Author: Mary Hamilton

I'm an operations specialist, analytics nerd, recovering journalist, consultant, writer, game designer, company founder, and highly efficient pedant.

Back to blogging: 10 days on

back to blogging11 days ago I decided to blog every day for 10 days, in an attempt to kickstart myself into writing more online for lots of sensible reasons. It’s gone… OK, I think. The quality has been dramatically variable, which is to be expected: I said at the start I was rusty, and that’s still true. I can hear bits of me creaking when I write. And without the luxury of time to let my writing sit and then come back to edit it, a lot of what’s gone up here has been rough and ready.

Despite that, the world has not ended, and my crazy perfectionist brain hasn’t given me too much grief about what I’ve posted. I’ve put something vaguely readable out every day. Some of it’s obviously been interesting – I had more than a thousand views in a day for the IGN piece, which for this blog is a significant number. Some of it’s just me thinking out loud, which is also fine. One of the reasons for doing this was to get better at thinking, after all.

It hasn’t been particularly easy to fit around a standard day. That’s partly because right now there are no standard days – the one real constant is that I’m very busy with work – and partly because I’ve not set aside a set block of time to blog. Days when I spot something first thing in the morning, or when I’ve got something brewing in the back of my head, have been relatively easy – I can knock something into shape over lunch. Days when I’m struggling for a subject or when I can’t get words to flow quite right have been much harder. And if I hadn’t written almost all of this post yesterday, there’s no way I could have gotten it up today.

But that will change as I get back into the groove, and as my magpie habits return. I’m finding myself squirrelling away interesting links for analysis, not just tweeting them and leaving them. I’m reading more deeply, forcing myself to articulate what’s relevant in more depth than 140 characters minus a link. I’m also realising there are lots of things I want to write that need a bit more care and attention than the average day can provide. I’ve not talked about my work, or written that piece about movement in Morrowind and the problem of fast travel, or gotten really snarky about Snowfall-related news commentary. Yet.

So the experiment will continue for a while. I’m not going to commit 100% to posting every day, but when Grant recovers from PAX I am going to ask him to join me in doing this again. If it takes 60 days to build a habit, then perhaps that should be the goal: in 60 days time, I’d like to be blogging more days than not. I’d like to be posting better quality pieces, too, but it’s more important that something exists than that it’s perfect.

Video game poetics

Via @brkeogh – Craft and Form by Andrew Vanden Bossche is well worth reading.

Talking about character and plot without form rapidly becomes ungrounded and airy, because I’m hearing about people that aren’t real and things that didn’t happen without any grounding in the countless craft and form choices that made all of that junk matter. If plot and character was all that mattered, Wikipedia would be a sufficient replacement for literature. Any description of the effect a game has on the author should come with your explanation of how that happened. What exactly was it about the heartbreaking indie puzzle platformer that made you feel nostalgic? What did Jane Austin do to make you like that dour Mr. Darcy so much? These are not strange or unusual or “academic” questions, they are questions of very basic specificity and clarity in any sort of writing. It’s incomplete to talk about the emotional reaction the game effected in you without describing the cause. This matters for “game mechanics” but it applies equally to writing, art, and music, and the mechanics and form and craft that drive those as well

Where I part ways with him is that I don’t think it’s critics’ backgrounds in literature or English that are an issue here, so much as it’s the particular critical skills that are being brought to bear on games. At present a great deal of games writing is concerned with hermeneutic questions – issues of interpretation. What does it mean? What is it trying to say, or saying without trying? Is it aesthetically pleasing? What’s the cultural or generic context? But much less common, as Andrew notes, are questions of poetics: questions that tackle the mechanics of how a game functions, how its elements fit together and act upon the player – or how the player acts upon them – to cause an effect.

Robert Louis Stevenson speaks to game designers about realism as a tool, as well as to writers. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters has kinship with the Personism Manifesto in its approach to accessibility, personality, realities of experience. It’s only a matter of time before we get a video game version of Projective Verse, most likely delivered at a conference or in free ebook form disguised as a design approach to the Oculus Rift. I can see Aristotle getting along nicely with video game formalism.

