The Have Done List: March

Rather than writing a to-do list, here's a list of things I did do in March:

• bought two seasons of Angel incredibly cheaply at the dump shop
• discovered (and developed a crush on) The Big Bang Theory
• used TV Gorge, before it folded
• started a game of Bad Family on Google Wave
• won poker (and 10 packets of Girl Guide biscuits)
• entertained a three-year old with a talking rabbit
• went body-surfing in Lyall Bay
• drove up and back to Auckland
• saw the Pixies perform Doolittle
• drove around Auckland by myself

Music: February

Image via Wikipedia

Pearce lent me Neko Case's album Blacklisted.

Stand-out track for me so far is Deep Red Bells, which is all haunting and yearning.

... Whoa: according to Wikipedia, Deep Red Bells is inspired by her memories of growing up in Seattle while the Green River Killer was still at large.

So, yeah maybe less yearning and more melancholy.




I'm in love with the drive and intensity of this new track from Massive Attack - Babel. Here's a live performance in Moscow




Fluxblog has been posting links to Animal Collective for a while, but I'm only now starting to really let their album, Merriweather Post Pavillion, sink in. My Girls is obviously awesome, but the track I get drawn back to is Summertime Clothes.

Two changes to the blog

I've freshened up the look of the blog using the new Template Designer.

Also, you can now get to the blog via www.stevehickey.com. It only took me four years to realise that Openhost has a free option to redirect a url. No longer do I have to tell people to go to "multi hyphen dimensional dot blogspot dot com". Think of what I can do with all the time I'll be saving.

Made to Stick: Do you believe me? Am I Credible?

Cover via Amazon

What makes someone believe an idea? In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers propose a variety of things that can make a message or an idea 'credible':

• people we know and respect believe it
• the idea matches our own experience
• we're told it's true by an authority
• we're told it's true by an anti-authority (see below)
  
• we take it on faith
• the message stands on its own merits and is inherently believable (it has 'internal credibility')
• the message contains vivid details that make it easier to visualise the point you're making
• statistics ... but ONLY IF they're phrased in human, everyday terms
• you use an example that definitively proves the point you're making (aka 'The Sinatra Test')
• the message challenges you to test the truth of it for yourself

It's worth going into more detail about a few of these sources of credibility.


Get the endorsement of an Anti-Authority

You can get someone to deliver your message who has personal experience with what you're saying. Someone who has lived through the experience your message is conveying, someone who's 'living proof' that what you're saying is true or works.

Someone like Pam Laffin, for instance.

Watch this at Boston.com

We're all aware of ads that try to seem credible because they use a celebrity endorsement from someone we want to be like, or a fronted someone with a reputation for honesty and trustworthiness (or an actor dressed to symbolise honesty and trustworthiness). Sometimes a message is delivered by an expert (like an academic or a professional).

These are all forms of credibility because they use an 'authority' to present the message. But Pam Laffin started smoking when she was 10. She's an anti-authority; she has credibility because she's real. Or rather: had credibility. Pam died on 3 November 2000 at the age of 31.


Use vivid details
Weirdly enough, simply using a vivid detail or two can make your message more believable. But these details need to be truthful, meaningful, and they need to add to your argument.

The Heath brothers cite a dance company who demonstrated how much they value diversity by letting people know that they had a 73 year old former mailman who danced with them.


Statistics (tend to make your eyes glaze over)

Statistics may sound impressive and seem like a good source of credibility, but they aren't particularly great at showing people what you mean.

I'm sure you can think of examples where people have quotes stats at you, and you've thought "These are just numbers," or "I don't understand what these numbers mean." I get baffled by stats all the time, primarily because it's hard to visualise these numbers mean in everyday, human terms.

But statistics are a good method of illustrating the relationships between things. If, rather than throwing numbers at your audience, you focus on describing that relationship in everyday, human terms you'll find people remember and understand your stats - which will make them more credible.

The Heath brothers illustrate this by quoting a series of statistics from Stephen Covey's book The 8th Habit, where a survey of employees in various companies revealed the following information:

+ Only 37 percent said they had a clear idea of what their organisation was trying to achieve and why
+ Only one in five employees said they were enthusiastic about their team's and their organisation's goals
+ Only one in five said they had a clear 'line of sight' between their daily work and their organisation's goals
+ Only 15 percent said they felt their organisation enabled them to fully execute their key goals
+ Only 20 percent said they fully trusted the organisation they worked for.

To me, that's a whole bunch of information that's pretty difficult to assimilate. So, instead, Stephen Covey provides an analogy that puts less emphasis on these numbers, and more on illustrating the relationships and meaning of those statistics using an everyday, easy-to-visualise concept:

If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. ... And all but 2 of the players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.

Statistics are a good source of internal credibility but they aren't inherently helpful. They're only helpful if we understand them in human, everyday terms (which helps us get an idea of their scale and context).


The Sinatra Test

"If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere."

-- New York, New York
(as sung by Frank Sinatra)

Passing the Sinatra Test is shorthand for saying that providing just one example is enough to establish your credibility (as long as it's the right example). For instance:

"I'm in charge of security at Fort Knox," means you can get a security job anywhere.

"Our company promptly and securely delivered the final Harry Potter book to every bookstore in America," means you can get any couriering job in America.


Test it yourself

You can challenge the person who's receiving your message to test it for themselves.

Made to Stick cites the example of the Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" ad. I'd heard about this for years, but never seen it till now. So, let's go back to the year 1984 and take a look:



The point here is that you can go into a fast-food store and test for yourself whether you're eating a bigger or smaller beef patty than you'd get at a rival store.

