Tag Archives: writing

See More Skinner, Part Two: Discipline and Punish

Posted on by dconstructions
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I want to really get into the weeds on how players negotiate playstyles and play events, but first I want to stay on the orthogame more, because we’re in a really interesting place with that right now.

I never thought of myself as a game designer until very recently, which is odd for many reasons, not least the patterns you see in the other things I’m interested in: con artistry, education, animal behaviour and probability, the last two which I studied to very high levels at university. I actually spent a lot of time researching games and game design while I was doing my probability studies and was disappointed to find out that game theory, despite the name, has almost nothing to do with games. The definition of game in game theory is one of an abstract mathematical system where there are different choices a “player” can make, or may make with certain probabilities, and which lead to certain outcomes. Although game theory started with the idea of games, and was developed off into psychological concepts, if you pull a book about game theory off a shelf, it will be lucky to feature any games at all in it. It will be about optimization algorithms, which we do now see more and more use of in AI, and the expert systems that came before them. AI is game theory in that it makes choices, runs down those choices, and checks the outcome, and then compares the outcome to a win situation. If it doesn’t win, it then adapts the choice gates, weighting them differently.

I was disappointed, thirty years ago, because I wanted to learn game design and – unlike now! – it was not an area with any academic study. Such things just did not exist before the year 2000 or so. We relied on Homo Ludens and developmental psychology, and the few rare cultural studies like the amazing work by Gary Alan Fine which was the first person ever to go “these gamer nerds, how does their subculture work?”. But then in the 1990s computer gaming became big business and everything changed, and all of a sudden you could get a grant to study this stuff and we started figuring out what people liked in games and how to monetize that hard. It’s important to remember though that we didn’t know these things at all then and we had to learn them through making mistakes. One now-legendary game design anecdote is the story of Golden Ages in the Civilization computer games. Originally the game had Dark Ages, where production slowed down and it was harder to achieve goals and make progress. They swiftly discovered that players hated them so much they would often stop playing when they encountered them. So the designers made Dark Ages play regular play and made what had been regular play Golden Ages. In effect, nothing had changed, but psychologically the game was completely different. This became known as the phenomenon of Loss Aversion.

Nash Equilibrium is a game theory term that has almost no relevance to game design theory, but it’s fun to say.

Most of the study of game design has been in psychology, and understanding human behaviour. But interestingly, so far, not a huge amount of that has actually trickled down into the orthogame space. By this I mean that the design of the orthogame tends to still operate as if we are making chess, and thus operating in a game theory space. A game is designed to be, still, a mathematical and tactical and strategic operation, where the participants make choices with the goal of producing the optimal outcome. Games typically have dramatic win and loss conditions and score tracks around the outside that provide constant feedback, measuring how well you made those choices. This is considered good design – as I said last week, nobody would play a game where your choices didn’t matter.

But here’s the thing: games, we are discovering, are inherently learning environments. They teach you how to play them and how to learn more about them, and they teach you how to master them, and then they also teach you about yourself and the world and the things they represent. Games in fact have some of the best possible tools for learning because of that direct, actionable feedback, and the ability to repeat the same circumstances over and over again, and to experiment and explore different options. Games we now think overlap with educational processes, in that you can’t play a game without learning more than just how to play that game, and games and game elements may be the best way to teach many things. In fact, I’m thinking about writing a book about how games are actually a kind of social learning ritual, more in common with ceremony than warfare. Given those things, it’s worth knowing that education has been going through something of a revolution in the last few decades and is also still a very young science. We’re starting to explore this new idea that making mistakes and being corrected isn’t actually as useful as we thought. Which is to say people respond better to learning that isn’t based on saying “no, that’s wrong” as a fundamental principle.

At first glance that sounds insane – are we going to start saying something like “one plus one equals three, yes, good job, but let’s try and imagine a better answer.”? It’s not that. It’s more thinking that as much as possible we want to give the participant in learning the most chance of succeeding at something before testing if they succeeded, because the more they fail the slower they learn. Mistakes and failure aren’t learning opportunities at all, but rather impediments to learning. Navigating this is the new frontier of education, because even while we’re not entirely sure how to teach this way, we know that our current education system leaves kids good at taking tests but lacking in imagination and often crippled with a need to be correct. I sometimes use the metaphor of expanding what the light can see: you’re not wrong if you hear something in the bushes and guess what it is, but you’re guessing until we expand the light.

I work in animal training and we are doing the same thing there. To return to Skinner, he helped us divide the learning in operant conditioning into four kinds:

  • Positive Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so you shock the rat when it goes on the platform. The word “positive” here means an element was ADDED to the rat’s environment. Contrast that with:
  • Negative Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so the food supply stops when it goes on the platform. It is negative because something good was SUBTRACTED.
  • Positive Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so it gets extra good food when it does go on the platform.
  • Negative Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so the electric shock STOPS (is subtracted) when it goes on the platform.

Note how the terms positive and negative here don’t refer to the consequence: the middle two use only something nice, and the first and last use only something nasty. Of course, there is a fine line here. For a young child, losing access to a toy can feel like a terrible terrible thing but it is a world away (at least experimentally) from giving the child a smack. And here we return to loss aversion: it felt bad when the Dark Ages kicked in, and it feels great when the Golden Age kicked in. This isn’t operant conditioning (because these weren’t causal) but it shows the paragidm above, while also showing how psychology can shade how we see these things. In effect the Dark Ages felt like aversive – something came along and made things worse – and the Golden Age felt rewarding – something came along and made it better.

So the question then becomes: are we taking this knowledge into designing orthogames? And should we?

Let’s take a look at chess. Chess has positive punishment all the time: if you make a poor move, you experience loss. You had a queen, and you lose it. (Some find Go much more relaxing because when you realise you’ve lost territory you can dance away somewhere else and try to come back to that space a different way. It can still feel very punishing, but it’s less direct.) Modern games have, generally, moved away from the chess model though, and try to instead just reward the leader for good play. They are learning this idea of nice for others rather than nasty for you. It can still feel a bit rough to miss out on a bonus card or a combo, but it doesn’t (for most people) sting like losing a queen. Don’t get me wrong, if you have ten points and your opponent has fifty, you are definitely likely to rage quit, but it does (we think) feel different from “this player keeps moving to attack my pieces”.

A lot of game writers say that the “euro” style games tend to have less “head to head” conflict than American and take that games, and that’s true but also not the whole picture. Because getting cut off, penalised or torn down or knocked off your spot is still an attack and still a loss. So euros often actually feel a lot more cutthroat and “mean” than they look (and that some say). Having the Robber on your hex in Settlers of Catan is in theory only denying you resources (you aren’t losing things from your hand but not gaining them) but it feels like an attack and it feels very personal! Something can become an attack by comparison. If everyone else gets cheese, the act of “not getting cheese” becomes a nasty thing, rather than “not getting a nice thing”. Games like Tokaido are said to be “cosy” because you’re just walking along a road and the worst someone can do to you is get a prize before you do, but the game actually feels like musical chairs: everyone gets a good thing and the loser gets shut out. This makes Tokaido one of the harshest games I know as a result!

It’s like a knife-fight in a phone booth.

All of which is to say: yes, we’re trying to look at the orthogame and say “can we remove the nasty stuff” but we still end up in punishment territory a lot of the time, because games are either competitive or they are pass/fail. Not winning reflects and becomes losing. As hard as we try to make everything a Golden Age rather than a Dark Age, it’s hard to make orthogames actually feel nice. That might be because the orthogame is set up to be a ritualised test. In other words, our idea of a game is that it should be inherently educational not experiential: you are here to learn to play well, and if you fail to play well, you will be marked down. And that may not be something we want to change! We might not want to do a crossword that lets us put any words in the box. But I think as education begins to ask “what does education without being wrong look like?” we might wonder the same about games. We don’t know what that looks like. It may be impossible, as in, games stop being games if they aren’t about correction. It may be rethinking games entirely. It may be that this is what play is. It may be why we like play so much, and it may be why we should do much more play and why games are actually a poor substitute! (Look, for example, at how many computer “games” now are just colouring in exercises, or dolly-dress up).

