You know that pensive feeling you get, when you know you’re missing something? I’ve got that now. And though I generally know the reason why, I can’t figure out what to do about it. What I’m missing can’t be found.

I don’t know.

So, every so often, I wonder about what it is that I actually do. That is, if you ask someone ‘What is a doctor?’ they will have a relatively straightforward answer. If you ask someone, ‘What does a mechanical engineer do?’ they will generally have an answer. ‘What does a game designer do?’ is tricky for two reasons. First, it’s not a profession that’s been around particularly long, and even throughout its existance, it’s been somewhat amorphous. Second, to define what a game designer does, first you must define what a game actually is.

On the surface of things, a game designer’s job is to come up with cool ideas for games. Great. But as pretty well everyone knows, coming up with cool ideas for games is pretty trivial. That’s basically the process of ‘Wouldn’t that be cool?’ where you sit around and think of awesome things to do. Wouldn’t it be cool if you made a game where the world was ruled by sentient stand mixers, and humans had to overthrow them using only aluminum foil and a spatula? Stuff like that. Come up with ten of those scenarios. It’ll probably take you what, half a second?

That’s what it seems a lot of people think game design is all about. It’s certainly the image they pitch on those Westwood College commercials where they’ve gotta ‘tighten up the graphics on level 3.’ Whatever. Let me just dispel that notion. That part of game design is maybe the initial .5% of the work. Doing it well, and coming up with compelling concepts has great worth – don’t get me wrong. It’s genuinely difficult to come up with innovative, compelling ideas that are actually even marginally feasible, even in a blue-sky style brainstorming session.

So, yeah, it’s a skill. But it’s a skill a lot of people have, at least in some degree.

So… about what a game actually *is*. I had to think about this a great deal while writing my NaNoWriMo project this year, because it deals with someone who’s thinking about exactly that, and I needed to have a plausble, realistic conclusion for this guy to come to. As you might know, if you’ve ever written a book, sometimes, your characters say unexpected things. It’s like exploring some bit of your subconscious that you’ve allowed to speak for the first time.

The essential conclusion was that a game was a series of choices that allow the player to make choices *better* as the game progresses.

It’s a relatively nonstandard definition of what a game is. In ‘A Theory of Fun for Games,’ Raph Koster solicits definitions from several famous game designers, and it turns out that that definition appears to align most closely with Sid Meier’s definition of what a game is. That’s not surprising, to me, because as much as I love action games, I’m a system-based designer, and Sid Meier makes a lot of system-heavy games.

But then, what does the game designer actually *do*? This was another thing that I had to tackle for NaNoWriMo, because in the context of a novel, you can literally make anything you please. I had to figure out some concept for a plausible game for this character to design in a fantasy world I’d created. One of the challenges he faced was the notion of creating anything you wanted without restriction.

A game, without restrictions, is essentially meaningless, given the previous definition. How do you determine what the consequences of an action are, if you can actually be doing *anything*? I could say, I’d like to design a game where the game world is the whole world, augmented by my imagination. I can have any or all powers I can dream of, and I can do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. If it’s not something that occurs in the real world, I can change it so that it does. I can open doors to dimensions that are defined only by my imagination.

So, what I’ve come to is that being a game designer is fundamentally about creating an efficient, compelling representation of a limited space, and providing situations where a player has to make meaningful choices, in a way that augments their ability to continue to make those choices.

Which is about as academic, and dry a definition as you can get. But let’s take a game like Gears of War. It’s a limited space. You play as a human. The physics that govern the game world are largely Earth-like. You possess no real ‘powers’ save for a largely superhuman durability. These are all limitations on the player’s experience, and they were *created* specifically by a game designer who was working within another set of restrictions – time, budget, manpower, technology. A good designer creates an efficient, compelling representation of a limited space *because* all games are fundamentally limited by time, budget, manpower and technology.

The difference between a good game designer and a bad game designer come down to basically how well they can create a compelling experience (the X factor), and how efficiently they can translate the resources at their disposal into that compelling experience.

This, I think, is a *very* system-focused view of what game design is, but I think it still works. For me, a lot of my work is utilizing existing tools to produce unexpected results. Flexing systems to do things they weren’t necessarily designed to do, but are capable of. Taking two systems that work independently, and finding the capabilities of the intersections of the two systems to produce something new. I know that sounds sort of obvious, but this is where a lot of the most interesting stuff I’ve created has resided.

