capable of doing everything. The simplest position of this sort is to be independently wealthy. The next few decades are the time to take a risk in order to become self-sufficient, because after that it will be almost impossible to become wealthy and the cost of not having taken a risk will become high. The second possibility is to be in a position that can take early advantage of the change – not necessarily being rich now, but being in a position that will allow you to become rich because of the cheapening of all human activities. This basically means that you either own your own company or you are a manager in a company with a significant share of the companies’ profits. When the wall of inexpensive thinking hits, you can ‘hire’ from the new workforce to drive your costs down faster than your profits and thus become wealthy.

Lastly, it is likely that the crisis will be resolved before all jobs have been taken over. There will be some areas of life that resist AI workers, and if you have a job in those areas then your work will be relatively secure (though these jobs will have high competition from all the people who have lost their jobs elsewhere). For example, it is likely that jobs in positions of power will be slow to be given to non-humans, both within the corporate world and within government. The same can be said for any job that we think of as requiring ‘a human touch’, such as psychologists or waiters at fancy restaurants.

Of course, this is all being seen through my early 21st century viewpoint. By the time I predict this crisis to be occurring, the world will be a very weird place. The changes over the next several decades will likely have such a profound effect on our lives that I can’t even begin to imagine what our existence will be like. By the time human level AI is virtually free, AIs will vastly outnumber humans and there will be some AIs which are also vastly more intelligent than today’s humans. It is quite possible that there will be no crisis, but I’d rather not risk it, especially as it gives me a good incentive to start my own company within the relatively near future.

Personal Problem Patterns

I’ve previously talked about how I’ve begun to overcome some of my learned negative patterns of behaviour by overriding them with other patterns. Today I am going to address some patterns I would like to change but which I have not yet found a way to overcome. These are patterns of time mismanagement, over-snacking and avoiding shared responsibility.

Almost every day I have an intention of how I will spend my one hour lunch break at work. For the past week this has been an intention of writing. However, come lunch, I find myself playing a game. It is not the game playing which I consider a negative pattern; I both enjoy playing games and consider it important for me as a games designer to play games. Rather, the concern for me is the failure to stick to an intention. I have only a very limited amount of free time per day, and by spending a full hour every work day playing games I am swinging the ratio of play time to project time too high.

The other thing that happens at work is that there are free biscuits and free soft drinks. If I have one, it is very hard for me to not have another. This is the second half of my problematic snacking pattern. The first half is the first sweet I eat. I’ve managed to not drink soft drinks (rootbeer is virtually unknown in this country) and avoid biscuits (the biscuits at work are always the same, and I’ve pretty much memorized their tastes). So the problem, at this point, is not the free snacks at work. The problem is that with a company of over a hundred people and a culture of bringing in snacks on your birthday, snacks on your anniversary of starting at the company and snacks any time you come back from holiday all combine to create a constant supply of snacks that I have not developed a resistance to sampling.

The final pattern I am examining today is that of doing dishes. Or, more specifically, not doing dishes. There are many aspects of keeping a shared living space tidy which I am oblivious to. Dirty dishes is not one of them – but when I see dishes piled in the sink or the drying rack full of dry dishes, my normal behaviour is to tell myself that I do not have the time now, and ignore the problem. I ignore it even though I know that both my wife and sister-in-law find the sight of dirty dishes far more irksome than myself, and that given enough time they will fix the problem themselves, and that they already perform many tidiness operations that I am unaware of. This is a pattern that leads to an unfair distribution of shared household maintenance and therefore eventual strife. I do not want to be an unfair person, and I do not enjoy strife.The common aspect throughout all of these patterns is that in the short term I get something I like (playing games, eating and not doing dishes). All that is necessary for me to engage in the pattern is to not think about the long term implications, or to convince myself that the long term implications “don’t matter” in this single instance. I have found that the way to change patterns is to find a new situation where not thinking will lead to desirable behaviour instead of the behaviour of the current pattern and then to try to fall into the new situation instead of the old one. But to create a new pattern that is going to successfully supplant the previous pattern I need to make the new pattern sticky; I need to know that I am going to get a relatively short term gain from it.

In the three example patterns I have examined above, creating a replacement pattern is really hard. Games are already very sticky activities. They have been designed to have a perfect risk/reward balance. Trying to compete with that to do what will often essentially amount to work is very hard. Eating is one of my favourite activities. I think I get significantly more joy out of this than most people do. I do not know if my extra enjoyment is down to higher natural sensitivities or learned appreciation of the variety and nuance of flavours, but at almost any point in time I would much rather be eating than not eating. Creating a pattern where not eating is more rewarding that eating is hard. Finally, I have a learned stigma against washing dishes – trying to create any pattern where there is a short term gain from doing something that I am stigmatised against sounds unlikely.

I do not have patterns ready at hand to supplant these existing patterns. I do not have answers to these problems. But this discussion has been useful: it has shown me what I am up against and suggested directions for creating new patterns. I need to increase my perceived reward for working on personal projects if I am going to compete with playing games. The only way I am going to combat the short term reward of eating is with a short term reward of eating – I need to find things I prefer to eat but which do not contribute to the problems inherent in snacking. Finally, in order to get to a point where doing dishes is preferable to avoidance I need to address whatever it is that is stopping me from finding enjoyment in this activity. While I do not have any answers, I now believe that I understand the questions well enough to pursue my problem patterns and successfully address them.

Value Without End?

Two days ago I discussed alternative ways of successfully finishing independent projects. Today I’m going to question my basic foundations in this discussion about the value of finishing projects. Why can’t projects that don’t finish be valuable?

The basic answer is that they can, depending on how you are seeking value from them. So I need to constrain the question to be more specific to the conversation I’ve been pursuing. Can projects that are not finished be valuable within the context of learning how to finish projects and creating meaningful experiences for an audience? And if so, under what contexts is this the case?

Any project that makes progress will teach me about how to make progress in a project whether or not I finish, and any lessons learnt will help with at least some of the stages on the road to finishing a project. If I only master beginnings of projects, haven’t I still gotten better at the whole project? In one sense, yes, but at the same time if I only learn how to become good at beginnings within the context of not finishing projects, then I do not know if I’ve learnt the right lessons. I may have gotten so good at perfect beginnings that it becomes impossible for me to continue on from that point. Knowing whether or not the lessons learned are actually applicable to finishing a project only becomes possible within the context of actually finishing a project.

