delve
verb /delv/
delved, past participle; delved, past tense; delves, 3rd person singular present; delving, present participle
If anyone’s shocked by a Sunday update from the Acre, I apologize. I felt like putting together and sharing something personal, something outside the realm of the usual Wednesday posts.
A couple of notes on the video above:
I go on at length about a number of things Minecraft related in the video, but I’d just like to re-iterate here that, beyond a shadow of a doubt in my mind, that this game is creative therapy.
If you know me, you know I’m a huge fan of James Lipton and Inside the Actors Studio. As a resource for creative people that contains a wealth of information on the art of entertainment and trials and tribulations of fame, I’ve found it indispensable for encouraging and motivating me during this first year of life on the Acre.
There are two things in common with every episode: the guests will remind the students in attendance that success relies on hard work and luck, and Mister Lipton will begin the ironically named “classroom portion” of the program with Bernard Pivot’s questionnaire.
I Tweeted earlier this week about the establishment of an analogue to this program for game developers. Someone should do it, really, and not only because I want to be on such a program someday (hopefully many years down the road when I have a life worth researching and questioning) but because it could provide critical insight into the paths taken to becoming a successful game developer.
While there’s currently no version for us game devs, nothing’s stopping us from answering the questionnaire. So, along with whatever psychoanalysis you may have gleaned from the Minecraft video, I invite you to look inside my psyche again with the answers I give, and also to ask yourself the same questions. It may be useful to record your answers and then revisit them some time down the road, to see just how much has changed with the passage of time.
What is your favorite word?
I like “myriad”. It’s both a noun and an adjective that means “countless” or “innumerable”, like the stars in the sky or the differences between human beings. (Now, it’s clarity . –Ed.)
What is your least favorite word?
No. I don’t like being told it, and I don’t like telling it to people. Of course I know what it means, and respect it in delicate situations, but if my persistence is being tested you can be damn sure I’m going to push back until I get proper reasons for the denial or a much more favorable “yes”.
What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Having my work appreciated for what it’s worth by someone other than myself. Getting feedback, both positive and negative, about my craft is just such a great thrill for me. (These days, the less I hear from the public, the better. –Ed.)
What turns you off?
Mortality. Knowing that someday I’m going to die kinda sucks. (I’ve long since made my peace with this. –Ed.)
What is your favorite curse word?
Fuck, if that still counts. I read somewhere that it’s become too commonplace. We need new swears.
What sound or noise do you love?
When a woman cries out in genuine ecstasy. Rare and beautiful.
What sound or noise do you hate?
Drunken anger or spitefulness.
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Plastic surgeon. Had I known better I would have focused on that from the beginning and spent my life getting paid to help people look “beautiful”.
What profession would you not like to do?
I wouldn’t like to work for anyone other than myself, so I guess that rules out a whole swath of things. (I lived this dream from 2008 to 2025. It was okay. –Ed.)
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
Welcome back.
Minecraft is copyright © Mojang AB.
Inside the Actors Studio is copyright © Bravo Media LLC.
[Lost content, image. Alt-text “Navigation, WIP”]
What is it?
A Smash TV/Robotron clone/homage. That should pretty much cover almost all questions & expectations you may have.
Why are you making it?
It was spawned out of frustration from the lack of feeling any tangible progress on The Child.
Call it therapy, if you will.
When can I play it?
With luck there’ll be a truncated version up on Kongregate before I leave for Tokyo next Tuesday.
Does this mean you’re shelving/cancelling The Child!?
No.
Good God, I’m writing a zombie story.
It all started with a little sketch I was doing of a person taking apart a katana, and before I knew it I had 1000 bleak words in a story about the walking dead.
I know, I know. “Zombies? Really?” Yes, really. On the one hand, I’m getting it out of my system. On the other, it might actually be awesome and worth reading, and excite zombie fans everywhere. I know that people who are into the living dead are as hungry for new content as their undead pals are for brains, so hopefully this will entertain those of you who count yourselves among those numbers.
That should also be published before I leave for Japan. (This never happened, and I have no idea where I put that story, nor what it was. –Ed.)
So that’s just a short shout out from the Acre for this week. Two mini projects to stave off the soul-crushing death-march of the larger ones. If it’s anything critically important that I’ve learned this week it’s how important it is to have creative diversion from the main bodies of work.
In doing Smash-o-Tron I’ve managed to discover several coding tricks that were eluding me on the Child. The time spent cooking up this smaller game has already paid off. If you’re having trouble continuing to work on your opus or prime project, why not sit down and sketch out something completely different for a little while? You don’t have to get deep with it, just enough to get a bit of that achievement therapy I talked about in the Minecraft blog on Sunday. It’s working for me, it just might work for you too.