Because all resources are limited, finding places where you can create things essentially out of nothing, and then understanding what makes something compelling are pretty core skills, IMO, to being a successful designer.

But what *is* compelling? What makes something interesting? What makes something fun? Something I read about the Wii, and its control scheme, talked about the concept of ‘input magnification’ and how the Wii magnified a user’s input *less* than other consoles. That is, if I hit a button in Gears of War, I can kill someone in a giant fountain of blood. To bowl, in Wii Sports, I have to make a much grander, and more importantly, *less abstract* motion. The input has a higher corelation to the output.

While the less magnified input is clearly compelling, I like the notion of ‘input magnification,’ and not just in terms of press button -> things go boom. In the food creation system for the Sims, for instance, the point was that you could take a system that’s quite simple – you have a palette of thirty-some odd ingredients. In previous games, you had maybe five different ‘ingredients’ that you could use to create five different meals. With the combinatorial system in Sims 2, those thirty ingredients could be combined in dozens of different ways, resulting in millions of unique results.

But, millions of unique results doesn’t mean anything, unless there’s some consequence to what result you generate. So, the stats for the food *matter* – they affect your character. Some combinations create powerups that can be used for a limited time. Because the stats are then tied to the ingredients, you give the player the tools to understand how the system works, and make better decisions in the future. You not only give them a large space to explore, but you give them the tools to begin to understand it.

Not only that, but in-game, their avatar can use that information to become more efficient, giving them more time to explore the space before they go hungry, or need to attend another need. The consquence of the system applied both to the player’s knowledge, and their avatar’s ability to use that knowledge.

That magnifies the input of not only the player, who can make very simple choices and achieve powerful results, but it also magnifies the input of the designer, who can create a huge amount of gameplay with relatively little input. That’s where the efficiency comes in. That system was created by probably only 1.5 person-months worth of effort, whereas other features in the game took several person-years, with less compelling results.

I’m not really sure if this is the best way to describe my job, but it’s something that’s been rattling around in my head for a while, and it’s certainly less arbitrary than many other definitions I’ve heard.

Really, if you’ve never seen Top Gear, you should. Torrents are available from finalgear.com – I’d start with Season 3, as they had a slightly different, and less good cast in Seasons 2 and 1. There’s all sorts of good stuff. Or, you could do a search on YouTube. I’d recommend this one:

Why this isn’t broadcast in the US is totally beyond me. If Speed carried this, I’d watch it every week, probably two or three times.

That was a pretty good weekend. Finished Lost Planet, which was alright. It’s sort of funny – where I couldn’t tell Dead Rising was made in Japan, Lost Planet was an obviously, obviously Japanese game. It had a lot of design “quirks” and narrative quirks that no western developer would do. Overall? Not a bad game – definitely had its moments, but by and large, it’s a B, B- sort of game. My my old rating system, I’d give it about a B:70 – ambitious and innovative enough, but not executed well enough to realize a lot of what they’d intended, I believe.

Saturday night, we went out to Karaoke, which was a ball. Started out the evening with Korean BBQ at Samwon, where we haven’t been in a while. For BBQ, it’s pretty damn good, IMO. Lots of sides, and everything’s uniformly good. Karaoke was pretty crazy, with something like eight of us in a room singing for almost four hours. Good stuff.

Today, I ended up getting up at 9, for no good reason, though I felt like I really wanted to sleep some more. Spent the morning reading cooking books. I was in the mood to cook something sort of involved, which was either going to be coke-braised or maple-glazed ribs, or a lasagna. Yeah, I know – usually lasagna’s a pretty low-intensity meal. Cheese, maybe some frozen spinach, a jar of tomato sauce, and a big pile of mozzarella, right? Nah.

I used Jamie Oliver’s “Top 10” “Easy Baked Lasagna” recipe. Sure, it’s easy, but it takes for-fucking-ever. Last time, it took about four or five hours to make, the first time I made it. The problem is that the sauce is supposed to simmer for a couple hours. Not this time. We used the pressure cooker to blast the sauce to doneness in about half an hour, while we roasted the butternut and acorn squash (replaced half of the butternut with acorn, ’cause we had another recipe that uses the other half of the butternut in the queue for Tuesday). Basically, it ends up being a pork and beef and tomato sauce, noodles, squash, creme fraiche (with a little anchovy paste), parmesan, and fresh mozzarella in layers.

