Blog 6-30-17 – About Face

Well here I am, back a little more than a month after the last update to give another one, as is custom for this type of thing, and I’ve made a decision that has been a personally difficult one to make. When starting, and during, my hiatus I was very adamant about not only it being a temporary thing, but something that would eventually “disappear” as I would work to make up all the content I had missed postin when I was on it. It’s more than a year later now, and while I have been working to catch back up, I haven’t been seeing the returns I’ve hoped for. My original intent was to just power through this section, creating both my backlog material and moving forward into new stuff. But, as many people who try to finish large project know, something like this creates a mental block. The sheer amount of things you are telling your brain it “has” to do dissuades your brain from doing those things, and as it puts them off, they only get bigger.

While I have been making some headway in this “power through” area it hasn’t been as much as I had hoped, and my “re-warm-up” phase has been much slower than expected, All the while things I was “supposed” to do kept piling up, and it got to the point where my mental resistance to moving things forward was preventing me from getting back up to speed. Looking at things now, it could potentially take me years to catch back up on a reasonable schedule (especially for a person with a house, job, and schoolwork). If I wanted to catch up by the end of 2017, I would have to do more than triple-time on my work, and that just isn’t coming from a person who wasn’t able to keep “regular time” for the last year. And extending that deadline only increased the mental block. Devoting that much time to catching up makes the brain think it’s failing, and that just isn’t good for work.

So the decision I’ve made is to “give up” on the idea of catching up. And that has been a possibility from the start, but it was shunned by my more optimistic side. Now the idea’s still there, and maybe sometime in the far-off future when I’m being super productive I’ll be able to go back and catch up on everything or something close to it, but right now I’m going to focus on what I can do next. Nothing is going to stop getting made at this point. In fact, I intend to increase my output, but I won’t be re-instating the schedule and might even make up a new schedule sometime in the future. My current new goal is to get myself back to putting up at least one thing a day, but none of this will be trying to make up for lost time, and there will likely be many new projects introduced.

And even though this has been a difficult decision for me personally (doing this essentially makes my last year a creative failure), I know that both my few dedicated followers and those many on the internet just passing by really just want more things they can read/view to enjoy, and that me making nothing for months at a time isn’t what they came to see, nor is it satisfying “artistically” for me. This will hopefully end up with a better arrangement for all of us, and allow for my various sites to improve.

I always want to thank everyone who has viewed (liked, and commented on) my content, and I appreciate the patience of those of you who have stuck with me. I’ve got a lot of cool ideas and new projects in the works that soon we can hopefully enjoy together.

-Austin

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Lessons From Board Games – Love Letter and Letting Go

Love Letter is a giant of a game, quite disproportionately to its components. I carry a copy around in my backpack every day with a deck of cards. It is that universally appealing and easy to teach. Its popularity is a testament to how many other people feel the same. The game has reached such a wide audience and is such a runaway hit that I’d be surprised if we didn’t have it in print for years to come.

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But still, the game is pretty luck based, even though it might seem like it’s not, with its layer of theme and modern game design. But that can really be attributed to the fact that it’s a modern game. It’s designed in such a way that it makes you feel like you’re much more in control than you are. In the end you’re just at the whim of the deck and it’s quite possible to draw a hand with which it is impossible to win.

But that doesn’t make the game not fun, just light. People have enjoyed games in which there is only luck and no strategy for centuries, and this game does have elements of strategy and theme, which make it more fun to play. But neither of these are at their most prevalent. With Love Letter one just has to let go of the idea that they can control the outcome of the game by having the absolute best strategy and outplaying the other players (which still isn’t possible in most games) and also the idea of having a theme that is so immersive that one can’t separate it from the mechanics (A Princess and Batman being the themes of versions of Love Letter make that point).

It’s a great game, and a lot (a Lot) of people really enjoy it. It has a balance of theme, strategy and luck that draws a lot of people to it and keep them coming back for games (and its length helps with that). But one does have to let go of some strategic and thematic preferences to embrace the luck and enjoy it at times.