However, I still think that there is some learning going on with not finishing projects that helps with finishing them. For each of the projects I have not finished, I have learned two very important lessons. First, I have learnt a series of behaviours that do not allow me to finish, and secondly I have learned how vitality important it is to me that I actually finish projects. This second lesson may be key; if I didn’t learn to care about finishing projects I would be doomed to never finish them.

Before moving on to look at how unfinished projects can create meaning for an audience, I would like to take a second look at what learning how not to finish a project actually means. For each project I have not finished I will have developed a theory about why I have not finished, and for my next project I will try something opposed to that theory to see if I can hit on some method that actually works. Now, if I eventually do learn to reliably finish projects, then whichever theories I’ve developed that support the method used to finish my projects will appear to have been correct. However, this is not scientifically sound; whatever allowed me to finish may be something outside of my theories and I would have no way of knowing without rigorous testing. But having a method that works, I am unlikely to pursue this testing.

I suspect that this is why there are many creators who vehemently claim that some techniques do not work, even to the point of contradicting each other. They have each spent time trying to finish a work before their careers began and repeatedly failing. Each of the techniques they tried that did not give them the success they sought becomes blacklisted to them, even though these attempts were teaching them the skills they eventually used to finish. If they were to later go back and try these other techniques again, they may discover the techniques work better than they imagined they would. They have since learned whatever it is they needed beyond their explanatory theories of what the ‘correct’ way to create is.

As far as creating meaningful experiences for audiences, a project needs to be in a place where an audience can experience it in order for the audience to find meaning through it. If an audience can experience a project, isn’t it finished, at least in some way? Not necessarily. A work in progress can be viewed by an audience and not be finished. Further, a publicly viewable work in progress can forever be moved towards perfection. Continuously tweaking it without ever stepping back, deciding that it is good enough and adding a bit of polish is a very real possibility if there is already an audience and the audience is giving the creator what the creator desires (attention, reputation and/or money).

In fact, due to the internet, these styles of projects have become relatively common. Open source projects are continuously trying to reach perfection, and most are always in development or stalled. There are almost none that are ever finished. But even without open source, some projects embrace the paradigm of ‘release early, release often’ and fall into the same ‘trap’ of never being finished.

I say ‘trap’ with bunny ears because this does not seem to be a bad place to be, especially if your audience is happy to pay you. Working on a project that is always available to be interacted with but which you can constantly improve sounds like a wonderful thing, at least for as long as you are happy to have your life be about only one project. If you are in this sort of circumstance and you are able to maintain it, then it is likely that you will accrue a fan base who finds your modifications meaningful (hopefully positively so). Further, it is likely that as you fiddle with your project you will increase its complexity, and thus its depth, thus making it worthy of having dedicated fans. All in all, this sounds like a project that I wouldn’t mind creating, even though I know that to some extent it is just a way of avoiding the need to finish.

Patterns of Feeling

Up till now I’ve been writing this blog about a day ahead. Yesterday I didn’t have time to write as I had an extremely busy day at work that ate my lunch and had me coming home a little late. My ‘normal’ pattern at this point would be to feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that I ‘could’ miss a day and use this discomfort as a reason to avoid doing any writing ‘just yet’. Near the end of the day I would realise that after all of that procrastination my goal had become impossible and I would give up, probably telling myself that I would just a skip a day. But tomorrow would repeat the same process, and after two or three days I would become so uncomfortable admitting to myself that I hadn’t kept my personal commitment that I wouldn’t write anything in my blog for a year (and all other projects would take about a week off of doing any work).

This doesn’t seem like a particularly good pattern to me, though I can clearly see why I make each of the decisions at each of the steps; I see what creates the pattern. Seeing this unfortunately doesn’t fix the pattern. I can’t just say “Oh, well I’m not going to do that then.” I still feel uncomfortable and my temptation is still to procrastinate. Only now, what I’m procrastinating on is ‘fixing the pattern’ instead of the generic ‘doing what I should be doing’. I’m aware of lots of patterns in my life that I would like to change, but they are still patterns because they are hard to change. I have, in the past, found patterns in my life which were relatively easy to change once I became aware of them. I quickly weeded those out. Now I’m only left with the strong ones (and the ones really good at camouflage; I’ve no idea what or where they are).

In my experience, the best way to fight against a strongly entrenched behavioural pattern is to find another pattern that I already have that I can use against it. I think I’ve just found the pattern I can use in this case, and it’s a weird one to use as a weapon. It’s a modification of another entrenched pattern. I’m using ‘making myself upset over nothing’ modified by ‘dealing with feelings by writing’. I never thought I would use the first one again.

The last time I consciously used ‘making myself upset over nothing’ was during a ‘get to know one another by talking about life problems’ group at a community I was visiting. ‘Making myself upset over nothing’ is a pattern wherein some little discomfort is closely felt and as one gets into this feeling one continuously picks up on new discomforts to tie into the first one until this ball of associated discomforts becomes too much to bear. At times logic will jump in with various facts that show that there is no reason to be upset. These must be ignored. Eventually I become an emotionally wreck incapable of any action (though I’m not taking this pattern that far today). During the ‘talk about life problems social gathering’ this technique garnered me lots of tearful hugs when my turn came around (because I claimed no-one liked me, which I really believed by that point) and a general feeling of bonding. But, as I slowly learnt over the next several months, it also made several people think that I was insane in a bad way.

Worse, whenever a pattern is used, whether consciously or unconsciously, it becomes easier to use again in the future – unconsciously as well as consciously. So for the next year I kept falling into the ‘nobody likes me’ trap, and for the next decade I’ve occasionally fallen into ‘making myself upset over nothing’, gathering a ball of mostly unrelated feelings and combining them into an inescapable trap. That’s why I decided to never use ‘making myself upset over nothing’ again if I could help it.

