2015 Goals

I’m not a big goals person. I especially don’t like bringing rigid, metrics-based goals into my life. Numbers tend to make me feel trapped, like I’ve got some arbitrary pass/fail condition built into an existence that’s very malleable. So I picked five things that I want to keep in mind throughout the next year to help make it a little better than the year-that-was.

  1. Read more. I’ve got stacks of books on my shelf that I’ve stared at for far too long—suggestions from friends, half-finished masterpieces, oddball comics and just-for-fun light novels. I spent too much of 2014 prioritizing empty projects and imagined responsibilities to other media. Enough of that. Books are fulfilling in a way nothing else is.
  2. Keep running. I’m not as fast as I used to be, and my strength still needs some real work, but I’m back in a routine and getting better, not worse. That’s enough. I just need to keep that up.
  3. Learn to cook well. I’m not especially clumsy or bad at learning new things, but I’m an expert at shooting myself down over minor mistakes. I didn’t grow up around people who cook, and thanks to a sedentary college lifestyle and a three-year stint at a company that literally fed me day and night, I was able to conjure up enough excuses to put off getting my hands dirty. But I care more and more about the stuff I put into my body, and I’m slowly discovering the deep sense of fulfillment that comes from learning a set of skills and applying them to a creative outlet. I’m looking forward to this one the most.
  4. Cut out the bullshit. Most of it comes from me. I’ll subconsciously construct a set of expectations for myself, and rather than question anything I’ll obsess over checking off a daily list before collapsing and calling it a day. Being busy and being productive are very different things. Time to start solving for the latter.
  5. Focus on making. I have lots of ideas. They’re mostly all lumped together in a stack of notebooks filled with chicken-scratch descriptions and rough illustrations. I love the ideation process because it’s a period of pure creation and design, but real creative gratification comes from making something, warts and all, and sharing it with other people.

2014 was the craziest and least-predictable year in my life. I have a feeling plans are gonna start to congeal in 2015, and with any luck that’ll mean a return to routine and structure. But if 2014 was a year spent learning at any cost, 2015 is going to be about doing.

The best and worst games I played in 2014

2014 was one of the most uneven, unpredictable and kinda-just-weird years I’ve ever experienced as a player, maker and critic of video games. But it’s not all bad news – 2014 was also a year with an impressively diverse range of games from all corners of the earth tackling design challenges and complex themes in new and exciting ways.

For the last six years, I’ve been part of a five-person team at Silicon Sasquatch that collaborates on a top-ten best games list for each year. This year is no exception, but I still felt like there just wasn’t enough room (or consensus) to share all of the games that I thought were noteworthy – both for being exceptional and for being terribly disappointing.

So here’s my master list of pretty much every game I played this year that made an impression on me. My goals with this list are:

  1. To highlight what I perceive as the best and most important games released all year
  2. To call out the worst and most-disappointing games that ought to be avoided
  3. To differentiate between games that require a lot of technical expertise versus those that can be enjoyed by anyone, “gamer” or otherwise
  4. To kill time before I have to write up my annual list of my top ten favorite albums of 2014, which is gonna be way harder

You can jump to a specific section, or just keep scrolling if you’re in the mood for some information overload:

• Top Ten Most Disappointing Games of 2014

• Top Ten Best Games of 2014

• Other Good Games You Should Check Out

• Games I Didn’t Play but They Sound Really Good

Continue reading The best and worst games I played in 2014

Failure to launch

I figure it’s probably about time I come clean about NaNoWriMo: I’m gonna fail this year. This marks my sixth unsuccessful attempt at hammering out a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. On the one hand, I suppose I ought to celebrate consistency wherever I can find it in myself; on the other, well, shit.

Why even try to write a novel? I don’t know. I’m the kind of person who loves creating checklists, I guess, and those vary in scope from day-to-day systems for validating my self-worth to overarching, lifelong pursuits. Writing a novel is on that list. (The objective originally said I needed to “publish a book,” but since I did that a few years back I’ve since revised it to “no, c’mon, I mean like a real book.”)