I am not the only one who has argued that games are the primary medium of the 21st century. But I’d like to expand that and make sure it doesn’t just include orthogames. I think PLAY is bigger and more important than game. This is the same as how we know that painting the stairs like musical notes makes people more likely to walk up them, and scoring them for how fast they did it does not. Games really are a poor substitute to play and I think as humans we crave play but are told the only way we’re allowed to get play is through games. We have decided that games are good, and play is bad, because if we’re not fighting or being corrected, it cannot be worthwhile. Maybe it’s time we looked at that attitude as well. Maybe the orthogame is a petticoat allowing us an excuse to be playful, and it’s not always the best one. At the very least, we might want to admit that it’s not the only part of play, and we’ll look at that in subsequent blogs.

The Art and The Rest

Posted on by dconstructions
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It took me a long time to consider myself an artist. It has only happened in the last five years. And that was such a hard process I didn’t want to to do anything else. It’s a herculean task to convince yourself that you have to break open reality and add something new to it, to justify all of that, to say this is different, this is important, this has to exist. Even now I’ll start working on a game and still end up asking “Is this worth it, even for me? Do I care enough?”. Especially when my health is so often making things harder.

Convincing myself is hard. Convincing anyone else? Sometimes too hard to even conceive of. So I invented the idea of the “art bucket”. I would, against all odds, create a thing all the way to the end and then simply drop it in a bucket. It has a sense of satisfaction: I have done something and proved it can be done. And maybe if people want to, they can come along and look in the bucket. This strategy is not without its merits: what matters most about art, a lot of the time, is getting it done for you. You need to break the universe and stick a flag in reality and pour your pain out into something and then stop and walk away and say “I did that”. Asking it to do anything else is a side issue. Hang the painting on your wall, share the book with your friends, tuck the prototype into your game bag. We should call that enough definitely! Even if you argue that art needs an audience to work – to be an act of communication – an audience of one counts as an audience.

That then however leads to the next battle: given that I have made things and made them good, I now have to convince myself if it is worth doing the rest. The “everything else” that allows me to find an audience and even make money. Every artist who has any kind of audience has to do some of the rest. Mentors have told me that the key is just juggling that ratio, and I agree. Some have suggested that their ratio is about 10% Art/90% Rest – 90% of their time spend on their art is not making art at all, but finding ways to make that make money. Or doing things that are adjacent to the art to get access or funding for the art, although to be clear, the 90% doesn’t include the day job/funding stuff usually. The 90% is just “finding ways so that the art gets to people or doesn’t drive you broke”. But it is worth remembering that even in profitable industries, even when having an audience and constantly “working” in their industry, very very few artists have ever been able to not have day jobs. Most Hollywood directors have day jobs. Pretty much all published authors have day jobs. And then the 90% is on top of all that.

Statistically speaking, the average writer/game designer doesn’t spend the majority of their time working at the keyboard. I wanted to be Steven J Cannell as a kid, because I wanted to be that guy at the typewriter. How dare you lie to me, Steve!

Just kidding. Steve is awesome.

I started in my role of “getting RPGs to people” by posting stuff on forums and blogs. Then I got work as a freelancer, which I did really enjoy, but it is conditional on being really into the RPGs in question, and also being able to get the work itself, which I used to do through contacts online and is becoming harder and harder to stay connected to those folks. I also have an auDHD thing where I bounce around from passions (and my skills tend to rubber-band a lot – being super super strong and then shrinking, or appearing too, after the focus drops off). I’ve spent the last eight years or so with a new approach which has been finding my own voice and publishing lots of my own games. And now I’m wondering – what’s next? Do I keep doing that? Do I alter it, or scrap it?

I have a sense that incrementally, I may be able to do more as a publisher, spending more money – risking more money – to get more of an audience and playing to a popular audience since The Score seems to be popular. But I also know that doing that means more of The Rest and less of The Art. On the other hand, having achieved everything I set myself to do in RPGs, I am feeling uninspired in that area and in non-RPG tabletop I’ve done tons of designs and could use a little break. Two arguments for doing more The Rest. But doing that reduces my % of The Art and deep down that’s what I live for. I DO need an audience. I DO want an audience. But I need to work the typewriter a lot. And another autism thing is we tend to feel things very strongly so when things suck we just do not want to do them at all, because that “this isn’t fun” burns like acid.

But at the same time, if I go back to just the art bucket, I find myself frustrated because I do want that audience. Last year I wrote like a million games (because my brain was doing that hyperfocus, hyperskill thing) and one of them is really good and I’d really like it to be published widely, not just made to look like a nice Word document and put out on my website to hope anybody cares about. That means trying to figure out how much of The Rest I can stand though.

I am trying to get used to never knowing what to do or how to do it, and never knowing what I want, and never really being content. It seems to be the way I am, and I am trying to enjoy constantly being in flux rather than waiting for anything to settle. I certainly don’t expect to have a good answer today. And I think sometimes it’s really hard to tell. Sometimes you have to try things to know, but sometimes, even then, you just can’t tell. Especially when so much of my ability to tell if I like anything has been twisted or muted with mental health issues. Maybe the only thing I can do is talk about it, in the hope that anyone else coming after can at least get that this stuff is hard to work out. Not only is it a puzzle to solve HOW to do it, a puzzle which constantly changes as you change and the industry changes and the art form changes, but it’s also a puzzle to solve the WHY and WHAT DO I WANT and DO I LIKE THIS parts too.

Sometimes, all you can do is just put words down and hope it does something, anything, in the act of coming out. And maybe tomorrow, or the next day, it will make sense again, if only for a moment.

Why I Hate Cole Wehrle

Posted on by dconstructions
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I think most of us know and resonate with the prayer of seeking the strength to change the things we can, and the serenity to accept the things we cannot and the wisdom to tell the difference. Few remember that it was coined by Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent 20th century American theologist and political thinker who was trying to construct a kind of middle way for liberal Americans, one that was socialist in its ideas that poor people were not inherently evil and did not need better angels above them in society to direct them, but also one that repudiated the ideas of communism and liberal reforms like anti-segregation movements. You can view him as a fence-sitter emblematic of the worst parts of neo-liberal deference to what they demand is realpolitik, or as an idealist trying to find a straight path in a bent world. I think the fact that he is confounding to some analyses is probably why people like the prayer: stuff feels complicated, and the individualistic sentence of trying to be perfectly moral has never felt harder than today. Our new versions might be “check your privilege” and “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”.

Anyway, to get back to games, I think we are always in danger of equivocating and saying “it’s complicated” when it comes to semiotics, and yet often seem to need to. Stuff IS complicated, and never more so than when it comes to signs and signals. Everyone comes to an idea with their baggage and we cannot change that baggage, no matter how hard we wish it were not there. My partner is a lawyer, and Australian judges do not use the term Ms; she cautions her female students that if that is the battle they want to fight, it will be difficult to win, noone will flock to your banner and it will be costly no matter the outcome. She tries to model a positive view but without neglecting the terrain the women will be entering. I tend to have the maxim that you should never believe anyone who tells you something cannot change, they are almost always arguing for their own cowardice. A few years ago I was arguing hard that the term “serious games” was a terrible one and needed to change; a friend of mine said the infamous thought-terminating cliche of that ship having sailed. He was, I was happy to say, 100% wrong, and “games for change” is catching on. He was also the same person who looked at my post about how games don’t have to be competitions and remarked that once again I seemed to be tilting at windmills, and trying to ice-skate uphill, when I should just accept that it do be that way sometimes and it is what it is.

