Interest
There’s a proverb, “genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains.” The main thing that determines our capacity to do well at a task is how much we work at that task; the main things that determine how much we…
Category Essays
Surface Level
Way back when I started this blog, one of the first essays I did was about conceiving of a game as the combination of three related spaces – physical, mechanical, and narrative – and gameplay as the act of allowing…
Priceless
There’s an idea I have a hard time getting myself away from: The idea that it is necessary to create. The idea that it is necessary to add value, to contribute, to build up. That is, the idea that our…
Processing
I’m thinking about how I think; I’m processing my process. For whatever reason I seem to be a weirdo who ends up thinking about things a bit too much – most of the time this is super inconvenient because it…
Context and Quantity
I feel that this is probably an essay that I should preface with the disclaimer that I don’t really know what I’m talking about here. This is a chain of thoughts and suppositions which grazes on some touchy subjects, and…
Body of Knowledge
I’ve been thinking about ideas and about plagiarism. The concept of stealing ideas is a bit of a tricky one, since it conceives of ideas as having a single origin point, or of being discrete and quantifiable things – but…
Being Heard
Among other ways to think about games, one that I rarely hear spoken of is their capacity as attention engines. Among the many social and emotional needs we have as human beings is our desire to be heard – even…
Agnostic Objects
A game is a collection of symbols and rules for how those symbols can interact with one another. I described these as being obstacles and tools, one of which defines the parameters of success and the other of which are…
Diagnosis
My energy ebbs and flows. I have good days, bad days, and runs of each which last weeks and sometimes months. Every time I have a few good days or a few bad days in a row I feel like…
Puzzling
I thought of a piece to write but I realized I didn’t have much to say about it. I was going to discuss the texture of canvas and brush and how they work to create texture in a painting, how…