It has been a very long time since I posted a Sunday Poem. I am about to get on another airplane in the morning, so I am posting it a day early.

This one’s bones came to me on a return flight from up the California coast, seeing the marine layer hovering at the edge of the ocean. It sat tall, far taller than any of the hills or cliffs. It looked a cliff itself, a glacier, maybe The Wall from Game of Thrones, overhanging the land. It looked like a shoreline in an inverted world where everything we are was lost in the dark except the little twinkling lights.

Seeing the clouds as an ocean is hardly new, of course, but it stuck with me as we descended. I thought about the liminal perspective a plane affords, an upbringing affords, and recited phrases to myself, trying to commit them to memory before they darted away like nervous fish. It has seen minimal revision from that version, scribbled onto an iPad in the airport parking lot.

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So, I have been working on the process to color all the cartoons in the revised Theory of Fun edition. I thought I might share some samples of the way it is looking so far.

The original cartoons were done very quickly, which is why they were in such a rough, naif sort of style. They were also done with ink on paper, rather than digitally. I am trying to have the coloring be in keeping with that… I want something that feels fairly organic, even though I am doing all the coloring on the computer.

So I tried out doing plain flat shading, and gradients, and that sort of thing… but ended up using a custom brush to get a bit more of a painted look with more color variation.

In the process, I am also replacing the Comic Sans with my own handwriting font, like I used in the 10 Years Later presentation.

There are well over a hundred of these to do, of course. I am on pace to do multiple a day right now, although the flu has gotten in the way a bit.

In other news, though, the contract still isn’t finalized, so I am a bit ahead of myself anyway. But that’s OK.

See a before and after comparison:

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So, the revised edition of A Theory of Fun is indeed in process. I thought I would post an update for everyone.

Where we are

I have been going back and forth with the publisher on what exactly needs to be revised. I have my own list, and I was hoping that the revisions would be shaped by responses from people as to things they disagreed with or have changed over time. I haven’t gotten a lot of those, alas… many thanks to those who have sent in stuff!

The reason this matters now, before any writing actually starts, is in order to set schedules for milestones. That said, I fully expect the coloring of all the artwork to take far longer than the text revision.

One thing that I have gotten as a vibe overall is “don’t break it.” Meaning, don’t change it too much or revise it to the point where it loses the qualities that make it what it is.

One big example of this that has come up and is still up in the air is the layout format of the book. As you know, it’s a non-standard trim size, wider than it is tall, and famously fits poorly on many bookshelves. I ran an informal poll on Twitter, and got very split results as to whether to change that. One of the biggest reasons in favor is that if it changes to a standard trim size, it cam move to print-on-demand in the book supply chain, and then it’ll tend to never fall out of print the way that it has in the past. Right now, when copies run out, the print run needs to be manually ordered. Plus, ebook versions mean that the layout aspect has already been somewhat lost. But a lot of folks seem to have great affection for what has been called “a bastard form of a picture book” … so we’ll see!

What’s done

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Next year will mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Fun as a book. The publisher is planning a second edition in full color!

The contract isn’t signed just yet, because I owe them an outline for the revisions. Needless to say, I get to do revised text, and this is where I would like to ask for help. The book is so widely used by folks in the industry that I want to make sure that it has all of the right stuff in it — updated science, latest thinking on game cognition and learning, new thoughts on game ethics — all of it.

I would love to get more eyes on the problem. So if you’re up for it, I would love for as many people as possible to

• (re)read the book – hey, it’s short!
• make a note of everywhere you want to argue, and tell me where and why. I’ll argue back in the actual text (well, I’ll try to make my case better, how’s that).
• make a note of any useful or cool references, science, news, or whatever that fits with what is already there. A lot has happened in ten years.
• any errata? (I already know about the mistake in the drawing of the go board… anything else?)

I realize this is a huge favor… needless to say, anyone who helps will get acknowledged in the new edition.

Another thing that has come up occasionally is use of the book in a classroom setting. If anyone here has ideas on how to make it better for that use, I’d love to hear about those too. Are you an academic who has used the book in a classroom setting? Do you have study guide questions or discussion topics? I am currently unsure whether this sort of material would land in the book or on the website, but given how widely it’s used for this purpose, it seems like a great resource to make available.

Finally, there’s the possibility of adding other new stuff. I don’t want to try cramming game grammar into a single new chapter, but… if there were additional material of some sort in the book, like a whole new chapter, what would you want it to be?

