Let's Talk Balance

(here's the slides PDF: Tools to Keep Play Balanced!)

At this last PAX I got to sit next to a clinician who I have tremendous respect for, (the very soon-to-be-Dr.) Anna DiNoto, and we got to tell a room of gamers some of our tools for balancing play. I thought that I would share that talk with you here.

We forward the whole thing by making it clear our talk isn’t about addiction, or “Internet Gaming Disorder,” as it’s labeled in an appendix of the DSM-V. We just wanted to cover tools, simple things people could do, if they were playing and/or internetting a little more than they’d like.

step one: assess

The first thing you’ll want to do is assess your play (or internet use, if that’s your deal) as accurately as possible. It’s not easy. In going back and forth about this, we talked about some tools we could use, and I made a handout which basically tracked the duration of your stay in these places. I think it’s slide 8/37. It lists maybe “facebook from 5:55 to 7pm,” then “Skyrim from 10pm to 1:13am,” and so on. Then we mark how intense it was on a scale of one to ten, one being that you were mostly focused on something else, cooking dinner, some paperwork, scintillating television drama. Ten would be that you were so focused that you left a pizza in the oven for roughly two hours.

I have some funny stories about burnt pizzas.

This is a good place to mention (again, I know) none of this piece is clinical advice. In person, Anna is extremely good, really professional about making that clear when she speaks. And I’m not a mental health professional; I’m just a gamer. I co-wrote a book on gaming addictions, but don't have treatment experience.

Back to tracking your play, and tracking that every day. Keyloggers might help, roommates might help (though some of us get defensive). You need to figure out where you’re at, so you have an accurate idea of what you’re trying to balance.

Next, before doing anything else, figure out where your stress is. If we notice that arguments with the husband usually lead to longer sessions of play, useful info. Sometimes games stress us out. The point here is to figure out what our “triggers” are. Figuring out what cues us off is essential to “hacking” those patterns, and being able to eventually redirect those to something we’d rather be doing.

(to jump ahead here: Post it notes are Anna’s go-to. If you interrupt your usual patterns with post-it notes, say one near the hook where you set your keys, or on the kitchen counter, you can stop your usual routines. Put one on your laptop, on your bedroom door.)

step two: plan

After assessing play, the second step is to make a plan. There are three kinds of plan, in general. Abstinence is breaking from games, temporarily or permanently. Harm reduction is switching to games or behaviors that might be less problematic. Play reduction is taking a favorite game – say League of Legends – and playing it less.

I actually do enjoy the occasional abstinence from games, altogether. Sometimes, when I have a big project or just need a break, I’ll drop games voluntarily for awhile. Hilarie Cash mentioned that at ReSTART, she typically sees even the worst withdrawal symptoms wash off of hardcore gamers after a few weeks. Abstinence can be useful, but Anna was quick to point out the number of times a parent would decide it was time to simply remove a game (without understanding why they’re playing it – it’s just a game after all). The graphic descriptions she’s given me of the consequences are startling even for me (she changed identifying patient details, exactingly, every time – she’s a pro). But we’re talking hundreds of thousands in dramatic property damage, and some pretty tragic self-damage. Just throwing that in there.

Harm reduction is pretty easy. If you like the vast landscapes of Warcraft, try playing Proteus, or maybe Dear Esther. If you’re a hardcore raider, try switching to anything else. Convince your raid friends to come with you, if you can. Raiding – in my research – held one of the few statistically significant connections to patterns we didn’t actually enjoy very much, the job loss, sleep loss, depression, etc. Addiction, in other words.

Some games have play reduction tools built in. Warcraft’s parental controls have it. The Xbox has it.

As you start to plan, make a boredom list. A list of things – besides just the games that make you stumble – you like doing. Creating nontoxic food and getting sleep were on mine, though Anna rightly reminded me that at that point I’m going past “simple balance.” Still, taking walks and cooking well, shopping for good food, that sort of thing, I’d say that they fit. When you do start to decrease how much you’re playing, there’ll be a void in your schedule. There are a lot of good basics to fill that time with, and there are some great ones.

