Sometimes, when I express frustration that I’m not able to figure something in my life out, a friend of mine (who is decidedly not a game designer) will needle me with ‘Why don’t you just make a game about it? Isn’t that what you do?’ And then I hang up on them. Well, no, but …
You have to show up for your art. It will pout if you don’t. Your art wants to be picked up, played with, joked with, and present with you. It wants to stare into your eyes like they hold the answers to the meaning of life. It is your child, your pet, your Best Self. …
A grad school professor of mine once related some wisdom to our class: “every artist has a certain percent ‘done’ at which they will stop working on a piece. For some people, they’re “done” when the project is 50% complete, others are “done” when a project is 137% complete.” Personally, I have yet to come …
I listened to a podcast recently in which the guest, a visual artist, was saying that it is the job of all artists to be vulnerable and to make that vulnerability public. I’m still thinking about it. I have certainly bared my heart and soul and fear and courage and pain and love and tears …
Today’s post is for everyone with a backlog of creative projects a solar system wide and a galaxy deep. Ideas exist in the way ghosts exist; they can’t take corporeal form without possessing people. Fortunately for ideas, many of us are willing, if not eager, to be possessed by an idea. Ideas also resemble ghosts …
L’appel du vide is a French phrase for ‘the call of the void.’ It refers, literally, to the feeling we get when we’re high up, looking way, way down, and feel an urge to jump into the abyss. Maybe you know this feeling. It’s not a desire for the consequences of that jump, simply the …
Perfection is alluring. It’s shiny, calming, and I imagine it would feel really good to achieve. You know what else would feel really good? Wearing pants made of clouds and riding around town on a 20-foot-high panda named Jedediah. Too bad those things aren’t real. Too bad perfection isn’t real.
Doing things is important. I am a big fan of doing. But on the flip side of the same coin is not doing and not doing is also important. As it turns out, it takes just as much energy, dedication, and grit to not do something as it takes to do something.
New Year’s Resolutions are interactive experiences. They just happen to suck most of the time. As a designer of interactive experiences that gamify philosophy, chaos theory, self-growth, and paradigm shifts, I’ve been experimenting with New Year’s Resolutions and gamification for years.