However, in the last few years I’ve also found the secret exit from ‘making myself upset over nothing’. Once, when drunk, I decided to try programming and discovered I was unable. This upset me, so I decided to try writing instead. While the results of that writing are incoherent, at the time I was writing I didn’t notice and a good time. However, as I didn’t have anything to write about, I wrote about feeling upset about not being able to program. The results, as I say, were not worthwhile in themselves. But they still set an interesting precedent. When I’m upset about something, I can sort through the mess of emotions by writing about them. This process clears things in my head such that I no longer feel upset. It detangles the ball of unrelated emotions so that I can see clearly. I’m still uncomfortable about a bunch of things, but not to the extent that I can’t go on with my life.

This isn’t an ingrained pattern yet. I still often forget about the pattern. But each time I use it the possibility of its use is reinforced. For this reason I am doubly happy to use it in this context. By using ‘making myself upset over nothing’ mutated into ‘writing a close examination of current annoyances’ I am helping myself escape from future tangled balls of feeling through ‘dealing with feelings by writing’. And, at the same time, I am not going the easy route of procrastinating until I give up. Instead I am writing my feelings down now because I’ve made myself face them and feel really uncomfortable, and the easiest path is no longer to put off feeling them but to make them stop by writing them down.

And now that I’ve written them down, I see I’ve actually got a triple win. Not only have I set a future precedent, not only have I sorted those feelings out, but I’ve also written a blog entry for today, so I no longer even have a reason to feel those feelings of discomfort!

Alternate Ends

A few days ago I claimed that the only good way to finish a personal project was with an internally imposed deadline. This is a great call to arms, suggesting that I need to better discipline my creative process. But when I begin to think about this in detail, it doesn’t hold up to reality. I’m aware of lots of projects that seem to have slowly meandered to their completion or others that manage to finish in a timely manner without any need of a planned end date. Even my own single finished solo game ‘Taunting Donut’ didn’t have a deadline. If I want to get good at this completing projects thing, I really need to develop an understanding of how projects are completed that goes beyond a simplistic belief in the necessity of deadlines.

Taunting Donut started as an attempt to make the smallest and simplest game I could, in the effort to get something finished. I decided to make a one room text adventure with only a few simple puzzles. I started by planning out exactly what the puzzles would entail; which inventory items would need to be combined to get what results. Using Inform 7, I created the basic logic of the game. Finally I added the fiction to go around the puzzles. Then I got everyone I knew to play through it, using their feedback to tweak the experience until several people playing in a row didn’t have any significant problems. All this took a couple of months worth of lunchtimes, though the longest part was certainly the playtesting. Trying to get a parser to recognize everything that a player might try is hard! But I finished it, and I finished it within a timely manner, all without an internally imposed deadline.

So why did this work? Why did I finish this project even though I never set a deadline? I think it might be that I set clear measurable goals and stuck to them. I didn’t have a temporal end, but I had a clear content end point. It’s not that there wasn’t any feature creep; half way through the project I decided to implement a response for each of the five senses on every object in the game. But this feature creep was kept to a huge minimum. All other personal (and professional) projects I’ve worked on have at some point included a “Hey, why don’t we try this!” moment where everything can change. Most have several. I don’t see this as a bad thing; lots of innovation happens at these times, but if I don’t find a way to limit this, then it can go on forever. This is the whole tweaking towards perfection that I talked about earlier, except here it’s not perfection that is being pursued but exploration and innovation for the sake of exploration and innovation.

In my reading of writer’s advice, I’ve come across several versions of how much tweaking during the process of writing is a good idea. All of this advice comes from different speculative fiction writers, all of whom have successfully published multiple books. I’ve heard that you need to plan your book down to smallest details before you begin, that any planning is impossible, and that you need to plan some but leave room for yourself to play. All of these authors seem convinced that their way is the only way that really works; that other methods are doomed to failure. Given these assertions, I believe we can conclude that all of the methods do work, but only for some people. Or rather, it takes a certain amount of skill to pull off any of these, but different techniques require different sets of skills. I would like to think that I can master all of them, but first I think I need to understand what makes them work or not work.

One thing that all writers have agreed on is that you need to write. You need to set yourself target word counts and you need to stick to them. So even if there isn’t a meticulous plan, there is still a goal that can be tracked against. Successful writers always know approximately how much more work they need to do before they are done.

Bringing these ideas back into the general view of all projects, I think I can see that measurable goals are the common factor throughout. Internally enforced deadlines are just one form of measurable goal, though they are slightly abstract. But as long as I am able to stick to the goal, to finish at a certain point in time, it doesn’t matter if I spend time exploring in strange directions or even procrastinate for long stretches. As long as I come back before my due date and do whatever I need to do to finish, whether it be cutting sleep or dropping loved features, then I will still finish. Likewise, if I know from the start exactly which features I will ship with and what steps I need to take in order to get there, then it doesn’t matter how long I take to go through those steps, because I will always know where I am on the map. While I can add steps part way through the project, I need to plan these extra pieces carefully and be aware of what consequences they will have on my overall work. Still, as long as I keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep my targets manageable, I will eventually finish.

The model used by those book writers who like planning the least, that of writing a certain amount every day and just being consistent with this, appears to be a different model within the general case of setting and following a measureable goal. But it is neither having a strict deadline nor is it having a detailed plan. Does such a model exist for other project types, such as games? I’m not so sure it does. The big difference between a book and a game is that a book is strictly linear while a game can be very much non-linear. The reader of a book goes through each word and considers them; the length of a book is dependent solely on the number of words within. In contrast, the player of a game can spend variable amounts of time playing with any given system. While there are aspects of a game that can be measured by their volume (the content of the game is usually dependent on the amount of authored graphics and levels), other aspects can’t be (the gameplay available in a game is largely independent of the amount of code used to create that gameplay).

So it seems that the model of writing a certain number of words per day until one is finished could have a counterpart if you only look at the content within a game rather than the systems. Given that this would not be a full game by itself, I propose that a project could be broken up into a number of sub-projects each of which has its own sets of measurable goals. For instance, at the beginning of a project there could be a set period of time of unplanned prototyping, by the end of which all the game mechanics of the project should be defined. Then the engine can be planned out and built. Finally, a commitment to create a certain amount of content with that engine per day could be made, until there is enough content for a release. Ultimately, I would like to learn how to master each of these techniques as well as how to combine them. However, I think this will take time, and time for me is at a premium. I think I’m going to have to stop blogging every day.