It’s an incredibly mellow lasagna – the sweetness of the squash, the richness of the creme fraiche and the meat all just … harmonize. It’s awesome. I’ll post a picture later, but visually, it’s the best-looking lasagna I’ve ever seen. Ei-Nyung made a great praline bread pudding, and some braised radicchio, which at first seemed incredibly bitter, but only the tougher outer leaves – the inner leaves were silken, and almost sweet.

We’d reduced some $8 supermarket balsamic vinegar a while ago, and it’s *fantastic*. We’d reduced balsamic any number of times before, but this latest stuff… when we run out, I’m definitely getting the same brand again. I can’t remember what it is, though, so I can’t tell you what brand it is anyway. 😛 But yeah, the radicchio with that balsamic… mmm.

Lasagna, radicchio, salad, and bread pudding, accompanied by a blood orange Italian soda Joe had picked up. Dang – I can’t think of a more satisfying home-cooked meal we’ve had in a good long while. Awesome stuff.

Tomorrow, the roofers are (in theory) coming to (finally) fix the leak in the roof. I’m not holding my breath, and I’m not even sure that they’ll have fixed it once they leave. It only leaks in really heavy, persistent rain. But if they do manage to fix this, it’ll be one of the biggest weights off my back in years.

Work? Well, work’s work. The game’s almost done – I think our end date is something like the 5th, which would mean only another week or so, but my understanding is that that date’s pushed back a bit, to something like the 9th. Beyond that? Well, we’ll see.

February, though, is (barring un-or-marginally-forseen circumstances) PerGaDeMo, in which I work on writing a doc for an idea a couple friends of mine and I had over lunch one day. Oh, that’s Personal Game Development Month. I’d realized that I’d really let myself slack, in terms of working on stuff outside of work, just because at times work can be so grueling that coming home, and working more, even on something you really love, can be a pain.

But NaNoWriMo was great impetus to actually buckle down and DO something, so I’m hoping that I can motivate myself with a goal – to finish a basic, but complete design document for this concept in the span of a month – enough that it honestly, and clearly communicates the core of the idea, and how it could be implemented.

I don’t know what Klay’s current status is, but as an update on my New Year’s resolution, I can say that 1.) I haven’t missed a single day on my workout schedule, and have actually gotten in a couple extra bits of exercise, and 2.) I’m now at 220.5, and definitely look better than I did at 233.5, which is where I started (though the official weigh-in weight, with clothes, was 238, since the next morning I weighed in at 233.5, that’s the starting weight I’m using. 7 pounds to go to meet that particular target, but I expect that the habits I’m developing will keep me going well past that.

I think ideally, my weight’s somewhere between 177 and 200 – I know that’s a pretty wide range. I’d say 177 is what I was in high school, and I don’t know if I can achieve that, but it’s definitely an indication that even at 213.5, which is the goal for this resolution, I’ve got a substantial amount of extra weight.

Still, things are going well – a change in exercise and eating habits – nothing too radical, even – just making sure that my intake is less than my output, and increasing my output.

So far, so good.

Allergy season, that is. My right eye’s rubbed raw, and swollen up. It’s happening way earlier this year, because the weather’s so screwy. Ah, well. At home, having taken a Claritin, because my eye’s so uncomfortable that staring at a computer monitor all day’s just about the least appealing thing I can think of.

Fun.

So. After something like five, maybe six years away from trail riding, Alan and I hit up Redwood park for some mountain biking. We got in late last night from Ei-Nyung’s company party (which was pretty fun), and so (I’ll be honest) I almost bailed on Alan. But he’d asked me a couple times, and I’d said yes on Friday, so I figured I’d just bite the bullet.

Got up at 9, which gave me some time to pull the slicks off the bike, put on the knobbies, take my senior thesis bike brake pulley contraption off the rear brake (one of the bolts had lost a nut), and take it for a quick spin to make sure things were okay.

