Checkpoint II

Checkpoint II is our midterm 'review' of our thesis progress. My biggest concern at the moment is that I am behind with background research. After reviewing my research progress for the last few days, I have come to the conclusion that it is specifically the nature of the background process that is causing me headaches.

For example, I have considered the fact that I work best when 'free writing' and then retrospectively researching. That is to say that I work best when I have a 'story' to tell, I define the beginning and end of the story to scope myself, and then I write freely what my ideas are and what points I want to bring up and prove. After writing, I review the document I have made and I begin to see areas that need 'proof.' I can look at each of these statements that need 'proof' and answer the question "What was I getting at here? What was my intention?" The answer to that is what I end up researching.

After spending some time with research papers, I either realize my gut feeling was wrong and I need to go back and alter my approach (which has to be done with free writing, again, because more research will just exhaust me at this disheartening point) or I am able to find references, or alternatively I am able to construct an argument to support myself, but that requires additional writing in its own right.

This process works really well with me, and it is the means by which I will be able to write my design process, reasoning process, personal research methodology, etc. However it does not work for a field in which all of my preconceived notions are nebulous. Because a significant chunk of my research have either been black and white facts (need citation) or lengthy explanations of whole methodologies and theories which I've never even heard of before, it is impossible for me to free-write and then go back for a 'research pass.'

And so my research inevitably gets untargeted. Because I can barely articulate where my research begins, much less imagine where it is going to end, I have difficulty staying focused and on the point as to what's really relevant to me. Do I need picture-perfect depression rates stats? Will ones from 2008 work next to anxiety stats from 2013? I start worrying about the big picture. Then I wobble. Then I end up reading very interesting papers about the psychology of dogs. And then I realize I just speant the last four hours researching a statistics question that I just can't find an answer to through all the haze of business, leadership, and investment articles.

However, as my teacher has told me, I cannot stay on the background forever. Even though my background analysis is incomplete- and in fact does not yet make a coherent argument- I have to let it lie. I need to move on to my reasoning process.

I believe this shift will help me. By forcing myself out of exploration mode and into 'thinking' mode, I begin asking a lot more concrete questions. Because I'm not allowed to research anymore, I can't say to myself "I don't have a research methodology, I need to go research that." Instead I have to pull out a paper and some pencil and go:

 "Well since I can't research it, I guess I'll have to reason it. So what are my inputs and outputs? My inputs are an interest in women not gaming enough, culture, and the gender gap. So I guess that means my outputs have to measure cultural changes. No no no, that's impossible... Okay perhaps they have to measure cultural perceptions? And then if I really want to change culture, the game has to make the target demographic want to play it. So I have to evaluate their willingness to a) pick up the game b) play the game and c) spread the game. I also have to see if they simply like it."

Wow. After all that, does it look like researching my methodology is going to be such a big, vague, confusing chore after all? Or does it look like I'm going to be a research huntress with a very specific quarry and the means to identify it and track it down?

The background exploration phase was important to me because it opened my mind to the realm of things I could research (for example, for some reason it never occurred to me to look up theoretical frameworks for how a) games generate emotions other than Flow and sadness/frustration/admiration in players or b) how to use emotions in order to generate long lasting mood effects in players.

But now its time to free write and reason. If I can't free write it, I have to write out my reasoning process and then spend tiny chunks of time hunting specific answers. If I can't find those answers, I have to alter my reasoning.

I really think I can do this. I'm looking forward to what I come up with

Preparing for Checkpoint II

Checkpoint II, or the midterm, will be our 'thesis' (our 'written component' for Studio II). I'm not exactly sure what this entails. Obviously it is impossible to have done all the research necessary for writing a thesis paper that isn't to be done until the very last quarter of our masters' degree (which is a year away for me), on a project that we haven't done yet! But I'm assuming that this Checkpoint II will be an evaluation of whether we've done our background work/literature review, our basic reasoning, our criteria for what constitutes a finished thesis, etc.

Basically, I'm assuming that our teacher is instructing us on the how of writing the thesis. Some of us barely even have a thesis yet! So I believe that what he's looking for is to help teach us to think like graduate students, and to write like graduate students, and to research like graduate students. My assumption is that the midterm Checkpoint II will be a document that shows we're on the right track in terms of thinking, writing, and researching our final thesis project. This will lay a solid foundation on which we will actually be able to produce and evaluate some end implementation.

Still, that's going to be a hard checkpoint to reach for me. I believe I am one of a minority of graduate students in the major who currently has a very solid grasp of what her current thesis is and what her current thesis project will be. But that just means more is going to be expected of me. My academic inclinations and my very thorough understanding of my topic warrants a document that shows just how much thought I've put into my work. This is a thesis I've already been working on for a year and a half, and which has deep ties to my own experiences of being a female gamer and suffering from anxiety/depression.

Right now I'm concerned because according to my schedule, I'm already supposed to be working on my reasoning process- the process that will determine what my design principals for the new genre will be. However, I'm currently in a writing phase, and I'm still very much focused on background research.

It is to my great fortune that I seem to be getting better at researching. I'm less distracted by interesting statistics and information that do not directly support or effect my arguments. And I'm also getting a lot better at hunting down the 'missing links' between my logical reasoning bastions, and getting the data I need in order to support my claims.  But at the same time, a lot of the background research I have to do is very difficult to lock on to. Sifting through countless articles on mental illness is something of a chore, but its necessary in order to get the data I need to construct my arguments. On the other hand, sifting through this data also reveals a lot of important factors I need to be thinking about when designing my game, as well as tips for what a well-designed game will actually look like.

For example, it wasn't until I started doing my background psychology research that I realized there was already a discipline of psychology (positive psychology) that was closely linked with studies on play, and which already understood that the mechanisms in games can be used to promote human happiness. That's a ton of pre-existing data I can use in order to structure my game in such a way as to promote joy. Furthermore  researching the gender gap in depression really draws attention to not only what makes women happy, but also the stressors that they face, and the difficulties I'm going to experience in designing products that both fit their busy schedules and also encourage them to take more time for themselves.

I learned some very valuable things. I should be designing a game that is very moral in how it treats its player. The game should not encourage play outside twenty hours a day, so as to avoid gamer regret and accusations of 'addiction.' The game can and should encourage the player to experience happiness-producing actions outside of the game (recommending that players take breaks, meet up with friends in real life, or which offer praise and incentives for doing things like household chores.) My game can actually help gamify a woman's life, and like games like Superbetter, it can improve both her relationship with the game and her overall mental wellbeing. How could I have known that my main character should reward the player for doing her real-life chores, if I hadn't studied these things?

Studio II:Checkpoint I

The Prompt
Every few weeks in Studio II, students are expected to put together an update to illustrate what they have been working on, and to help ensure that they remain on task. The prompt for Checkpoint I is as follows:

Present research journal and blog, update on 10 open questions, present
written component outline, task list, research method, schedule. Peer critiques.

The Difficulties of Figuring Out How To Research Effectively

For me, the 'research' part of this blog has taken up the majority of my time. Although I have been working on my thesis and absorbing relative information for a very long time, the truth of the matter is is that I have been researching for the learning aspect, for the creative problem solving aspect, and I haven't paid attention to citing, gathering, and archiving my sources.

It is becoming more and more apparent that keeping an up-to-date, organized, thorough, and valid research journal is very important. But the task of keeping one has been no piece of cake. I often conduct my research in my off hours and save bookmarks into Google Chrome, which I'm then able to reference later. While my brain aggregates the material I've researched and keeps me focused on the right track, it has no interest in tagging that information with website links, names, or statistical data.