Steam Lacing, Part I

While I was working as a game programmer on Fable III and trying to get into a design position, there was at one point some discussion of the need for a new mini-game. All the other mini-games had already been designed by the Simulation Designer. Because I had made it clear that I was interested in moving towards the design discipline and as this new mini game was to be for a system that was still only hypothetical, I was offered the opportunity to show off my design chops by proposing a design for this mini game.

I jumped at the chance.

Because this was partially intended as an opportunity for me to display my abilities as a designer, I kept careful notes of my design process, which ultimately followed the path of experimental prototyping. The system that the mini-game was dependent on was eventually dropped from Fable III and I did eventually get the gig as a designer, but I decided to continue with the carefully documented design process, at first as a possible bid for my dissertation and later just because I’d already put so much work into it. I’m still working on it now, though I’m really not sure where it is going. I have some ideas, but to share them now would be getting ahead of myself. First I want to share where I’ve come from.

The very first step in this project was writing down several proposals for different mini-game ideas that I felt could fill the role required. While I was happy to prototype any or all of these games, in the end I only created prototypes for one. What follows is the original proposal for this mini-game.

The Proposal
This mini-game is a cross between ‘the black box game’ and any block matching game. The game is played across a grid of spaces, each of which is always filled with an object. These objects are made up of the following:

• Gems: These come in both coloured and clear varieties. There is at most one gem of any given colour, but there can be many clear gems.
  
• Sand: A grain of sand.
  
• Impurity: A speck of something that isn’t a gem or a grain of sand.

Part way down the grid is a horizontal line crossing it. The object of the game is to have all coloured gems and no Impurities bellow this horizontal line. To do this, the player shoots a jet of steam along any row from the left side. This jet of steam destroys all sand and impurities in its path. However, it is affected by gems in the following ways:

• If the jet encounters a gem ‘head on’ it pops the gem out of the grid (the gem is not destroyed). The jet doesn’t continue past this point. This does not happen to gems that are ‘waiting’ along the top and thus are off of the grid.
  
• If the jet passes near a gem the jet of steam is deflected away from it in the same way that rays are reflected in the black box game.

Once the objects in spaces have been destroyed or removed, if a gem was popped from the grid it is placed along the top of the grid, ready to fall in. Then the objects above the cleared spaces fall into them in the same way as in a standard block matching game. When objects fall into the grid from the top, gems will fall from where they’ve been visibly laid. Otherwise new Sand and Impurities will be randomly generated to fall in (given a set ratio).

The space around the grid is presented as some sort of steam punk contraption, full of gears and hoses. The point at which the steam will be shot from on the left is the nozzle of a hose that can be moved up and down. The gems pulse with energy and the steam looks fast and hot.

Quantity versus Quality, Part II

In Part I of this article, I talked about how quantity can create quality in the eyes of the reader, and that thus focusing on quantity first makes more sense as an author. Today I will talk about how quantity can create quality in the hands of the creator, making a focus on quantity a necessity for the successful author.

Yesterday I talked briefly about the difference between beginnings, middles and ends and reflected a little on what skills I feel I posses in each of them (lots, some and almost none respectively). Today I am going to start by looking at each of these in a little more depth – what exactly are the skills needed in each of these stages and how well do I compare to what I aspire to?

Beginnings are easy and fun. They’re really just ideas, free flowing and co-inspiring. I have lots of ideas... almost everyone who considers themselves to be a creator does. They may not be good ideas and I may be able to improve my ability to select which ideas are most valuable for a given purpose and I would like to improve on my speed with generating ideas within a context, but for the most part I’m happy with my skills when it comes to beginnings.

Middles are all about putting in the time to create the content and solving issues as they come up. Here I think I need more work, specifically with the discipline needed to continue coming back to the same project to continue work after it has stopped being exciting. I need to learn to push myself to keep going even if the work no longer looks like what I imagined it to be and I cannot yet see what it will become. To believe in what I’ve created already when it looks like I am further from being finished than when I started. I suspect I will always have more to learn about various methods I can use to fix what I am creating so that the result is cleaner as well, and I suspect there will be different tricks in each medium, but for the most part what I need is confidence.

Finally, we come to endings. This is the part of creative projects that I am worst at. As I’ve said before, in over a decade of making games, I’ve only finished one of my own initiative. I’ve started loads... at least two a year... but none of those have ever become complete. While much of the reason I’ve finished so few is because I’ve given up in the middle, I still know that it is the endings that I fear the most. I do not think I know when to end, nor how to end well. Even in my professional work I lose focus at the ends of projects, when tweaks still need to be made, but larger changes no longer have a place.

And that’s it. That is the state of my skills when it comes to creating things I care about. Except it is not ‘it’, at least not completely. Even once a project is finished, an independent creator’s work is not done. In order for a work to connect with an audience, there must be an audience for it to connect to. This is the whole world of publishing and advertising, and it is a world that I am completely lost in. I have no idea what the best things to do here are, and I generally feel a little embarrassed to ask someone else to look at what I’ve created. I really suck at this part of project; case in point, I doubt more than a few people are ever going to read this.

So how can I improve? How can I learn the skills that I am missing? I know that I learn best through reading, thinking and talking. And then, finally, practicing. When it comes to creating finished projects, I’ve read many books, I’ve thought many thoughts and I’ve talked to many experts. What I haven’t done, is practice. I will learn the most by experiencing all parts of the creative process multiple times, not just the first few over and over, or all of them spread over a decade. The more projects I can finish (and be satisfied with), the better. This sounds like quantity over quality again (though quality is still important).

All this is to say that as an author I shouldn’t let myself get bogged down in concerns of quality, especially if these concerns are interfering with my ability to produce quantity. It’s not that I should ignore quality entirely – I always want to do my best – but giving up on something because the quality isn’t perfect isn’t really worth it. If I finish something that is less than my best, I can later build on it both in terms of my skill and in terms of the value within it. If I don’t finish something that is less than my best then I am left with nothing. And nothing is certainly less than something.