Feel free to add whatever you can in the comment thread here, or to use the contact form to connect with me on this (I’m not going to post an email address here, to avoid spam, but if you use the form, I can email back).

I’m excited about this — though I do expect that most of my time will be spent coloring the cartoons.

After a bunch of painful adventures with domain registrars and WHOIS and other stuff, I am happy to say that the A Theory of Fun for Game Design book website is back.

In the process, I also modernized it — it’s all CSS fancy now, instead of using ancient Javascript stuff to make highlighting buttons. It’s got a fresh coat of paint on it, and actually looks like it was maybe made this century, maybe.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

It’s been a while since I had big news to post about the book! But here it is: A Theory of Fun is on Kindle finally. I am told that it took a while to do the Kindle conversion because of all of the images. It is also available in a variety of other formats at the O’Reilly online store.

I have seen a few odd glitches here and there in the Kindle version, things like the press quotes and reviews, but the book seems to have come through nicely, albeit with a few less penguins (the chapter header ones are gone). The cartoons are more like small illustrations inset into the text.

Amazon has it on sale for $9.99, so it’s definitely the cheapest way to get the book. Plus, you can send Kindle books as gifts now (nudge nudge). I probably earn more money if you get it from O’Reilly though.

Boston Photographs

There is a street in Boston where the gas lamps have been burning
For a hundred forty years; where lamplighters no longer walk
The cycle of the twenty four, since globule mantles left to glow
Were cheaper than the labor spent in dimming gas in rain and snow.

The gravestones at the Granary are sunk in mud, or shattered sheets.
The midnight ride of Paul Revere is heaps of rocks, is piles
of pennies, and a rain soaked flag or two. The Burying Ground
is older still, and the thousands share five hundred weathered stones.

A Custom House is a hotel. A macaroni bursts in yellow sculpture
Beside a Market square. A Brutalist town hall juts jaws beside
Stark glass memorials and Boston’s oldest pub. They said, “You can’t
Hear city sounds from inside Boston Common!” but they lied.

Look! — homes upon a fisher wharf, held up by mussels and stout wood,
The Charles for a cellar door and a neighbor in a sloop.
With California earthquake eyes, the pilings underneath the wharf
That hold the condominiums high are trembling on the edge of hope.

We watch the tide; the rise, the fall, the six foot gap from tall to small.
The fixity of history, the folly of infinity, the way the town believes itself
The sailing ship, the catamaran, the hackneys and velocipedes,
The ferry, horses, cabs and cars, the moving van, and the rumbling T,

Four hundred years all held as close as simultaneity.
Mistaken hills hold monuments to battles fought elsewhere,
And staid New England poets paint their copperplated iambs
In pixels on a screen, declaiming beats from Faneuil Hall.

I cast these Boston photographs to what they once called ether,
Where they may last as long as tiny mantles glow.
They are the fixity of touristry, the river banks we made by hand,
Are monuments as long as networks grow, as long as human power flows;
Are structures standing strong upon the sand.

This is a villanelle. You’re supposed to be able to read it as either life being the dream, or dreaming while asleep.

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Apparently, Candyland, Battleship, and Asteroids were optioned for movies. To my surprise, everyone focuses on Asteroids. “How can they make a movie of that??” People keep saying this but they’re wrong!

A motley crowd of ethnically diverse people thrown together by circumstance are traveling in a hermetically sealed spaceship with an incredibly valuable cargo. Inside it is dark, and sweaty, and clangy. The cargo must reach Earth before everyone there dies of the mysterious alien plague. The clock is ticking. Then — SABOTAGE! The ship falls out of hyperspace in the midst of a huge asteroid field, full of giant tumbling mountains, with deep dark crevices and deadly pockets of methane gas that spout forth in majestic geysers. They must jet and shoot to stay alive, and find fuel to get them back out. The ominous alien ships are circling, just waiting for them to make a mistake, and unbeknowst to them, one of the crew on board is a traitor to the human race…

Battleship, now, that movie will suck.

Stippled red striated speckles buttered deep
In cocoa, aloe; the slide of cloth on skin
Searing scars of sun and sand.

Skin in sheets, shed sly like sidewinds
Scrubbing rocks, sloughing like cicadas,
Scattered food for mites.

So starts the metamorphose, stretching
To a higher self, a sentience sophisticated
Now for SPFs of sixty-plus.