Alan came over at about 10, we got to Skyline gate at about 10:30 (I’d tried to find another park entrance that I used way back in the day, but couldn’t find anymore). We ended up riding ’till about 12:15ish, but with some breaks for me to catch my breath, and not die.

We started out at Skyline gate, and took the West Ridge trail to the right of the parking lot (heading south?), across to the Graham trail, with a left onto Dunn, then switching back onto West Ridge to head back where it joins up with Baccharis.

Parts of the trail were a little muddy, and I started out really conservatively, over-braking in many places, and generally being a little paranoid. Probably not a bad thing, but it was much easier to ride once I’d loosened up a bit. It’s much easier to go when you’ve got some momentum behind you, frankly – it’s almost safer to move at a reasonable clip than it is to go too slowly.

Three major things I learned:
* My cardiovascular system is way out of shape.
* I desperately need a new seat for my bike.
* My bike is not set up for climbing AT ALL.

So, the cardiovascular thing’s no surprise. I’ve been swimming, but not with anything even marginally matching today’s intensity. The seat’s also pretty straightforward. I’ve got a Selle Italia Flite on there now, and it’s hard as fuck. Just absolutely rock-solid. It’s a great racing seat, and was good when I was, say, racing. But I haven’t done any of that in years, and my butt just can’t handle the pain. A lot’s happened in the last six years with regards to saddle design, so it’s desperately time to upgrade.

A Cannondale Super-V’s not a climber’s bike. That’s just the way it is, in that regard. But even still, my bike is even less set up for climbing than I remembered. Hopping onto Alan’s bike, where the seating position is near vertical, I realized that the seating position on my bike almost evenly distributes my weight over my butt, and my hands. Basically, I’m slung really far forward, and leaning way more forward than he does on his bike.

This never really bothered me in the past, but that’s probably because East Coast mountain biking is totally, totally different than West Coast mountain biking. In Boston, it was all about fast singletrack, on relatively flat terrain with a few short climbs, most of which you’d stand up for. Out here, the climbs are steep enough that you have to remain seated, in order to keep the rear wheel down, but leaning so far forward, my knees were practically in my chest with every revolution of the crank.

So, I’m thinking I need a shorter stem with a greater rise. I don’t know, though – I might just swing by Cyclesport and have them fit me for my own bike. Wacky, but probably would be much more comfortable than it is now.

The ride was fun. I really enjoyed it. Riding through the trees and stuff was as fun now as it was then. I’d definitely like to find some more singletrack, though – I think I just enjoy the East Coast style more, because here, it’s all fire roads, and heavily compacted trails. There’s less quick, technical navigation, and more technical climbs and steep descents, both of which currently, I fear more than I look forward to.

So, next week, if the weather holds up, I think we’ll try to find the place in Orinda I used to ride, and see if it’s still like I remember it was. Probably not, but there you go.

The rest of the day? Trying to recover from the ride, Korean food, and Karaoke Revolution with some friends. Good times. Tomorrow, we might take Mobius to Redwood Park, if my legs aren’t broken into a thousand little bits.

I’d say we had a pretty uneventful weekend, ’cause that’s certainly how it felt, but in many respects, it was actually pretty interesting.

Friday night, we went out to dinner at a Korean place called “Luxury”. (there’s a review on food.helava.com by Ei-Nyung) I got some curry rice, ’cause I just had a hankering for some, and wondered how it’d be different from what we make at home (answer: not very – they put in more stuff – mushrooms, zucchini, etc., but the basic sauce is clearly from the same box we get ours from). It was tasty, though, and exactly what I wanted. Ei-Nyung got a soup that had some wacky dough flakes in it that was quite tasty (and unbelievably HUGE) as well.

Strangely, we ran into a friend of ours (more of a friend of a friend, but who’s counting?) there, who we hadn’t seen in like a year or more.

Saturday morning, we took the dog for a walk and lounged around. I played some Lost Planet, which is a good, but not great game. In the afternoon, we took BART over to the city to meet up with H&M to go check out a comet that was supposed to be visible for a few minutes at sunset. We ended up at the Sutro Baths, which are basically the ruins of some old public baths near Ocean Beach, looking out over the Pacific Ocean. The sunset was great, and just watching the waves crash against the rocks was worth making the trip out there for.