All of that's not very useful when you need to go back and write a thesis. Heck, even though you successfully manage to learn the information the 'first' time, you have no up-to-date record of what you justified and what you simply guessed. What happens when you have to remember why you made certain assumptions two to three years ago? A lot of times you might go back, second guess yourself, despair that you did certain crazy things, and rewrite half your idea- just to find out that the new revisions aren't justified and you really did know what you were doing all that time ago.

On the other hand, if I sit down with my research journal in hand and record each and every website I find and visit, and every tiny interesting word I see on every page, soon I have an equally unusable journal filled with nice quotes and reading material, that thoroughly chronicles one exhausting research period of my life, and which is otherwise useful and unsubstantial for basing a thesis on.

Its very hard to figure out what to research. What keywords do I put in? What exactly do I need to know? When am I justified? How do I find authoritative sources when I'm only 50% clear on what I'm looking for in the first place and I don't know how to phase interesting questions? How is it possible to keep a big picture view of my research process so I don't waste time researching useless things and at the same time explore necessary questions to such a thorough level that I turn up useful information?

Research can be exhausting. Frustrating. Emotionally draining. And go nowhere for way longer than we'd prefer. But hey, if anyone could do it, we wouldn't be special, right?

"Research Methodology"

Research methodology can mean several things. When I have something available to prototype and I want to analyze it for data, I need to apply one of countless different research methodologies to it and to some sample target audience. In this context, 'Research Methodology' is actually something that I have to keep researching!

There is another usage of research methodology that I would like to discuss in this context. It is not merely necessary to have a strong methodology for when I am gathering and analyzing my own internally generated data; It is also important to have some kind of living methodology in mind for how to gather external research from papers. 

So in this context, I need a methodology- or a set of rules, principals, and guidelines- for how to expand my newly budding research journal. 

My Current Methodology

Delineate Arenas/Areas

There are two basic kinds of research that I conduct. The first is exploratory  in which I don't really know what's out there and I'm trying to get a greater awareness of the topic. For example, since I am marketing to baby boomers for my thesis project, I ought to know a little bit about the entertainment and leisure worlds of tech savvy baby boomers. Actually, how old are baby boomers, specifically? People conduct a lot of research on what a generation is 'like,' and this can help me get a better handle on my audience. 

The important thing to do when conducting exploratory research is to delineate an area for exploration. It is beneficial to set a time span, and to try and numerically limit oneself in other ways. Limit Oneself? Why? I am a bit of a hoarder. I like to gather things. If I don't numerically limit myself, I'm prone to open 100+ tabs of websites that I'll never actually look at, and then waste time archiving the web address of each one of them 'So I don't lose them.' 

It is VERY important not to catalog the exploration in full, which creates a lot of unnecessary clutter. There is a temptation to archive/highlight every interesting quote, or to provide a description of every website. But this process does not usually help you in any way.  It is important to go out and find one or two good representatives to landmark the exploration you did, to throw down five or six quotes, to nab a few web addresses, but the most important part of the exploratory phase is this:

Digesting what you did.

Not summarizing each website or paraphrasing each quote. Not copy + pasting walls of 'valuable' text. The important thing is to take an hour to explore, jot down a few observations, and then walk off with your notebook and to try and describe the basics of what you found. The digestion process begins sending alternative arenas of exploration to your mind. You think of additional keywords, draw a circle around the kind of information you've been seeing. You can write down in your notebook, "I found out that there are baby-boomer-generation-specific leisure websites, and that they rarely discuss video games. They are more concerned with books and physical activity. They do provide a lot of tidbits about the technology companies they love, however."

That's a lot more useful than cataloging a whole lot of: "2008 study, 78% of wealth controlled by baby boomer generation, which stands to inherit 14 billion as silent generation parents die."

It is very easy to get distracted during the exploratory phase, and its the time you're most likely to end up on a totally unrelated website like Wikipedia studying a totally unrelated question, like what exact temperature does acetylene ignite at, and is it possible that a hypothetically bio-engineered dragon could act as a living blowtorch? Taking frequent breaks is important, because information is easiest to digest in chunks. Breaks also help to avoid distractions by providing natural points for refocusing research.

Forming Questions

The next part of my research methodology is to start formulating questions. During this phase, it is very important to have some notebook on hand at all times, because questions will come to you while you're eating or trying to sleep, and a good number of them tend to escape you. In fact, I never have my notebook on me, so I have to try and remember all of them, and let me tell you it is an EXHAUSTING experience.

There are a lot of ways to start raising questions about your project. Once you've explored an arena/area, questions are necessarily going to come to mind. If you've found that most websites don't seem to include the information you need, ask specifically "Does there exist a website of type A, or doesn't there?" If the website doesn't seem to exist, forming a question that will get you to exactly where you need to go can be hard, and it may be necessary to conduct a large series of mini explorations.

Eventually, however, as a thesis grows and peers critique what you've done, questions naturally begin to flow. "Why did you make this green?" "I feel that green will have effect A on my audience." "Do you have any evidence to support that?" Well now it's time to start forming some questions. What are the effects of green on a target audience? What products already use green and what was their reasoning process? Do other things initiate effect A on the audience? Is effect A needed by the audience? Is it possible that effect A yields some additional benefits that you assumed existed, but that need some proof in order to stand firm in court?

Take a Break; Refocus

Taking breaks is the single most important aspect of my research methodology. Without breaks, research goes nowhere for a very long time. And by breaks, I don't mean times in which you stop research and start writing in your research journal. I mean: Go eat. Sleep. Play volleyball. Hang out with someone. Drink a beer. Hunt a snowboarder. Ride a seal. Live, damn you, live!

Breaks are necessary because the outside stimulus helps form new questions and raise new areas for exploration. Talking to a friend about what problems you're working on can raise glaringly obvious solutions that you've overlooked (why do you have a single equal sign in the if statement? *asks the statistician standing behind the programmer, slurping on her smoothie* doh!)

Breaks are also important for refocusing. The mind starts to wander, jumping from idea to idea and eventually ending up too deep down an unnecessary rabbit hole or so far off topic that nothing of value is being researched. Breaks can either put the mind back on topic, or pull the mind out of an unnecessary rabbit hole and put it down a more necessary one.

Fragment the Question

No answers as to the effects of video games on the emotional well-being of middle aged women? Start to break the question down, and ask it in chunks. Do women play games? Do women suffer from depression? At what rate compared to men? Is it true that women have less leisure time? What do they spend their leisure time on? What is the effect of play on depression? In adults? Is there no research on that? Very well then; on children?

And what kind of play is best for them? Freeform or structured? Is leisure time linked to depression? Can we construct a reasonable, logical pathway that pulls the effects on children and fairly extrapolates them to adults? What pieces are missing? Is there another angle we can come at this from? What constitutes freeform play? If the only existing studies involve physical activity, can we find another study that talks about the differences between physical and cognitive freeform play and their effects on a person?

Do casual games assist with depression? Violent games? Social games? Role-playing games? Does 'online interactive play' assist with self confidence building? Do women like social simulation more than men?

Read the Blog Posts of Other Masters and PhD Students

Concerned you're researching 'wrong'? Constantly going down dead ends and don't know what's wrong with you? Read the blogs of other graduate students! Don't worry, it's normal to feel disillusioned, helpless and confused! 

My Personal Progress

My Research

My research has taken a turn for the better over the last week, with much more getting done than during the initial week of studies. My research journal is currently filled with the results of my first exploratory study, which turned up a lot of interesting quotes and background information but didn't lay out anything substantial to build a thesis on. 

At the end of week one, my exploratory studies began to streamline themselves as I took more breaks and varied my keywords from search to search, focusing on the first few websites found by Google instead of opening countless tabs and exhausting myself.

Perhaps one of my most important finds was a game called Seaman for the Sega Saturn which validated my original game-play loop (something I had been questioning and attempting to rewrite, feeling that it would never be acceptable). Seaman helped me think about my gameplay in another way. 