This leads me to suspect that – concerned as they are with the mechanics of language, the careful structuring of words to build worlds with minimal tools, with rhythm, pace, meter, tone, pattern, breath, the physiology of the reader, the interweaving of meaning with mechanic – theories of video games are going to end up having a surprising amount in common with theories of poetry. I know that my own thinking about game mechanics – in terms of their effects and their overall aims – draws on poetics as a framework along with other disciplines. But they’re often excruciatingly inaccessible, and perhaps lifting the curtain is less engaging for audiences who want to be entertained, rather than to examine the nuts and bolts. As Stevenson says:

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art.  All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.  …  We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will always grudgingly receive details of method, which can be stated but never can wholly be explained…

The PAX problem

It’s PAX Australia this weekend. Some friends of ours over at Pop Up Playground recently decided to pull out and cancel their panel there, on live, pervasive and urban gaming, and today Ben McKenzie posted a long explanation of his decision, which includes Mike Krahulik’s public transphobia and the way that’s been handled, as well as the fallout over the Why So Serious? panel.

I don’t think the organisers have created an event which is non-inclusive; I’m not boycotting the event based just on the description of the panel or Krahulik’s comments. As the Pop Up Playground statement says, those things just revealed to us that the culture surrounding PAX Aus is not that different to the problematic culture associated with Penny Arcade in the past. We weren’t invited to speak – we submitted an idea for a panel and were accepted. Most of the panels are community suggested; the organisers and the high ups at Penny Arcade have pointed this out in the wake of criticism. They didn’t title them or write the descriptions. So the program of panels ought to give us an idea of what the community at PAX wants to talk about; the community that created them is the community that wants to engage with PAX Australia.

Given that, is it telling that something like only 15% of panellists overall are women? That a clear majority of panels have no women on them at all? (I’ve no idea what the ratios of non-straight, non-white participants are like.) Perhaps they weren’t invited; perhaps they were and didn’t feel comfortable participating, despite the clear harassment policy and lack of “booth babes”, both things I certainly applaud. When you look closer at the PAX Aus program, you find a lot of near misses; panels that almost, but don’t quite engage issues of social justice. There’s discussion of games being criticised for being sexist and racist (“Why So Serious?”), but not of the racism and sexism in games. We have two panels critical of how other forms of media portray geeks and gamers (“That’s What She Said”, ”Is There Such A Thing As A Fake Geek?”), but none about how our own medium portrays women and minorities. There’s advice on how women can navigate games as a man’s world (“Not Fair? Then Grow Some Ovaries and DO Something About it!”), but no challenge of the systemic sexism which makes the industry unwelcoming to women. There’s even one about the entitlement players feel and the impact this has on makers (“Gamer Rage – Entitlement Issues”), but nothing about the entitlement and privilege unconsciously possessed by white, straight and/or cis-male players.

Looking at all that, it’s easy to be left with a clear impression that the PAX audience hasn’t thought about these issues yet – or doesn’t want to. In such a climate, it’s not hard to see how people wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing them up.

PUP aren’t the only people to have pulled out; Brendan Keogh has also decided not to take part, and there may be others I’m not aware of, who have decided not to participate at all or rescinded after seeing the events of recent months. Their decisions won’t have been easy ones. Ben’s been careful to articulate the tricky decision here: is it better to stay and attempt to change the culture from the inside, or back off and make your statement by disengaging? Either way, something is lost.

It’s a fair bet there will be a lot of eyes on that panel this weekend, and a lot of interest in precisely how equality issues are enacted this time round, at this particular event. Thanks to a panel description and some extremely unwise comments from a founder in a different country, PAX Australia has become a flash point for the broader issues at play here. Whatever happens, whether it passes without incident or implodes in a mess, it’ll be held up as emblematic.

