Theory of Fun status

 Posted by (Visited 8662 times)  Game talk, Writing  Tagged with:
May 292013
 

penguin-14-transI have finished revising all of the text in the book, and sent off the manuscript to O’Reilly, a few days ahead of deadline.

How much has changed? Well, I would guess that half the pages in the book saw some sort of edit. That said, the shape of the book is largely unchanged. I got a lot of feedback saying “don’t break it,” from people sending in revision suggestions.

Big differences would include:

  • A big update to Chapter Six, “Different Fun for Different Folks.” There has been a lot of new science on brain differences between the sexes, and it points to both the fact that male and female brains are overall more similar than different — and yet there’s concrete evidence for some very real differences that could affect how we look at different games.
  • A lot of new science and references throughout. Some of the new material touches on Bernard Suits, deliberate practice, ludonarrative dissonance, etc. A lot of this material was not in existence at the time of the original book.
  • Clarification and updating on things like “what is a game,” “what about engaging with games in ways that aren’t fun?” and so on. A lot of this material was drawn from the Ten Years Later presentation.
  • 4000 new words in the endnotes (!). That is around an additional 50%, I think.
  • A new afterword.

In the end, there will only be two new pages in the main text. I still have one new cartoon to draw — the other one is a diagram, I’m afraid.image3Because of the new afterword, I did need a new penguin as a chapter header, though. I sketched one out, an old penguin (he’s ten years older, after all), and then tried to get my Rapidograph pens to work. No dice, as you can see from the mess I made of my sheet of test paper. I am going to have to visit an art supply store for some cleaning solution.

So I resorted to size-matching the Rapidograph nibs with Micron pens and inked him that way. It was supposed to just be a test inking, but he came out with some charm, so I decided to just scan the image and crop out all the spatter.

There is still quite a lot of layout work to do, plus I am sure the editors will come back with suggested revisions. One thing we are still contemplating is how exactly the cartoons will change given that the book is moving to a new trim size, taller than it is wide. We may actually change the layout of many of the cartoon pages. The trim size change is because it will allow us to do color print-on-demand, which should help with the book’s availability. It currently still has to have manual print runs, which is getting to be more and more obsolete these days.

We’re also still discussing how to handle the endnotes. One suggestion is to mark them out in the margins of the book somehow, perhaps with a little icon, rather than drowning the book in superscript footnotes everywhere.

May 182013
 

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.

Continue reading »

On personal games

 Posted by (Visited 16095 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
May 092013
 

I don’t have any tales of games saving me from depression.

I mean, I did go through a period where I was depressed. I dropped out of high school while living overseas and basically just didn’t go anywhere. I slept for 23 hours straight. I woke up to eat something and read. It was listlessness, pointlessness, it was like a blank. I didn’t feel sad. I felt… absent. Eventually I was dragged to a doctor who basically prescribed sunshine and a lot of vitamins, and a swift kick in the ass.

The terror of reintegrating into life was enormous. I was shaking and trembling as I caught the bus to downtown. Walking onto the campus had me breathless. And the perfunctory disbelief as I tried to explain to the school administrators what had happened was shocking: idle curiosity married to not caring. Their response to my terror was to say “well, just go back. It’ll be hard.” It was. And it comes back, every once in a while, though never as bad.

But games didn’t save me from that.

Continue reading »