The initial questions in response to my 'thesis work thus far' presentation at the end of the first week helped me move into my second week of research. The questions people had to ask about my research and about my beliefs were very obvious, but I was unable to form them on my own, submersed as I was in my field of study. These questions I was able to fan out into series of research questions.

Lately I've been able to focus on specific areas of exploration and questions to ask, which has led me to some very interesting papers supporting many of the techniques I intuitively assumed would work, and suggesting areas I should focus on and develop further in order to get the greatest benefit from my work.

Sample Week 1 Research:

What do they like? Boomers are among the biggest buyers of new technology and new cars. (Especially cars. more than younger folks) Source: AIO http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2010-11-15-babyboomers-spending_N.htm  Their Source: According to J.D. Power & Associates

Sample Week 2 Research:

Does there really exist a significant gap between the genders in terms of leisure time? Yes. Source: http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/.3ndic.1t.4r@-eng.jsp?iid=52. Aside from physical activity, has depression been linked to leisure time as a whole? This source suggests that non-leisure time physical activity has no effect on depression, posing the possibility that researchers have misdiagnosed leisure time physical activity as stress reducing when in fact the stress reduction component is that women are making more leisure time for themselves: http://www.ijbnpa.org/content/5/1/27 Must research further. This next source not authoritative but provides good vocab and things to think on for forming further queries: http://www.lifepositive.com/mind/psychology/stress/male-depression.asp

My Written Component 

More Research Necessary

The more I research the more it becomes clear just how much research I have left to do. My written component will end up being the most important part of my thesis project, not just because I have a lot to 'justify' and report on, but also because without this research I cannot possibly hope to product a valid thesis project. 

Due to the scope of my thesis, I am currently focusing my written component research on the relationship between my game, women, and the play that will bind them. I want to know everything about my ladies, why they play, why they feel they can't play, the benefits of play, the relationship between play, leisure time, and stress, and so forth.

Important Discoveries

 I have made an enormous discovery both with Seaman and with the uncovering of data that suggests freeform play is specifically useful for stress reduction. Left alone, I would have assumed that the lack of structure inherent in my game was a gameplay flaw, and that it was something I needed to repair. Now I see that offering optional goals in a freeform playing field is the proper way to go. 

For example, check out this source: http://www.sodahead.com/entertainment/can-playing-casual-video-games-reduce-depression/question-1523149/?page=3

Bejeweled and Peggle are freeform in that there are not specific 'quests' or 'objectives,' only increasing levels of strategic difficulty. 

It would be interesting to see if the game GTA had a stress reduction effect on players who casually drove around vehicles- http://dailytrojan.com/2011/10/18/violent-video-games-hold-hidden-benefits/ & http://www.watchmojo.com/blog/children/2008/11/20/kids-play-violent-video-games-to-reduce-stress Oh wait! Be careful that's off topic. But wow, so interesting. GTA is singled out as specifically good at reducing stress and managing feelings. I wonder, is that specifically because of its freeform sandbox component?

Thesis 'Outline' and Expanding on Open Questions

While checkpoint I asks for an outline of our up and coming written component, I know I'm not yet ready to compose one. I'm still working on expressing my thesis and answering some of the important questions encircling it. If I had written the thesis component two weeks ago, I would have focused on the augmented reality aspect of my game, which was in truth more of a skin and facilitator than the core of my thesis. 

I have, however, done some work in positing together what my final thesis ought to look like, and outlined some important components in order to keep my thesis online. Firstly, I believe that my paper is argumentative in nature; I am making the claim that my game will help promote leisure time in and reduce stress in women. 

Based on this, my thesis statement should be assertive, and I shall make a shot at voicing it here:

Women suffer from increased depression partially as a result of reduced freeform leisure time. Women should be encouraged to play the game Agon and Alea, which uses a wide variety of techniques to specifically meet their freeform play needs and reduce depression.

This two-pronged thesis statement may need additional work in order to streamline it into a single idea. I am not a psychologist, and I am not interested in discovering the effects of games on female depression sans actually developing a game. On the other hand, there is insufficient research to quickly and easily establish the need for my product without laying some preliminary groundwork. 

Some difficulty comes about when trying to phrase my thesis in this light. Am I identifying a need, creating a product, and then making an analytical paper discussing my findings (and indeed whether or not I seemed to have been right about the need in the first place)? Am I simply documenting my process, in which case my paper would be an expository or narrative explanation of my reasoning process and my quest for identifying a difficult-to-see need and then trying to meet it?

Or is my paper truly argumentative in the sense that I am fighting to show that a culture where women do not play games is detrimental to female mental health and that games with freeform play specifically targeted towards women are necessary in order to improve our cultural health?

Looking at it, I can see that writing the narrative of my artistic process, from identifying the need to creating the project, would make for a legitimate, sound, and (For me, given my storytelling attributes) easy to write thesis.

But if I am truly out to change the world, I don't suppose any paper other than argumentative will truly do, mm? In that case, I must reconvene with my peers and mentor in order to pin-point target my thesis before a further outline is possible. I need to make sure I know exactly what argument I'm making, and where the weight of my written material should go and what it should justify, and I need the experience of someone whose already done it and the fresh eyes of those who have no previous exposure to my project.

The "Hit List"

Today at SCAD Hong Kong (Savannah College of Art and Design) the subject is the "Hit List." According to the very brief summary in the syllabus, assignment 2 is "The Industry and Hit List (Choose ten companies and decide on a focus.)"

Now most students operate on a strange form of hearsay. We don't really know much about the world, and to be honest its kinda huge and unfathomable and vague at the moment, so our opinions concerning what our job opportunities are and where we will be happy is built from the opinions of other people.

And so most students, when confronted with the Hit List assignment, would end up engaging in a process somewhat similar to this.

1. Start with empty document
2. Place studio of favorite game at top of list (Skip this step if suffering from low self confidence)
3. Place studio of several lesser known artistic games on list
4. Activision and EA are tyrants
5. Getting into a Japanese company is too hard because they are too insular
6. Put Ubisoft and Bioware on list
7. Realize you haven't filled in the list, just start putting down 'cool' games companies who did games you like
8. Hand in & move to the west coast

Let me tell you about my class's experience with the Hit List.

The first thing you need to know is that my professor makes a strong argument for the case that not everyone is supposed to go out and get a job working for a big name company. A lot of students are going to want to try and launch their own studios. Some of them just don't like being told what to do, others want creative freedom, some want to choose the projects they'll work on, and still others will simply have a knack for it. 

From this vantage point, if we aren't interested in getting a job, our experience might be more like taking a look at our 'environment' as game designers. We need to look at everyone around us who a) can help us or b) has a good example of 'how it's done' that we can reference.

Even from this vantage point, however, we're subject to a lot of hearsay, prejudice, and insular research. Maybe now our intellectual steps in leading to our Hit List would go something like this:

1. You'd just be treated like a cog in a big name company, and you'd never be able to make decisions.
2. Small companies have to do stupid 'snack,' Hello Kitty, and movie promotion games, and basically sell their souls to the devil in order to make money. 
3. If you had to people in suits to financially help you out, you would have no creative freedom and you'd be a slave to the person paying you.
4. Start off making small apps and iPhone games with help of friend who is interested in going into games business with you. 
5. So fill the list either with: small artistic companies to join, companies you want your company to be like, and/or friends who can help you start your own. 

Some of these statements may be true or slightly true; others may be false. Whichever they are, they still stem from an incomplete way of looking at things, and a faulty logical reasoning process. Furthermore, they come from a failure to accurately define that thing inside of us- as game designers- that makes us passionate about games.