But misogyny, transphobia, racism, homophobia in gamer cultures: they are not one incident, one big emblematic moment. They are a series of small decisions, individual moments that taken in isolation are small. It’s climate, not weather. It’s not one massive fish, but an ocean teeming with small ones. The problem with PAX is not just the problem with PAX: it’s also all the smaller problems it subsumes by being so visible. It’s not only the events themselves but also the standard set.

So here’s hoping for a positive PAX that solves some problems, turns some of those near misses into hits, and sets a higher standard. And much respect to Ben, for setting a very high bar.

UK welfare: what the hell is going on?

Today’s the first time I’ve seriously tried to get my head around the developments in the UK on benefits and welfare since I left, prompted by Sarah Ditum’s blog post on the attempt by Tories in marginal seats to persuade Cameron to toughen benefit rules for teenage single mothers. Using the Guardian’s society coverage purely for ease of use, this is an incomplete list of what’s happened since I left to come to Australia on May 18, less than three months ago. This is neither an exhaustive list nor a cherry-picked one, and it’s biased to a single source.

I am struggling to understand what is happening at home as anything other than a war waged by some of the richest people in the country against some of the poorest.

IGN’s commitment to changing its comment culture

Some of the comments on the IGN announcement of their new moderation policy. As they say, there's a long way to go and a lot of work to be done before the change takes hold.
Some of the comments on the IGN announcement of their new moderation policy. As they say, there’s a long way to go before the change takes hold.

IGN, one of the largest gaming sites in the world, has recently announced changes to its commenting policy explicitly aimed at tackling the culture of abuse in its threads. In a blog post announcing the change, editor-in-chief Steve Butts says:

Will that mean we won’t tolerate disagreement or fiery debates? Not at all. We’re an audience of advocates who come to IGN because we feel passionately about certain platforms, products, and philosophies. Being able to express and defend those tastes is part of why we’re here. Articulate disagreements about those tastes are a healthy and necessary part of those interactions. The comment guidelines aren’t meant to stop that.

The problem comes when a disagreement stops being about the merits of the argument and starts being about the people making it. It’s okay for us to disagree with each other, but we won’t tolerate abuse and threats disguised as disagreement. We also won’t tolerate ad hominem attacks, where you insult a person’s character or identity merely because you don’t like that they’re not the same person as you. None of us are perfect, and we all have bad days, of course, but we can’t let a difference of opinion devolve into being nasty to each other.

The context to this change, on top of years of growing hostility in the comment threads at IGN and elsewhere, is an open letter posted on Reaction last month by Samantha Allen, calling games media generally and IGN among others specifically to account over the toxic discussions they host below articles. It is worth reading in full, repeatedly; it’s a measured, articulate, passionate piece that firmly places responsibility for debates in comment threads with the sites that host those debates, and gives three clear calls to action for those in a position to change those debates. Addressing site editors by name, it says:

We have a problem and you can do something about it.

Our medium and the culture surrounding it is still in its adolescence and we’ve been experiencing a lot of growing pains lately. Those of us in the games community who are a part of marginalized groups have been going through hell lately. You can help us. You can do more than just express sympathy.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” You have a chance, right now, to shorten that arc. You are in positions of power and privilege. You have the luxury of being able to effect change at a level that we can only dream about.

Framing commenting and community policy and moderation as a moral issue is not new, but locating responsibility squarely with sites and publishers, rather than the commenters who frequent them, is a quietly revolutionary attitude. And a right one: much as people who run social spaces in the real world take on responsibility for enforcing behaviour norms within those spaces, people who open up social spaces online have to enforce the behaviour they want to see within them too. Simply opening a door then washing your hands of the damage caused is not enough.

IGN’s new policy is interesting not least because of its relative mildness. It bans personal attacks and discrimination, while encouraging debate and disagreement; it bans trolling, flaming and spam while permitting sensible pseudonymity. There’s also a section on questionable content, to act as a sort of catch-all:

Since we can’t have a rule to cover everything, this is the rule to, well, cover everything. These are public discussions, so act like you would if you were in a public place (a nice place). These issues are left to the discretion of individual moderators and staff, but may include any material that is knowingly false and/or defamatory, misleading, spammy, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, sexist, obscene, racist, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person’s privacy, that otherwise violates any law, or that encourages conduct constituting a criminal offense. Asking for or offering any of the material listed above is also not permitted.