As the sun set, we were looking intently at the horizon, trying to see something that was supposed to be very close to the sun. Just as we were about to give up, M, who’d been telling us humorous, but totally untrue stories all night, was saying, “Well, at least we’ll always have the memory… WAIT! THERE IT IS!” and pointed. All of us were like, “Sure, dude. Whatever,” but indeed, he’d seen it. It was much higher in the sky than we’d originally thought, but there it was. No, I didn’t take a picture, and I doubt it would have been visible on a photo, anyway.

Still, it was nice to see. Apparently, it’s the brightest comet we’ll see for the next 30 years.

After that, we pondered where to go for dinner, before settling on Andalu, a tapas place near H’s (soon to be H&M’s) place. We’d been there for H’s post-triathlon dinner, and it didn’t let us down. Their Coke-braised ribs were still awesome, and everything we had was pretty darned good. Because Ei-Nyung & I have been eating less, we even got out of there for a reasonable price – $80 for the four of us.

We ended up back at H’s place, where I checked out her Mac (I’ve been eyeing a MacBook), then played Guitar Hero 2 for hours and hours. Good times.

Today was similarly chill. Some Lost Planet, then shopping for groceries and a haircut. Ei-Nyung made some delicious rosemary roasted sweet potatoes, parsnips, and carrots, while I made a puff-pastry wrapped, mushroom-stuffed chicken breast recipe from one of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks. We watched Gordon Ramsay’s “The F Word” while waiting for stuff to finish. Fun show – the premise is a little weird, and I won’t bother explaining it here, but he basicaly makes a number of very simple, but elegant dishes – the kind of thing one might make at home relatively easily, provided access to the proper ingredients.

Ei-Nyung’s got tomorrow off, but I don’t, so it’s off to bed for me, so that I can get up early and hit the pool.

The resolution’s going well. I’m down to ~224, from a starting weight of about 233 (though the official “Wii Contest” weigh-in weight, in jeans and a t-shirt, was 238.) I’ve been swimming every morning where I don’t walk the dog. My stomach’s already a little smaller, I felt some muscle in my shoulders, and basically am looking a little less blobby.

Also, got some new glasses – they’ve got transition lenses, which is sort of ridiculous, but also, surprisingly useful. They change color relatively quickly, which is nice, and even when “dark,” they’re not overly dark, but also not “underly” dark, either.

Probably looks ridiculous, but I couldn’t really care less. 🙂

Oh – also, borrowed some comics from a coworker: Y: The Last Man (pretty good – interesting premise, decent writing, okay art), Conan (pretty good art, really good writing, interesting premise, has gotten me interested in reading the original Conan books, though not interested as much in watching the movie), and The Astonishing X-Men (written by Joss Whedon, drawn by John Cassaday – both absolutely incredible talents. Not only that, it REALLY harkens back to my favorite period of the X-Men (feels very much like late ’80’s-early ’90’s). I can’t recommend it enough to anyone who was a fan of the X-Men comics when they were in high school).

Went to the Lost Planet launch party tonight. Wasn’t really sure *why* necessarily, other than it was something to do. Figured maybe I’d make some contacts or something, but it wasn’t that sort of thing at all. I stood in line for about fifteen minutes, though, before finding some people from Backbone, and so we got into the VIP lounge, which was sort of funny. Lots of other game people, and “journalists,” but not really much in the way of talking to people. Just not that kind of event. Very much a “press” event, to show how excited the masses are for the game, and indeed, there were a lot of people. It was a fun time – I hung out primarily with a friend of mine from work, picked up a copy of the CE version of the game, and got it signed by some of the creators, which for some reason, was still pretty entertaining.

That list, and the resulting discussion that’s popped up about high school made me feel like reflecting for a moment.

I have no love for my high school. I largely hated my high school experience. College, I’m somewhat ambivalent about. But we’ll get to that later.

The defining quality of my high school is that it’s a relatively small school in an incredibly affluent neighborhood. Half the town of Piedmont is spectacularly wealthy, the other half is firmly ensconsed in upper-middle-class. The school feeds in from a middle school, which is in turn fed by three elementary schools. If you started one of those three elementary schools, there’s a very good chance that 80+% of your class made it all the way to senior year of high school with you.