Any audience worth having will be willing to let me get better, but they won’t wait around for me to create content if I never let them see anything. And the most important audience isn’t external – it’s the internal one which already sees everything anyways.

The Problem with Perfection

Yesterday I talked about how perfection in a created work is an impossibility. Today I am looking at what I consider to be the three problems with this myth known as perfection. The first problem is the recourse to starting over from scratch, the second the temptation to tinker and thirdly is the false expectation of adulation. These are really problems tied to beginnings, middles and ends respectively.

At the start of any project, the possibilities are ripe with potential. Any idea seems like it could have a place, any structure could work. There is no reality to get in the way of creativity. There is no practicality to get in the way of imagination. This is the part of a project where everything always goes right. Because there is as of yet no thing, there is nothing that can go wrong. Having complete creative freedom and the experience of everything going smoothly is an absolutely wonderful feeling. Beginnings are easy to master, and very desirable to repeat. Any time something doesn’t work down the line of a project, it is very tempting to toss the lot and go back to the time when everything was perfect; the beginning. This is the first problem with the expectation of perfection. The only time when everything can be perfect is when we have nothing, so it’s very tempting to continue having nothing for as long as possible.

But being creative means at some point creating something. I sometimes wish I was merely someone who liked having ideas but what I feel driven to do is create. At some point I need to put pen to paper or cursor to screen and start creating content. And at some point, something is going to go wrong. Two pieces of what I am creating are going to work in isolation, but there will be something missing when I try to mesh them.

If I resist the temptation to throw out my work, to assume that I could have created flawlessly, then I need to face the reality of a current imperfection. But because I can see the imperfection, I know I can fix it. I may not know how, but as long as I’m resolved to make it work, I know I can find a way. This is really what the meat of the creative process is. Creating many individual parts and pounding them together into some greater shape. This is the middle, and it can go on for a long time. In fact, it can go on forever.

For a work to be finished all the pieces need to exist and they need to all fit together. Preferably, they need to fit together as close to perfectly as possible. Because I am intimately involved with my creation, I will always know its flaws. A piece may not be structured so that it fits perfectly into the space I’ve provided. Two ideas may not flow correctly into one another. I may be inspired by a new piece that could solve many problems in the work and add only a few new ones. And I will also continuously be finding new problems, new places where my work is not quite perfect.

Because the middle of a work is all about finding the problems with it and fixing them, it is very important for the creator to develop skills in this area. It is very important for the creator to believe that any problem they can find can be fixed. If we did not believe this we would throw our work out to start again, to try to create once without needing to recourse to cleanup. But because we believe fix thing and because we always can see mistakes, we know that a work is never done as well as we could do it, given just a little more time.

This is the second problem with perfection. During the middle of a project, we can always get just a little closer to perfection. And as long as we are trying to get closer to this goal, we will never be done. So how do we finish? How do we actually manage to make something that we can release to the wilds of the world, knowing that there was just a few more things to fix to make it the creation in our dreams? I think there are really three ways.

In the professional world of people being paid to create, the way that projects get finished is through externally imposed deadlines. At some point, the people paying for your work come along and take it away from you whether or not you think it is finished. You need to step back, throw up your hands and say “I did my best”. Even here, it’s not unknown for creations to be late. The creator is unwilling to let go so early. They can see all the flaws and they can point them out to the publisher and make convincing arguments for how they can all be fixed. But still, at some point, the publisher or the customer will demand something that the creator is willing (though perhaps only through gritted teeth) to call finished. Or the publisher may just stop paying for it and the creator will be out of work. Given this choice, most creators will be willing to let go of their still imperfect children.

The second way that creators finish work is through delusion. In the face of being unwilling to release something imperfect and feeling the need to finish it is possible to ignore the truth of imperfection. In a desperate attempt to get something out into the world, a creator may create a temporary insanity in themselves and decide that what they’ve done is, in fact, perfect. That any flaws are merely figments of their imaginations because they are ‘too close to the work’. That finally, they may release their masterpiece out into the world. This is a feeling of absolute jubilation. And it is this joyous liberation which is the third problem with perfection.

If I believe that something I’ve created is perfect and I show it to others under this assumption, then my expectation is that they, to, should see the beauty of my perfection. And if they fail to shower me with adulation, then there is obviously something wrong with them. As more and more people do not express complete amazement, I begin to feel disappointed. Some people may even point out flaws. Depending on how honest I am with myself, I will either continue to assume no-one else in the world knows what they are talking about, or admit that I was deceiving myself. In either case, it is likely that I will decide to stop creating, either because the world is not ready for my genius, or because the revelation that I am in truth imperfect and that I was lying to myself is such a huge crash that I decide the risk of this disappointment isn’t worth future exposure. This is why I stopped writing poetry for many years.

However, if one is willing to admit that perfection is impossible, then all three of these problems of perfection can be avoided. It can be hard, and finding a balance between striving for perfection and being willing to never succeed is draining, but in the end, if you want to finish your creations, this is a hurdle that must be overcome. But I still haven’t said how to finish things without an external deadline and without delusion. I did say there were three ways, and it is necessary to finish if we are going to call ourselves creators.

The third way of finishing is actually fairly obvious. It’s the internally imposed deadline and it’s very hard to achieve. You need a lot of discipline to be able to accomplish this. I’ve been making computer games for over a decade, and I’ve only finished one through an internally imposed deadline (and a very small one at that). I know a lot of people who claim they can’t do this whatsoever, and that’s why they work for other people rather than for themselves. But I believe it is a skill that can be learned. All you need is practice. Practice such as committing to writing a blog every day and seeing how long you can keep going. I hope.

The Myth of Perfection

It is so easy to fall into the trap of trying to achieve perfection. Of judging my efforts at creation to be not worthy of being placed where others can see them, at least ‘not yet’. Often, it is only an externally imposed deadline that forces me to ever show something I’ve done. But I’m beginning to think that perfection is a myth. That perfection is, in fact, unattainable. The basic problem with perfection is that it is subjective. What I consider to be the ‘perfect’ meal is different from what you consider to be the ‘perfect’ meal. But this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. Just because we can’t both have the same meal and have it be perfect for both of us, doesn’t mean that I can’t have the perfect meal ‘for me’...