Figuring out a way of making it easy for your audience to establish that your message is credible for themselves, is a powerful source of credibility.

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• How to Write a Blog Post That's Stickier than Velcro (problogger.net)

What's coming up

Hi. I'm changing the posting schedule of the blog again. Posts are going to appear once a week until my life calms down a bit.

I'm looking forward to the next few months on multi-dimensional. This series on Made to Stick is almost over, and once that's done I'll be doing two things:

1) Summarising all the books on story creation I've been reviewing over the last year into one big post - which will bring closure to the journey that started with my dissatisfaction with the way Presentation Zen covered this subject

2) I'm going to try applying the Made to Stick principles to a few topics. If you've got any messages you want to work on communicating better, I'd like to help - so I'm inviting you guys to offer up topics you'd like to cover and we'll work through them together.

I'm also going to start a new thing where I pitch some story ideas on the blog. I am sick of developing stories in total secrecy - partly because it makes it difficult to get the benefit of everybody's ideas, but mostly because of this: an effective story is one that people want to share with others, and I won't be able to tell if you want to share it with others unless I share it with you.

That'll probably start in May. In the meantime, that's enough blogging - I'm off to enjoy the sun!

Links of Interest: February

Here are some of my favourite links from last month on my Google Reader's shared list:

JP talks about the implications for National Standards (Part One, Part Two). A great consideration of what they might mean for students.

I investigated and got annoyed with Google Buzz. Here's how to disable it permanently.

Axe Cop! Written by a 5-year old. Illustrated by his dad.

Seth Godin talks about the importance of devising ideas that spread. Favourite post of the month.

The showrunner of Bones discusses what's involved in creating a show that millions of people watch. One lesson: reinforce mainstream cultural expectations.

Fred Hicks describes what's involved in building an online community, in a series of practical easy-to-apply steps.



And three links from January:

Alex Epstein at Complications Ensue points out that you can use non-fiction as the basis for a screenplay without needing to buy the rights to that piece of non-fiction. He contends that the process of creating your story will completely change the way the underlying facts are represented. Alex is not a lawyer (as far as I know) but his point makes me feel much more confident about where I can get my inspiration from. (Not sure how this applies to biographies, though.)

Seth Godin links to a MOMA exhibition of the works of Tim Burton, and observes the vast number of Burton's failed projects. Seth's conclusions: finish projects, get them out the door, and get on to the next project. Don't be afraid to fail.

Seth also speculates about the future of libraries, and proposes that they shift their focus from 'providing information' to training people in how to:

a) find and use information
b) connect with and lead others.

Made to Stick: Make it real; make it Concrete

View Larger Map

Made to Stick is a book about what makes ideas memorable, and what makes people want to tell your ideas to other people. So far, Made to Stick has talked about making sure your ideas are:

+ simple
+ unexpected and surprising

The next quality it recommends is 'concreteness' - describing your idea as something you can see or something you can do. Make your idea vivid and easy to imagine.

For instance, compare these two goals.

Goal 1: We will build the best passenger jet in the world.

Goal 2: We will build a passenger jet that seats 131 passengers, can fly non-stop from Miami to New York City, and land on Runway 4-22 at La Guardia International Airport.

What's the difference between these two goals? What are the different things you still need to know after reading them? Imagining you're an aircraft engineer, what would your next action be after receiving those goals?


What are the benefits of concreteness?

Making something concrete means that everyone has the same clear idea of what to do. Concreteness improves your ability to co-ordinate people, and make sure they're all working in the same direction.

Also, when something is concrete, it gives us something to focus on – a symbol, a representation, a known environment we’re all familiar with. As an example of this, Made to Stick describes the creation of the Palm Pilot. When they were designing it, the creator of the company would carry around a block of wood that represented the finished Palm Pilot. He wanted to avoid the failing of previous attempts to build a handheld organiser, which he saw as the tendency to keep packing as many cool features as possible into the palm pilot. So when a tech would come up to him with a new idea and say “How about we add this?”, the company's creator would pull out his block of wood (which he carried with him everywhere) and ask where this new feature would fit.

How can you tell if something's concrete?

+ You can examine it with your senses
+ You can see someone doing it
+ You can talk about it with someone, using terms and concepts that are familiar to them
+ You can use an example to describe it.


The opposite of concrete

The opposite of concreteness is abstraction. We talk abstractly when we use buzzwords, professional jargon, and ideas and descriptions that don't have any relevance to the real world.

When something is abstract, it makes it harder to understand and remember an idea. Abstraction also encourages people to interpret your idea in different ways

Unfortunately, it's extremely easy for us to slip into describing things abstractly. I'm sure you can remember a time when you were explaining a subject you know a lot about to someone who knew very little, and you realised they weren't following you. When I do that, I often find that I've:

+ forgotten to explain an important piece of information, assuming they already know it
+ used a word that means a lot to me, but means nothing to a casual audience
+ summed up a complex idea in a pithy sentence, rather than explaining in step-by-step, real-world terms what I mean.

It’s easy to forget that we’re experts or knowledgeable in something, and we have to actively try and remember that the more expert we are, the less natural it is for us to talk like someone who knows nothing about the subject.

The upshot: if you're passionate and knowledgeable about a subject and you want other people to know about it or care about it, then you're going to have to get concrete.


How do you make something concrete?