One of the most important things my teacher does for any new student on a graduate level is to question every statement they make. To us it seems antagonistic, passive aggressive, frustrating, and disrespectful in the face of our passions, hopes, and dreams. But the fact of the matter is that while "I'm passionate about video games," seems to be a complete grammatical sentence, it isn't actually a solid idea. You can't figure out where to go with your life, or what's really going to make you happy, with that statement. 

My professor digs at the route of what makes us who we are. Why do we love games? Why did we first start playing them? What emotional, mental, psychological needs do they sate? When we play, what are we really looking for? And more than that, when we create, what is it about games that we're so fascinated with that we feel we NEED to create anything at all?

He also forces us to examine our emotional drives independent of our artistic drives. As an artist, a character designer might be fascinated with a certain style of shape, movement, or coloration. But as an individual, that character designer might actually be motivated to go into games because they are interested in group dynamics, culture, or international conflict, and they perceive games to be the proper medium, the proper vehicle, for their expressions. 

When we go out and find jobs from SCAD, we aren't just identifying a neat company and sending in our resume. We are much more active than that. First of all, we don't limit ourselves to big American companies. There are local companies in Hong Kong who have ties all over the globe that come in every week to talk to us students. We print business cards ASAP, develop a network, and soon we know a guy who lives next to Steve Jobs (or did, sniff) and might be able to recommend us to a Scandinavian company working on precisely the sort of interesting problems we most enjoy. 

So when we make a Hit List, we aren't just looking for company names. We are looking to do an in depth research-based assessment into the rest of our lives. We are looking at what each company has to say about itself, who the founder is, what the vision of the company is, what idea/theory/artist's-statement holds them united. We want to know who is in charge of each company, what they eat, what they do with their lives, do they travel, are they a member of the NRA, what do they have to say about Starbucks? What company culture is like, and the campus, and overtime?

And more importantly, who do we have to go out and meet who can introduce us to these people and get us a real interview? We weren't researching our environment; we were researching our ecosystem.

THE HIT LIST FOR ME

When I graduate from SCAD, I am probably going to launch my own studio. At least, that's what I think I'm going to do... ehm... To be honest, when I entered this quarter at SCAD, I was something in a funk. Over Christmas break I had realized I didn't quite know what I was doing or where I was going. I knew that I had gone to the right place- that Hong Kong and SCAD were both right for me- but I was caught by the fact that I really didn't have any idea what I was doing with my life.

The Hit List is specific to the person who writes it. Not just in terms of what companies they pick, but in terms of what they are even looking for. Making the Hit List requires doing a lot of research, and the knowledge available out there to be 'searched' is infinite in nature. It is imperative that the student start with some kind of vision, quest, or dream so that they can limit down the scope of their research. "I'll go wherever the wind blows me," is a good plan B, but it's an attribute of yours and not any way to formulate a Hit List. Not unless you want to find your future job employment opportunities by drawing lots (and then forming a list of all the potential options would take an infinite long amount of time).

So in order to do the Hit List, I had to move from 'free bird' to having a goal again. And I had to take a long hard look at how I feel, what I've been doing, what I've been frustrated about, any emotional discomfort I've experienced that might be shading my judgement, and the core of what makes me, well, me.

I wasn't precisely who I thought I was!

Good thing I like me better. It took a very interesting struggle. Even though I had no hard facts or data obtained as a result, my entire view on my prospects, my current projects, my future goals, and my own value did a turnabout. I realized that I was the sort of person to open my own studio. In fact, I'm entrepreneurial.  I want to start multiple businesses, get each to reach a level of stable success, do something big and new and different with each, and then sell it and start up a new business and repeat. I wasn't who I thought I was at all. I was the problem solving wing of a business partnership; I had it in me to want to be a CEO, and I most likely have it in me to be a good one.  

I didn't truly believe that before this assignment. 

Let me show you some of the Hit List I composited with my professor's aid, so you can get an idea of the base I've started with. My goal was to find creative and business talent that might be willing to help me, that I could partner with, or that I could study and ask questions from:

1. Two preliminary locations I could mine my teacher for information on: Hong Kong for ease of setting up a new buisness; Canada for business tax credits that can help a new studio in its infant years.
1. Ontario is trying to attract video games. They recently pulled in a division of Ubisoft, but they're offering up to 40% tax credits and tons of support structures for games to move in and currently have only 14% of Canada's industry. 
2. Hong Kong Commons (Sheung Wan + Lai Chi Kok) offers cheap office space. http://www.mic.polyu.edu.hk/index.php/create/partners/hong-kong-commons
1. Has an Incubator
2. Jung Lee, was in American and Chinese Real Estate... corporate Lawyer... Huge Interest in Games. Interested in solving Big Problems like Hunter, Education, and Health. He's overseen a lot of Indie Stuff. He's the incubator for a company by someone else I need to look into (Claus). Studied Columbia University. Helped found the commons. Involved with Pacific Rim Private Equity. Interested in Early stage technological, social, and cross-borders companies. 
3. Brian Ng- still researching
4. Charlotte Wu - still researching
3. Cyberport (Space) 
1. Incubator called Incutrain
2. Outplace, a very successful publisher group and games company, run by Yat Lee (Grew up in Austria, at the Conservatory he studied Classical music) He may invest, bring you to his company, help you out, acquire your company, etc
3. Has Creative Microfund and Incubation program
4. Enterepenuer, Knowledge, Collaboration portals. (& Success Stories to study)
5. Will help through Seed (Microfund) STartup (Incubation) and Market Growth. http://www.cyberport.com.hk/en/about_cyberport/our_5_centres/entrepreneurship_centre/about_ec_what_we_offer
6. Lots of discounts, financial assistance, office space (if needed). Peer Group, Consulting, etc. 
4. Claus: The founder of 3D Avatar School, currently in Jung Lee's Incubator, he's started tons of creative businesses and done consulting work, he is a great person to meet and ask about how to launch a new studio. 
1. Realized games were important to his kids, wanted to investigate them further.
2. Has done a lot with using virtual spaces to try and make real world results  such as virtual world businesses, education in virtual spaces, etc.  (Synchronous Communication)
3. Might be someone I want to Intern with if he has job openings
4. His investor heard about him through a banker who learned about Claus from a Tedx Conference. 
5. Has surrounded himself with the talent he needs. He has someone on business  education, foreign language education, a CTO, a chief of production, etc. Clearly I need to know him better. 
6. Won Hong Kong ICT Award Best Start-Up Buisness (Offered by Cyberport ;)
7. He likes travel, and recently went on a trip to Sri Lanka where he photographed locals, environments, and elephants. 
5. Sources of Money in the Government:
1. Create Hong Kong (CreateHK). Mostly Film, 300 million dollars investment fund in small companies and innovative ideas while employing new people. Jerry Liu.
2. Invest Hong Kong (Invest HK) Hook you up for free with people, services, makes inquiries for you, helps get things done behind the scenes. Person to know is Wendy Chau for here and Creatieve Industries
6. Innocenter: Free office space for designers
1. Science Park: same management, mostly for health, and has game studios that work with health. 
7. If I want to sell in China, there is a single gate keeper, and behind that the market is arguably very big. But then I have to identify who this person is and find someone who knows them.  I know some people who know this process (Adam)
8. If I want to continue forward with Agon and Alea (I do, after some soul searching) then I need to know people who buy products for venues frequented by women. Someone to know might be Joyce Ma. How does she buy? I'd need to know a lot about her and how she makes decisions and postures/positions herself in the marketplace. 
9. If you have selling figured out, then getting a business incubated is easy. You need respect for the fact that the business must grow and that the products must sell to get incubated. 
10. My strengths/weaknesses: It's very easy to get me into problem solving with my skills, and to point discussions towards the skills I already know.
1. We need to make sure this strength doesn't come off as 'afraid' of new topics; I need to show how I am unafraid to investigate areas, stay in those areas of discomfort, admit that I'm not sure, admit that I need to investigate more, and still be able to present a strong plan.