Thanks for tuning in this week, and as always I invite you subscribe and follow on the G+ if you haven’t already, and if you have thank you very much.
P.S. Whether or not there’ll be a week 48 report depends on how busy the next 7 days are, what with flight preparations and all, so if it slips I apologize in advance and if it doesn’t just ignore the last 40 words.
[Lost content, likely an image link to the Smash-O-Tron project page.]
Dark Acre’s Smash-O-Tron is coming together!
I’ve posted a couple of times about the value and practice of social networking. You know, posting status updates and adding Friends and all that.
Something I’ve noticed as of late is that I’ve been suffering somewhat from engagement guilt.
What’s that, you ask? It’s that feeling you get when you log into your Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus and find that you can’t or don’t want to respond to everyone who’s linked up with you.
I notice this a lot, not just on my own lists of folks, but on others. How many comments go unanswered? How many of the big soc-net “nodes”, you know, the celebrities who fire-and-forget their posts, feel the same?
It’s not easy being green, I guess. I often wonder if networked humanity is on a fast train to hell with all of its open sockets of engagement that go unanswered? All people want is a little attention, and while it may be somewhat satisfying to re-post an animated .GIF of a cat bouncing off a wall, it’s far more to get an actual conversation happening.
There’s an interesting threshold that exists between being a relative unknown, say a person who’s contributing little of interest and Following many more than being Followed, and someone like Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson who Follows no one yet has a million (ONE MILLION!) Followers.
[Lost content, likely and image of the Rock’s Twitter account.]
Between the two poles you have all manner of soc-net citizen. There’s the raw re-poster, who trawls the world wide webs and brings back targeted links. There’s the commentator, someone who’s cultivating their criticism of a certain facet of information. I’ve already mention the celeb, who could post a picture of their half-eaten lunch and get a few thousand re-Tweets or Shares before it’s digested. Some of these people are focused, others not so much.
If we step back and say, “don’t take this all so seriously, Jack, it’s only the Internet for Christ’s sake”, it becomes a lot easier to manage. Why should I care? It’s not like status updates are people, right?
Right?
That’s the thing, though. They are people. And that’s where it gets hard, if I want to inject any sort of humanity into the mix. The real problem is that there’s actual work to be done, and what soc-nets have become is just another distraction from the tasks at hand.
I’d love to have hard figures to quote on the number of times I’ve seen (indie developers in particular) complaining about not having gotten any work done, when their soc-net feed is chock-a-block with updates for the few hours prior to their breakdown. There might be some causality there, but I’m no psychologist so it’s all conjecture.
Regardless, in the past few months I’ve found that by streamlining my soc-net use and isolating the time I spend on them that I’ve gotten a lot more work done. There was a brief period in July where I was letting it get the better of me, and I found that by limiting my primary feeds to information I care about (thank you G+, Facebook, and Twitter for allowing me to Hide, Circle, and List all the data flow) that I was able to get more work done.
Sometimes the best thing an indie developer can do is turn off the soc-nets and build the damn game.
It’s been an incredible week for Kickstarters, and these two projects spotlight two different ways to go about orchestrating success on the crowd-sourcing tip.
I’ll let the video do the talking there. The main reason Mr. Boyer’s managed to rocket past his initial goal was due to his vast amount of social proof. He’s a known variable with a track-record of getting things done, and he’s preparing to provide a service that has clear and present demand. Are you someone like this, with a similar offer? Kickstart your way to happiness. (This one aged like milk. –Ed.)
Again, the video should make it clear that this is hard-rock candy set to serve a market that’s starving for this content. Here the lack of immediately-evident social proof is more than made up for by the quality of the presentation. It’s obvious that there’s a lot of groundwork already laid for this project, so much so that it’s a foregone conclusion that it’ll become a reality and we’re just contributing to its final polish.
Two excellent examples of crowd-sourcing on Kickstarter done right. I fully endorse both of these and you could find far worse projects to back if you’re a supporter of video games and the culture in general.
Will the Acre ever again dare to reach out to public funding in this manner? Possibly, but not before all other avenues have been exhausted.
By the time you read this I’ll either be the victim of a horrible air accident over the Pacific, or doing stuff like depicted in the above video. I’ll be in Tokyo for two weeks, and maybe some of you are too? If you’re in town for the Tokyo Game Show, drop me a line and let’s have a beer or sake and talk game development! As always, I invite you to subscribe to the Acre and perhaps we’ll have something to report next week besides a massive hangover…
2011.09.01 – 2011.09.30