It’s a sensible policy and it’s excellent to see IGN taking responsibility for the comments on their site and committing to improving the discussion. They’re being careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, keeping what’s good about their community and reinforcing the positive behaviours they want to see – rather than turfing over the comment section, closing it or outsourcing it. I hope it comes with increased mod resource and support, and the buy-in of their writers too. It’s a strong commitment, and I hope their actions speak as loudly as their words on this – and that more sites follow their lead.

Social, search, serendipity and sharing

social_searchSearch vs social discovery is a debate that’s been going on since Twitter’s ascendancy as a link discovery machine. TheMediaBriefing has an interesting piece that suggests hybrid discovery is the eventual goal – a blended approach that ignores neither option. It’s a sensible conclusion, though I don’t share the belief that search traffic is necessarily disloyal – or that social media traffic is necessarily loyal. Both are used too broadly by too many readers to be so easily characterised.

Search is private, while social is public (at least to some degree, depending on your privacy settings). People will search very honestly for what they want to see, and will express ignorance, voyeurism or an interest in the salacious in the secure knowledge – or at least the reasonable belief – that no one but Google will ever see that information about them. Google autocomplete suggestions are full of quiet questions asked by millions in private.

But through social media, people will share what they think makes them look more like the idealised version of themselves. We use social media to construct our identities for other people to consume, and in so doing we share what other people will think we look good for sharing. For the most part we’ll ask stupid questions, or difficult ones, for the purposes of illuminating a facet of ourselves or to call for interaction with others – not necessarily to gain information. We’ll share what outrages us in order to comment on it, but read what interests us without sharing if we can’t fit it in to our constructed identity.

This is one reason why frictionless sharing is a problem: what we read and what we want to tell others we read are two vastly different things. It’s also one reason why social and search end up positioned as adversaries, when in fact they are complementary allies. Search discovery for publishers is not serendipitous; it relies on information-seeking queries, on individuals being interested enough in something specific to type words into a page and select from what appears there. It isn’t about teasing headlines or making someone wonder about what comes next; it’s about being as relevant as possible right there and then. Often, that includes personalisation, or simply being a reader’s preferred source for a story; loyal readers come through search as well.

Social discovery, by contrast, is about stumbling upon something potentially interesting because it’s been passed on by friends or by individuals you trust. It’s about not knowing you wanted to read something until it’s in front of your face. And a successful social piece works because you enjoy reading it, and you want to pass it on, and so do dozens of others. But social discovery happens as an interruption to the flow of doing something else; you move seamlessly from browsing Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/wherever to a different site for a link, then hit the back button and return to your browsing. It’s a diversion, not a journey in its own right.

Because of the commercial sensitivity around reach and discovery for publishers, an awful lot of inaccuracies get cheerfully spread online. For some time, there’s been a popular conception that search and social are fundamentally at odds, when in fact they’re often fundamentally intertwined. Plenty of news organisations reach the same people with both, at different times, with different articles. And plenty of pieces work perfectly for both, because they both illuminate a relevant issue for those directly interested, and make for interesting reading for those who didn’t yet know they cared. As Jackson says, what matters most is making content people want to consume. Making sure they can find it is the second step.

Instagram (finally) introduces web embed code

Like this:

This is what I’ve been doing today. Grant’s cousin Caroline (who, as you can see, is significantly more bendy and stable than I am) has been staying with us this week, and we’ve been exploring Sydney a little. Today we did the walk from Coogee beach to Bondi, finishing up with an impromptu yoga session on the sand as the sun went down. Yesterday we went to Taronga Zoo, and saw this particularly ridiculous bird:

The one above is embedded with Embed.ly, which generates embed code – it uses img tags rather than an iframe, and therefore has the benefit of letting you muck about a bit with the source, correct typos, and so on. It also has the bonus of being visible in WordPress previews. Right now while typing I have no idea what the top photo’s going to look like, whether it’s sized sensibly for my blog template, etc. I don’t know if it includes comments or like counts or captions. [edit: counts yes; captions no.] It also means the bird photo will be the one pulled in elsewhere on this site attached to this post, unless I upload the others separately; my related post plugin won’t look for images inside frames.