I have another friend who designed a game for the Salvation Army designed to built an understanding of how villages in poor agricultural areas can build themselves out of poverty. I asked him why it wasn’t competitive; his answer was that nobody understands cooperative games. Not in the audience he is trying to reach. He’s right. It hurts me, but he’s right. And I guess that’s what this is all coming back to: we are in a watershed moment in games and that involves dealing with the things that, right now, we cannot change. With the hand we are dealt, to use a gaming metaphor.

Me, trying to explain why everyone else sucks but me

I’m lucky enough to have lived through the revolution in comics when the western world finally caught on that just because a comic had Batman in it didn’t mean it couldn’t be literature. I also have enough historical connection to the 1960s to remember the same arguments being made about rock and roll and stand up comedy. All of them invariably started with a very similar argument: that the art form being derided as not serious was ancient. Ancient neanderthals drew words and images together on cave walls; they played music around the fire; they told stories to make each other laugh. The idea of this was to create a kind of ritual significance with two ends: to help a thing that felt knew seem less new to the mainstream, but also to calm down the academics at the sidelines. Yes we know, academics, that comics aren’t new, and nothing they are doing is new, but we have to PRETEND it is new because to the maintstream audience, it FEELS very new.

The people who remembered the newspaper strips about Peter Parker’s married life and the POW! BAM! of the Batman TV show were having a kind of cultural shock to see people going “no, this shit matters, and is good and is politically and culturally significant”. Some of that was amazement, a wondrous suprise to find more adult depth in old concepts. Similarly, a lot of people’s experience with board games is “we played them as kids and they were kind of … bad?” or “we played them as kids and then we grew out of them”. Wondrous day then, to find games have “suddenly” somehow “grown up” and become “good” or socially acceptable. More and more I see gamers use the term “modern” meaning “good”, with their particular choice of cut off naturally being “a few years before I started getting into the hobby”. Naturally, as someone who knows games have always been here and who has always been here myself, I object loudly from the kitchen. But I get it: for them, the world has jumped a great distance. The first animes (is that the plural?) I ever saw were Astro Boy and Battle of the Planets, the very next one I saw was Ghost in the Shell; that felt like a bullet to the brain and a very silly thing to say they were the same thing, and confusing to me how one got to B from A. Then people tried to “get me into anime” and all failed because it was super hard to get context and nobody inside was very good at giving me context.

I think, more than most folks, I need that context and a sense of a critical language to understand a medium, so I tend to want to offer all of that to those newly arrived. I have always prided myself on being what I call a dragoman. The term is one I stole from colonial history: a dragoman was the man you, a European, hired when you went to the Middle or Far East, who understood the local world and could introduce you to it safely. (A near equivalent is the term indian agent but it has historical problems.) I often remark at conventions how people from one fandom are totally lost when they encounter another, and I love to be the person stepping up to fill that gap. I love being a teacher and an explainer – not least because that’s how I interact with the universe myself. But it is also worth noting to myself that not everyone needs this. The kids are alright going straight to Ghost in the Shell or Wicked City, and it does not matter to anyone that they think the board games now are COOL because they have HOT CHICKS (or I guess trick taking mechanics, in games) and the old ones are FOR BABIES because they don’t.

But it DOES matter as a game designer, because our audience is vast, and expanding, and shifting. But also because games, even more perhaps than comics and cartoons, depend on interpretation. Games need to be swiftly understood and internalized which means the symbols and signification we use has to work with the software available, and that software is the human brain. It is true that a lot of people react violently to the idea of a cooperative game, or any other kind of ideas outside their view of what a game is. We can change that, but slowly; we have to acknowledge a lot of where we are to begin with. I hate that people think games are competition, and I am driving hard to change that, but I also (grudgingly, with no serenity at all) accept that this is a long ongoing process.

At the same time as our audience is opening up, there is also going to be an urge to not have to keep starting from scratch. Previously the game industry was so small and broken up it was difficult to have a conversation about games in game design. It had to happen instead in a critical space or the academic space. I’d argue that Friedmann Friese probably created one of the first real salvos of games about games with Copycat, so-called because he wanted to acknowledge that he hadn’t invented anything in making it. 504 was then the natural extension thereof, a game that was 504 games in one, just add your own theme. I’d also argue that the problem with both games is they didn’t really make sense to anyone but someone deeply immersed already in that conversation about innovation and euro-game mechanics. Games, because they are so dependent on understanding a shared language, are at great risk of iterating ON that language, until it becomes indecipherable to the new player. Of course everyone knows that red is life points and blue is mana points, and so on.

Here’s the thing: although all art exists in conversation with other art and its time and its context, I’d argue that really great art can and should transcend that and be universal and timeless. It’s true that Watchmen is about superheroes as they were as a storytelling medium and corporate property, but I wasn’t reading comics at the time and I can understand Watchmen perfectly without that context. It operates on many many levels. Shakespeare doesn’t always translate but so much of what he writes does, even when he was flipping scripts and commenting on other works around him. Compare that to Undertale: a video game where when you get stuck a kindly character comes and helps you pass a level. That joke only works if you’re immersed in what video games are; worse still, I could not get to that point of genre-interrogation in Undertale because I couldn’t get past the earlier levels. As interesting as a critique as Undertale was, it was not just unintelligible to the average person, it was unreachable. And that’s with nearly 50% of people regularly playing video games.

At one point I spent a few years checking which games explained that AWSD were how to move around. Almost none of them did. That had become assumed language. I wonder if we’re really close to making the same mistakes in board games.

And that – at last -brings us to why I hate Cole Wehrle. Cole, amazingly, brilliantly, is having a deep conversation about wargames and dudes-on-a-map games, and history games. But the problem I have with him is with each new game he makes, he goes further down a line of conversation that started with some central assumptions about what a war game is and why it exists. And every time he iterates on that, the conversation gets further and further away from me, because I don’t have the experience OR ABILITY to keep up with the kinds of games he makes. (Ability is of course something for a whole other column, but I need to wrap this up at least for this instalment). None of it is approachable or accessible. All of it feels like it’s about things I barely understand. At the same time, I love that he’s asking these questions and iterating over and over further down into those questions. I just wish it was about some other part of gaming that I could relate to understand. It’s frustrating to see someone clearly doing great work in this space and not being able to go with it; but more than that it makes me fear that we might, like video games did, end up in a world where we are so busy congratulating ourselves on subverting the dominant paradigms that we’ve forgotten that those paradigms have become walls that the outsiders can’t get over.

Some might look at that and go well, we’re not designing for those people, and that’s fair enough. It is what it is, and some people can’t be convinced to like a thing. I will never be able to understand the games Cole makes and I’m sure he’s okay with that, and certainly I should be. I also don’t mind when people miss the subtle levels in my fiction or game design writing…but I also want to make sure that, to some extent, they have a way in. I pitch high, but I also don’t want to be very careful not to push away. Not that setting a game at any giving difficulty is inherently pushing away! It’s also probably fine to make games where people attack other people with dudes on a map. I’m only worried about going down the silo too hard. And that designers might occasionally forget that not everyone “gets” the idea of a war game. I tried to play Arcs and immediately I was hit with the idea that the setting didn’t give me any reason to attack anyone. The mechanics did (although not strongly), but I still didn’t want to do it. Shut Up and Sit Down talk about Arcs makes its own lore for you; but at least when I’m being the space turtles I know that I’m supposed to hate those barony guys. Of course, not everyone cares about setting as much as I do, either. Twilight Imperium isn’t a better game because of this element. I think my point is, we should always remember that our audience may be seeing this thing for the first time. We can’t always design for that, if we want to go deep, but, like a memento mori, we should keep it in mind. And maybe I’m weird because I don’t want to attack people in games, but I can tell you like I said in the first article in this series: THE MAIN REASON PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO PLAY GAMES IS LOSING MAKES THEM FEEL STUPID AND WINNING MAKES THEM FEEL MEAN.

And I bring that thought to every game I design, and try to design with that as the hand I am dealt. That doesn’t mean I want Cole to stop being Frank Miller; it just means I think we need some Scott McClouds as well.