So, once an X, always an X. Did something ridiculous in 3rd grade? People still remember. Maybe they don’t remember the exact event, but it doesn’t matter. If you’re in the in-crowd, you’re in. If you’re not, you’re not, and it doesn’t change. That’s not to say that I did something idiotic in 1st grade that I regretted in 12th.

I have great friends – better than I could ever hope for, that came from my experience throughout that school system. Hell, one of my current housemates, I met in kindergarten. We’ve known each other *forever*. A fistful of my other friends I met along the way. Some when the elementary schools merged in middle school, and some I even became friends with after it was all over, just because of peripheral connections that remained.

That said, the group of people I’m close with now aren’t, by and large, the group that I was close to in high school. Why? I wasn’t really close to that many people. Pete, Sean, and a couple others, but in high school, I didn’t really hang out with anyone except the swim team, and even then, I always felt like a bit of an outsider.

In part, that was because I did a *lot* of extracurricular stuff. I was in the band/orchestra, so I’d perform in the pit during the high school musicals. I swam, and played water polo, I played tennis (you know, I totally forgot about that) for a good part of middle school – not on a team, just took private lessons with my mom’s instructor. I took piano, saxophone, and clarinet lessons, and basically was always doing something or another. It was immensely educational, but it meant that I never really “stuck” with a single group, and never formed really tight friendships with a large group.

The track team, where most of my current highschool-era friends hung out, was really tight. The swim team was close, but aside from Sean, and a few people to a much lesser extent, I don’t have any friendships that have lasted beyond that. Which is fine – I burned a couple bridges pretty severely at the very end of senior year. Not something I’m really all that proud of, but I can’t say I’d do it differently, even now. The stupidity of the righteous, I guess.

I also took some classes at Berkeley, which I went to with Patrick and Pete. Pete was a really good friend of mine. One of my best, if not the best friend I had in high school, and someone I still consider one of my very best friends, though I see him quite rarely. That was another source of discontinuity, I suppose.

Bleah.

Still – I can’t really complain. Like I said, I did have a couple really good friends, which are friendships that have lasted to this day. But I despised most of my high school. The whole social atmosphere was incredibly cliquish and oppressive.

College was different. There were vast swaths of it I genuinely loved. The place I lived was awesome, and there were some incredibly, wildly creative and intelligent people, the likes of which I’ll never experience in that sort of density ever again. The problem, for me, was that essentially because we all lived together, the 30 people I knew formed a very… incestuous group of friends. By that, I mean that though each of my 30 friends had 30 friends, it was the same 30 people. Over and over.

MIT has a really interesting dichotomy – or it used to, at least. East Campus had the super-liberal, experimental, weird, creative crowd. West Campus generally housed the more conservative types. Each side looked down their nose at the other. Thing was, by senior year, I was kind of fed up with the East Campus-style scene. It just drove me bonkers. I was sick of the “HEY! LOOK HOW WEIRD I AM! ISN’T IT AWESOME!?!?!?” attitude that pervaded a lot of that scene, and frankly, I’m not *that* weird. When it gets right down to it, I’m generally relatively reserved, and staid, in my social life, and as a result, I really was looking for something less… loud.

So, senior year, I started hanging out with some friends from West Campus, and wondered why there was such a fucked up dichotomy to it all. But those worlds didn’t blend well, and I found myself sort of split in two, again. No, I’m not saying this is an experience unique to me. God, no. But it breaks the *time* that you spend with a group in two, and things suffer, as a result.

I also had a relationship that dragged me to Harvard for a good portion of my time for two years of my school experience, then had a huge crush on someone who was unavailable, before meeting the love of my life. Relationships, undoubtedly, colored a lot of my experience at MIT, because when you’re hosed on a bunch of problem sets, and trying to juggle your time to split it between MIT and Harvard, everything gets a little bonkers. Again, it’s all a matter of breaking up your time into chunks that are too small, and trying to spread them too thin.

Maybe that’s why these days, I so enjoy spending huge chunks of time at home, relaxing – doing nothing, hanging out. Not heading off to this party or that one, or frantically squeezing in as many people as possible.

At this point, I think I have a good group of friends. Some of them have known me for 20+ years, some of them I’ve met only in the last six or seven. I wish, as always, that I had more time to spend with some of them, and some friends go for far too long without contact. I know it’s my fault, as much as anyone else’s, but I’m enjoying the quiet times.