A clever person turns great troubles into little ones, and little ones into nothing at all.

–(attrib) Chinese Proverb

I am obsessed with efficiency. I like problems to be solved quickly, effectively, and with a minimum of fuss. Myers-Briggs pegs me solidly as INTJ, and while I don’t necessarily ascribe completely with the evaluation, it’s definitely fitting in a lot of ways. I want things to be done in tidy ways, and I tend to feel like any problem that is solved with brute force is being solved inefficiently.

I’m also fascinated by the solutions to problems. I love to hear about the clever processes people have discovered to solve otherwise unsolvable (or extremely difficult) issues. I equally love little life hacks, ways of creating little efficiencies and helpful tricks in everyday life, particularly if they’re not intuitive but highly effective. Anything that makes me go “wow, that works? I would never have thought of that” catches my attention.

Similarly, my favorite entertainment to watch involves highly skilled people doing the thing they’re highly skilled at. This can be everything from professional League of Legends to Iron Chef to Ocean’s Eleven and other heist movies. I like to see how things are done at a high tier of skill, sometimes to learn, sometimes just to appreciate demonstrations of skill.

I love terrible jokes. They’re really the best. Awful dad jokes, excruciating puns, you name it.

Rather than going on a list of truly outrageously awful jokes, I actually want to try to analyze WHY I like them. Kodra or Ash would probably say it’s because I’m a terrible person who feeds on the anguish of others, and while that’s not entirely false, I feel like there’s more to that story.

Cognitive dissonance is the term for the mental friction between two thoughts or concepts that either contradict one another or just don’t fit. It’s a weird form of discomfort, like pulling a muscle, except that the muscle is your brain. It’s also a really potent source of distress– when you pull a muscle, you limp a little bit, because you’re forced to adjust how you move. When your brain undergoes the same effect, it can force you to reevaluate how you think. I’m a big fan of anything that forces thoughts to go sideways, or otherwise flex in unusual ways.

A really excellent awful joke is like a bridge with a gap in the middle. To cross it, you have to jump, and that jump is a brief thrill for your brain as it adjusts. As you “get” the joke, everything snaps into place suddenly and you laugh. Like a puzzle or a math problem or any other sort of challenge, it’s a brief moment where your brain gets to bend in a slightly unusual way, and it keeps your mind sharp.

Also, I do sustain myself on the anguish of others. Hence the puns.

The link, if you’re not familiar, is on my sidebar. I have never been much for podcasts, there are relatively few that I listen to, and none regularly. I’ve had a few people ask me to participate in podcasts, and I’ve generally declined, partly because when I’ve been working in the games industry I’ve worried about having people potentially think I’m speaking for the company, when I’m speaking only for myself, but mostly because I don’t feel like I have very much terribly useful to say.

The same, honestly, is true for blogging. I’ve long hid behind “I can’t blog because of paperwork I’ve signed” as a shield behind which the reality is I generally don’t feel like I have useful or interesting things to say. Even this blog didn’t really take off until I framed it as a repository of my thoughts and ideas. We’ll see how well that works.

Participating in Aggrochat has helped me unwind a bit. With the gentle but relentless tidal forces he emits, Bel managed to talk me into doing a few shows, which became more shows until I’m more or less a regular on the cast. I occasionally put on my “game designer hat” and go on some rant or another, which hopefully doesn’t put anyone off, but on the whole it’s rarely any different from my usual nights just talking with Rae, Ash, Kodra, and Bel.

At any rate, hopefully it’s worth a listen. As I say in August 30th’s episode, come here and tell me when I’m wrong, it’ll be fun.

I’m continually frustrated by politics. This is probably true of everyone in this and every other country. Kodra, if pressed, will probably tell you that I’ve said that I hate talking politics, and this is generally true. I take serious issue with the “red vs blue” political spectrum, and the unyieldingly trenchant taking of sides that marks most political “debate”.

The entire thing makes me think of MMOs. I’ve long said that two-faction PvP doesn’t work terribly well, as it leads to massive imbalances and a lot of direct butting of heads without a lot of nuance. The same is true of politics. In the meantime, PvP factions in excessive numbers tend to create a big, disorganized mess (and my limited understanding is that the same is true of politics in other countries as well).

I do, however, think that games make for good microcosms of society in many cases, and there’s a lot to be gleaned about the political system by looking at the smaller analogues in player organizations in games. Resource management, policymaking, conflict resolution, all need addressing and there are some very compelling practices that both sides can glean from one another.