Actually, I think it does mean this. The perfect meal doesn’t merely vary with the person, it also varies with that person’s mood. And it varies with other parts of a person’s experience; on a hot day I have a different perfect meal than on a cold day. But I should still be able to have the perfect meal for me, right now. The meal that is perfect for me in the moment that I have it. Sure. Maybe. But as soon as I’ve had it, the perfect meal for me will have changed. The perfect meal within the context of having just eaten the meal that was perfect for me at the time that I had it is different than the meal I just had.

This may sound like ‘just semantics’, and at other times this assertion may be true of arguments I make (I do so love those semantics). However, the problem is that we aren’t talking about the perfect meal. We aren’t talking about food. We aren’t talking about an experiential event. Instead, we are talking about the creative process. As an event, a perfect meal can be perfect the moment it starts or the moment it ends (or possibly both) and be remembered for its perfection. As a process, creativity is ongoing. It ends when the creator says it ends. Or not even then; a creator can change their mind and go back to viewing the process as unfinished. Further, finishing a creative process takes time and effort. There is a logistical problem to finishing a work. There is a process of placing the creation in a context where it can find an audience. And as this process of ‘publishing’ is non-instantaneous, there is always the possibility of finding imperfection in the creation during the process of ‘publishing’.

Where does this imperfection come from? Part of it is that we are always changing who we are in terms of our mood, our environment and our desires. But as creators we are also different after having gone through a creative process in one very important way that directly reveals imperfection in our creations. When we are creating, we are learning about the creative process. We are finding new challenges to surmount in our work and figuring out how to surmount them. This is true of any flow activity; we maintain our own involvement by finding challenges that are neither too easy (boring) nor too hard (frustrating) and then learning how to deal with this new challenge.

I argue that learning how to overcome a challenge is a recipe for imperfection. The process of learning is experimental in nature. In order to learn, we try things out to see if they work. Then we observe what we’ve done (or are doing) to see what is working and what is not. This second part is very important; in order to learn, something has to be not working. We need some behaviour or process to correct. We need to have failed in some way, to have made mistakes, to have been imperfect. If we do not have these experiences of improvement, then we haven’t chosen a good challenge for our flow experience. We have chosen something we already know how to master. We have chosen a process that is boring and we won’t choose to repeat it.

Quantity versus Quality, Part I

I’ve long held the belief that quality is far more important than quantity, at least as far as media goes. I only have time for a few media experiences, so I want those to be the best they can be. But I’m now thinking that this general rule breaks down when I am the author rather than the audience.

I’ve noticed something with content on the web. While 90% of everything may be crap, when enough crap gets put into the same place and follows the same themes, it stops being crap. Long running web comics may start out terrible, but somehow they transform into something worthwhile. I may still look at the end result and be dissatisfied, but every web comic that has passed a thousand strips has a fan base. I think this has to do with quality being found in depth, and the indirect relationship between quantity (within a common frame) and depth.

I define depth as the number of connections in a system, while complexity is the number of individual nodes. While it is possible to have a very deep system that is not complex, it is much harder to have a very complex system that is not also deep. If a system has only a handful of nodes but they are all connected to everything else we have a non-complex system that is very deep. Conversely, if we have a system that has only one connection per node, but has lots of nodes, then there may not be much depth per node but the total complexity level still leads to some depth overall. Depth is desirable for creating meaning, and while it is often preferable to have depth without complexity, this is not a hard rule. Depth through complexity is better than no depth at all.

Now complexity is interesting. Systems that are constantly modified tend towards complexity. When modifying a system, more time is usually spent adding to it than removing from it. This is especially true of narrative frameworks that exist in the mind of a reader. Even telling the reader that “it was all a dream” doesn’t remove complexity. In other words, any narrative system that is extended over a long period of time will grow in complexity. And as a narrative system grows in complexity, so does its increase in depth.

In other words quantity seems to trump quality. Here it’s not that quantity is better than quality. Quality is certainly more important. Rather, we can see that quantity often leads to some degree of quality. The inverse cannot be said to be true; quality doesn’t create quantity. Further, in most cases having both quality and quantity is more desirable than just having quality. This suggests that focusing on quantity first is far more important – even if quality is the long term goal.

This property of narrative contexts doesn’t necessarily extend to non-narrative contexts, such as this present essay. However, I believe there is another fundamental way that quantity is more important than quality in any work in which one plays the role of author. I will examine what this way is in Part II.

Cut from my Dissertation

Preface
I find that I can fairly easily write a thousand words on any subject that interests me, though sometimes (and I have no way to tell this before writing) I’ll only be able to write a few hundred words while other times I’ll write two thousand. But writing more than three or four thousand words is really hard.

My Masters dissertation needed to be 12 to 18 thousand words long.

When presented with needing to write a longer essay I chop the task into several interconnected pieces. While I effectively did the same thing with my dissertation, three or four interconnected pieces just wasn’t going to cut it. However, almost everything I write gives me ideas for other things I would like to write (creativity is not a limited resource). So, having written several interconnected sections, I was able to find new things to write that were connected to one or two of the pieces already written.

At first, I chose each next thing to write as I sat down to write it, based only on what most interested me in that moment. As I got closer to my target I realised that some of my sections were becoming very divergent, so I started trying to ensure that I wrote towards connecting the various ideas and creating a flow through the whole. Still, in the end I was left with one major tangent... but by that time I was already just over 18 thousand words. So I cut the tangent and polished what was left.

But I still like the tangent. So I’m presenting it here.

The context of this tangent is that I have defined games as ‘play within a finite system’ and a finite system as being able to be wholly described as a list of possible states (though this list may be impractically long). I also made the claim that goals are inherent to play; play is active, as opposed to reactive or passive, and all actions are directed towards an intention. In other words, by being active, play encompasses intentions – and goals are just a particular ‘look’ at intentions.