I thought I had a decent-enough concept this time around, but as usual, I just didn’t have my shit organized in time for the actual kickoff. 50,000 words over 30 days averages out to around 1,667 words per day, or approximately seven double-spaced pages of a term paper – and in my experience, they’re about as much fun to write. I figured I’d just write whatever came to mind on any day so long as it was within the loose boundaries of the story I’d concocted in my head—and seriously, it sounded kinda good! Like, there were parallel stories with complementary themes that intertwined in an interesting way and culminated in hopefully something somewhat resonant with an average audience and—and yeah, shit, that wasn’t nearly good enough.

To be honest, I’m more frustrated at my poor planning than the lack of execution. I should’ve been thinking about this story for a year. I should’ve been battling through its key points in my mind for months, questioning the relationship between its core elements and the way that they’re revealed to the reader. I should’ve been reading more goddamn novels, because—because come on. I should’ve gone into this thing excited to finally have a chance to plow through the grunt work of bringing something I cared about to life through the singular and unsettling practice of churning out a gross, bloated, shitty rough draft, because that’s where anything great comes from.

Instead, I have less than 4,000 words of a couple of opening chapters. I think a few hundred of those words are me just talking down to myself and questioning why I bothered in the first place.

I don’t think I’ll be trying NaNoWriMo again. Maybe it’s just not the right setting for me. Maybe I’ll never understand the basics of creative writing – it’s a long story, but childhood anxiety plus fear of criticism means I made a conscious shift to nonfiction and journalistic writing well over a decade ago.

Or maybe I’ll just never accomplish anything daunting and impressive and deeply gratifying as long as I keep hounding myself for not being good enough.

If you’re in the middle of finishing a book (for NaNo or anything else,) do yourself a favor: don’t be a sore loser like me. You sit down and you write and you finish that goddamn thing. The world may not need your novel, as they like to say, but trust me: you do.

What I whine about when I whine about running

Like many other humans who find themselves trapped in this bizarro-world timeline, I’m prone to some nasty and extended bouts of depression. I’ll think I’m doing fine for a while until one day I realize that, over the last few weeks, I’ve barely bothered to change my clothes or reply to people’s texts. I know I’m really in the thick of it when my sense of time starts to lose definition: I see a drab gray fuzziness on either end of my timeline and fall into what’s known among psychologists as a “major bummer situation.”

What’s it like to be depressed? Everything I usually enjoy—bagels, photos from space, alive puppies, tasteful potpourri, room-temperature beer, etc.—loses its luster. Like a poacher watching The Lion King, I feel nothing. And obviously, feeling nothing is a pretty un-ideal way to go through life.

Motivation? Kinship? Opportunity? Those things just aren’t really on your radar when you’re overwhelmed by the fact that all your socks are shitty and boring but why does that even matter because who really cares about socks anyway because they’re just socks and also you haven’t seen another human being in four days so wait why are you yelling.

Of course, everyone’s responsible for finding their own coping mechanisms to keep their mental health in check. For me, sometimes talking it out over a pot of chamomile tea just can’t cut it. That’s when I need to do something so jarring and filthy and thoroughly unpleasant that it snaps me back to reality. So I go for a run.

On the surface, running seems like the worst thing a human can do to itself. That’s because it is. You take a relatively sanitary (possibly even clean, by some standards) body and subject it to arduous, repetitive torment, and the end result is a layer of sweat masking aching muscles and a crippling new self-awareness of how dumb you probably look to other runners.

But surprisingly enough, there’s a real benefit to putting yourself in a position that, by all estimates, totally sucks. It begins as a sort of physical self-admonishment: “Ha ha! You stupid body! Look at your wobbly legs trying to keep up with those athletes over there!” I don’t know if other people get like this when they’re going through a bad spell, but I like to envision that depression-inducing part of my conscience as a thin man with a five o’clock shadow standing half-hidden under a dim lightbulb, sporting a pinstripe jacket over pressed (but frayed) brown slacks. He chain-smokes Parliaments and slings verbal barbs my way, all the while talking like an off-Broadway character actor doing his best mobster impression. He doesn’t make a good first impression.