Writing, drawing, and the myriad forms of making art. Getting involved in city government. Designing your own games. Taking college courses on topics that interest you, be they marine biology, architecture, or (yay!) games.

We can use timers – whether it’s an egg timer, alarm clocks that shower the room with puzzle pieces, or the color-coded Time Timers – to make ourselves more mindful of how much we’ve played. To become aware. In general, following the plan should help you get to be more aware of how you’re using your time. The point is to build a general mindfulness. I’ve learned a lot of good things in all this time gaming, but mindfulness was one of the most important.

step three: maintain

The third step is maintainance. To hold your progress in the long term, you need to reinforce your progress in the short term. In other words, don’t forget to treat yourself.

You want to give yourself “dings” for your real progress at keeping things balanced. Even better if you can apply meaningful fun and engagement, to keep yourself to the plan you want. You can also take cheat days. Like, with most successful diets, there’s usually a day out of the week where you can have pizza and beer with some good company.

I do, anyway. I’m still working on all this, but I still enjoy games for longer than three hours at a time. I just – far more often than I used to – get meaningful things done at work, at home, or for my bad self before those mini-binges. Those sometimes turn into missed bedtimes and some mild regret, especially when I’m not with my good gaming buddies, so I have to be careful. Still it’s been awhile since I’ve vanished for a month straight. So that’s good.

step four: revise

Finally, remember that you’re human. This shit is a challenge if you haven’t exactly been the balance king, in the past. If that’s the case, some professional help, with a solid local therapist? Highly recommended.

You’ll need to reassess your plan, as life changes, and having someone whose job is to help you, is sort of like having a professional gamer coaching your gamerly prowresses. Most clinicians just charge a lot less than, say, the pros at Curse Gaming.

Anyway, those were a few suggestions we threw out, to deal with keeping things sane to begin with. I’m not a therapist, and I don’t know what you’re going through, but I do want you to be able to keep play balanced with everything else. Hope it helps.

The Secret World is not entirely grindy

It is still possible to play this game a lot. To binge it, even. Though in Secret World this feels much less about compulsion, gilt carrots or maliciously labyrinthine design. I'd compare it to Skyrim before I would Warcraft, in that the content feels like content.

One example I've been throwing around is of Sam Krieg, a bestselling New England author who's holed up in a lighthouse while zombies ravage the little island. I found this guy, my favorite character, after saying,

"Cool lighthouse. I wonder if anything's going on there."

Then braving the weird horrors in the fog, which take inspiration from Lovecraft, Poe, and pulpier American authors. Then being rewarded with a quest I'd describe as anti-grind.

All repetitive behavior as "destructive and unreasonable"? This guy is cool. He lambastes my sexy Illuminati superheroine, saying that as a writer he's got a damn good excuse to repeat himself: it makes him millions. But what's my excuse? What's the player's excuse?

The quest takes typical grindy mechanics, then adds little twists. For instance, we kill a set number of zombies by impaling rotting corpses (irresistible zombie bait, as we all know) at the edge of a bluff. The animations aren't perfect (especially clear in the more lightly funded Egypt and Transylvania expansions) but we get to watch zombies goofily launch themselves off cliffs. The game, sometimes by adding extra little flourishes of programming, sometimes by creating riddles which require Latin Vulgate dictionaries and thoughtful deduction, pokes fun at MMOs in general. 

The combat is made interesting by a mix-n-match system. It's one of the first times I've enjoyed being the mage sort of character.

The fun of designing your own weird combat is, tragically or wonderfully (I'm really not sure), mostly a creative fun. Some of the animations get ridiculous to the point of pure comic gold, as one swirling pistol attack which should probably involve a half-empty bottle of vodka. It's just not gripping. 

The cutscenes have their share of charming moments. I get the sense the writers had carte blanche to be the best possible kind of weird. 

Hitting the paywalls in TSW isn't fun, but I didn't until about 20 hours in. Their in-game store is super basic, and not very usable. Almost like the wacky quest writers also got to label their DLC so as to make it nigh-impossible to buy anything. 

Their store is also restrictive. You can't gift DLC (like, wtf? You guys don't like money?).