I had to know some things about myself to come up with this list, and also to figure out what to do with it next:

• I have no destination, no perfect studio, and no perfect job. I want to identify opportunities and then explore them, to do and try lots of things. I want to work on many kinds of projects
• I want to solve many interesting  sorts of problems. The way I solve problems is by injecting life into an area where there is none. I want to turn virtual worlds into personalized make-believe. I want to work with engines of simulation and discover how to pace them and work stories into them. I want to create virtual reality pets. 
• I want to put myself into many situations with unique constraints and succeed. To always seek out new areas with new boons and new constraints, which need 'life' and to successful work with those constraints and boons to build new life.
• I want to observe and learn how to be a successful life-long entrepenuer.
• I enjoy tackling a difficult problem, building it up to a stable level, and then moving on to a new problem.  (I actually play video games this way. I play until my level of satisfaction under difficult circumstances.)
• I will be the vision holder, the problem-solving creative talent that makes a project work. Will be the CEO. 
• I will require a lot of help. I need to learn, be taught, and surround myself with advisers mentors, partners, and outside experience.  I need this to get where I really want to be.  You cannot run a company alone, or in a vacuum. 
• I want to be a polyglot and world traveler. 
• I want to be able to visit my family at least once yearly.
• The cat goes where I go.

This translates into a sort of road map for the future, which I can crosscheck with my professor.

• I need to publish small pieces of my own material, with a 3 or 4 man team, so I can begin to fathom what it's like to have one's own company. 
• I need to get an internship over the summer semester, which will give me the opportunity to watch how someone else does things. To this end, I know that I want to work in an established small to mid sized studio, which makes games and has several games under the belt, and that I want to be mentored by someone high up to be given a birds eye view of the company.
• When I graduate, or before I graduate, I will need to go under someone's wing. I need a business partner, and I will likely be going into an incubator. 

Which translates into some website requirements

• I need to sell myself and my own skills. Myself is: A creative problem solver. Therefore, my website should demonstrate how I solve a wide variety of problems creatively. 
• To the internship company, I will need to position myself as a high level intern who can handle a lot of responsibilities and a wide variety of tasks, and an interest in discovering what it is that company leaders really do. 
• For potential sources of grant money, I must show my interest in solving compelling problems, especially because I really am interested in bringing technical jobs to developing economies, working to improve culture (particularly for women), and language and health education through games. 
• For incubators, business men, and investors, I must show my interest and respect for business, and that I am studying these attributes and sensitive to them when making my design considerations. It is to my benefit that I am interested in making a very wide variety of games (all of which I will be able to make well), because I will be able to pitch myself (and the business plan) as opposed to attaching myself too closely to the game. 

The Near Death and Restoration of an Acer Aspire One

While I was packing to return home for Christmas Break, I was assailed by a sour sensation (I love alliteration too, but that's another story). In Hong Kong I have a power gaming Desktop PC I built from scratch, an ancient 7-year-old Dell Latitude which I'd converted into a Mac using tech magic so that I had a development machine for iPad games (long story), and an iPad2. This was a good setup. I had the gaming, Mac, and portable/mobile note-taking-and-such angles all taken care of.

But I was going home for Christmas. I couldn't bring my PC. My PC, which not only has all of my games, but also is home to all my windows-only versions of creative software. There was nothing for me to use back in America. We hadn't updated our 'family computer' for the last decade. It ran as slow as chocolate pudding. Ugh. How was I going to game? The old 1990s games that ran on my Dell laptop in the past were Windows only, and couldn't run on it now. And how was I going to do anything neat, creative, or productive? Bleck. I'd just have to hope that Dad had one of the other kids' old laptops lying around, or that he'd let me use his own desktop.

It's kind of a sin to touch another person's computer- or to ask to share in it- but what choice did I have?

When I came home I eventually set about looking for my external HDD so I could make a backup of things on the American end of things (also a long story, the HDD is dead /sadface). When I went to pick it up out of my drawer, I realized there was a white tech object in the drawer, maybe ten inches long, five inches wide? What was it?

Oh my god! It was my tiny Acer Aspire One! I remember you, little guy! Oh my goodness, I loved you in college! You were such a relief after hauling around a massive laptop across a huge campus! And- holy crap! Last I remember, I installed all my old Adobe Creative Suite CS3 stuff on you!!! Is it still all there!?

I asked for my Aspire One probably halfway through Junior year, for Christmas, and it was a godsend. Some people have no problem hauling around a book full of laptop gear and textbooks. Not me. I was dying with nothing else in my super-duper-padded-comfy laptop backpack but a single Latitude D630. My Aspire One was like a featherweight, and far more convenient and friendly. I took it everywhere. I took notes on it for everything. I left it behind when I went to Hong Kong because of space issues and apartment hunting.

But there it was, all beautiful and pearly and shiny. I turned it on and it had a bunch of 1990's games all ready for me, and all my CS3 programs. Now an Acer Aspire One is a tiny little cutie pie, so if I wanted to game and draw without straining myself, I would have to hook it up to a monitor and an external keyboard and mouse. But still! It was more powerful than anything else my dad had lying around, and had more hard drive space. Best of all, it was all mine, so I didn't have to invade anyone else's personal computer space to have it.

There's something I should mention.

Both my Aspire One and my Dell-Mac have critically ill batteries. They can't be unplugged, or they power down.

So as I was trying to fix my external HDD (long story, still dead, making clicking noise, probably irrecoverable without making a monetary commitment) I got up to grab a can of cola and eat some dinner. In the process I tripped over my Acer power cord and jerked it right out of the machine, but fortunately the Acer stayed firmly on the table and didn't fall to the ground. Seemed good to me. I came back from eating and settled down to power on the computer.

Boot Normally. Yadayadayada-

Bluescreen.

...  Oh. Crap.

Boot with last settings. Bluescreen. Safe mode? Bluescreen. Safe mode with command prompt. Networking? Bluescreen Bluescreen Bluescreen.

Oh crap. It's a netbook. There's no CD drive. I can't boot from disk. No! Wait! I know you can boot from a pen drive/USB stick/etc... you just have to set it up, it's a bit of work if you don't buy one straight from Microsoft. Right? I'm sure of it! I start researching on my iPad.

My Mac can't access the internet and my dad has an old laptop whose CD drive doesn't work very well. I start off on the Mac and try to make an .iso and then an .img file from the original disks using the Terminal and burn it onto a pen drive. I try it all out, but the Acer won't even try to boot from it. Hmm. Poopy. Something's up.

I'm worried because I only have a 500 MB flash drive my mother lent me for this task (when you are constantly and rigorously cleaning out your drives, repositories  and clouds like I do, you might not need more space than that, so I don't even own a bigger Flash Drive back in HK). But then I research the problem on my iPad and realize the Bios may need to be flashed, and that the Acer may have trouble booting from anything other than the HDD without that flash.

Flash a Bios? Uhhh... Well... I've never done that. Ever. I mean I think I installed a Bios update once on a Dell, but it was safe and secure and part of some regular update... thing I mean... I mean...

I have no idea what I'm getting into, but I am determined to save my Acer. Because people like me don't just roll over and give up.

I find some extremely complicated sounding instructions on a web forum that say I need to download a bios update from the acer website, rename several of the files inside, pull them into a flash drive, put the flash drive in the left USB slot on the laptop, and then hold Fn+Esc while powering on my computer in order to flash the Bios.