And of course I don’t actually hate Cole at all. The fact that he’s talking about this stuff in his games is amazing. I just used that title because although I hate clickbait, I also have to deal with the internet as it is. I don’t have the strength to retrain your brains not to click on outrage, and I hopefully have the serenity to forgive myself for playing to it.

The Atomic RPG Action

Posted on by dconstructions
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Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about it recently. It comes up a lot when we play The Score but it also sneaks into other RPGs all the time – and I think we probably find ways to do this kind of thing more than we might imagine, but it’s not written down in any rulebooks. And pretty much the entire history of RPGs is thinking of things people are actually doing and turning them into written rules.

First, let’s do an example, and I’ll do Star Wars again because I’m old. Luke wakes up to find his new droid has wandered off into the desert. He goes looking for it, and finds signs of sandpeople. He pulls back to see if he can see them from a distance, and they – having set a trap – ambush him and knock him out. He is saved at the last moment by the appearance of a strange figure using crazy mind powers, who is luckily, a person Luke has been thinking about.

Atomic comes from the Greek a-tmos, a as in not and tmos as in cuttable. Something you can’t cut divide any further..

As a writer, here’s how you might think about this scene: you want to establish some character beats. Luke isn’t as tough as he thinks he is. Obi-Wan has mysterious powers. We can show that by having a nice moment of “plot zig zag” – Luke finds the droid is gone (oh no), Luke finds the droid (hooray), Luke sees sand people (suspense), Luke is attacked (surprise), Luke is saved (hooray). You would write this all as one scene, and the chief purpose of the scene would be to get the two characters together in an interesting way, and establish some character and world building.

Obviously there isn’t and can’t always be a parallel between non-participatory storytelling and participatory storytelling, but here’s how this might look in an RPG: Luke would make a roll to see if he can find R2D2s trail. He succeeds! Then the GM has him roll perception to notice the sand people. He succeeds! He decides he will hide. The GM decides (somehow) that the sand people are setting up a trap so gives Luke some rolls to see if he can figure this out, like say Local Knowledge and Perception. Fail, and fail. Okay, Luke, give me a dodge roll. Fail? Okay they knock you out. But … I guess an old wizard comes along and stops them from eating you? Luke’s player will spend a point on his I Know This Guy stat to say this is an old mountain hermit he’s met a few times.

And at this point someone might go – and it might be the GM, and it might be in secret, or it might not – “oh, can that be the person my character, Princess Leia, was trying to find?”. And that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s a lot like retro-active continuity but done in the act of creation. It makes sense that this thing that we’ve already decided happened and that thing we’ve already decided happened are linked. Perhaps causally or through an heretofore unestablished connection. And like I say, I think we do this all the time.

So often when I’m generating random stuff from tables, I’m putting two or three things together so that they are linked like this. Which has got me pondering: is there a way to make this an explicit mechanic? In The Score I’ve been toying with the idea of drawing two cards at once, so that you can explain the failure of the first by the arrival of the second, or resolve the failure of the first with the success of the second. However particularly since the game is all about drawing cards, it tends to work better at the table if everything is atomic. And that’s when it hit me: almost everything we do in TTRPGs is atomic like this. The example above was something you might call a scene but each roll stood on its own. The GM might have prepared several ways the encounter might have gone, and seen that as a cohesive whole but each roll was “what happens now, at this point” with Luke rolling to see if he gets a yes or a no or a sort of outcome. The story branches around these atomic choices. And that’s fine…

…but if you were writing this scene, you’d write this at the very least as a one-two punch. First this, then that. Luke takes a hit, gets rescued. You’d get the two things at the same time.

There are some systems that can work like this. You could do a scene-based resolution where say, Luke’s trying to “find R2D2” and he gets a yes but, and the player decides that he gets ambushed then saved. In this case though the test is still a kind of an atomic thing – a yes no maybe of “does this happen”. And if you go out to this step, the scene with Obi-Wan is connected to Luke not being at home when the stormtroopers arrive and to Luke finding Obi-Wan and getting some of his backstory.

Alternatively you could have a tug-of-war style system (like in Dogs in the Vineyard or Cortex) where the GM is playing “planetary threats” and there’s a back and forth wagering until finally Luke wins but with a sacrifice (he takes a wound, say). This does get to the idea that we build in connections and outcomes but it does still feel like we’re trying to solve a singular situation. We have a procedural scene: Luke wants to achieve an outcome and rolls to determine if he does. And certainly we can start with that idea and bring in what I’m talking about, because “solving a problem” is a pretty standard core RPG mechanic.

But what I’d like to see is something that steps outside the atomic. Imagine a situation where every roll in an RPG is always two rolls, in the sense of we’re getting two ideas we want to link together. This isn’t the same thing as rolls that produce lots of information, like in the Genesys system, because that still feels to me sealed inside the atomic concept. Although again, that’s probably a good way to come at this problem – it might be that we’ve solved this issue already, with this idea. But I’m curious about what else we might do. Another way to think about this is systems where everyone rolls their initiative at the start of the round so you know that when you finish your action, who is coming next. Similarly the Balsera Initiative system where you decide who goes next is going to prompt into this area as well. What we want is for players to think about connections, and what just happened and what’s about to happen is a start.

But what if whenever Bob the Fighter wants to do X we get Eric the cleric to roll for whatever they are doing next? Of course you’ll say they don’t know what they’re doing next, but we often DO have some idea. Maybe Bob is trying to bust down the door and Eric the Cleric is going to blast some spells. Roll both. Then explain and describe the whole thing when you know all the things coming into the scene. In this case there’s basically four outcomes, but they’re all kind of interesting. Can Bob fail to get the door down but Eric look badass when casting spells? Maybe. If I was writing that scene, I’d have Bob hit the door, hurt himself, have a comedy beat and then a skeleton shoot out of the door a second later and getting blasted. Or maybe the door opens but Bob goes sliding in, looks up and sees a skeleton about to kill him – and then Eric saves his life. If Bob wins and Eric wins, then it’s a moment of two comrades acting in perfect synchronicity. If Bob wins and Eric fails then Bob slams open the door only for the skeleton to shoot past him and Eric’s faith to fail. If they both fail…the skeleton kicks the door open, knocks Bob down and Eric fails to get his holy symbol up.

Of course all of those situations can be achieved with atomic rolls but I hope you can see how starting with lots of information coming into something BEFORE we interpret the roll, we can get different results. And that currently, we mostly do RPGs where each player makes an atomic choice and gets a singular answer back from the system before we move on. And there’s probably a whole other series of things we could be doing that aren’t atomic like this. Games naturally teach us to take turns and keeping things atomic does mean that each player feels independent and in control. Turns, in other words, make sense. But they’re not the only way to play. We don’t take turns in tug of war – we all come in at once.

I do not have the answers here. I only have this question, this start of an idea. I’m putting it here because I want to see someone take it somewhere. Because that’s what I’m talking about – collaboration. Collaboration, like narrative, is rarely atomic. Let’s see where we can go, not just one step at a time, on our own.

The Blog You Must Read Before You Die

Posted on by dconstructions
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“Let me not seem to have lived in vain” – Tycho Brahe, one of history’s greatest scientist, dying words

It’s important to know your mythology, because it reveals what cultures care about.

One of the running themes throughout the Old Testament is patience. This is because it was written for cultures feeling terribly oppressed and abandoned by their god, so their stories are about how patience pays off even when you think it can’t possibly. Samson is promised by God he will destroy his enemies as long as he keeps the faith. He disobeys, then loses his great strength, but at the last moment, has a chance to destroy his enemies. When all is lost to a conquering king that God promised to kill, Judith marries the victorious Holofernes, gets him drunk and cuts his head off. And when Abraham is promised a son, he gets older and older, and even when he and his wife are nine hundred years old, God delivers on his promises, with a son called Isaac.