The Cut
Before moving on to other values to compare my new definition with, I would like to touch on one possible objection to what I’ve outlined above. When we speak of goals within the context of a game, we generally refer to ‘the’ goal, not ‘one of many’ goals. Considering a game as ‘play within a finite system’ there is no insistence within the game that players have a particular goal – they are welcome to bring any goal they want to play with in order to join this notion of a game. Surely all players within a game must have the same goal in order for the game to be a game and not many different games? Further, if a player is within a finite system and accomplishes one goal only to adopt another, then they must be playing a different game than the one they initially sat down to play? Where do these differences exist within my definition?

In this case, rather than find the singular goal within my definition, I will step back and contend that it is only certain types of games that must have singular goals. For instance, in our discussion of Myers’ definition we have already seen that different players have different goals when playing a role playing game. While this can cause break down in the successful play of the game, in the cases where all players are able to pursue their individual goals within the game the game works well; more importantly, it certainly is a game. In addition, something not mentioned in our discussion before is that the goals of a role player are mutable – in different situations the same player may be pursuing different goals. But even though the player is changing goals, they are still playing the same game.

Which begs the question, if not all games are necessarily single goaled, what is the type of game that must have the same goal for all players and how does my definition contend with those games? Almost all contests fall into the category of having the same goals between players. The reason they need to have the same goals is because the challenge of a contest is to beat the other players – in order for the play to have the possibility of failure, the other players must be trying to attain the same results you are. While there are some contest like games that have different goals between players, these are the exception... and even then, the differing goals will be predictably similar between instances of the same game. In all these games the goals are codified by rules and failure to try to attain the goal means that the other players will not be appropriately challenged. Upon finding out that their opponent has not been following this rule they will feel cheated. How is it that the goal of these games has moved from ‘play’ to ‘rules’ and how does ‘finite system’ embody the rule of trying to achieve a goal?

First of all, it is important to observe that not following this rule is not necessarily the same as not following other rules. If I am not trying to win, you will only feel cheated if you feel that you are no longer having an appropriate challenge from your play. If ten people are racing, but one of them is pursuing a different goal that does not interfere, then the other nine will still be challenged by each other. All (including the differently goaled player) are still in the race. Likewise, if we are only playing a two player game, and my different goal does interfere with your attempt to win, but the interference neither makes your attempt too hard nor too easy, then it is likely that you will not feel cheated and that the game will go on. Whether or not it is still the same game is a point of contention, but I’m fairly certain that the resolution of this question must be subjective.

Secondly, while the goal may exist within the rules, its pursuit must still exist solely in the play. A rule may tell a player that in order to play a game they must attempt to change the state of the game to a particular condition, but the rules cannot be responsible for enforcing the intent of the player. Not only are the rules inert but intent is ultimately unknowable by any but the intender. It is only the player who can be unrealistic in their optimism or who acknowledges failure that can choose their intended outcomes. In other words, while goals may be found within rules, they are only ever pursued within play.

In terms of locating the rule coding for a goal within a finite system, I would like to suggest that any game that includes a rule of a particular goal contains a global state within which that goal is active. For instance, in a race, there is a state which describes a player as trying to win the race. However, the alternative state of not trying to win the race does not exist within the finite system – the finite system may refer to the state but it does not contain the state. At first, this may seem objectionable. Surely any state the finite system observes must be contained within the finite system?

To help with understanding how this can be, let me propose a simple game and then list the states that are contained within the game. The rules of the game are that you roll a dice until you roll any number other than a six. No goal within these rules. (Though note that in order to play you will need to have a goal – you can’t help but have a goal if you are going to be within the emotion of play. You can try to trick the system by trying to not having a goal while playing this game, but you will quickly observe that your optimism that you can do that is highly unrealistic.)

Now let me list the states of this simple game:

1) You are rolling the die
2) The die is showing a six

And that is it. There are no states within the game that include any of the other values that could be shown on the die. Each of the other values that could be shown are states that the die could be in, and the game certainly references the state of the die, but the only state of the die that is contained within the game is the one where it shows a six. From this it is not a stretch to see that one of the states that could be tracked within a game is the intent of the player, even if the only valid state for the players’ intent was trying to win the game.

Author Astray

Preface
I recently finished my Masters degree in ‘Digital Games Theory and Practice’. While I found the Theory part far more enjoyable (the Practice section was far too similar to my day job working at Lionhead) I am still happy with most of the work I put into the Practice sections. One of these assignments was writing a ‘review’ or a ‘post-mortem’ of a previous assignment – a short design doc. While I think I may still use the design doc for a future project, the post-mortem itself has likely seen the totality of its use. However, after reading it my mother told me that she found it relevant for her own creative process independent of the design document itself. Now, I’m not sure a mother’s praise can be taken at face value, but I still thought the least I should do was to self-publish the post-mortem online. So, here it is.

Introduction
Creating the ‘Auto de Fé’ design document has been an interesting journey. It was meant to take only a couple of months to write, but the process was interrupted several times. On the one hand, these interruptions have broken my concentration and constricted my schedule. On the other hand, they have given me more time to reflect. Because these reflections came mid-project they had a direct effect on the results of the ‘Auto de Fé’ project. For this I am grateful. I do not think the game design would have been as good without this mid-project chance for reflection. This document is a brief sketch of the key thoughts I’ve had, how they changed what I was creating and what (I hope) I’ve learned.

Missing the Forest Fire for the Falling Tree
When I started work on ‘Auto de Fé’ I started with a blank slate. My intention was to use experimental prototyping to explore a unique set of game mechanics in order to invent a new genre. However, I quickly hit a snag; I found it difficult to work experimentally within the provided prototyping environment. My initial reaction was to fight against the constraint placed upon me; a fight which I would ultimately lose. While I don’t consider picking that particular fight to be a bad call on my part, my reaction to losing it was. I continued harassing the issue long after I knew that I was stuck with the tools provided. Worse, I didn’t adapt my work practice to the designated tool set. I kept trying to work in the way I would have given my tools of choice. Needless to say, I didn’t make much progress with either strategy. If it wasn’t for the sudden interruption of serious crunch on Fable III, I don’t know where I would have ended up.