It’s a sensible, if belated, move from Instagram to make their content more easily spreadable, in the way that Vine and Twitter are; it’s hard to see it as anything but a way to encourage people to make more use of its video features, by making those videos are more broadly available. Of course, because some laws of the internet are immutable, there are already people writing SEO-friendly posts of advice for brands about how to leverage it. It makes Instagram a more viable option for live coverage of events, because it’s more easy to pull it all together afterwards into a single page. But right now, for me, it just makes it a little easier to show family back home who don’t know what Instagram is the beauty of Australia in midwinter.

Detritus: lessons learned from making my first Twine game

Node map for Detritus. Broken-looking passages use the print macro to link based on the contents of a variable.
Node map for Detritus. Broken-looking passages use the print macro to link based on the contents of a variable.

One of the side projects I’ve been hacking away at in my spare time recently is Detritus, an interactive fiction game thing about, well, packing. It’s a packing sim. In all it’s taken me about two months of intermittent work, including a couple of days where I put in six hours or so on it.

It’s made using Twine, a pleasingly versatile game creation tool that lends itself really well to branching narratives. It’s widely used by all sorts of awesome game makers, and it’s capable of a great deal more than it at first appears. There’s a Google group associated with making it better; there are some talented people devoting themselves to making macros for it, chunks of code that extend its native capacities to let people who can’t code do complicated things simply. I’m indebted to Porpentine’s resources list and a bunch of Webbed Space’s macros – without those things Detritus would have been impossible.

It’s much cleverer than it would be if I’d tried to do it all from scratch myself. I learned while building it that by far the best way to implement my ideas was to build on the work other people have done before me. It is not the first time I’ve bodged something together standing on the shoulders of giants, but it’s the first time I’ve literally copied slugs of code without knowing anything about what they do, as though they were magic spells where my only input is to know the activation words. It is humbling to create with tools other people have given freely to the world.

I learned that sometimes, not knowing what you’re getting yourself into leads to bigger, more exciting work than you’d originally intended. I decided, when I started it, that Detritus would have five short acts, each one using a different technique, because that would be a good way to teach myself some of Twine’s idiosyncracies and I’d come out of it knowing which ones worked for me and with some ideas about how to employ them. I thought it’d be a quick project. If I’d realised, when I chose the first objects the player encounters, that my choices would lead to having to write fifty separate individual passages and a reasonably complex looping system to make act 5 work, I might have chosen to do it differently. But I don’t regret that choice at all – it’s a much deeper, more intricate piece than I’d otherwise have written.

I learned that it’s sometimes better to work out what you’re doing before you do it, too. At one point about half way through act 3 I spent an upsetting amount of time stripping out and redoing the inventory system so it used array variables rather than single-item strings, because I had a list of twenty or so individual variables that might have several values and I was trying to write if statements and failing horribly because of the complexity. Not incidentally, I also learned quite a lot about Javascript array variables. And I learned that no matter how many bugs you think you’ve squashed, in a project this complex, there will always be at least one more. (Detritus has done more for my coding ability in two months than Codecademy managed in six.)

I learned about branching. Every time a narrative branches in a game like this, the path not taken by the player can, if you like, be seen as wasted work. If you want your players to see everything, you have to avoid branching too much, or branch only with descriptive elements. But the flip side is that then player choices don’t necessarily have much weight. I wanted Detritus to have weight in every decision, and it felt right to close off branches, to leave much more unread by the player than read, every time. It’s a game about loss, and that loss ought to be expressed mechanically, not just verbally; that’s why I wanted to use Twine to tell an interactive story, after all, rather than just writing something linear to express it. The game’s 27,000 words long, but the average playthrough will see less than a quarter of what’s written. There are easter eggs down some pathways, too, that mean much more because they aren’t signposted, and because they’re easy to leave behind.