See: (http://www.leosquarez.com/acer-aspire-one-bios-recovery-acer-aspire-one-zg5-screen-not-working/)

Okay. I tried that. Now I try to boot from the USB and... DARN! IT doesn't work! What could be wrong? Maybe it has to do with that 500 MB limit. I ask my dad for a bigger Flash drive, which he supplies, and then I transfer over into Windows. Maybe the different 'ideology' behind Windows will help me overcome whatever wall I hit with the mac. I mean, of course it could just be that I was using too small a device when I created the .iso/.img. But on the other hand perhaps I really did need some 3rd party softward like Ubuntu, and the Mac is internet-less, so installing things is more of a hassle.

I pull out the laptop Dad had offered to let me use, which has about the same specs as my Acer despite being a whole bunch larger and heavier, and slower (It's running Windows 7 instead of my Acer's trimmed down XP). I start looking for some information online. A lot of guides want me to manually push around files for whom the download links have already expired. That's no good. At last I stumble upon a program called WinSetupFromUSB. It feels like the creators don't speak English as their first language, and their 'home page' is a forum posting, but on the other hand it should be able to take care of everything I need.

I test out a few XP disks at home, conscious each time that I am using a computer with an 'iffy' DVD drive now, and that if it goes, I will have no recourse other than to retreat to the Mac and send software to it via the 500 MB USB my mum had lent me. Either that or I could try torrenting, since I already have a XP license. I wonder if it matters what service pack I use, or if all of them will get me equal results. It turns out that a SP3 copy is the only kind that plays nice with WinSetupFromUSB. I get all ready to make the USB bootable with Windows XP. I set up my options following an online tutorial and press "GO!"

WinSetupFromUSB fails from the get go. It tells me can't copy some file from the MBR, which I understand to mean Master Boot Record, and either means that I should be using a different format, or else that the solution I'm looking for is a Fat32 based solution. Eh. I start searching for the error message online, and I come across a forum post. In it, someone is trying to make a USB stick bootable for Windows 7. The replier answers that it doesn't matter what software the user is trying to put on the USB, the problem is with the USB itself. He recommends downloading RMPrepUSB and using it to A) Format the USB stick and B) copy the missing MBR related file over to the USB stick using a button on the RMPrepUSB interface.

Now that I think about it, this is familiar from when I turned my Dell into a Mac. Back then I had needed a boot loader called Chameleon, and it looked like this 'file' for the MBR was also a boot loader (But it went by some crazy name that I couldn't pronounce, much less remember. I download RMPrepUSB, format the USB stick to be XP/Bart bootable (hey I recognize BartPE, I've used it before! But I digress...) and Fat32, and then I press the button to copy over the MBR special ingredient.

Now I head back over to WinSetupFromUSB (Even though it looks like RMPrepUSB MIGHT be able to do something similar to WinSetupFromUSB, I'm using a tutorial, and I don't want to wander off the beaten path for no good reason). I put all my settings back in- location, destination, Fixed, GO! This time there's no error. Everything begins to load into my USB stick.

MUAHAHAHAH, I feel invincible!

I nab my USB stick when finished, plug it into my Acer, and successfully manage to boot from it.

Oh god, it's a disaster in there. First of all it looks like the computer can't even tell Windows was ever installed on it. Tutorials say to highlight my partition with my installation and push R to repair. Snort. Snicker. I don't even get that option. When I try to find it, It let's me know why it won't repair the installation, and it won't try and do a clean install over the space without reformatting and wiping out all my data. It tells me everything is so corrupted and broken inside that it can't make heads nor tails of the situation, and it demands a reformat. No! I'd just found files on that Acer that I hadn't seen in years! I need to back them up! And those programs- I don't have the disks for those programs, they're all in Hong Kong!

I backtrack and go through the recovery console. A few times. In between fiddling with other things. Because I hate command prompts and the recovery console immediately disagrees with me. It doesn't use the commands I learned for Mac and when I type in "DIR"...

*Shudder*

I type in "DIR" so that the recovery console will list the contents of whatever folder I'm in. I should start out at C:\ But when I type in DIR, the recovery console tells me there's an error with device enumeration. It displays no information. From top to bottom, my entire drive is inaccessible, broken- in fact it's difficult to even detect the format that data SHOULD be in.

All this... because I tripped over a power cord?

I fiddle around with things like FixBoot and FixMBR, but nothing works. The computer claims to be able to fix the boot record with FixBoot, but the C:\ directory still shows nothing, and of course the computer does not successfully boot to windows without a blue screen. How do I navigate to drive D:\, my usb stick? Ugh I'm so un used to the windows command line, and chdir D, D:, and D:\ are all not working!

I'm told I should use CHKDISK but I tried that out in the very beginning of my list of endeavors  and the computer yelled at me to say AUTOCHK.EXE could not be found on the drive or CD ROM and I needed to supply a path to it. What? I try the default path that Google tells me it should be at: C:\Windows\System32 but ah... well if I couldn't find C, why do you think I can find C\Windows or C\Windows\System32? Remember when I tried that DIR command? Nothin'.  The internet tries to be helpful and tells me there's a backup copy in a dllcache file, which would be useful, if, ya know, my C drive were accessible. But it's not.

Dad comes in and tells me to just type in D: into the console, not chdir D:\ and suddenly I can access my pen drive. Only I can't see any folders into which AUTOCHK.EXE might be. There are two directories that start with a $ character, which I understand usually to be temporary, and which yell "ACCESS DENIED" at me anyway for some reason. There aren't any more sensible directories. This is strange, but a combination of the internet and past experience tells me there should be a directory called I368 or some permutation of those numbers on the original disks somewhere that has files and utilities like AUTOCHK.EXE.

I take the USB stick and plug it back into the windows computer and examine it. Sure enough there's no I### folder on there. I navigate through the installation disks Aha! An I386 folder (I had two numbers swapped, but that's pretty good don't you think?)  I drag it over onto my pen drive to sit with all the other bootable goodies. It takes awhile to copy, but at last I bring it over and plug it back into my Acer.

I turn on the Acer. I boot from the USB stick. I run the recovery console. I run CHKDSK or whatever its called. I try to let it know- from memory, since it keeps all my directories Access Denied from me- where the AUTOCHK.EXE file is. Not that hard, it's just in the I386 folder right? I cross my fingers.

BAM.

It runs.

I let it run.

I type in DIR when it is finished.

The contents of my C drive display correctly.

I let loose a whoop of excitement, exit form the recovery console, and try to start windows normally.

It works. The Acer is functional. Everything is alive. My programs are fine. My Google Chrome is patiently awaiting my orders. And would you look at that! Flashing the Bios appears to have fixed the Acer's battery! Oh isn't today the most wonderful of days? I need a nap. And a beer. And a cat. Why didn't I bring home my Bamboo tablet to fix that too? I wonder if that hard drive is really dead, or if it's only mostly dead. I need some billows. Goodnight, and thanks be to the Omnipotent: For the Acer was dead, and by the power invested in me it has risen again!

Game Design Auteurism

What on earth is Game Design Auteurism? Auteurism doesn't even show up as a 'real word' in my spell-check program. It's certainly not a common word- not outside of film, that is- but it could likely be applied to any creative discipline, and could certainly be applied to film's next door neighbor: video game design.

Auteur theory holds that a film reflects its director's personal creative vision. The film exists as a manifestation of the director's design philosophy. For us to study game design auteurism is for us to look at video games and to try and extract from them the personal design philosophy of the 'directors' who orchestrated them.

One of my first questions when entering this class was to wonder whether or not this class really ought to be, 'The History of Game Design.' Then I considered that perhaps it ought to be, 'The History of Thinking About Game Design.' It was only after I cared to look up the definition of 'auteur' that I suddenly comprehended why my college so valued this class.