On top of that, I feel that in the same way we’re seeing games become extremely mainstream, we’re likely to see the same thing creep into the political sphere. We’re not too far out from a government where a majority of the participants play video games at some level, and I can’t help but wonder how that will change things, if at all.

People are fascinating, frustrating, and fantastic. The ways in which we communicate, play, and share with one another are myriad, and while my usual medium for that sort of thing is games, I’m no less interested in the differences between media.

I also find it fascinating to see how our media shapes our culture, the things we do, say, and think. Ten years ago it would have been unheard of for the “popular kids” in high school to even know what a d20 was, much less use one for anything. The other day, a friend of mine told me a story about his middle-school-aged daughter, who was nearly in tears because a boy she had a crush on was playing in a D&D game that she wasn’t invited to. I can only imagine my friend’s reaction to this– he’s been DMing tabletop RPGs for 20 or 30 years, works in video games, and here is an opportunity to become The Best Dad Ever, hosting a game for his daughter and folding her into a group she desperately wanted to be a part of.

Twenty years ago, the idea of everyone having a phone, an instant camera, a notepad, a game boy, a voice recorder, an up-to-the-minute map, a source of driving directions, and a boombox all at once, constantly, would have been laughable. Now I carry around a device that does all of this and more and is less than half the size of my wallet. The cultural shift that’s followed has been immense. We’ve gotten food porn and the selfie, two frivolous but extremely popular things that have only arisen because we have smartphones, and up-to-the-minute news comes from actual people reporting events live on twitter, for the entire world to see, and countries that try to censor their media find out just how difficult it is to stop the signal.

Culture has been undergoing a seismic shift over the past few decades, and the speed with which it’s changing is only increasing.

Yep. Boring, I know. Part of this is that as I advance my career and my education, I’m learning a lot more about both business and money. That’s not really the cause of my interest, though.

We (by which I mean the ‘we’ that is likely to read this post) tend to vilify corporate interests without a second thought. I’ve spoken to many people, some of whom are good friends, who are quick to use words like “greedy”, “stupid”, and “selfish” to describe businesspeople in general, regardless of industry. I think this is a failure of perspective. I wouldn’t call a Starcraft master an idiot because they can’t explain to me the story of Mass Effect, because we’re playing different games. Similarly, the professional gamer isn’t greedy because she accepts money to play games.

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, I think it’s important to see all of the different sides of a given story. I’m in the unique position of being able to get a good look at both sides of things, and it’s something I’m hoping will give me a good position to talk about. I think that making sense of decisions on both sides is important– beyond simply “why didn’t game X include my favorite feature” or “why did they cancel game Y” to more complex questions: “why aren’t we getting more Mega Man games?”

I don’t think these are necessarily simply answered, and I suspect there are a lot of questions that would come from the executive business side that we find easy to answer. I’m hoping I can find myself in a good “bridge” position that lets me speak intelligently to and on behalf of both sides.

I occasionally have people ask me why I do things, or why I think things. It’s not always an easy question to answer, as it requires that I analyze myself and my motivations. In the course of doing so, I usually either find I feel more strongly about something than I thought I did, or don’t care about something that I previously fought fervently over. I like it when people ask me questions and challenge my worldview, because it tends to mean that there’s a perspective that I’ve missed, or it lets me analyze and become more secure in my convictions (if I can adequately defend my thoughts).

Every so often, I find that there are some very simple questions that I have a hard time answering, which is an interesting situation to be in. A great example is “what kinds of games do you play?”

It’s not a simply answered question. The flippant answer is “everything”, or “everything good”, but those are non-answers, both untrue (I don’t play everything, that would be impossible and very expensive) or vague and elitist (by saying I only play “good” games, I’m implying that what I think is good is somehow an objective view of ‘good’, and that everyone else should be able to recognize what I mean by my shorthand, which is an incredibly arrogant stance to take). A real answer would take an incredibly long time; I play quite a few games and listing them all out would take ages. A better answer is probably “I play games that are culturally relevant, either because of massive ad campaigns or word-of-mouth or because of the issues addressed therein, and I particularly like games that I can play cooperatively with my friends and/or have a strong focus of some kind, be that exploration, narrative, puzzle-solving, reflexes, or what-have-you”.

Sometimes, the flippant answer is best:

Q: “Why are you writing 30 posts in about as many hours?”

A: “Because Ashgar doesn’t think I can, and I’m concerned he might be right.”