Like most MMOs, once the content runs dry, what's left appears to be grindy endgame for gears (destructive and unreasonable, much?). That made a sad panda, since in so many other parts of the MMO oeuvre they'd found innovative solutions. For most sane human beings, this is going to be an awesome treat of content (actual content!), on most logins. For anyone with a history of problematic use, I don't recommend playing alone. I'm conflicted myself since the questing phase was so delightful and easy to take-or-leave. It's worth seeing, but only if you can do it strictly with friends. 

That said, right now I'm staring off the edge of a gear precipice. I look, and wonder if I've finally learned not to jump. 

Humble Paleontology

Yeah, yeah. A few months later I crawl back here, to drop a few unceremonious words.

PAX was fun. One gentleman took this picture with his Google Glass.

Apparently there was also Much Video. That particularly unimpressed look is probably me telling him to, like, kindly quit with the ninjalike lifecapture.

Then I got to wear his specs. He activated this easter egg whereby I could turn 360, and everywhere around me were the developers for Glass. Here's one brusquely-grabbed shot to illustrate, courtesy google images.

The point was that I felt like I was right there, and all it took was a tiny screen next to one eye. If they ever release this, it's going to multiply everything we've been saying about games by 100x. Maybe that's exaggerating. It's also probably untrue, in that Google Glass will add altogether new elements to those conversations.

I also spoke at PAX, for the first time. Once with the delightful, brilliant Anna DiNoto, on how to keep play in balance with everything else in life. And then again, with James Portnow, about how games are art, and why that matters. I loved both, but have to admit that the art one felt a lot more powerful and impassioned (probably a fair comparison when the other is a finely tuned one on "balance"). There were also roughly 10 times as many people at the art talk (many there to catch James, before he rode off into the pixelated sunset). Still, on day three, I saw the line building up and said aloud,

"We're gonna need a bigger latte."

When the talks were said and done, it was good to see the friends I mostly only catch up with at things like PAX and GDC. They're good folk.


So, only one more thing to announce. A few weeks ago I wrapped up the first draft of a book I've been plugging away at. It mixes my collected games research from the last decade or so, with all the weird stories I have from growing up around games. I think it could make for a good context to help non-gamers get what we're doing, but more I wrote it for the miscreants I've played with all these years. One in particular, a guy who's been my friend for years, who we all call Squatch.

And maybe also myself. It feels good to have a chunk of words that I'm happier with than anything else I've done.

While it's good to have something to show for all that work, the finding-agents and selling-books phase has never been my favorite thing. But then again, I like what I've done. I think that should help. It's exciting.

Teamwork 101: Or How I Escaped Bronze in the League of Legends

For those that read this blog for game studies, psych research, or because (apparently) there's a page that's a top google hit for "sweet ass pictures," sorry! Today I'm just posting a quick guide that I wrote after getting out of the time-out corner in the League of Legends: Bronze Division.

Since it's at the bottom, you often deal with the worst kind of gamerly element: trolls, misogynists, racists, the employed. You can win, in despite of all that, with a mix of compromise and communication.

(More after the break)

---

How Games are Art: A Very Slightly Extended Version

Note: This version includes a few minor selections from Dutton's book, as well as higher-res images. The version I plan to cross-post to Gamasutra, a bit later, I want to keep at or close to 100 words. I say only very slightly extended, because this topic is insanely huge. 

In 2009, aesthetician Denis Dutton wrote The Art Instinct. There, aiming for something inclusive and objective, he outlined twelve cross-cultural criteria for art. I like Dutton for his mix of accessibility and intellect, so use his criteria as a starting line in the search for a language of the aesthetic experience.

1. Direct Pleasure

“The art object – narrative story, crafted artifact, or visual and aural performance – is valued as a source of immediate experiential pleasure in itself, and not essentially for its utility in producing something else that is either useful or pleasurable.”

2. Skill & Virtuosity

“The admiration of skill is not just intellectual; skill exercised by writers, carvers, dancers, potters, composers, painters, pianists, singers, etc. can cause jaws to drop, hair to stand up on the back of the neck, and eyes to flood with tears.”

Some creators:

Levine
Blow
Anthropy
Chung

3. Style
 
“Style provides a stable, predictable, “normal” background…”

“…against which artists may create elements of novelty and expressive surprise.”

