State of the jmac.
Feb. 14th, 2010 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progWork is work. There's stuff worth talking about but nothing I'd want to blog about; so goes working for oneself. The overall status of Appleseed and my relationship with it remains stable.
I want to finish the next Gameshelf before PAX, which affords me another five weeks. I've put a lot of work into it (as have many friends), but my motivation level now is not nearly as strong as it was a couple of months ago. This is in part because of the resurgence my interest in -- wait for it -- gaming, or anyway gaming of a particular nature, and the novel creative paths this activity has been urging me down.
I found my interest in multiplayer online digital games re-ignited last month. This started with my rediscovery of TF2 on Xbox, built itself up with my ensuing seeking out and palling around with certain online communities of mature gamers, and most recently culminated with the surprise re-launch of Planbeast.
I'm not sure what pushed me to actually do it, but at the start of the month I made a post about Planbeast to Geezer Gamers, a web-based community of grown-up Xbox Live fans I'd been hanging around long enough so that I could make a project-pimping post without feeling like a spammer. The next thing I knew, the Planbeast website actually grew a bunch of events from people other than myself. The interest has died down somewhat from its initial spike, but it remains far higher than it was at any earlier point.
Tending to this effectively sopped up all of my attention for an entire week, and made my thoughts wander even further afield. And: I loved every minute of it. I am starting to cultivate a new obsession. Planbeast, after all, is the child of a greater interest: researching the state of multiplayer video games, isolating its faults, and investigating the ways it could be improved. I have a lot of loose notes about this which I'm presently choosing to spare you. You will be informed when I have patted them together into some more concrete shape.
To give you a taste, here are four tweets I made on the topic:
One related whim of particular interest is an untitled web game project, based on a design I scribbled together last fall while I was thinking about Facebook games. It's a web-based multiplayer game of a sort that I've never seen before, and might not actually work, but deem Absolutely Worth Creating just the same. I really want to block out a month or so of free time and make it happen.
The problem with all this is that I hate pretending that I can multitask. If I can't focus all my attention on one thing, then I become effectively paralyzed. I celebrate Planbeast's surprise resurgence, but it's absolutely had a negative effect on every other boldfaced creative facet of my life, whose demands on my attention didn't get magically put on pause just because this one project went into an unexpected good-crisis mode.
I suppose the correct thing to do is concentrate on shipping that Gameshelf episode while continuing to chalk up my weekly quota of Appleseed billables, and let the other stuff sit until after PAX. I hate that, because what I really want to do is clear the table and work on the new and awesome stuff instead.
Right now, as I sit here typing, the thought of working on the video while the game stuff sits there, glistening and gravid with potential, makes me feel very impatient with myself. I say: wouldn't it be awesome to show up at PAX with that crazy game idea all done, and playable? Wouldn't that be better than having a dumb little video done? I ask myself this, nodding and salivating, and paying no heed to my past self who was so excited about the prospect of that same video, just weeks ago.
I wonder how much of that is the fault of the ol' Lizard Brain, the force that doesn't want me to ever ship anything, because shipping leads to critique, and nothing is more terrifying than that to one's internal troglodyte, crouching on the brainstem in worry. It would much rather I just start these cockamamie projects but never finish them, forever. Nice and safe, that way.
But I also know that it's the game stuff that I have the most holy-crap levels of excitement about right now, and it seems like wasting an opportunity to ignore that. Don't I do my best work when I'm at my most impassioned about the topic? Why do I want to deny myself that?
This is what brings paralysis.
I want to finish the next Gameshelf before PAX, which affords me another five weeks. I've put a lot of work into it (as have many friends), but my motivation level now is not nearly as strong as it was a couple of months ago. This is in part because of the resurgence my interest in -- wait for it -- gaming, or anyway gaming of a particular nature, and the novel creative paths this activity has been urging me down.
I found my interest in multiplayer online digital games re-ignited last month. This started with my rediscovery of TF2 on Xbox, built itself up with my ensuing seeking out and palling around with certain online communities of mature gamers, and most recently culminated with the surprise re-launch of Planbeast. I'm not sure what pushed me to actually do it, but at the start of the month I made a post about Planbeast to Geezer Gamers, a web-based community of grown-up Xbox Live fans I'd been hanging around long enough so that I could make a project-pimping post without feeling like a spammer. The next thing I knew, the Planbeast website actually grew a bunch of events from people other than myself. The interest has died down somewhat from its initial spike, but it remains far higher than it was at any earlier point.
Tending to this effectively sopped up all of my attention for an entire week, and made my thoughts wander even further afield. And: I loved every minute of it. I am starting to cultivate a new obsession. Planbeast, after all, is the child of a greater interest: researching the state of multiplayer video games, isolating its faults, and investigating the ways it could be improved. I have a lot of loose notes about this which I'm presently choosing to spare you. You will be informed when I have patted them together into some more concrete shape.
To give you a taste, here are four tweets I made on the topic:
Shooters are the superhero comics of the multiplayer videogame world. The medium's potential is vast, but nobody wants to leave the house.My guiding light, here, is a piece of self-realization about my relationship with games, come to me a good decade after I got back into the tabletop gameplay hobby: I am far more interested in media that bring people together through play, rather than solitaire play experiences. This is true in both face-to-face games, and the much (much) newer world of online games. As for the latter, for all its good press, its exploration beyond the familiar is so goddamn timid it drives me up a wall. I want to do something about it.
Spider-Man (the character) and TF2 are best-case scenarios of their respective sub-genres, building on decades of art. I am glad they exist.
But the continued super-ultra focus on gun-fetish games or underwear-crimefighter stories rolls on anyway, as if there's no other path.
Part of what I wanna do with Planbeast is help strengthen the signal of all the other MP games that are unheard in the chattering gunfire.
One related whim of particular interest is an untitled web game project, based on a design I scribbled together last fall while I was thinking about Facebook games. It's a web-based multiplayer game of a sort that I've never seen before, and might not actually work, but deem Absolutely Worth Creating just the same. I really want to block out a month or so of free time and make it happen.
The problem with all this is that I hate pretending that I can multitask. If I can't focus all my attention on one thing, then I become effectively paralyzed. I celebrate Planbeast's surprise resurgence, but it's absolutely had a negative effect on every other boldfaced creative facet of my life, whose demands on my attention didn't get magically put on pause just because this one project went into an unexpected good-crisis mode.
I suppose the correct thing to do is concentrate on shipping that Gameshelf episode while continuing to chalk up my weekly quota of Appleseed billables, and let the other stuff sit until after PAX. I hate that, because what I really want to do is clear the table and work on the new and awesome stuff instead.
Right now, as I sit here typing, the thought of working on the video while the game stuff sits there, glistening and gravid with potential, makes me feel very impatient with myself. I say: wouldn't it be awesome to show up at PAX with that crazy game idea all done, and playable? Wouldn't that be better than having a dumb little video done? I ask myself this, nodding and salivating, and paying no heed to my past self who was so excited about the prospect of that same video, just weeks ago.
I wonder how much of that is the fault of the ol' Lizard Brain, the force that doesn't want me to ever ship anything, because shipping leads to critique, and nothing is more terrifying than that to one's internal troglodyte, crouching on the brainstem in worry. It would much rather I just start these cockamamie projects but never finish them, forever. Nice and safe, that way.
But I also know that it's the game stuff that I have the most holy-crap levels of excitement about right now, and it seems like wasting an opportunity to ignore that. Don't I do my best work when I'm at my most impassioned about the topic? Why do I want to deny myself that?
This is what brings paralysis.