Author Archives: David Mullich
Starting The New Year On The Write Note
My New Year’s resolution for 2015 is to set aside some time each day to write. Like many others, I have a love-hate relationship with writing: while I very much enjoy putting my thoughts down on paper, actually getting started is a painful process for me. As a result, I am ‘way behind on a number of articles that I’ve agreed to write for various websites and organizations, I’m having trouble getting past the research stage for a new book that I’m putting together, and my posts on this blog have been sporadic, to put it charitably. I’m very envious of colleagues like Andrzej Marczewski, who seems to churn out blog posts about gamification as reliably as Big Ben chimes the hour.
Since I always begin any writing project by doing at least some research, here’s some advice from multiple sources around the internet about getting into the writing habit, which I am sharing with you in case you’d like to write more regularly too:
- Don’t just plan to write — write. (P.D. James)
- Write…. only about things that interest you. (Annie Proulx)
- Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organize your life accordingly. (Andrew Motion)
- Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you. (Zadie Smith)
- Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet. (Zadie Smith)
- You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. (Jack London)
- Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. (Neil Gaiman)
- Don’t concentrate on technique, which can be the same as concentrating on yourself. Give yourself to your story. (tracy Kidder and Richard Todd)
- Jot down ideas and phrases as they occur to you. Free yourself from paragraphs and sentences for the moment–use flow charts, arrows, boxes, outlines, even pictures. (The Center for Writing Studies)
- Make the paragraph the unit of composition. (Strunk & White)
- Don’t panic. (Sarah Walters)
- Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. (Joshua Wolf Shenk)
- Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it. (Zadie Smith)
- Write drunk; edit sober. (Ernest Hemmingway). (Since I often write in my work office, I’ll take “drunk” to be a synonym for “care freely”.)
- Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! (Henry Miller)
- Work on one thing at a time until finished. (Henry Miller)
- Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it. (Neil Gaiman)
Well, that got me through my first writing assignment since making my resolution! Now, to get started on that book!
Have Yourself A Very Immersive Christmas
Are there any children in the room? If so, send them out. I am something sensitive to discuss. Don’t worry, I’ll wait”
Are we in the clear? Okay, here we go.
I was about ten years old when my mother told me there was no Santa Claus. Of course, I began to figure it out long before then. As I listened to the radio for reports of Santa’s progress on Christmas Eve, I would try to calculate how many houses he would need to visit per hour in order to deliver all of his presents in one night. I didn’t see how that could be possible; he could only be in each home for the tiniest of fractions of a second. Still, I was angry at my mom when she told me there was no Santa Claus.
You see, I loved Christmas, and I still do — the presents, the decorations, the songs, the food, the stories. The season would begin with us kids pouring over the Sears Catalog, picking out the gifts we would request from Santa when we visited him in the mall. My mother painted images of Santa, his sleigh, and reindeer onto wood panels that my dad cut out and placed on our front lawn. My youngest brother would dress up as Santa, and I decorated one of the bedrooms as his workshop so we could act out all the Christmas preparations. And when Christmas Eve came, my family didn’t have the patience to wait for morning, and so my dad would take us kids somewhere in the early evening, and when we returned, we’d discover that Santa had just visited our house just moments before. As proof of Santa’s visit, my dad would discover the next morning a roof tile that Rudolf had evidently dislodged when the sleigh landed.
It was all so much fun that as I developed the cognitive ability to figure out the incompatibility between Santa Clause and the real world, I willingly suspected my disbelief to immerse myself into the fantasy behind Christmas.
Immersion is an important tool for game designers, and we need our players to willingly suspend their disbelief. Games are built upon rules and mechanics that can seem like work, as well as art and audio that are imperfect representations of reality. Without immersion, there would be no fun, which is an essential element of games.
As Christmas comes upon us, and we deal with all the work required by the holiday preparations and the inevitable imperfections to the celebrations, I hope that you will be able to immerse yourself into the fantasy of Christmas and end the year having a fun time.
David Mullich 