4. Novelty & Creativity

“The unpredictability of creative art, its newness, plays against the predictability of conventional style or formal type (sonata, novel, tragedy, and so forth).”

5. Criticism
 
“Professional criticism, including academic scholarship applied to the arts where it is evaluative, is a performance itself and subject to evaluation by its larger audience; critics routinely criticize each other.”

Some critics: 

Bissell
McGonigal
Hernandez
Ebert
Bogost

6. Representation

“…a realistic painting of the folds in a red satin dress, a detailed model of a steam engine, or the tiny plates, silverware, goblets, and lattice-crust cherry pie on the dinner table of a doll’s house. But we can also enjoy representation for two other reasons: we can take pleasure in how well a representation is accomplished, and we can take pleasure in the object or scene represented…”

7. Special Focus

“A gold-curtained stage, a plinth in a museum, spotlights, ornate picture frames, illuminated showcases, book jackets and typography, ceremonial aspects of public concerts and plays, an audience’s expensive clothes, the performer’s black tie, the presence of the czar in his royal box, even the high price of tickets…”

8. Expressive Individuality

9. Emotional Saturation
“…emotions provoked or incited by the represented content of art…”

Or, “…the work’s emotional contour, its emotional perspective…”

10. Intellectual Challenge

“…working through a complex plot, putting evidence together to recognize a problem or solution before a character in a story recognizes it, balancing and combining formal and illustrative elements in a complicated painting, and following the transformations of an opening melody recapitulated at the end of a piece of music.”

11. Art Traditions & Institutions

“Art objects and performances, as much in small-scale oral cultures as in literate civilization, are created and to a degree given significance by their place in the history and traditions of their art.”

12. Imaginative Experience

“Finally, and perhaps the most important of all characteristics on this list, objects of art essentially provide an imaginative experience for both producers…”

“…and audiences.”

That’s how some games are already art, and how others might get better.

Languages of Experience

Note: I'm about to cross-post this at gamasutra. I'd thought about using this blog for a version with a lot more cheeky personal rambling. Still might, I did enjoy the bit about how I make games while double-fisting tequila and redbull. For now, I'm going to keep the two posts the same.

This GDC I had the pleasure of watching two well-known game designers nearly stand up shouting, as they violently agreed over minute distinctions between “fun” and “engagement.” Say what you will about Cart Life (they did) but anything that gets us that excited about a whole medium is working.

I don't want to give a precise summary of last month's game theory writing, by Dan Cook, Robert Yang, Mattie Brice, and Raph Koster, or the spark lit by Leigh Alexander,  the flights of Anna Anthropy, and the veritable army of posts, comments, and prognostications which colored the exchanges. Read it, if you want a sense of how we’re juggling the want for useful discourse, with the want to relish artistic freedom, to violently resist assimilation.

But even when we’re being loud, I’m struck by how much we’re agreeing in different languages. Raph Koster has been cheering on crazy, new shit for over a decade. Anna Anthropy says that everyone should be making personal, cool shit. Their outlooks don't seem all that different, on the face. The arguments signal to me that procedural literacy – the shit that we can only learn by interacting with game systems – has already begun to create new and robust experiences for which we lack words. Excepting the work of a few genius-level writers working on games – among which I’d count Patricia Hernandez, Cara Ellison, and Ian Bogost – we fall over ourselves trying to describe the power of the medium. And there's a really good reason that we'll keep falling over, and violently agreeing:

Games can do anything.

In games, we can recreate any experience within or without the human experience. And there are dozens of vetted, objective vocabularies for the human experience. I’m interested in outlining five: for cultural criticism, human engagement, human manipulation, spatiality, and aesthetics. We can and do use these languages to break down literature, poetry, cinema, sculpture, a range of mediums which includes games. But in games we go beyond reading or watching an experience. We live it. We can't help but live it. Procedurality means we need to get involved, it’s the major ordinance of games. Books say, know me. Television says, gaze at me. Games say, touch me.
   