Made to Stick recommends that you spend some time visualising your customers or the people you're trying to influence. The book uses the example of the Saddleback Church in California which seeks to recruit and convert people they call 'Saddleback Sam'. They describe Saddleback Sam as:

+ not currently attending a church and skeptical about organised religion
+ in his late 30s or early 40s
+ has (at least) a university degree
+ married with two children
+ happy in his job, and content with his life

In fact, the Saddleback Church goes into even more detail than this, but the point is that once you have a clear idea of who your customer is, you start to figure out what their needs are. What do they want? What don’t they want?

That helps you figure out what messages will appeal to them. You can make your ideas concrete in ways that meet their specific needs, and you can figure out the best ways to deliver your message. For instance, Saddleback Sam works hard and wants to spend time with his family, so tele-marketing to him at night is probably a very bad idea.

So now you're explaining your idea in a way that people can easily visualise. How do you make them believe you?

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• Want to convince? Use abstract rather than concrete language (scienceblog.com)

Games: February

Cover of Cold Print

I took UnSpeakable, the HP Lovecraft supplement for InSpectres, for a test drive with my Tuesday night group. The results for the first part of the adventure have been spectacular. As a group, we've worked together to create a mood and I've gradually been putting the characters under more and more pressure. I'm quite proud of the sense of unease I've helped create, and of my description of the abomination that Jenni's character discovered in the bedroom.

The adventure situation was inspired by a Ramsay Campbell short story from Cold Print, called - I think - Voices on the Beach. Each of the characters had a relationship with a writer, Micah Brody, who lived in a beach house on the east coast of America and had recently written them a series of disturbing messages before disappearing. Into that mix, I threw a possibly racist sheriff (Micah and his brother, portrayed by one of the players, were African-American) and some non-Euclidean geometry. Based off the players succeeding in their investigation rolls, it became clear that an invasion from another universe was underway - with the beachhead being peoples' dreams.

UnSpeakable has a great narrative device built into its rules: the game can't end until one player's character has gone permanently insane. This encourages the person who's running the game (in this case, me) to really throw details and events into the story that unnerve, dismay and (ultimately) unleash madness into the universe. I took about a session and a half to get really comfortable with this but it was extremely late at night by the time we reached a point where the players were being confronted by a series of scenes of unspeakable madness on a regular basis - we had a player who had to catch the train home and I had begun to tread water with the stuff I was inventing. So we called it a night around the point that three of the characters had to burn down a church and euthanise a kindly chaplain in order to escape the horror, leaving the fourth (African-American) character to face the town's wrath.

Which left us totally disturbed without invoking the permanent insanity rule that'd mean one of the players would have to make their character start acting as the villain.

A group of us are beginning to organise a long run of Bliss Stage (my favourite game of the last 6 months). We met up after a series of emails to do some brainstorming about which teenage survivors in a ruined future version of Wellington we'd be playing and what the alien menace they'd be trying to defeat would look like. This brainstorming session was really interesting - for most of us, there were at least one or two other players we hadn't met before, and I could actually feel the trust being built between us as we learned to listen to each others' ideas, learned how to disagree with each other, and started learning how to talk through potentially difficult subject matter. One of the rules of Bliss Stage is that each session needs to begin with a bit of hanging out and connecting with each others' real lives before starting to play the game - that feels particularly wise in this situation.

We've created a nice tightly-wound situation where the teenagers are living in the tunnels under Wrights Hill, trying to learn how to farm and starting to play the next (first?) steps in their war to drive off the aliens. First session is tomorrow night!

Read Over the Edge by Robin D. Laws. I have wanted to really study a copy of this ever since one slipped through my fingers when I was working at Mind Games. In reality, this game about Naked Lunch style conspiracies on a Mediterranean island would have been great when I was gaming in the 90s. Now it feels a little too ... full. Of setting details. Of rules details (which is odd for a legendarily light game). In all, an interesting read and a great step in the career of an excellent game designer.

Finally unlocked the second-to-last level of my cellphone poker game.

Tried to play the Flash version of the Torquemada game from Dice Man. Got irritated and quit when (a) my character accidentally killed his own wife, and (b) I realised I couldn't cheat.

Played, enjoyed, and gave up quickly on Scrambled - a great idea for a path-finding game where you guide a robot through a series of obstacles.

Made to Stick: Using Suprise

To deliver your message successfully, you have to get the audience's attention and then hold the audience's attention. One way of doing this is through using surprise and the unexpected.

Unexpected ideas inspire us

In a speech to Congress in 1961, President Kennedy clearly summarised a new goal for America:



(Transcript, here.)

Kennedy's idea is huge, surprising, and (obviously) provoked reactions like "Is this worth it?", and "Why should we do it?" Kennedy clarified the reasons America needed to embark on this endeavour in a speech at Rich University in 1962.(*)

(*) Let's leave aside discussion of the real motivations for the Apollo project for now.



(Transcript, here.)


Get the audience's attention

You can get your audience's attention by surprising them. This works because we tend to think we're good at predicting what's going to happen next; we think we have a good understanding of the world around us. Surprise heppans wehn taht understanding fails us; when things occur that we don't expect.

After experiencing something unexpected, we then start paying extra special attention - trying to understand why we failed to predict what was going to happen (which is something I've hopefully just demonstrated).

Surprise means we've failed to predict what's going to happen, which causes us to pay attention so that we can make better predictions in the future.

So, how do you create surprise when you're trying to design and deviler a message?

In the previous post, I talked about identifying the core of your message. I used the example of 'time management', and narrowed my message down to the core of: Only do stuff that adds to you being the person you want to be.