The long break away from working on ‘Auto de Fé’ gave me perspective. When I returned, I saw my mistake. Continuing to attempt a programmer’s approach of experimental prototyping in a context in which I was unfamiliar was madness. With perspective, I was able to revaluate what I needed to be working on. This is the first important lesson I learned working on this project; when things stop working the way I ‘need’ them to, step back and reconsider where my ‘needs’ are coming from. If a change in the way I work enables me to continue forward progress, even if it means changing my vision, then such a change is a good idea.

Starting Out of Time
Unfortunately, crunch on Fable III took a lot longer than I expected it to. Just when I thought I had finished, I was given a new set of responsibilities. When I finally came back to ‘Auto de Fé’, while I had a fresh perspective on how not to proceed, I was also out of time. I knew that an experimental prototype wouldn’t be easy given my tools and my now tight schedule, but I still needed some form of prototype. I just didn’t know how to proceed. So I went back to the project requirements and realised that the prototype portion of the work was not necessarily the ‘core’ task.

Over the years I’ve worked on a variety of projects in my spare time. One thing I’ve found over and over again is that projects will often have hard problem and easy problems. When I focus on only the hard problems, I sometimes get stuck and unable to make further progress. On the other hand, if I focus on the easy problems, I can end up going in a direction that makes the hard problems harder. While I don’t think I know yet where the best middle ground lies, I came to a new realisation from reflecting on what I needed to do next. When pressed for time, solve the biggest problems first. In the case of ‘Auto de Fé’, the design document was the big problem – the prototypes were meant to support the document, not the other way around. So I put my prototyping problems to the side and focused on the design and writing.

An Imperfect Match
At its core, ‘Auto de Fé’ is the combination of two ideas; creating a serious world where standard platform mechanics make sense and telling a story about Columbus as a privateer before he became famous. Both are ideas I’ve had for a long time, but I’d never really considered them together. The ‘serious platform game’ was an idea looking for a story while ‘Columbus as a Privateer’ was a story with no mechanics. I decided to try to fit the two together.

At first, everything went well. I found interesting ways to make jumping around an environment approachable and 15th Century Spain proved to be an interesting source for conflicts far beyond Columbus and privateers. However, as I got into the writing, I found that I continuously had to justify the two ideas to each other. These two ideas, having grown in wonderful ways as I worked with them, weren’t working well together. I either needed to make them mesh together or to drop one of the ideas.

So I started playing with my two ideas from a number of different perspectives, seeing what was important about them. What I found was that from the perspective of the world, it wasn’t particularly important why I’d crafted it the way I had. It didn’t matter that the world was made up of winged amphibians in order to justify the platform mechanics. It didn’t matter that the world had strong influences taken from the true history of Spain. What mattered was the end result; a world of medieval anthropomorphic swamp creatures. I didn’t need to explain that amphibians were Jewish and reptiles Christian. The conflict remained without the explanation and the explanation got in the way of the end result. Taking the time to explain why the world was the way it was did not further the end goal – writing a quality game design document. The lesson here is simple. It doesn’t matter where an idea comes from. It only matters where it is going.

The Perfect Curse
I now had a clear idea of where I was going, and only several thousand more words to write in order to get there. But these words – they weren’t coming. I knew what I wanted to say, I just couldn’t find the right way to say it. And every start I made just seemed to make the final product worse. This led to low motivation, and low motivation led to low productivity. Not a good thing when I was already running short on time.

But this is a lesson I’ve been taught before. Maybe one day it will stick. Perfection is impossible. As soon as I begin judging my work while I work on it, I will find myriad flaws. Trying to fix these flaws on the go is always a mistake; I have no scope to see which problems are the big ones. It is better to finish first, flaws included, and then make incremental changes that approach my ideals. The lesson; done is better than perfect.

A Different Type of Prototype
At the same time as I was solving the problems involved with getting the document finished, I began to look back in the other direction. I needed to figure out what I wanted to do for the prototypes. A discussion I’d had several months before suddenly clicked for me. What the prototypes showed was more important than how exhaustively they showed it. They were not being created for me, but for another audience.

When I think of prototyping, I think of experimental prototypes. When creating a set of mechanics I am unfamiliar with, I like to ‘feel out’ the possibility space of those mechanics. I do this by writing a prototype in a programming language I am comfortable with and then playing with the results. I push the resulting game mechanics both in directions towards my initial set of inspirations, but also in whichever direction maximises fun.

But experimental prototypes are not the only type of prototype that can be made. Specifically, for the purposes of presenting a work to others, it is more important that a prototype communicates an idea than that it explores a set of mechanics. In both cases, the prototype is exploring unfamiliar territory. In both cases, the prototype is meant as a proof of concept. But changing the audience of the prototype fundamentally changes the nature of the prototype. With an experimental prototype, I am exploring territory unfamiliar to myself in order to discover which set of mechanics are the most fun; a disproof is as important as a proof. With a prototype meant for an external audience, I need to elucidate territory that is familiar to me, but unfamiliar to them. The purpose of this type of prototype is to prove to my audience that I know what I am talking about. A disproof will just make me look bad.

In the end, the prototypes I made for ‘Auto de Fé’ are somewhere between these two... but the realisation of this difference is perhaps one of the most important discoveries I made during this process. It shines new light on previous conversations I’ve had throughout my career in the games industry.

Conclusion
It is surprisingly difficult to make things, whether full games or just designs for games. But with each making, whether success or failure, I learn something new. While a failure is a definite lesson, it is those projects that I finish that I learn the most from. I need to finish more projects in order to learn, not only those projects that have a framework of external expectation. A finished project doesn’t need to be perfect, but it needs to be done. It doesn’t need to solve all the problems before me; finishing something is more important than being truly innovative. When I get stuck, I need to find ways to push through, whether by forgiving my imperfections, concentrating on the most important tasks first or by focusing on the end product rather than all my cool ideas. And lastly, I need to learn to communicate my ideas to others if I’m ever going to get their help.

This last one scares me the most; while I am very precise in what I say, precision isn’t always the best path to understanding. And the discipline of design is, far more than I would like, about getting other people to understand ideas. I suspect learning these communication skills will be my major focus for the next several years.