Gamers will sometimes grasp behaviorism, positive psychology, art, and design implicitly and inseparably, because they've touched them, walked through them. With a few gorgeous exceptions –most of which I’ve ruthlessly pillaged, and some of which are listed below – older academic languages aren’t so holistic. Games are. Games are systems designed to be experienced. We have a lot of great work right now on how they function as systems, and similarly rich work on the craft of design. Where we’re lagging is in understanding the experience. If we can live games, then we can understand them through the languages used to analyze life.

Over the next few weeks, I want to talk about these languages in turn. Each could lend both precision and depth to conversations about why and how games matter.

1)    The Language of Cultural Critique Challenge

As a note: if I do lay out parts of a language on cultural criticism, it would be strictly academic. As a completely privileged white man, rarely do I encounter oppression that’s openly institutionalized. While I can lay out some theoretical work on othering, gender, cultures of abuse, and certain structures of oppression, my goal is to assemble a language, not solve anyone’s problems. If you’re reading this and think you can make a language which genuinely cares to help creators assess and elevate their challenges to existing social ills, maybe even generate new forms of empathy, then what are you waiting for? If there are objective vocabularies that you already use, then I really want to hear about them.

2)    The Language of Human Engagement

Some of the scholars adding to the language of human engagement do come from the games industry. “Fun” is the sweet spot, for commercial consultants and the media industry both. You see clear paths to fun in the work of folks like Rigby and Ryan, Nicole Lazzaro, and Raph. In psychology we can (and many do) pull from the standard folks like Cziksentmihaly and Maslow. It's also interesting to get into the deeper happiness research, with folks like George Vaillant, Frankl, and the parts of Maslow that don't involve pyramids. It's there you can start to plumb for the difference between pedestrian human happiness, and a depth of fulfillment.

3)    The Language of Human Manipulation

This language could clarify the line between engagement and manipulation for creators and the general populace both, by covering work in radical behaviorism, neuropsychology, motivational psychology, as well as their present applications within gaming. For a very non-confrontational instance, in what Dr. Nick Yee has called the Proteus Effect, embodiment alone can change behavior. Further, he's found that morphing an individual's face onto that of a political candidate caused significant increases in whether a respondent would vote for that candidate. With this possibility that media might (perhaps forcibly) change behavior, an understanding of human manipulation is growing increasingly vital for civic life, to say nothing of the subtlety of aesthetic expression.

4)    The Language of Spatiality

Architecture has long been asserted to shape behavior, for instance in Jeremy Bentham's Big Brother-style prison, the Panopticon. As with then, contemporary CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) puts a major focus on architecture for deterring criminals. Though some vocabulary can be inferred from crime prevention projects, academics such as Don Norman hold out hope that we can free the conversation to be used in the pursuit of human fulfillment. Games-savvy academics have been working with government agencies to apply what we know. Spatiality is also a great place to point out deep links between these languages – for instance – between space and art, space and happiness, even the role of space in manipulation and oppression. Ultimately, these languages are meant to work in tandem, and expand past just five.

5)    The Language of Aesthetic Experience

Objective languages for aesthetic experience could jump the debate of whether games are art, focusing instead on how games fulfill established aspects of art. For one instance, if you compared games to Denis Dutton's twelve-item, cross-cultural aesthetic vocabulary, it becomes fairly clear how our medium has already fulfilled every established role of art. Dutton pulls on folks like Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Hume. McLuhan, Warhol, John Cage, and Walter Benjamin also have a great deal to offer. It is also possible, once assessing their theories, to map ways in which games add wholly unprecedented vistas to the aesthetic experience.

Other fields and works are ripe with languages for experience. Critical theory, social psychology, education.

Languages for experience don't just hold potential for informing games. If games help us to compile, and then refine our languages for experience: for engagement, space, manipulation, aesthetics, oppression, and beyond, the literate naturally take those and use them to better discuss life. Notation once helped music to be understood, to expand and flourish. Once we can see firsthand how game spaces inspire and fulfill, once we understand and hardy ourselves to commonplace manipulation, and when more people can objectively critique art, humans refine our ability to make powerful, positive changes in all of our spaces. Online and off.