To surprise people you need to explore what's counter-intuitive about your message's core. What are its unexpected implications? The authors of Made to Stick, the Heath brothers, have a nice turn of phrase about this: "Uncommon sense". Things that are common sense are obvious, and therefore easy to ignore (because we'll have guessed what's coming and won't be surprised). It's the part of your message that makes uncommon sense that will "break your audience's guessing machine".

In an attempt to illustrate, I will try and figure out what's counter-intuitive about "Only do stuff that adds to you being the person you want to be." I expect this will be reasonably hard - consider what's about to follow to be a bit of a brainstorm, rather than a final draft:

+ Without time management you'll never be happy
+ The person you want to be needs to be deliberately created
+ Creating yourself involves sculpting in time - paring away the bits that aren't you
+ Doing whatever you want is like junk food for your soul

I like that last one. I could think a bit harder and come up with more options, but let's go with that for now. So my counter-intuitive example is this:

Not using time management is much like eating a king-sized block of chocolate every day. Regularly eating junk food is a bad idea if you want to be healthy. In the same way, doing whatever you want, whenever you want, without thinking about it, tends to stuff your life with things you don't really want or need. And the end result is you don't end up with enough time to do the things you really want or need to do.

Hold the audience's attention

Curiousity comes from recognising that we have gaps in our knowledge. Apparently we have a psychological need to fill those gaps (as the number of morning tea conversations I have that involve me consulting Wikipedia will attest).

The process of raising audience's awareness that they have gaps in their knowledge leads to them wanting to stick around until you fill those gaps with answers, facts or stories.

Made to Stick outlines a bunch of ways you can create these gaps in your audience:

+ make them publically predict something which they get wrong
+ make them realise that they disagree about the topic with other audience members
+ provoke their interest with something unfamiliar
+ highlight their current knowledge and then point out some specific knowledge they're missing
+ make them realise they need your facts.

Made to Stick highlights a principle here that's also true in screenwriting: shift your mindset away from "What information do I want to convey?" to "What questions do I want them to ask?" People will stick around to find out the answers to questions that interest them, and (according to Made to Stick) they'll even stick around to find out the answers to questions that don't.

Movies: February

Cover of Marebito

I can tell February was busy because of the small number of movies I watched.

I got through the first third of Marebito, a J-scare from the director of The Grudge and Reincarnation. I actually ended up napping instead of watching, and still haven't gotten to the point where the story actually kicks off ... I'll probably go back to it and give it another 10 minutes, but so far it seems less solid and more pretentious than Reincarnation.

Doctor Who: The End of Time (Part 1) was a nice 'moving the pieces into place' episode with a great scary kick at the end of the episode that absolutely makes me go "What the hell is the Doctor going to do?" *and* may give me some closure on Donna Noble.

Doctor Who: The End of Time (Part 2) made me cry. An effective payoff to the "He will knock four times" set-up, and a series of scenes that provided closure on a number of Russell T Davies plots. This part was less about the plot and more about the emotions, and I choked up as David Tennant finished his run. I think I'll miss his Doctor about as much as I miss Tom Baker's.

Started watching my favourite film, The Insider, but had to go do something else. Even watching the first 20 minutes though has reminded me how good this script is. An expanded review is definitely coming.

A Nightmare on Elm Street played like a sit-com to me. The last half hour of this movie consists of idiot cops and ultra-violent pratfalls as Freddy Kruger falls victim to a series of booby-traps that Nancy has set up in her home. An odd, hilarious movie.

Made to Stick: Keeping things Simple

Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath is about creating ideas that stick in people's minds, ideas that make people want to spread them. The first element of 'stickiness' is simplicity.


Simplicity is a proverb

When you're creating an idea, you want it to be short, easy to remember. Ideally you want your idea to be short and WORTHWHILE for people to remember. For instance, think about these phrases:

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

Proverbs are worthwhile ideas that are simple, profound, and (most importantly) useful. They provide a guide about how to behave in a complex situation or a principle to live by. Proverbs provide wisdom. And people share them - the bird-in-the-hand proverb can be found in Spain, Russia, Iceland, and even in medieval Latin documents. Its origin may be from one of Aesop's Fables, dating from around 570 B.C.


Simplicity is the most important thing

Think about a subject you know a lot about. Now, if you want to, try this mental exercise - it should take about 10 seconds. Imagine a friend asks you to explain a bit about that subject to them. They'll give you a couple of minutes to give them a bit of an overview of it.

Have a think about a few of the things you'd want to explain to them.

While you're doing that, I'll try it with the idea of time management. Skip past the bullet-points and I'll keep on with the post:

• write everything down
• review stuff regularly
• keep a list of tasks you want to do
• have a list of goals (yearly and monthly)
• do stuff that's important but not urgent
• do things in small chunks
• do stuff that excites you
• do stuff that adds to the person you want to be
• eliminate unimportant stuff
• keep a notebook with you to write stuff down
• time management is a habit - start small
• there are lots of good books to read.

So, here's why simplicity is good. People who are experts want to communicate a lot to their audience - and the tendancy is to communicate too much. I have 12 things in my list above - the chances are that 10 minutes after I explain this stuff, my friend is going to remember nothing. Maybe one or two things at most.

When an idea is simple, it means you've found its core - the most important thing about the idea that you want to communicate.

You can't have 5 'most important' things that you want to communicate. You've got to prioritise by weeding out the important ideas that aren't the most important idea. You've got to eliminate the superfluous.

What's left is like a proverb or a haiku: the most important thing about your idea.