Now, previously, like Samson, Abraham had disobeyed God and lost the faith, telling his wife to sleep with another man. So God is, as is often the way, wary of Abraham’s faith, so he devises one final test to check Abraham has learnt the lesson that God always fulfills his promises, and orders Abraham to kill Isaac. Spoilers: once it is clear Abraham is on board, God relents at the last second, and presumably Isaac grows up with severe trust issues.

Modern eyes find the story of Isaac difficult to deal with and it leads to discussions about the nature of trust in a deity – but those discussions tend to be grounded in the idea that what Abraham is doing is an abomination because he is killing an innocent. But that’s NOT the point of the story. The point of the story is Abraham is asked to destroy the very thing he wants most, the thing God promised him eight hundred years ago: descendants. Abraham doesn’t care about life, not his own, certainly. He lives in a culture where death is a constant and the only sense of assuredness and constancy is passing your name onto children and grandchildren.

The story of Abraham dates from somewhere between 1500 to 600 BC. Fast forward a thousand years and Jesus has a very different message in his philosophy, where he promises an individual salvation from death. Society in the Middle East is now at a point where death is no longer so certain that nobody cares about it. People want to live forever. Skip forward another 1600 years or so and it’s the 17th century. The Dark Ages are over, the 100 Years War is Over, the religious wars of Europe are ending, and the plague is now so rare its extremely localized appearance is a scary minor event, not a world-ending apocalypse. People now think they really can live forever, because they just don’t see death everywhere they go any more. In many cases this causes people to turn away from religion, meaning it has to be reformed; while others becomes straight-up humanists and atheists. Other parts of culture are horrified by this trend so they invent the memento mori: the inclusion in every work of art of a skull or another symbol of death to remind the viewer they are going to die. It’s considered very important in some cultures to include this, lest the beauty of the art without it seduce you back to thinking you’re immortal. They literally refuse to let you forget you will die, because they think that will kill you and society.

Fast forward another four hundred years to the late 20th century. Modern medicine is unbelievable. We destroy the Third Horseman by eliminating polio and expunging smallpox. Life expectancy shoots through the roof. The implementation of plastics and universal plumbing make hygiene possible at unimaginable levels a century ago. Random death is so uncommon or great fears coalesce into the one disease we seemingly can’t cure – cancer. And some of us are so sure we’ll live forever we stop vaccinating our children. We’ve lost our fear of death even on a population level – and that can be dangerous. But mostly we talk instead of poor health outcomes. For many, a life lived in pain or weakness is far more frightening than death. Euthanasia is on the table because as a culture we believe there is something worse than death: a life of suffering, or fear, or regret.

And those things are bad, but every society has its unthinkable horrors that must be warded against. Abraham feared nothing so much as being childless. 17th century folk did fear their souls going to Hell. And we fear our lives being wasted. And when we have those kind of all-encompassing existential fears, there are those who would turn them into cultural touchstones and cult-like beliefs. We have our own memento-moris of this age. We have a series of books and shows listing hundreds or thousands of things to do BEFORE YOU DIE, lest you live a life of lower value. A life lived in fear is a life half-lived. Begin it now, the self-helpers demand, lest you waste a moment not beginning. Follow your dream and your bliss. Quit your job and roam the earth before you get too old. Live like there’s no tomorrow. Don’t die still wondering. Take a chance. Live life to the fullest. You should be writing.  Just do it. And have a Coke while you do.

Like most things, there’s some truth in this. It’s important not to settle for a reality filled with pain, suffering and abuse, and to seek out support and tiny ways to spiral upwards away from such things. But like most things, it’s exaggerated and expounded and shoved down our throats to a terrifying and disgusting degree. And it’s just not helpful. Not for most people.

And it’s enormously unhelpful to a large section of people. People who can’t begin it now. People who don’t have the privilege of money or health or freedom that you do. People who see suffering every second so they need no memento-mori to remind them. People who instead need memento-vivas, reminders that life is okay as it is. Pictures of puppies and kittens, for example. (Of course, advertising likes to tell you to embrace the status quo just as much as it likes to cast you as the hero of just doing it, but advertising ruins everything.)

Nothing has been more damaging to my writing career as the pressure of being told to do it and do it now. That brings it with it a terrifying sense of urgency, a sense that your ideas are a limited resource, and those ones burning and bubbling out of you every second will be lost if you don’t write them down. That your duty is to eternity and every lost moment is betraying yourself and everyone else. Make great art, ordered Neil Gaiman, but you must add Joss Whedon’s addition: don’t write a story if you don’t have a story to tell. I’ve sat at blank pages and gripped pens and screamed at my body to make the words, because everything else was the most disgusting thing, the most unbearable thing: to live a life half-lived, to not create, not use my gift.

I was born a gifted child so from the very beginning educators beat into me with emotional wounds the sense of wastage. But I have learnt, at last, through bloody battles, that nothing is wasted. Ever. And if you are going to create, you need to know that. Your ideas will seem to go nowhere. They will bubble out like steam and appear to fade into the ether. They will die on the page or never make it that far. And it will look like the garden is empty.

But life goes on and those ideas and attempts lie dormant and wait. And sometimes, they come back to life in the most amazing ways, but only when they are ready. You cannot pick the fruit before it is ripe. The Divyavadana, Buddhist scriptures written in sanskrit in the 2nd century BC provides the quote I keep beside my desk:

“What we have done will not be lost to all eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour.”

Seven years ago I started work on a project for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, a supplement for Estalia, the Spanish-equivalent of the setting. It’s finished now, an epic tome of 144 pages that took an amazing amount of work. Several times I completely abandoned it. Several times I knew it could never be done. And I needed to think that, or it could NOT have been done. I tried to give it to others so that the fans would not be denied the product they wanted, but others didn’t want it. I asked for help, and got some at some time, none at others, and then at last, the right help at the right time, when I was strong enough to use it. Because you see, they didn’t want the book, they wanted MY book.

But not even that; apart from a few posts in approval, nobody really cares. Ultimately, we don’t make art for our audience, it doesn’t make sense to do it like that. And while it’s wonderful to see that this project ripened at its time, it’s the ripening that mattered, more than the finished product. I’m proud of it, but I’m more happy with the process. I learned more from the process and I cherish the process more. Which is why it wouldn’t matter if it had died. It was only once I let go and accepted it might that I had space to heal and ripen to a point where maybe it could be done. Once I knew I could live without it, I could make it. Once I knew my life was not betrayed by stepping away from my dream, I could live authentically enough to have art within me.

Tycho Brahe was one of the greatest astronomers the world had ever known and his measurements were so precise that they weren’t bettered until the 20th century. Without his work, his colleague Johannes Kepler could never have discovered elliptical planet movement, and Newton could never have discovered gravity. But Brahe lived his entire life in fear of being forgotten, of being a nobody, and on his death bed, he prayed to God and all who would hear him that he might mean something. Kepler, himself neurotic and afraid, found understanding in his friend’s last words. And Kepler’s reflection also sits beside my desk to remind me what matters.

“The roads that lead a man to knowledge are as wondrous as that knowledge itself”

See the road, and walk it haphazardly. You can’t force it. You shouln’t be writing; you should be growing to a place where writing is natural, and safe, and joyful, and how you get there is yours to discover. Don’t let anyone tell you they know the best way for you to go – or that you need to start going now, lest you waste your precious time. You’ll go when you’re ready. You really do have time. And anything else is madness.

And I hope you enjoy Swords of the South.

 

 

Emotional Environmentalism, or The Care And Feeding of Your Creative Urge

Posted on by dconstructions
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Pollution is something we talk about a lot these days, but sometimes we forget what it means. If an oil tanker crashes on the road, and the oil leaks out, that’s not pollution, because it can be contained. But if the oil catches fire and the smoke goes everywhere, that is pollution. The difference is containability. What makes it pollution, in other words, is that it is all-pervasive. Inescapable. It is part of our environment, where we live, eat, drink, breathe, and so becomes part of us. And we know, now, that these things can make us very sick indeed, even kill us, even if they are invisible, because we live with them. Eat enough fish and you can die of mercury poisoning even though the doses themselves will be tiny.