I’d really enjoy hearing feedback on this outlook, the meta idea, but maps for these languages aren’t the kind of thing that can be plopped and done. No matter how perennial the idea behind a word, language is a living thing. If any of it sounds relevant to your interests, then leave a little love!

At the GDC

I cross-posted this as my first gamasutra blog. I'm not sure how their process functions, so for now I thought I'd set it here as well. This GDC was at times intense and serendipitous: I survived a 15 hour drive on no sleep, and was invited into locked basements for traditional Chinese folk music. It was in equal parts meditative, almost boring. I walked alone through a lot of San Francisco, spent time in a couple of cathedrals, and was singled out by the one-legged maybe-a-monk.

Fun week, though. Hope you enjoy. 

“This GDC is really weird,” says Jesse.

“Why?” Asks Soraya.

“Because every year everyone seems to know what's happening. Like, maybe one year it's the PS3. Or another year it's motion controls. This GDC, nobody knows what the fuck is going on.”

Adam Sessler is chatting animatedly with a group of random developers, outside the Hotel St. Regis. He's wearing a very stylish hat. I idly wonder what he's been up to, since G4 got bought out. Another part of our group is having a very serious conversation, maybe on business development, while we wait to hit the food courts hidden under the Westfield Mall-thing. Jesse is teaching Soraya a game that he, a former Disney Imagineer, developed while he and his daughter had been waiting in long lines. I mention that their faces look a lot like people playing Johann Sebastian Joust. Jesse looks over, with a very suspect grin.

“Oh man! Have you played Wushu Turtle?”

“Err, no?” I say.

He reaches into a pocket. “Guess who has turtles?”

–

I fucking love the Indie Games Festival.

Dys4ia. Year Walk. Thrity Flights of Loving. FTL. Terry Cavanaugh. Brendon Chung. A dozen badass people I've never met, all of them just sitting around, showing off magic.

I fucking love it.

Walking away from that part of the show floor, I just randomly saw the very last game developer for which I could anticipate nerding out. Raph Koster was wearing an old, grey hoodie and dad jeans.

“Hi Raph Koster,” I say. “You are amazing.”

“Well thanks!” He says, “Who are you?”

The name on my badge has been blocked by a highlighter-colored Hello Kitty.

“Right,” I say, handing him a Hello Kitty business card. “You linked a thesis I once wrote. That was way cool.”

He's peering at the back of the business card. “Oh right. I'd have known that, if I had just been able to see your name.”

And then we proceed to talk about durians, for a moment, before we go our separate ways. I never mention that Star Wars Galaxies – a game for which Raph was the creative lead – taught me how to take chances. That it showed me, first-hand, that I could strive to do big things.

–

“Could you please lower your voices?” Croaks the hunched, white-haired lady behind us.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who hears her, but am loving this conversation about “fun” and “engagement” too much to stop either of the two tired men. James wants more than fun. He was just given a 20-year-old roleplay guidebook for holocaust internment camps. Nick wants better fun. He just came from an IGF awards ceremony that glossed over beautiful, innovative designs. Over the past ten minutes, their volume grew to block out near every other sound in the crowded Westfield food court.

“Gameplay can be boring, and still be meaningful.” Says James. “It can be hard, or tedious. Wrapping tedium in gameplay sends a message. Right?”

“No. Boring gameplay is just bad gameplay. We're past that. Other mediums know how to make tedium fun. It's why I keep coming back to Fight Club. Fifteen seconds and we know Tyler Durden's job is boring. Fifteen fucking seconds and we still give the gameplay award to Cart Life. Profound respect to that game, right. Did it deserve to win narrative? Yes. Did it have beautiful art? Yes. But gameplay? I mean--”

“EXCUSE ME... SIR.” Says the old lady, for the fifth time. “Lower your tone!”

Nick turns around, and puts a hand over his chest. “Oh my gosh, I am so, so sorry.”

James says, “We need to do this more often. I love it when we violently agree.”

“Absolutely.”

“Wow. I don't get it.” Says a younger game designer. “Why get so worked up if you both agree?”

“Because these kinds of tiny distinctions will fundamentally alter how this medium develops.”

–

“Is he good people?” Asks the Conference Associate honcho. He gives me the Buddy Christ double-thumbs-up, paired with a questioning look.