If I were to do this with my list above, getting rid of stuff that'd merely be nice to talk about, I'm left with this:

• have a list of goals (yearly and monthly)
• do stuff that's important but not urgent
• do things in small chunks
• do stuff that adds to the person you want to be
• eliminate unimportant stuff
• time management is a habit - start small

If I then eliminate the stuff that I think would be really beneficial to know, I get this:

• do stuff that's important but not urgent
• do stuff that adds to the person you want to be
• eliminate unimportant stuff
• time management is a habit - start small

Those are four principles of time management that I think are really important to know. But four is still too many - if I were forced to choose only the most important thing, then what would it be?

Only do stuff that adds to the person you want to be.

So, I didn't know that before I did this exercise. For me, the purpose behind time management is to help you live the life you want to live, and to help you be the person you want to be. Now, discussing that idea any further would be irrelevant to this post but it's a good illustration of this principle.

***

The chapter on Simplicity goes into more detail about how to achieve short, profound, essential statements of your idea. It talks about relating your idea to concepts your audience is already familiar with, and with using analogies (especially analogies that allow the audience to extrapolate a lot of information from them).

The whole chapter is a worthwhile read, but essentially it emphasises again and again the reason why we should aim for simplicity: when people remember the core of your idea, they know what's important. They know what to focus on in any given situation. Knowing the core allows them to make good choices under pressure.

Next up, ... Surprise!

Previous posts in the series:

In which I am impressed by the cover
An overview of the book

Time Management: Tips and hacks

I thought I'd follow up on some ideas from the Facebook post about how to stop myself from wasting time on the internet. Please let me know your ideas for not procrastinating, both online and in real life.

* I've started breaking my internet addiction through giving myself designated 'offline hours' and a dedicated half-hour in the evening where I can do guilt-free browsing and read anything I want. Also: no internet before 9 in the morning (which, it turns out, is quite hard for me to stick to)

* As part of this, I went on a one-week media fast - no news sites, or political sites, or newspapers/radio/TV. This felt great, and freed up an amazing amount of time.

* I built up some strong negative emotions (like loathing, frustration, or boredom) towards particular websites - which motivated me to block them in my hosts file. This means I can't access these sites without manually unblocking them. Seems to be working - I don't miss them, and I think I *wanted* an excuse not to go back to them. (And unless Facebook makes some changes to its new homepage design - which has made the site way more irritating - it's another site that might be joining this group.)

* Decided to not follow or read blog posts comments or discussions - this is tougher, but I've realised that I don't really process these conversations very well. They sort of swim in a haze through my eyes and brain and don't really sink into my long-term memory. A complete waste of my time, really, to look at them or check back in on them.

* I've re-categorised all my Google Reader feeds, allocating them to either 'Must Read' blogs, 'Skippable' blogs (where I can delete their posts if I'm running out of time). I also have a Probation' category now - where I put all the new blogs I'm subscribing to. I give them about a month in Probation and then decide whether to unsubscribe from them or not. Having a Probation category has also prompted me to delete several big blogs from my feed - most notably Aintitcool - which has significantly reduced the amount of infocrap I need to wade through.

Also a big shout-out to Billy from the previous Facebook post: he introduced me to the studyhacks site, which led me to this long but good talk by Merlin Mann about time and attention, and his recommendation of the 4 Hour Work Week was the tipping point into me getting the book out and having a read. Fascinating stuff.

What about you? What do you do?

Lost: Second Impressions III

The finale of Season 1 was exciting stuff, had a great momentum, and we would have continued straight on into Season 2 if the disc had worked.

A couple of weeks later we managed to watch the opening three episodes of Season 2 in a row. This is something I've wanted to do for a while - my memory of watching these week-by-week was that they were a bit frustrating in the way they replayed the same events from different points-of-view. Watched in sequence ..., well it was good fun but the repetitiveness was still there. And perhaps that's a part of the explanation for the start of the huge drop-off in Lost's audience during Season 2: a slow, repetitive start followed by a huge dose of mythology (with buttons to be pushed and Dharma Initiative orientation films to be watched).

... Also, my advice is never to play a drinking game where you have to scull every time Michael yells either "WALT!" or "They took my boy!"

Based on reading a few 'Favourite Episode' lists that are floating around the net, we decided to skip forward to the highlights of Season 2. This meant we missed out much of the Dark Charlie, and the long con with the guns stuff.

Instead we skipped forward to the one-two punch of Shannon's spotlight episode followed by 'The Other 48 Days'. Shannon is still a favourite character, and her spotlight episode goes to great lengths to make her sympathetic and someone we're willing to root for. And then Ana-Lucia shows up. Unfortunately, Shannon may be a sympathetic character but she's not iconic in the way Jack, Kate or Locke are - therefore: bye-bye Shannon.

(Is it worth noting here that I like Ana-Lucia? I'll go into that in more detail if it seems relevant.)

The Other 48 Days, which I thought would be terrible given that most of the characters it developed are now gone (although at least one of them will return in Season 6)

was great, actually. Really rewarded rewatching - even though some of Goodwin's behaviour bugged me now that he's been fleshed out as a character in subsequent episodes. It just seemed to me that his conversation with Ana-Lucia should be much more reasonable and less darkly villainous ... but it wasn't really a deal-breaker for me.

In our next re-watch session we sat down to the very character-centric The 23rd Psalm, an Eko flashback episode that I found moving and involving.