Auteur theory stresses that a film will reflect it's director's vision despite the fact that films are the end result of a highly industrialized creative process, involving hundreds if not thousands of additional minds, opinions, and design philosophies. Although games and film different in many key ways, the overall form of their production process is very similar. This 'industrialization,' this collection of massive numbers of warring ideologies, is what makes Auteur theory just as applicable to game design as it ever could be to film.

Here at the Savannah College of Art and Design, there is a strong focus both on anchoring ourselves in our artistic values, but also on one day obtaining a job. Nowhere is this dichotomy more present than in the disciplines of game design. The idea that  a single man/woman's vision can rise above all this chaos and be heard in the final product is of immense value to us as art and design students. We are not training to become cogs. We are training to become visionaries  as vital to our own production pipeline as directors are to theirs.

Actually, that's exactly what Game Design Auteurism implies in its very name: that game designers can be, should be, are, directors. That a game developer to his/her industry is as a director would be to their industry. And that we are responsible for the creative vision that steers the game as a whole.

Of course this levies upon us games students a heavy responsibility. No longer can we be content to be programmers, technicians, engineers, or managers. We are not even craftsmen or artisans. We are directors. Our voice, our leadership, our vision is going to be heard. And should we avoid this role, or should we neglect to cultivate a powerful design philosophy, the result will be felt in our games.

Before this quarter, I had never considered what my own personal design philosophy might be. I had started looking at how I designed games differently, to be sure. I had moved away from boring tasks like trying to 'fix' the games industry, and headed off to find blue oceans of untapped gamers, and was investigating new forms of game play that had not yet been thoroughly explored. In my studies on women in video games, I realized that one of the reasons I played games was because my father had originally shared them with me as a small child.

I had never considered what it is about games that actually gives me pleasure. I knew what genres I liked, and I could tell a game I cared about from a game I hated. But when it came down to it, I lacked the vocabulary to talk about my choices. I could title a game good or bad and explore its strengths and weaknesses, but I had not analyzed my own sense of taste. The closest I had come to doing anything of the sort was to say that I liked strategy games because I was a highly logical person. But that didn't explain why micro managing alien armies made me comfortable, happy, and relaxed.

This 'taste' was important not just because it reflected what I chose to consume, but also because I have long been a producer of game and game-like products, and in that too, I had a sense of taste. In fact, I was incredibly picky. There were certain areas in which I refused to consume anything at all, because only the ideas I produced were 'good enough' to me.

Okay, but then what was my 'taste' like?

I honestly had no clue.

At first I considered the video games I liked to play. Then, as I kept going with the readings in the class, I began to realize that the true driving force behind each individual didn't necessarily have to do with the products they liked to consume, or the media they cared about. Each individual had been sculpted by childhood experiences. Will Wright had gone to a highly creative school where learning was built around playful exploration of toys and spaces. Carmack had been denied access to computers. Jobs had been something of a social outcast, totally removed from the office-type white-collar worker that usually consumed computer products in his day.

The more designers we studied, the more it became clearer: there was a vision deep inside me, and it didn't come from games. It was a lot deeper than that. And I had to find it. Because if I couldn't identify it, I couldn't cultivate it. As an Auteur/Author I could not permit this to happen.

I sat down and thought about it for awhile. I stopped thinking about video games and I went further back. What forces had driven me out into the forests as a young child to build stick forts and dig up bugs? What had my favorite movies been? What kinds of impossible Christmas presents had I asked for on my Christmas list?

I was very surprised to find out that Agon and Alea, my current project, is all about bringing a digital companion to life. And judging by my childhood Christmas Lists, I was constantly asking for a real-life miniature dinosaur/dragon/unicorn/Power Ranger to play with.

I kept thinking. I pulled out gardening books, and started looking for images that struck a chord in my soul. I searched the internet for some of my favorite kinds of images in the world: images of mountain-top temples, in places so far removed from modern civilization that nothing can be seen in any direction but the temple, stone, water, and trees.

A movie I loved lately was "How to Train Your Dragon". I'd once asked my father as a child, "If you really love something that's not real, how do you make it more real?" and was totally devastated by his answer, "You can't."

It that moment of recollection, I hit soundly upon my design philosophy: To undermine that, 'You can't.'

I design games because I want to make the unreal, real. Just for awhile, just for the duration of an escapist journey, just a little. I want to give everyone their, 'Where the Wild Things Are,' their own fairies, their own dragon, their own unicorn, their own Power Ranger, their own hero. I wanted to send them to worlds they would never otherwise experience, and meet people they could never otherwise meet. I wanted to put more poetry in their lives, and to chip away at the mundane. At the end of these stories, the children/protagonists always return to the real world to live out their lives. But they are better for it. Happier for it. More joyful for it.

Game Design Auteurism started out- to me- as The History of Game Design. But what I left with was a surprisingly deep insight into myself, into what I believe in, into what I value, into what I love. I have finally thought to wonder what the force is that powers me, and I have started to piece together what that force is. This is the design philosophy- the heart of my beliefs- that will have to anchor me through any rainstorm, that will need to persevere through the chaos of the production process, and emerge unscathed and handsomely clothed on the other side, shining for the world to see.

And as a result?

I am ready to put on my director's hat. Cut!

On Design Methodology

We were reading in class about the architect Frank Gehry. All designers share some aspects in common with one another, and architectures are most certainly designers. Frank Ghery has an interesting design methodology. You can read about one of his latest buildings, the Opus, here: http://www.opushongkong.com/en/Design_programming.html

So what does Franky Gehry do that's so interesting? Well he builds funky buildings, but that crucial point for this discussion is that he doesn't just dream them up in Maya or sketch them from scratch. He has a design methodology. That isn't just a funny flavoring word added in to talk about his modeling pipeline in AutoCAD. Design Methodology is the topic of this paper. The idea behind it is that there are certain things an artist has to do: rituals they must perform, angles they must look at, breaks they must take, and slightly-related problems they must solve, in the course of creating a new work.

Basically, Frank Gehry's first step (after obtaining all the survey data and so forth) is to build very childish looking towers out of brightly painted wood blocks.

And if he didn't, he couldn't design buildings. Pay attention, because this is crucial. He couldn't design buildings without his wood blocks. It is part of his process. Without it, the creativity will refuse to come. It cannot be skipped, or the resulting building will not be a Frank Gehry building.

For any building, Gehry makes about twenty of these towers, glues them together, and then sets them all out for his examination. He pushes them about and deforms them. Perhaps they let him visualize and block out shapes and space. He goes through each of these and begins to articulate why it is he is attracted to each form. The process of articulating these things brings the design to the forefront. It is only after building his block towers that Frank Gehry can sit down and start to put together the amorphous wriggles of glass and oddly positioned corners that have become his trademark look.

Now how does the discipline of design methodology apply to me? Obviously I'm not going to build block towers like Frank Gehry, but it's clear to see that I could and should have my own process for building games.

I should identify and pay attention to this 'design process' that I must somehow possess and then study it. That's pretty simple. Essentially, if I know what it is I do that helps me be creative, I should document it, so that at points in the future when I need to be creative, I know what to do to get the creativity juices flowing. Okay, I get that. Ah, and then I can also study my own design methodology. I can tweak it, make changes to it. My methodology becomes something I'm designing and reiterating constantly, with every new project. It becomes a project in itself.

This is kinda neat stuff. As soon as I identify the existence of a design methodology, I can start applying my own creative talents to it. I can intelligently alter how I think about and pursue projects. I can conduct experiments on my own creative process. I can design my life to yield more creativity. I can formulate a process- specific to me- that helps me come up with the best ideas. I can try new things within a framework. I can form a basis for evaluating my own actions based on whether they are helpful to my creativity, or detrimental. Cool.