So we’re learning – slowly – to control our environment. To ensure that our air and our water are clean, because we take them in so often we can’t afford anything less.

But what we also need to think about is emotional environments, and the pollution that gets into that.

Emotional health and physical health have much in common. Particularly in that they have levels of resistance, and that that resistance can be overcome both with single strong attacks and by long-term small ones. And when that resistance runs down, we cease being able to function properly, and need to hole up somewhere safe until either the threats die down or the resistance builds up again.

We’re familiar with the big, strong attacks to our resilience. Some of them are massive, crippling attacks, like the loss of a loved one, or a sudden change in our lifestyle. They’re the getting hit by a bus attacks. Then there’s the thumbtack in the foot attacks like negative feedback or breaking your favourite thing. There’s the slow cancer of not liking what you see in the mirror. We know these ones.

But there’s others. Some we can’t avoid. There’s missing the bus even when you ran for it. There’s the elevator being broken and there’s vomit all over the stairs. There’s not having a shirt without a hole in it to wear. There’s the screaming kids in the restaurant, the rude person at the traffic lights. The cold look from a stranger who decides to disapprove of you. Coming home to a messy kitchen, where the doorknob’s still broken and the stove smells funny all the time. All the little things that fill us with weltschmertz as the Germans call it: the sense that things are not necessarily bad, but not what they could be. Bad enough to notice.

This is emotional pollution, and like the mercury in fish, it can build up and up, and it can – it absolutely can – kill.

One thing I’ve learnt in the last few years with my excellent psychologist is there are two ways to attack mental health. One is building up your inner resistance – making your self image, self resilience and self esteem strong so it can repel attacks. The other is reducing the attacks coming in. Avoiding or lessening the attacks. And where possible, purifying the toxins from your environment.

Some toxins will always get in. No matter how much you plan, there’s always going to be a bus you miss; eventually there will be a soup splash on your favourite shirt. But some of these things can be fixed, but we often don’t think to, or we think they’re too small to bother with, or that they’re just part of life. And then they build up, and then they kill you.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that dealing with a lot of these things takes emotional strength in the first place, so sometimes we’re so worn down we can’t solve these problems, or can only tap away slowly at the tiniest levels. It’s also really important to note that most of these things require money to solve, and if you’ve ever been poor you’ll know what I mean. All the little things that money could solve, like catching a taxi when you miss that train. Buying a new shirt when the old one tears. Having insurance so you don’t have to worry so much about running for the bus on a slippery road. Being able to afford the gym so you don’t have to go running in the cold, freezing rain. If you’ve been poor, you know. How they break you down and kill you by inches, and how just trying to stop them wearing you through to bone uses up every resource you might have used to fix them.

Being depressed is a lot like that, too. It is a poverty of emotional strength, an impotence to change anything at all about your environment. Depression’s friend, anxiety, is more like having massive immunodeficiencies: everything is an attack, or a potential one. Together they make your environment so poisonous you can barely breathe, and give you no strength to do anything about it. Little wonder we depressives retreat to the comfort of bed – like the boy in the bubble, it is the only way to survive.

But for those of us who are doing better, all of this is still useful, still important. If you’re struggling with something, if you’re going beyond yourself, if you’re pursuing something creative or ambitious, you are running your emotional reserves ragged. Whether it’s a marathon or a sprint, you need your reserves strong. And while we often do a few things to pep us up (like taking some vitamins for the soul) we often forget to control our environment.

It can be simple, tiny things. If you are trying to write something, and you can see the dirty washing pile, your mind may turn to something else you “should” be doing. It can be big, life-planning things, like having a day job or savings so not every word is life and death. I’ve done that kind of writing – where if it cannot be sold that week you will literally starve – and it kills creativity and enthusiasm pretty fast. The environment is too toxic, there’s too much terror of survival, eating away at your emotional reserves. But it doesn’t have to be that critical; it could also be that you’re not going to write your best with your current computer because the keyboard sticks a lot or the screen flickers; it could be your novel isn’t going to come until you’re in just a generally nicer house or better neighbourhood or can afford some new shirts, because right now, your goal to live in a nice place or better clothes is eating those reserves and you can’t eat into them further.

It can be adding the positive, by hanging up motivational posters or making plans for the future or visualising goals. It could be giving yourself restoratives, like buying yourself lunch on the day you do your big writes, so you don’t have to lose that tiny bit (or not so tiny bit) of your reserves making your lunch. It could reducing the chances of attacks, like taking a taxi on writing days so there’s no chance you can miss a bus. It could be as simple as walking home a different way so you don’t see the cold strangers or hear the screaming kids. They are tiny things so they might seem frivolous, if you even think of them at all. But again, it’s about pollution: if you eat the tiny thing every day, it might not kill you but it will make you weaker.

A lot of writing is learning to be a resilient writer: to write every day no matter what, no matter how sick you are, or tired, or whether you have no ideas or no motivation. That’s the resilience part. But you can’t learn resilience when you’re being attacked all the time. Yes, I’m sure the fire makes the steel, but the human body doesn’t work like that. If the wound isn’t cleared, the blood can’t clot and the scabs can’t form. You have to wrap it up in gauze and keep it clean and dry. Writing – designing, creating, changing, striving – is much the same.

A better metaphor might be keeping a plant. You need one with strong roots, but you also need a good pot, good soil, potting mix, water, sunlight, and to protect it from all the things that could hurt it. You know how to spray the aphids, yes, but sometimes we leave them in too hot a sun, or above the exhaust fan. These are the little deaths, the slow, invisible killers. Yours are out there too. Some of them you might have to be a millionaire to fix, or at least well off. Others you might need to think really hard or wait a long time for them to get better. But if you’re aware of them, you might be able to do the tiniest thing.

There are spiders in my backyard. Every day I go out that way, they take away a bit of my strength. It’s a tiny thing. But it matters. And all I have to do is remember to go out the front door instead, and I stop that bit being chipped away. And I grow stronger, bit by bit. Day by day.

Throw Away the Carrot, Burn the Stick: Rethinking Procrastination, Part Three

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“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it” – Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven

I’m not an expert in beating procrastination, just an expert in suffering from it. So here’s the part where my insight becomes even less applicable to all of you. And remember that what we’re dealing with here, as discussed in parts one and two, is breaking down an entire culturally-coded mindset towards work and creativity. So it’s not going to be easy. It takes a lifetime to rewire your brain. But what I’m doing is starting to make a difference, for me.

The answer, unfortunately, is time management and scheduling. Unfortunately, there’s no way around that. But the trick is doing it well. One of the reasons we hate schedules is because almost always, the things we schedule are the boring things. If your schedule has nothing on it but TIME FOR ICECREAM, you might learn to like scheduling. That reminds me: in 18 minutes, I have to eat ice-cream.

There’s an old stunt they like to do in time-management classes. They take a jar, and fill it with golfballs until they can’t get any more in. And the jar is full! But then they add ballbearings and they go into all the space between the golfballs, until you can’t get any more ball bearings in. Jar is full! Then you add sand, and once again, you can add a lot to the jar, even though it was already full. And for the final demonstration, they show that if you put the sand in first, there’s barely room for any ballbearings, and no golfballs after that. The metaphor is banally obvious: look after the pounds and the pennies will look after themselves, as it were. It is not unuseful advice: you can, in fact, take your eyes off the little things if you keep the big things in line. The gigantic problem with this visualisation is they forget the important part, which is figuring out which things in your life are golf balls, and which are sand.

And most people get it backwards. Because we’re taught to.