So I endure the slings and arrows of my not-very-helpful inner monologue while I wait for the initial discomfort of running to pass. And sure enough, the litany of self-deprecating snark gives way after a few minutes to a sort of calm, meditative state—“well, as long as we’re stuck here doing this dumb thing, why don’t I just call up the Pituitary Gland and see if it can’t hook us up with some tasty endorphins.”

It’s not a permanent fix. But I’ve never had a day get worse after going for a run, and I’m rarely happier than during those times when I’m forcing myself out the door for some exercise a few times a week.

I decided to first take up running four years ago on the tail end of a particularly crappy series of events. I’d never been an athletic or even particularly fit person, and I was always one of the slowest to finish the mile-run test in high school P.E. class, but I needed some sort of goal to latch on to that helped me forget about the heavier stuff in my life. After a dozen false starts, I managed to settle into a consistent routine and, like, half a year later, finally achieved my goal of being able to run a 5k without stopping at the drop of a hat.

It was a rare sort of accomplishment for me. I’m the kind of person who was lucky enough to be predisposed for success academically, but I’ve always left a lot to be desired in sports and fitness. I felt like maybe the person I thought I was and would always be might actually have been an incomplete picture. Maybe I could even change the fundamentals of who I am.

Of course, I quickly fell back out of shape once I took a job across the country, and life moved on. But every time I’m feeling particularly miserable about myself, I remember when I used to be a not-terrible runner, and I remind myself that I can become that person again if I set my mind to it.

And if it shuts my smug, pinstripe-wearing mental roommate the hell up? All the more reason to get back on my feet.

Welcome to the Neighborhood: Five tips for getting to know your new local community

Photo (modified) by Keith Tyler

One of the best things about being an indie developer is the freedom to tailor your lifestyle just the way you want: what schedule you keep, how you shape your business, and even where you decide to live. But as exciting (and, I’d argue, important) as moving can be, making friends in a new city is never easy—and that’s doubly true if you work independently. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever for indie game devs to connect in meaningful ways.

Here are five tips I’ve picked up from my last few moves around the United States that should help you get started.

1. Find a Meetup Group

If you’re not familiar, Meetup is a platform where like-minded individuals can create groups that get together in the real world to talk about shared interests or participate in events. I’d argue this is the best place to start, especially if you’re a total stranger to your new home city, because Meetup is accessible to anyone and most groups make an effort to facilitate introductions.

There are plenty of great groups in major cities for indie game developers. For example, I was a member of the Seattle Unity3D User Group and the Seattle Games Cooperative, both of which met regularly and offered a wide variety of workshops, presentations and social events.

2. Join the Discussion on Facebook

Most cities I’ve lived in have had a number of active Facebook groups dedicated to indie development discussion, support and event organization. Seattle Indies is an excellent and very active resource for finding work, learning about what people are working on and making new connections, and the Portland Indie Game Squad (or PIGSquad) is filled with great ideas and enthusiastic people.

Or if you can’t find any relevant groups, it’s also worth searching for Pages on Facebook. For example, Austin has a very active and welcoming group called Juegos Rancheros that’s organized by indie luminaries like Adam Saltsman, Jo Lammert and Brandon Boyer. They post details and invitations to their monthly meetups on their Page, so it couldn’t hurt to like or subscribe to it.

3. Enter the Indie Circuit

While it’s still a brand-new thing, Indie Circuit is trying to bring the world’s local-multiplayer aficionados together, wherever they may live. Fill out an anonymous questionnaire with your interests and Zip code and get a sense for who else is interested in playing those games in the same area. If you’re feeling particularly social, you can also sign up to be a host for a future game night.

4. Attend a Game Jam

The previous few suggestions are good for getting to know others, but there’s no better way to learn more about yourself than to take the plunge on a marathon game jam. Whether they run for a few hours or several weeks, jams are a great way to get to know other developers and identify your individual strengths and collaboration habits. Bonus: you also get to walk away with a new game with your name on it.