This contrasted with an episode I thought I was really going to enjoy: Meet Henry Gale. The introduction of Henry Gale into the show is one of the pivotal moments of Lost, but rather than being character-focused, it's an episode about people shouting at each other and using torture as the option of first resort. So, it felt plot-heavy and not particularly insightful. Pretty great Sayid performance though.

Play: Looking back on February

So, at the end of PLAY!, here's what's I've done:

Read Mixtape: I did enjoy this script. It's sweet and light, with five or six laugh out loud moments. The structure of having a thirteen year old trying to track down the songs her parents (who have died) loved is excellent and leads to nice character growth. The film feels very much like Freaks and Geeks to me. Here's a link to Scriptshadow's review, and an interview with the author.

The Orphans: continued plotting out my creepy 'kids stuck in a haunted orphanage' movie. Have written another couple of sequences, and am getting to the point where I really need to start thinking about the film's tone: its pretty grim, but is there going to be a happy ending? Or a pyrrhic victory? Or will I embrace nihilism? I think I've realised that I'm writing a Saphhire and Steel story in which Saphhire and Steel never show up. and I'm definitely at the point where I want to find out how it all turns out for them.

Free writing: Spent a little bit of most days just jamming on different story ideas, putting absolutely no pressure on myself. So far I've played around with LARP ideas, status updates for lovebites characters, and a best-selling thriller.

Artificial (the AI story): I said that I was thinking about how to make the Pessimist character interesting. Well I did nothing on this until the very last evening of the last day of PLAY. I was reading this excellent interview with the author of Source Code, and his comment on his focus on character awoke something in me. I saw the moment between the Pessimist and the AI that I needed to work towards, and then came up with a diagram that defines the relationship between the three of them (AI, Pessimist and Optimist). That gives me pretty much all I need to start outlining the movie.

Destinies: I think I'm pushing this back a little - to focus on finishing Bad Family, and then outlining these other ideas. Need to discuss, re-negotiate timeframes with my brain-storming collaborators.


And for extra credit ...

Read The Second Session: INCOMPLETE! In fact, unstarted. My first draft script about musicians trying to record an album is still in my to-read pile.

Made to Stick: I've blogged 1.5 more posts in this series - cued up to publish in March.

The Limit: Still need to assemble a contact list of emails for producers.


I've also decided to shift the time I spend playing and working again. For the next little while I'm going to spend four weeks working and two weeks playing. See how that feels.

Test: Please comment on this post

Hi all. Regan just told me that she's been having problems commenting on the blog.

Could you reply to this post, please? If you have any problems, give me an email or comment on facebook.

Hell, let's even make it constructive: what would you like to see me blog about this year?

Books: January

Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert is the story of an army of mercenaries laying seige to Carthage in the third century BC. I was enjoying it until I lost the library's copy of it on the train. But ... go Project Gutenberg! Here's an online copy of it.

Illium by Dan Simmons took me by surprise. I thought it was a simple re-telling of the Trojan War where the role of gods is taken by time-travelling humans with advanced technology. It's more complicated than that - there's an inter-cutting storyline between three planets that doesn't fully pay off by the end of this first book, but has helped to set up a pretty amazing change in the situation. Favourite subplot: a bromance between two robots.

The Left Hand of Darkness - a simple, ultimately moving book about first contact. Le Guin creates a world that simulataneously feels real and like an parable.

The Four Hour Work Week is filled with some quite inspiring ideas about creating more time for yourself. I'll be re-reading this one more closely.

Olympos is the sequel to Illium (above). If Illium was about exploring the novel's setting, then this is about exploding it into action. There's a game called Sorceror which has a concept called a Kicker: a starting situation that radically upsets everyone's lives and the status quo, forcing unpredictable responses from everyone. Olympos starts with a great Kicker, and continues to place the characters in terrible situations where they must choose, choose and choose again while under time pressures and limited information. It is great stuff, and Achilles is once again a bad-ass.

This stuff has inspired me to give the Illiad and the Odyssey a go.

Mixtape turns out to be a sweet, funny little script. I really liked it and wish it the best in its journey towards becoming a movie.

Movies: January

Surf's Up is a surprisingly enjoyable animated film. It's a story about a penguin trying to win a surfing competition, and the film takes advantage of the fact it's shot in a handheld reality TV style to create a relaxed (almost-improvised feeling) series of jokes.

Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is a film I remember as being long and dull. I was wrong - this time round it played out as a fun romp with engaging characters.

Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest is a film I remember as being long, dull and overly-complicated. I was mostly wrong - it is extremely long, but I think my two main problems when I watched this in the movies in 2006 were (i) I'd completely forgotten who all the characters were in the two years since I'd seen the first one (like, who is this 'Norrington' guy, again?), and (ii) in the cinema this played out like an ADD assault on my senses with a volume at somewhere around 120dB. Both Dead Man's Chest and its sequel play better watched as part of a trilogy - they play even better when viewed as a single epic fantasy film that you can break up into easily digestible pieces on your computer.

Avatar was good.

I watched Mike from Milwaukee's video review of The Phantom Menace. It's a 70 minute long work of incisive, cruel comedy gold. Among the many highlights, a two minute explanation of why Qui-Gon Jin's strategy to free Anakin Skywalker from slavery makes no sense whatsoever. It also spends a lot of time pointing out the biggest flaw of the movie for me: that it lacks a main character, and that the most obvious choice for a main character (Anakin) doesn't show up for 45 minutes and then proceeds to do basically nothing for the rest of the story. What I hadn't noticed before was the story potential to be mined from amalgamating Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan's characters. Anyway it's great: here's a link to all seven parts of the review. I've embedded the first part, below.

Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End. Again, I enjoyed this, breaking it up into smaller chunks. (Perhaps I have become influenced by watching too much TV on DVD, and 45 minutes seems like a natural amount of time to sit down to watch something.) Particularly liked spending alone time with Jack, and the battle at the end.

Inglourious Basterds doesn't actually feel like a Tarantino film to me, and I think that's a good thing. I suppose what I mean by that is that there's a focus on the story that I appreciate (as opposed to focusing on making sure that you'll perceive that the story is being told in a way that's cool). As a script, I guess the main character is Shoshanna, the protagonists are Shoshanna and Aldo Raines, and the antagonist is the German education system - which seems to produce perceptive and resourceful soldiers. I broke this in a multi-day viewing - because the film itself is broken into chapters - and I found it immensely satisfying.

Watched Reincarnation at Chris' recommendation. An excellent J-scare by the director of the Grudge, involving a movie being shot about a horrible slaughter at a hotel 35 years ago. Past lives, repressed memories and multiple timelines ensue. What's great about this film is that it slowly trains to you keep looking into the backgrounds of shots, because weird and disturbing shit keeps happening there in really subtle ways. After about 25 minutes of that, the movie had me on the edge of my seat without really needing to do anything scary at all - it had made the ordinary terrifying. Bonus points for NOT playing out a twist with one particular character, and for having a very very appropriate ending. I, too, now recommend this film.

Games: January

Battlestar Galactica: The Boardgame. It's a good game that nicely captures the 'struggle for survival' dynamic of the earlier seasons, and has the 'all the players co-operate against a common pressure but one of them might be a traitor' structure that I love. However, I'm not convinced I ever need to play it again.

My third one-shot of D&D 4th Edition was an almost-dungeon-crawl undertaken by a group of all 'arcane' (magic-using) characters. Most important thing I took from this game: Skill challenges can be great. I really enjoyed how they give scenes importance and weight. Skill challenges take encounters that previous editions of D&D would have solved via conversation, GM fiat or a single dice roll ... but under the skill challenge system, role-playing conversations and investigations is encouraged and then converted into successful and unsuccessful tests. If you accumulate a pre-defined number of successes or failures and the plot advances. Luke (as DM) was great at making them 'follow the fiction' rather than just be dry dice rolls.

Biggest problem? I found that combat was an excuse to unplug from being involved with the character for LONG periods of time. Combats are fine and will go faster when you know the system, and running encounters using video game logic and level design would be great.

I also think you have to aggressively work to contribute to the game's fiction when you're in combat. For instance, me narrating tentacles coming up around a platform to drag an enemy to his death works far better than simply activating a power. But that's something I have to push for and remember, rather than something that's encouraged or mandated by D&D's rules (for a completely different experience, try playing Dogs in the Vineyard sometime).

I spend a couple of weeks in January taking a deliberately low-key approach to gaming. I reduced or postponed game pre-Kapcon, to avoid burnout.

In that time, I played VVVVVV, a brilliant platformer that's challenging, but not too challenging. Click on that link to play the first two levels for free.

I also checked out the Doom Roguelike, an overhead ASCII version of Doom I. This was my first experience with Rogue-like games. I liked it, and decided to uninstall it before I got too deep in, as I could feel the addictive properties starting to well up inside my brain. Basically, I asked myself, "Is it 'worth' spending the time learning the interface and mastering?" In this case the answer was, no. But I recommend it, anyway.

Canabalt is a nice simple adrenaline boost of a Flash game. Got about 5 minutes amusement out of it.

One of the reviewers on Play this Thing described Avalanche as the best Flash game ever. I found it completely frustrating.

Despite my commitment to not continuing to play Poker on my cellphone, I cracked another level on this game. I continue to be impressed by the economics of this game - and by the way each level forces you to develop a feel for different aspects of poker.


KAPCON

Kapcon 19 is a two-day games convention held in Wellington, NZ, in late January. This was the third year where I was helping run Games on Demand, where we pick the games to run based on player enthusiasm.

In the first session, Jenni insisted I run Bad Family. Excellent peer pressure from her. Mike summarises the session nicely here. This was my first test-run of the revised rules, and I thought for the most part they worked splendidly. I'm particularly happy with a section in the set-up of the game where everyone asks one question of everyone else's characters - it generated a lot of good material to use in the game. Probably one more revision from here, which will focus on creating an Apples to Apples style simplicity, and fleshing out a few bits of the text to make them more readable.

Poison'd, Vincent Baker's game about nasty pirates was very satisfying. My first time running it: we captured a ship, took down two of His Majesty's vessels, killed a plantation owner after setting his mansion on fire, betrayed the captain twice (once, successfully), and made deals with both God and the Devil. Playing this helped me see how you can adjust the dial from extremely brutal to fun romp, and that you really need to, depending on the players you have.

Two-thirds through the game, I was a little worried that after a couple of ship-to-ship combats and some time on shore that things would get a little repetitive. Fortunately, the design of the game and some excellent characterisations from my players shifted the story into a revenge/atonement finale that proved extremely satisfying.

Bliss Stage was a highlight of the con - a powerhouse of gamers I respect sitting down at the table to create a gritty, incredibly tough story about the cost of war on a group of teenage soldiers. Apparently just as good, if not better the second time it was run.

ACTION CASTLE! is a work of genius. It's the game of 1980s text adventures. One person plays the computer telling you what you see, and every other player gets to take a turn giving the computer one single command. ('Go north'. 'Examine tree'.). Remember to save!

