Love of Money
The saying that the love of money is the root of all evil is both very useful and very misleading. It is a specific case of a principle that one can easily generalize: The love of means over the ends…
Category Life in the Machine
Aftermath
President Trump. President Donald fucking Trump. The last few days have been strange. There was a kind of trick we played on each other as kids, where we’d hold one fist on the other person’s head, hit it lightly with…
Skins and Costumes
Halloween keeps growing. More and more over time, this act of pretending, and of naked greed for candy, has defined who we are. It’s expanded, taken over the entire month. October is Halloween now. It’s a couple of days before…
Zeroes and Heroes
How is a number like a hero? How is an equation like a tragedy? First: The world as we perceive is not the world as it is. As we perceive the world we live in, through our sense of sight…
Numb
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how finding an audience is tied to finding a community, and generally being more open as a way to access more energy and creativity. Since then, I’ve been trying to be more…
Somewhere Out There
I am not an outgoing person. This is a trait that represents a significant obstacle as an artist, and I’m just now beginning to see how much of my time and effort has gone towards denying these problems rather than…
Monstrous
What are monsters? Are they scary or just strange? It’s a shifty word that keeps on shifting. Monsterness is in the eye of the beholder – although, with the beholder being, itself, a monster made of eyes, this may be…
Makers
Creation is so much harder than creativity. Creation is engineering, is sport, physically and mentally exhausting, the tiny motions, tapping of keys, scraping of pencils. Creation springs from creativity, is rooted in the imagination, but can only manifest through days…
EverEnding DevBlog, July 2016: Underground
It’s going better now. Rather than hammering my head constantly against the glacial mass of animation work that needs to be completed, I’m approaching the project from many angles now, largely with a view towards completing a vertical slice of…
Empirical
As time goes on and I write more posts for Problem Machine, I notice certain themes emerging, repeating themselves in slight variation. One of these is the idea that there are no good or bad elements of game design, only…