Think about it: if you put “play Civ 5” down as a golfball, you sound shallow. Silly. Childish. No, those golfballs have to be big and important. Jobs. Security. A future. Or “fulfilling”: love, family, spiritual meaning, connections, saving the rainforest. And for some people, that might work. You might put those things in as your golf balls and somehow, you just naturally fill in everything else without thinking. But a lot of us aren’t like that at all.

Like I said last time: as human beings, we need and deserve leisure time and rest. We depend on it. Without it, we wither and die and can’t do anything else. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to make it the biggest golf-ball of all.

So you schedule it. You put it in first. Also important: a good night’s sleep. That goes in there. And also, you can even schedule procrastinating activities, those non-engaged activities that are just fun to do while your brain is asleep. Stuffing around on the internet. Checking email. Watching TV. Lying in bed thinking about Spiderman. Eating ice-cream. Licking ice-cream off interesting body parts. These are the things that go on your daily schedule. And probably nothing else, at least to start with. Because everything else is the sand. It’ll get done. It’ll happen. But only if you have the strength to tackle it.

And what you find is two-fold: one, you really work harder at the sand when you know you have to stop and think about Spiderman in ten minutes. The motivation is built in, and the excitement drives you on. You forget about achievement and output because you don’t have time to think about them. You have ice-cream coming up. You have to move or you’ll miss it. Second, if you schedule your ice-cream, boy, do you enjoy it more. Because it’s guilt free. Right there, on your timetable: half an hour to eat ice-cream. You don’t have to worry about what you should be doing, because you’re DOING what you should be doing. In fact, you may engage so much with the activity, you may even want to do it less.

Think about it: most of the time you stop playing a game because you’re no longer engaged, or because it’s time to do something else. What if you couldn’t stop, because you’d scheduled 2 hours to play and you had to fill those hours? You might actually get bored. You might distract yourself. Do a bit of sand-stuff, so you can fill out those two hours. You might even be less keen to rush back to the game for the next two hours because you remember the drudgery at the end. You might stall a bit in your writing, go over time, just so you don’t have to do quite so much Civilization. Like sand, the writing slips between the cracks, filling in those precious little seconds. And it gets done. Because you’re not fighting against what you do and don’t deserve any more.

I have two minutes left, so I’ll finish there. Like I said, it might not work for you. But it’s really not as crazy as it sounds. Figure out what is important to you to DO, not to have accomplished, without judging or shame, and give leisure its deserved role. Then schedule that and only that. Then let the sand be sand. And see what happens.

Good luck.

Throw Away the Carrot, Burn the Stick: Rethinking Procrastination, Part Two

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For the most part, we as a society are learning that to abjure the stick. If you know anything about dog training, you know that punishment training – negative reinforcement – is not used any more. Not because it’s cruel, although it is, but because it rarely works, and if it does, it works far less efficiently. And it’s true of all animals: we respond better to rewards than we do to punishment, of an order magnitude more.

But we still use the carrot, and getting rid of it is a lot harder. Partly because it does have it uses. It’s very important for young children, for example, and for animals, because simple minds have trouble with cause and effect. This is why babies love peek-a-boo: they have no idea, when you go away, that you’re going to come back. Learning that kind of cause and effect is part of growing up. That to get the drink to your mouth you have to concentrate on holding the cup. That to be able to find your coat you need to put it on the right coat-hook. That thinking and working in advance leads to good things in the future.  We’re a primitive species and we like experiencing pleasure. When we eat the spoils of the hunt we get a lot of dopamine released so our body knows this is good for us. When we have to go out and hunt, our bodies are under attack and working hard, and so we don’t get the dopamine release, otherwise we’d get addicted to hunting and either work ourselves to death or get eaten by the lions. So we learn: hunt first, eat later.

The problem comes when we apply the carrot idea to everything we do. Beyond the simple and beyond the child. As we grow older, and our work and our play and our minds become more complex, the model ceases to apply, and breaks down. Think about it: when did you really first notice you were procrastinating? For most of us, it was high school. Not because of high school (although that plays a part) but because we were going through puberty and becoming fully rounded people, and the old ways stopped working. And for a lot of us, what happened next depended a lot on how we handled that problem, or avoided it.

There is a lot of emphasis on the carrot, so you may not believe me it’s so bad. Here then are some reasons why it’s so bad at what it does, and destructive to good habits.

1. It turns the “work” into a bad thing.

Go back to the metaphor itself: the carrot is there to make the donkey walk forward, pulling the wagon or the cog-wheel. The donkey does not want to do that. It is a terrible chore. Importantly, it is not what the donkey would naturally be doing. That’s important because of some of what the donkey would naturally be doing would still not be “dopamine stuff”. The donkey would naturally work, it would go around finding the best grass it could and use its muscles to tear it out, and so on. What the donkey is doing is WORSE than working. Every time you use this metaphor, even if you don’t voice it, subconciously you’ve decided that the work that needs to be done is pulling a terrible heavy load, in a way that is unnatural, that is outside what you consider good for you. Even if it was already an unpleasant task, it becomes worse, and happy tasks become drudges. We’ll come back to this mischaracterisation of the process later.

2. It makes the work suffer by comparison.

To get the carrot, we must do the work. Therefore, the carrot has to be better than the work. Now we’ve put two things in front of us, two ideas. If you’ve ever seen a cop show, you know about good cop bad cop. This is fundamental human psychology: if you present a person with a bad thing X and a less bad thing Y, they feel drawn to Y, even if Y is not necessarily in their interest. We are built on comparison. So if you put up two ideas – write my RPG or play Civ 2, say – you can’t help compare them. And since you were clever enough to think of an excellent fun reward, because you really want to motivate yourself, your carrot will be a wonderful thing. Once again, the result is you make the work task look worse than it actually is. You’ve mischaracterised it as a burden, a chore, and as something you don’t want. You ache now for your carrot more than you ever would if you could choose it freely. And that sense of constrained desired is yet another emotion that drains your strength, and makes you weaker, and less able to do anything at all.

3. It is dangerous to our self-esteem.

We are creatures of hope. The way we deal with pain and suffering it to rely on a great and fundamental truth: pain and suffering do not last forever. We are suffering now, we will be happy later. But somewhere along the way, our pattern-loving minds turned this into a cause and effect. We think I will be happy later BECAUSE I am suffering now. Or worse, in order to be happy later, I MUST SUFFER FIRST. I’m using poetic language, but the carrot teaches us this same thing: in order for me to have happiness, leisure, entertainment, relaxation, dopamine releases, time to myself, etc, I must first do this thing which is drudgery, unimportant, unvalued, unshiny, this thing I have cast as a terrible chore, that makes my time belong to something else, some higher code that I have somehow set outside what I actually want, or require lots of reminders as to why it is important (constantly waving that carrot in my face). We start using words like DESERVE and EARN and SHOULD and ALLOWED. I am not ALLOWED to play Civilization until I have EARNED it.

We are human beings. We are born with the right and the need to be happy, to relax and have leisure time. We deserve these things unconditionally. We need them to survive and be our true selves. We need them to be strong. We need them to make the world better. And anything that tells us differently is bad for us, for our mental health, and our sense of self and for the goals and outcomes we want to reach.

There are standards in life, both external and internal, and they are useful and worthy. But the moment we use them to punish ourselves or diminish ourselves, they become dangerous, twisted and hurtful, and they can make us achieve less, not more.  We’ll come back to this, too.

4. It fetishizes the outcome over the process.

We’re outcome-oriented, as a culture. Part of that is capitalism: a process is hard to sell, a product is easy to sell. A finished product is easier to move around, to conceptualise, to admire. Artists in particular are at the mercy of the outcome. It is laudable for a nurse, say, to spend her life doing nursing, but if you spent your life playing music but never recorded a song, people will label you a failure who could never finish anything. Completed projects go on the resume, time served does not.