One of the really neat things about having grown up playing games is getting to see the advances the industry has made, and in turn the leaps and bounds by which games have advanced themselves. Watching games evolve from chip-sound and monochromatic graphics to the audiovisual extravaganzas we have today has been a wild ride, to say the least. More than that, though, the ways in which we play games have evolved significantly.

We are long past the days where games were mostly played by teenage boys, and we’ve left the days where games meant a specific, dedicated machine used for no other purpose far behind. Arcades have risen and fallen in most places in the world, replaced by the home consoles and ubiquitous PCs. Solo or small-group multiplayer has given way to online play, and couch-gaming is rapidly less and less of the overall games breakdown as mobile and social games take the fore.

In and among all of this, the games themselves have been rapidly evolving. You can trace the lineage of many games back to their roots, and with any luck, following those paths might hint at where games will go.

We’re on the cusp of a variety of new technologies– Google Glass is poised to either overhaul our relationship with our personal devices or fall flat, while advances in streaming technology get us closer and closer to gaming on the cloud, without specialized equipment or physical software. In the meantime, tools advancements and rapidly developing middleware on the industry side are making it easier and faster to make games, while perpetually driving up the quality bar, and indies are filling in the gaps left by the massive rise in production values.

Whether any of this is sustainable is up for (heavy) debate, but one way or another the future of games should be exciting.

My taste in games has continually evolved, and as games have become more and more varied, I’ve made a specific point to try out new types of games I don’t expect to like, and try to avoid the trap of developing tastes so rarefied that few games meet my hyper-specific standards.

It’s a philosophy that’s hard to maintain– I need to constantly try things I don’t think I’ll like and push myself out of my gaming comfort zone. For a long time, I motivated myself by thinking this was, essentially, a professional requirement of being a game designer. Now, the habit is so ingrained that I do it automatically. It’s done wonders for my enjoyment of video games, because with so many games coming out, there are plenty that I find I enjoy, and it’s given me a better idea of the kinds of games I’ll enjoy.

That being said, I still have my esoteric tastes that I don’t often expect to see, but would love to see more of. I am an avid fan of the Thief series, every game that’s come out, and the most recent one, while panned by critics, was a joy for me. It specifically triggers my love for ghosting through the darkness in games, NPCs around me totally unaware of my passing. I will cheerfully sit on a rooftop for ten minutes watching guard patrols before making a move, which is a particular bit of fun I fully recognize most people think is crazy.

Occasionally, I’ll talk about games that I really want to see, even if I don’t think they have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever getting made. Every so often I’ll be surprised (Mirror’s Edge 2? What?)

I have a dog. Her name is River, after River Tam, because the pun was too good to resist. Here she is, I’ll get the cute puppy picture out of the way first:

River, my dog.

When I was very young, I was attacked by a German Shepherd, who jumped over a fence to knock me down and bite three-year-old me. Not growing up in a household with dogs, or having any close friends or family with dogs, this initial experience instilled a deep phobia that stuck with me for a very long time. Throughout grade school, I would actively avoid visiting friends’ houses who had dogs, and I grew to deeply dislike and distrust people who would force their dogs on me, claiming that they were “harmless” or “just wants you to say hi”.

This lasted for more than twenty years. After I left Austin, I met a co-worker who would become a close friend of mine. He and his wife were incredibly friendly and welcoming and I loved hanging out with them, even though they had a pair of dogs. One was a large mutt, and the other was a friendly beagle. Both were perceptive and immediately recognized that I was extremely uncomfortable around them, and generally stayed entirely out of my way, either motionless across the room or in another room entirely. This suited me fine, and I enjoyed hanging out despite the dogs.

Over time, I became more familiar, and while the larger dog continued to be ambivalent towards me, the friendly beagle developed a need to make friends with me. As my friend’s wife later put it, “he didn’t understand how there could be anyone in the world who didn’t want to pet him”. Over the course of almost a year, the beagle would sit a little bit closer every time I’d visit. First, across the room. Next, on the floor near the TV. Next, at the far end of the couch. Then, on the couch. Then, a cushion closer to me. Finally, after about nine months of this slow indoctrination, I looked up to see my friend’s wife taking a picture of me and beaming. I had been idly patting the beagle for several minutes without having noticed it. It took some reinforcement after that, but I’d slowly been broken of my intense dog phobia.

River, my shih tzu above, is the final step of puppy therapy. I got her as an eight-week-old puppy and have raised and trained her myself. I am, I think, finally over my dog phobia.