A World of Possibilities was an excellent scenario created by Mash. In discussing it, I need to give away a little bit: this is one of the games of TORG (*) I've always wanted to play, and I got a lot of satisfaction out of fighting in a war for reality. My only advice to Mash might be to emphasise the cost of our decisions a little more - spend a little more time milking the denoument for pathos. On the other hand, it featured a brilliant Mash-created cosm that was plausible, freaky, and stunningly clever in its Twilight Zoneness.

(*) Don't worry if this means nothing to you. It's totally a 90s RPGeekery thing.

In Session 5, I decided that I was feeling exactly in the mood to run some Primetime Adventures. I got together a large group filled with some welcome familiar faces and some people I'd been curious to meet for a while. The brainstorming session to decide on a show, I decided to run it in an extremely relaxed, no-pressure style. I wanted us to take our time, build some trust and share some ideas about the types of TV we find excited. We actually found a show idea that 'clicked' pretty early - after talking about the "Anything's possible" vibe of New Dr Who, and getting a hit from the whole group when Sapphire and Steel was mentioned, we started creating a show about an organisation that fixes problems with reality. We spent a bit of time mining the show for ideas and structuring the series, and ended up with the group playing members of two rival teams - one that solves problems through creativity and compassion, the other using guns and murder.

We decided to play an episode where the two teams collide on a mission, and an excellent conflict-filled series of scenes and time-loops followed. Props to Eric in his second Kapcon experience for playing a real bastard of a military leader, to Andy for playing his minor role with comedic aplomb, and to Rohan for a great characterisation of an intellectual who really didn't look like he was capable of saving the day.

I finished Kapcon by running my craziest game of Inspectres ever (and that includes the game set in the town of Footloose). I've been feeling a little burned out on InSpectres, and was tired and headachey, so I warned everyone I'd be running it mean, activating the death and dismemberment clause, and pushing hard. By the end of the game, we had recruited an entirely new second (and rival) franchise of InSpectres who were sitting at the other end of the table, solving a parallel mission - team one consisted of three beta-male losers struggling to make their business work, and team two consisted of their extremely aggravating ex-wives. Featured: a ghost with Alzheimers, the transformation of Brian Tamaki into an immortal, an ex-husband and wife meeting-cute over an alien abduction, and regular spots in the confessional chair to call out to our sponsor: Hell Pizza.

Great stuff.

Play: January-February 2009

I've just finished a big re-draft of my game about dysfunctional family sitcoms, Bad Family. Which means it's time to kick back and spend another two weeks exploring new projects. Here's what's on my plate at the moment:

Read Mixtape: this coming-of-age script ranked highly on this year's Black List. It's about a thirteen year old who finds a mixtape that belonged to the deceased parents she never knew, accidentally destroys it, and uses the song list to go on a journey to find all the music in an attempt to get to know her parents. Really looking forward to this one.

AI story: Gino and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about how having an AI in a sci-fi story never ends well for the humans. Which got me wondering - what would a 'good' AI story look like? I'm going to have an explore and see if I can find out.

Destinies: it's time to push this web-series project a bit further and have a meeting with some of my brain-storming collaborators.

The Orphans: plotting out my creepy 'kids stuck in a haunted orphanage' movie will continue. Looking forward to seeing what these kids do next, because the situation is getting pretty grim for them.

Free writing: I'll spend a bit of each day just jamming on different story ideas and see where they go. The key will be to put absolutely no pressure on myself.

And for extra credit ...

Read The Second Session: my first draft script about musicians trying to record an album has been in my to-read pile for a while now.

The Limit: next step here is to assemble a contact list of emails for producers.

Made to Stick: I'd like to blog a bit more, and lock this series of posts off.

Speculation: Media in 2030

Following on from the last post, I wondered what life will be like for a teenager in 2030. (*) I want to hear your thoughts - add them in the comments:

***

Do you want to listen to something? Watch something new? Well, for the most part it's available instantly. You want it? Say it to your voice-activated googler and there it is.

Which means there's no cachet for someone who's dedicated themselves to collecting rare singles, B-sides or concert footage. All that stuff is just ... there.

What you do get cachet for is having a reputation as an explorer and a discoverer. Can you introduce your friends to the new, the old, the unfamiliar and the fresh? Can you discover and point out the history and inter-connections between music (its sounds, producers, rivalries and riffs)? In the world of 2030, there's so much stuff to experience, that most of it has never been heard or watched before. The shit that's been lost due to quantity and the death of the mainstream would boggle your mind. It means that media archaeologists are cool.

And pretty much everything's digital, right? I mean, your grandparents have shelves full of books. Your parents might have a few. But you? Everything's stored, waiting for you to access and project onto your wall or your hud.

But what use is a book? You can't search it, except you know via eyeball. You can't tag it, rec it, comment on it or read what your friends or the author thought of your favourite passage. Books are dumb.

(They're also maybe, like, increasingly unnecessary. For some of your friends it's a mark of pride not to be able to read. I mean, when do you really need to? But post-literacy is like way out on the fringe. Maybe for your grand-children it'll be normal but you don't even want to think what the world'll be like when your hypothetical grand-children are teenagers.)

Oh, yeah. And everybody who wants to create something, can. The engines of creation have been open-sourced for decades now. Record an album, remake Lord of the Rings again - you're a teenager: you've got tech and free time. Go nuts.

***

(*) Of course, all of this assumes the continuation of civilisation as we know it.

Anyway, add your ideas in the comments. And let's apply brainstorming rules: don't disagree or say why someone's idea wouldn't happen. Just write something different.