So is there an example of a person who has a design methodology in games? Does it involve blocks? To answer that question, we researched  KeitaTakahashi, the creator of an extremely innovative and ground breaking gamed called Katamari Damany. This is they keynote 'speech' he gave at an annual game jam. The subject is, "How to Come Up With an Idea," but it shows off a very different, less structured, and more emotional design methodology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbiVtYPtIqk

Hmm. You know, I'm starting to think that Frank Gehry's methodology isn't specific to architecture. It's just how he visualizes problems. And likewise, Takahashi's design methodology isn't specific to anything at all. It's more a creative exploration of his environment while letting an idea bake away in the back of his skull. These design methodologies look to be the ways by which we creative humans solve problems, and each one is specific to each of us.

I have done a great deal of exploration as to my own design methodologies this quarter, and I have come up with some observations that I need to document, so that I can understand them for later. To study my own creative process, I looked at how I solved a number of problems, from designing my video games, to planning out a demo module for this semester, to the actual research I conduct while developing a game, to the way I pick out computer parts at the store, to puzzling out how to bring my cat to the USA for a month and a half over Christmas, and then get him safely back to Hong Kong without quarantine.

Based on my studies, I've managed to isolate a few elements that were present in every problem-solving scenario, and which seem to be common across my entire decision making process. At the moment, I am currently focused on identifying largely beneficial aspects of my design methodology, but in the future I expect I will have to isolate faulty aspects as well, so that I can eschew them.

When confronted with a large problem (and often even a small one), the first thing I want to obtain is a bird's eye view of the situation. I want to know the full extent of the problem. I try to surround the problem with my arms, as if putting it in a big hug. At this point, I really just want to know what it's circumference is. How big is this problem? Where does it extend to? I will start off by researching the problem indirectly, trying to find things like reviews, opinions, forums, help sites, etc. instead of going straight to the source.

Often times I will enumerate potential options for solving the problem, as well as potential pitfalls that I may have to solve in the future. I bookmark answers to problems I may encounter, reference materials, Wiki sites, etc. I keep a very organized set of bookmarks in Google Chrome. This is one of my brainstorming phases. I will labor through big problems and read books. I need an understanding of what it is I'm doing, a set of ideas in which I can base my upcoming activities. I need to feel informed and competent  I need to feel a bit like an expert in the field.

This stage of the process is not usually very long, and remaining in it for too long can leave me feeling emotionally drained and exhausted. Never the less, it is an established part of my design methodology, and is vital for me to take my first steps along the road to solving a problem.

The next step is to release my bear hug on the problem and to freeze it's size. At this point I am tired of skirting around the edge of the issue, and instead dive straight into it. The next thing I want to know about is not the breadth of the problem, but rather its depth. At this point I will basically make an 'asset list,' of each and every tiny last minute detail of the problem I am trying to solve.

I cannot make this list from start to finish. I have tried doing so many times, and it is never beneficial to my creative process. For awhile I was writing out ideas on index cards. Index cards let me constrain the problem to bite sized pieces. Working this way,  I felt like a DNA Synthase, chewing on one tiny part of the problem at a time and eventually getting around to chewing on the whole issue. However, I was never satisfied with this method. The fact that certain cards could go missing or simply not be displayed at the moment was both a mixed boon and a distressing curse. I also disliked the fact that it was hard and time-consuming to visualize the entire problem at once.

The latest addition to my design process has been mind maps. Because I am working at the speed of consciousness,  I cannot afford to use programs like Illustrator to create these maps. Often I work by hand on very large pieces of paper.  This is pleasurable. It keeps my hands busy. It keeps my artistic side busy while my logical side is working. In fact, I frequently use architecture stencils to make rapid circles, squares, and other shapes. I always work with multiple colors, to render groups visually distinct. The neatness and simplicity of the stencils keeps the overall image looking well-planned and organized. I feel good while creating the diagram, which prompts me to keep working on it. When I back up, I get a very clear and instantaneous visualization of my problem- as well as any elements I've failed to wrap my arms around in the previous stage.

For ideas that require a lot of online research, I will usually use a mind mapping software called Mindomo. Mindomo is very useful for referencing files and images and linking websites. The map can be closed up or expanded as I need it. I can visualize the problem as a whole or drill down to view only a few branches at a time. I use it not necessarily because it is the best, but because for what I need it for, it is good looking, professional in appearance, and easy to use. Remember that I am working at the speed of thought, and that I need my ideas to be visually distinct from one another and also to pleasurable to look at.

Once I have passed this stage, I am ready to start working on solving the problem. This does not mean my researching is over, only that now I will be researching answers to very specific problems that I encounter while problem solving. My previous bookmarks serve as useful anchors, and my asset list is something of a 'minimap' (gamer terminology) for keeping my goals in sight.

This is important. I am capable both of very broad lateral thinking and very deep vertical thinking. In order to keep one type of thought from upsetting and muddling up the other, I have to keep documentation on hand that soothes each of them while the other is working. This is why I had to bookmark answers to possible problems while doing my preliminary bear-hug research; and it's why I now have to keep my mind map on hand to refocus my on-the-ground development efforts.

The rest of my design methodology is not 100% clear to me, and seems to contain a lot of tips and tricks for how to get my brain to focus. For example, I must keep a clean living space, eat well, communicate frequently with friends and family, and both wake and sleep early on in the day in order to be productive. It will be my habit to try and eschew some of these things in order to focus, but the result will be intense frustration and lack of productivity.

I must also solve multiple kinds of problem at once. These problems may come from many difference sources. While solving a technical problem, I will also need to solve an artistic one. On the side I may be working on design issues. To let my inner creativity out, I may need to write something. When two problems of the same type show up, waiting to be solved at once, I enter a creative block. For example, two time-sensitive problems that operate in the same time frame will cause a lock up. So will two programming tasks of equal importance. Or two intellectual problems from different aspects of my life that are both important for different reasons.

In these cases, it is usually vital that I take care of the problem that's most personal, more urgent, smaller, or which strikes closer to home, first. If I can get past the initial block, the experience of solving a problem fills me with self-gratification and pleasure, and I am given a boost with which to complete my other problems.

For example. Say that I need to obtain a Visa for foreign travel and complete a final project at the same time. The Visa is very time sensitive, but quick to do. However, the fact that I have both things on my mind suddenly generates a sense of paralysis. The only way to break this paralysis is to bolt out the door and get to the Visa office. As soon as I commit to getting the Visa now instead of trying to weather through the anxiety of working on my long term final project awhile longer, I am liberated. When I return from the Visa office, I will be filled with energy to work on my project. If I recognize the source of my paralysis quickly, I can actually become more productive than usual as a result of having more problems to solve. If I deny the source of my paralysis, I remain paralyzed.

I frequently have to change my working environment. A current environment may suddenly stop eliciting creativity. This may be at home, which feels like a place of sleep and relaxation while I am exhausted pushing forward with a final project. Or this may be at school, where I feel overworked and stressed without the comforts of my home. Frequently, I work best in tea shops and parks, where I settle down with an iPad in order to plot out my course of actions for the day and solve difficult problems that had been plaguing me the night before.

I am still working out all the details of my design process. There are smaller details which I am not certain are significant just yet. For instance, I believe that tending to my cat may prove to be an instrumental part of my design process, at least for my current thesis. Right now I am working on games that permit escapism, bonding with digital characters, and encouraging relaxation and playfulness while alleviating loneliness. It is clear to see my cat is related to this problem, and that by interacting with him, I can better understand the product I am making and the audience I am trying to reach. However, I am not sure which is the cause and which is the effect. I do know that interacting with other living things is a vital part of my design process.

The crucial thing at this point is that I have acknowledged the existence of my own design methodology, and have taken steps to define it, modify it, research it, and nurture it. If I had to be completely honest, however, I would probably rather have a process like Gehry's instead of Takahashi's! Perhaps that is my logic talking.