CompoHub is an indispensable resource for learning about current and upcoming game jams. Even if the jams you’re interested in aren’t location-based, it’s never a bad idea to create a local meetup for other participants in your area to get together, give feedback and crank out some work.

5. If All Else Fails, Help Start a New Community

Every city is different, and that’s going to have a big impact on your search. If nobody in your town is meeting regularly to work together, it’s easy to kickstart a community yourself! Start your own Meetup group, create a Twitter handle or Facebook group to promote ongoing conversations, or consider hosting a game night or jam session.

There are way more aspiring or isolated developers out there than you might think, and you might be just the community leader they’ve been waiting for.

Anita Sarkeesian’s New York Times Op-Ed

It’s hard to believe we’re several months into the thick of Gamergate. Despite the apparently unyielding work of faceless harassers and trolls, women like Anita Sarkeesian have refused to be silenced and persisted in their work to bring an academic lens to video games.

The New York Times ran an op-ed today penned by Sarkeesian where she lays out her own experience as a woman stuck between her love of games and a constant battle against social pressures working to keep women out of gaming. She also talks plainly about those who are persecuting her and other voices in favor of equality and diversification within games:

Instead of celebrating the expansion of the industry, though, some who self-identify as “hard-core gamers” attack these types of interactive experiences as too casual, too easy, too feminine and therefore “not real games.” Players from marginalized groups are also targeted because they’re seen as outsiders, invading a sacred boys’ club.

The time for invisible boundaries that guard the “purity” of gaming as a niche subculture is over. The violent macho power fantasy will no longer define what gaming is all about.

While the response to Gamergate from both enthusiast and mainstream press has been slower than I’d hoped, we’re finally starting to see a concerted and unified effort to cover the campaign of harassment conducted under the pretenses of promoting ethics in the games industry.

Speaking of ethics in journalism vis-à-vis Gamergate, here’s an awesome breakdown by Glenn Fleishman. (h/t @suzisteffen)

John Gruber’s XOXO Talk on Daring Fireball’s Success

I’ve been a fan of Daring Fireball for years, but it’s taken me a while to warm up to who John Gruber is and what he’s all about. This talk he gave at this year’s XOXO Festival is worth watching if only because it’s so rare to hear from successful independent bloggers, particularly those with the clout and experience that Gruber has after 12 years of running his site.

Watching this video dredged up some hard truths for me about the relative lack of success I’ve had with Silicon Sasquatch. But like Gruber mentioned, his wasn’t an overnight success — and it took a series of hard decisions over many years to arrive at the point of self-sustaining profitability that he’d been searching for.

We’re just weeks away from Silicon Sasquatch’s sixth anniversary and, against all odds, it’s still up and running. I wonder if it’ll still be around in ten?

A Year in Limbo

My last memories of Austin are sweat and donuts.

The sweat’s probably self-explanatory: it’s Texas. It’s hot. Even in October, we were battling 90-plus-degree weather and choking humidity. And as for the donuts? Well, we weren’t gonna leave Austin without grabbing a bundle of Red Rabbit baked goods for the long road ahead.

And that’s how, one year ago today, I remember cramming the last of my belongings into my surprisingly cavernous Jetta and setting off with my girlfriend and her dog on a 2,200-mile drive to Seattle, Washington.

The donuts barely lasted two days. The sweat never left.

* * * * * *

Time for a hard truth: It was irrational to leave Facebook.

I mulled the decision over in my head more often than I feel comfortable admitting, lying awake late at night or while staring out a fog-stained bus window at the same grey expanse of the 520 that I grew so familiar with during a short-lived contract role. I picked apart the threads that led to my decision: the factors that were within my control, the ones that were without. What were the catalysts? What caused what to happen?

I pieced together a haphazard mental timeline, corroborating dates to moods and specific conversations, trying to understand how I’d abandoned the first period of true stability in my adult life for something entirely unfamiliar. But cause and effect can be one and the same; so the model falls apart.