I return the pose.

He grins, “Good enough for me.”

And so I chat with a few random CAs before we move to Johann Sebastian Joust. The conference has wound down for the day, and here's a group of about 200 men and women in red shirts. A few of them pass along the Joust batons, and face off. Between the smiles and the game faces, you can tell they've each seen hundreds of game worlds. Some have even made a few. For a week, here in San Francisco, they get to be around old friends. There's a weeklong League of Legends CA tourney. There's a dragon's hoarde of board games. They're masters of Witch Hunter / Vampire Hunter / Mafia.

They are, for a week, family.

At a lunch, later in the week, I met Lincoln the CA. He could be in his late 40's, with a shaved head and a graying handlebar moustache. He lives just down the street from the Moscone Center, where he's volunteered as a CA for twelve years. It'd be thirteen, if not for a year where he was sick (though he still got out to say hi to a few people). A love of D&D brought him to his first GDC. He'd quit a bank job for a chance to work around games. He teased me for the Hello Kitty over my nametag.

“Clearly you've never been a CA.”

“Hey, you guys can scan over the top of it. You have the technology. I did move it once, though, to make that easier for a CA.”

“You could, you know, move it again.”

His wry grin is infectious. But he allowed me to simply grin back, and keep the Hello Kitty positioned just the way I liked it. I really hope I see him again next year.

–

Data doesn't lie. Especially not the data from EEDAR.

In 2012, the top 50 games in North America spent 350m in marketing, and that marketing war is expanding.

53% of gaming magazine covers are for shooters.

WoW makes 500m a year in subscriptions. WoT makes 350m a year in profit. CoD made a 1.6b.

Good games with good marketing make around seven times as much as the good games with bad marketing (emphasis on the around - I'm grossly paraphrasing a beautifully arranged dataset).

To the Moon moved a couple hundred thousand copies.

Limbo did okay. Minecraft made money. Dear Esther moved me. Botanicula made me cry. Flotilla and Star Wars Galaxies spoke to me on profound levels.

I've never played a Call of Duty game for more than a couple hours. If I've even played one; I get it confused with all the other big budget games trying desperately to look exactly like it and tackle its market share.

–

It's been a long time since the title “gamer” held any meaningful association in my mind. When the industry was small, maybe. But for years now, calling yourself a gamer has been tantamount to calling yourself a TV watcher. There are differences between Sponge Bob, Fox News, Survivor, and the surgery channel. With tens of thousands of new games coming out yearly, and 60% of the USA playing games “to pass the time,” the distinctions matter.

The people making games are still a community. I left this GDC thinking of them as an extended family.

But I still haven't figured out where I fit. Riding shotgun back to San Jose, in the dark, I'm a little disappointed by that. After all the truly strange, nearly mystical happenings, my place in the gaming cosmos hadn't revealed itself in any blinding burst of light.

So I mention that outloud.

“What is it you want?” Asks another writer. “Money? Power? I mean, be honest with yourself.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I really don't know. Somehow I thought it'd just, be clear.”

I ask the driver, who reasonably says that he doesn't really know me. But he eventually adds, “Think of your life as a wheel with nine spokes. They could be anything. Money, love, anything. But think about how big each spoke is right now, and decide where you want them to be in five years time.”

I write that down, while we try to decide whether it's the Caterpillar or the Cheshire Cat that asks Alice which direction she'll go.

The first writer says, “In five years, what sort of effect do you want to have?”

So I tell him. And it's personal. And when I'm done, I realize that I'm crying. Something I haven't really done since finishing a very neat indie game. I don't think anyone in the car notices.

Later, I go to draw out the spokes of my life, and I realize something. Maybe that the whole exercise is a paradox. Wheels need balanced spokes, if they're going to roll. There's something that I want, in five years. Something that I'd sacrifice for. But if I'm going to get there, nine other spokes need to exist. They need to be in place, but they need to be strong enough not to shred at the first rock in the road.

The games industry has a lot of component parts, each represented by people. New wheels and new spokes and new technologies will surely come. But maybe – just maybe – now's one of those times where we balance what we have. Maybe it's time to use the wheel to get somewhere.