To some extent, this is fair: what makes art art is that it can be shared, and a process is hard to share. And what can cripple art is not sharing it and getting so involved in a process that we never allow our ideas to be given to others. Finishing IS important, is more important for artists. But if we forget the process, or worse, demonize it (via the mischaracterisations mentioned in 1 and 2), we kill our art, and we kill ourselves.

Studies have shown that there are five basic returns people get from jobs, five values. They are: financial return, being important (either social status or having a large effect), being the boss and making decisions, working in an enjoyable environment for you socially, and doing something where the work itself is engaging and fun. The important thing is not everyone cares about these things equally. And the carrot theory is basically all about the first two: that the work you do will lead to a return later. But if we’re creative types, we don’t usually care much about money or status, but we really care about being engaged and having fun. So our motivation theory is ass-backwards.

Think about it: we’re encouraged to write novels, publish games, to make art. Even if you remove commercial success, critical acclaim or the audience applause – which we almost never do – we are told that the point of being an artist is to create an outcome. And everything becomes about that. That’s the carrot. To finish the novel. To publish the game. And everything before it is the cog-wheel. We do the cogwheel to get the carrot.

But what does that do? That demonizes the process and champions the outcome. It tells us that finishing something – ie not writing – is fundamentally better than working on something – ie writing. So every single day when you get up and think “well, I still don’t have a novel done, so I better do some writing”, you’ve sent yourself that message, loud and clear. That writing is bad, and not writing is good. That writing is suffering, and only if you suffer enough, you get your reward – because you certainly don’t deserve one now. You’re not worthy of that.

Is it any wonder, then, that you don’t want to write?

To paraphrase an old saying, a lot of people want to have written a novel, rather than want to write a novel. Because then they get to say, hey, that’s my novel, that’s proof of my success. Part of that is human nature (and healthy). Part of that is the nature of art. And a lot of it is because we fetishize the outcome, and demonize the process. And every time we do that, we make it harder and harder to do the process. We make the process into a chore and we turn ourselves into failures. And the only way to escape those horrible feelings is to feed the procrastination monster instead.

And he’s a nasty thing, but it’s our own behavior – our constant focus on the carrot – that made him strong to begin with.

In Part 3, we’ll actually talk about how to solve some of these problems. There are other options.

Throw Away the Carrot, Burn the Stick: Rethinking Procrastination, Part One

Posted on by dconstructions
5

Procrastination is a big thing. We often joke about it, but it can do a lot of damage to our life if we let it, or we worry about it too much. And it can certainly eat away at our reserves – our time AND our energy – to do things like writing and designing, things we often put last on our list, but also feel most pressured to do, as we are constantly told THEY ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT. There is a lot of advice out there on dealing with procrastination, and a lot of it is bullshit. Or rather, a lot of it is just what worked for one guy or a few people. But procrastination and the issues that make it up are a big, big thing, and it is wired into fundamental aspects of how we approach ourselves and everything we do in life. Which means there are multiple ways to attack it, and everyone has to do what works for them and their mind. What’s more, we’re all on our own journey to untangle ourselves, and you don’t only need to have the right idea for your brain, but the right idea AT THE RIGHT TIME. So my advice might be useless to you. I’m sharing it anyway, because only by getting lots of ideas can we all find the best way for us to untangle things.

I’m certainly not an expert on breaking procrastination, but I am an expert on procrastinating. It’s something that’s played an enormous part of my life, in many different arenas. Indeed, it is fairly true to say that my particular mental disorder, depression/anxiety, is an extremely heightened form of procrastination. You become so afraid of certain thoughts, emotions, feelings and situations you lock your body into a perpetual state of numbness (or panic, in the case of anxiety) to avoid those things. I’ve been on a long journey to work some of these things out, so in that context, my advice has some experience.

The first point to deal with is this: how we think about procrastination is typically very wrong.

Let’s imagine for this discussion that there are three activities. There’s W, the work we don’t want to do. Like say writing your RPG. There’s P, the procrastinating activity. Maybe it’s surfing the internet. Then there’s F, the fun activity, like maybe playing Civilization 5. To pick entirely random examples that certainly don’t reflect my life at all. Now, a lot of the time, people don’t have P and F as separate activities. Sometimes they are the same activity done in different ways or experienced in different ways – for example, when you can’t really enjoy yourself when you go out for a drink because in the back of your mind you feel you should be studying. Or you don’t get really into playing X-box because you’re just looking for a low-level distraction to keep your mind busy. This still might not be you, but go with me here.

Generally, our thinking about procrastination is this: I keep doing distracting thing P because I don’t want to do hard, painful, difficult thing W.

This is false.

Most of the time, what is stopping us from doing W has little to do with W at all. Don’t get me wrong, the anxiety curve is a big deal, especially with big, hard to grasp projects (go read up about the curve, it is also part of this subject). But what keeps us doing P is less about fear of W and more about our shame and guilt at doing P. And the more P we do, the worse we feel, and the worse we feel, the less we are able to act.

This is pretty obvious when you think about it.  When our body is injured, it stops doing things. It wants to fall over and lie still because then it can concentrate on getting better. Likewise, when we feel upset, we don’t want to go out and do things, we want to crawl into a foetal ball, hide in our room and eat candy. Our mind is just like our body: when it feels hurt, it devotes all its resources to healing itself, and devotes no resources to going out and doing things.

So the more you do the P activity, the more your brain feels attacked by feelings of guilt and shame, and thus the weaker you become. Your body now has no strength to do W, or to do F, or to do P even. You become less and less engaged with F and P, so the bad feelings work stronger and do more damage, so you become weaker and weaker. We wait for motivation to strike, but it now has an enormous uphill battle, because unhappy people are difficult to motivate. Sometimes impossible.

I’m going to say that again because it’s very important: the worse you feel, the harder it is to motivate yourself, or be motivated by others.

It’s important because so much of our mindset and culture are wrapped up in a very different idea of motivating. We believe in the carrot and the stick. And the carrot and the stick are all about suffering and being unhappy, or at best, fearing more unhappiness. We must do the hard task W, lest we feel pain from the stick, or so we can deserve the carrot. This point of view is burned into us at a primal level, and we accept it instinctively.

But everything we know about the human mind and human motivation tells us it is not only a poor model, it is a model inherently destructive to our health and our happiness.

Don’t get me wrong, the carrot and the stick are not entirely without merit, in very specific situations, at very specific times. It teaches us about cause and effect when we are children. But now we see through a glass darkly, and if we keep trying to walk as a child, we make everything worse.

That’s a big idea and I’m already at 1000 words, so there’s more in part 2.

Beginning is not the hard part

Posted on by dconstructions
4

The world is full of aphorisms.

Pretty much all of them are false.

Not just because they boil down wisdom to a soundbite, but because they’re designed to run on faith. They’re designed to keep you alive when the rockslide buries you. Articles of faith are always lies. And that’s fine, as far as it goes, because they can help. But it’s not fine because it builds false hope. And when you hit the reality, you suffer because nobody told you.

So allow me to disabuse this notion about beginnings.

They say that the journey of a million miles begins with a single step. This is true, technically. But it is then followed by a journey of a million miles, minus one step.

They say beginnings are hard, and they are. Getting from zero to one may be one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. But what they don’t tell you is that every single step after that is just as hard. Comparatively, beginnings aren’t hard. Beginnings are, at most, just as hard as everything else. But usually, they’re easier.

They’re easier than the point ten steps in when the joy of starting wears off. When every new step only confirms the pointlessness of the endeavour. When every line of creation only makes the work more inept and disgraceful. When the exhaustion sets in and every inch burns. Oh, and my personal favourite, when you’re close to the end and thus failure is a million times worse because it will waste everything you’ve done. And when you’re inches from the finish line and the terror of crossing it is slightly more agonizing than crawling on the broken glass in front of it.

Beginnings? Beginnings are hard, yes. Beginnings are all the fear and none of the knowledge, all the pressure and none of the distance. Beginnings are hard.

And then it gets much, much worse.