More than anything, I spent countless days wrestling with the uncomfortable realization that sometimes you can’t pin a tidy, self-contained reason to a complex decision. Maybe I’ll never be able to justify exactly why I decided it was time to leave my career and my friends and a city I’d come to see as home in order to chase something ambiguous but unrelentingly compelling. Maybe all you can hope to do is accept that it’s beyond you and that’s ok; it’s all right if you don’t know everything.

It was irrational to leave Facebook. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right choice.

* * * * * *

I moved to Seattle to make games. That’s it. And that’s what I did.

Making games isn’t especially difficult, as it turns out. It’s tough for an outsider because it’s an extraordinarily multidisciplinary field, which meant many weeks spent brushing up on programming techniques and art-asset production and debugging and build distribution and pretty much anything else you could imagine. But there are infinite solutions to any problem, such that all you really need to succeed in games is an optimistic outlook and the patience to endure a lot of trial-and-error.

There were plenty of tough days: ten-hour marathon sessions spent agonizing over one broken script, trapped in a Sisyphean loop of trying another approach and nearly succeeding only to have everything else come crashing back down around me. Those days were rough, but I learned the most from them. I kept learning.

The hardest part isn’t learning the craft of how to make games. Nor is it the process of actually making them. What’s toughest is deciding to give your all to pursuing an unreliable career path to the people in your life who, by and large, don’t see the potential and the promise that you do in the field you’ve chosen. I know the surest path to misery is to dictate your life around someone else’s whims, but there’s a loneliness—one I hadn’t anticipated—in changing your whole life to pursue something that very few people understand the value of.

I guess that’s the next big hurdle: finding satisfaction in the pursuit of something for my own sake.

* * * * * *

I’ve always dreamed of making games that are incredibly accessible to people who rarely play games or have avoided mainstream consoles due to the complexity of their controllers and the steep learning curve behind your average big-budget blockbuster game. The growing availability of powerful and free game-development tools means that more people can make more games about more things, and I can’t think of a better way to communicate with others than to build games that conjure up experiences that they can interact with, think about and share with others.

But even if a game’s as simple as tapping your finger on a screen, there are decades of stigma and an incredibly hostile (though, thankfully, shrinking) base of hardcore, xenophobic “enthusiasts” kicking and screaming against the inexorable democratization of games as a medium of expression for everyone.

I tend to think the future’s bright, and the vitriol fueling a cabal of supposedly disenfranchised “gamers” is sure to burn out sooner or later. Leigh Alexander, a writer I’ve always admired, argues that self-proclaimed “gamers” are already a thing of the past. Good riddance. You can’t properly appreciate or critique a medium if you base the core of your identity within it.

* * * * * *

One year later, I now find myself on the verge of another move. This time it’s different: there are plans; there’s stability; there are people to reconnect with and opportunities to pursue.

The last year has been an exhausting crash course not just in how to make games of all kinds but also how to survive when there’s nothing to hold on to. It’s also been an exercise in humility—in learning not to base my identity or self-worth around my career, my title, my position, or my network of friends. When you’re out on your own and away from the familiar, you’re left with a lot of anxious questions to puzzle through, but the end result is a better sense of self. Once you know who that person is, and you accept that person for who they are, it’s suddenly a lot easier to weather the small stuff that life throws your way.

I’m sure a lot of people look at me and wonder if I’ve thrown away opportunity over something fickle. On the other hand, I know a great deal of people who admire the risk I took and respect the way I’ve used my time to teach myself a vast new set of skills in the pursuit of something of great personal significance.

The truth that I’ve come to accept is that I am both people. I am the reckless abandoner of a steady path forward, and I am an idealist with the discipline and pragmatism to pursue bigger and better things in the face of uncertainty. I am flawed and I am exceptional. And I’m still here.

I don’t know how this next year will play out, but I know there’s one crucial difference this time around: I have a much better sense of who I am and what that person is trying to accomplish. For the first time in a long time, we’re both on the same page.