Biggest and best thing about making Detritus, though, has been the wonderful feeling of making a solo creative project work, seeing it through from opening lines to existence in the wider world as an actual thing that people can genuinely play. It’s been too long since I did that, and without Twine and the community around it I probably still wouldn’t have managed. The democratisation of creative tools has meant an explosion in the numbers of people who can create and publish, in games and in fiction just as in other forms of publication. People with stories to tell or games to make can do so. Even if that story is a packing sim about loss and carrying your life in a suitcase. It is a wonderful thing.

Where is the Roger Ebert’s commissioning editor of games?

warren spectorWarren Spector’s latest GI column asks: where is the Roger Ebert of gaming? He bemoans the lack of accessible, consistent writing about games in mainstream media, aimed at broad rather than specialist audiences. The key passages are a call to action:

I’m not saying reaching an audience that doesn’t know enough to take games seriously will be easy. I’m for sure not finding fault with people currently trying to accomplish this difficult goal. I’m just saying we need to continue working and harder to bring more writers and thinkers into the area between Reviewers and Academia. We can’t be complacent and say, “Aw, what we got is good enough.”

Let’s inundate the bookshelves, magazine sections and the web with work that isn’t above (or below) the heads of readers. Only in that way will we achieve the level of respect I believe we deserve. Only in that way will we create an audience more demanding of the medium, which will inevitably lead to different and, I’d argue, better games.

This kind of treatment – as exemplified by the Times articles mentioned above – would do games a world of good. Establishing games in the public mind as something good and worthy and serious, and not just “fun for kids, but not for me” seems important to me. It’s important to developers, publishers, players and maybe even to – for want of a better word – enemies who might come to a more nuanced understanding of our medium.

Frankly, if games are not up to this sort of critical analysis then maybe they are just a way to provide some thrills and chills or some time away from real world problems, as our critics (in still another sense of the word) contend.

I agree, broadly, with the sentiment of the piece – that there is not enough mainstream game criticism of explanation, rather than of evaluation – but the issue is not that we do not have one or many Roger Eberts. It’s that we don’t have Roger Ebert’s editors. In the English speaking world, we don’t have a mainstream press that commissions these pieces consistently from the many talented critics who are already doing this work. We have a mainstream press, for the most part, that commissions very short reviews with evaluative ratings on only the very biggest, most blockbusting titles, or that syndicates specialist content written for gamer audiences rather than for the general public. We have a mainstream media that doesn’t want to – or can’t – pay excellent writers properly to produce excellent work, or promote it appropriately when it does. (That’s a sweeping generalisation, of course. There are many exceptions and many outlets where this is changing. But there aren’t enough.)

Outside the specialist press, the enthusiast press and the academic press, accessible games criticism is not reaching the audience it deserves because it’s not being widely commissioned or published in mainstream publications. It’s not that there’s no demand from audiences – the proliferation of intelligent and accessible work on Tumblr, on personal blogs, and elsewhere is testament to the voracity of that demand. It’s not that there are no writers capable of such accessibility, insight and excellence; there are dozens.

It is, however, about the business and budgetary crises in mainstream media. It’s about the gradual shift away from gamer-as-identity to gaming-as-mainstream-pastime, as more people play games and fewer think of game-playing as a fundamental element of their personality. It’s about the youth of video games and video game writing alike as creative media, and their dual resistance to external critique. And it’s about the shift in thinking involved in situating video games as culture and entertainment when historically mainstream media has covered them as technology. These are all issues that time will solve, one way or the other.

This month’s Blogs of the Round Table topic over on Critical Distance asks what the future of video game blogging is, and this can serve as my response: the future of video game blogging is mainstream. At the moment – like it or not – the best, most accessible, most interesting games writers are freelancers, working for niche outlets and writing for themselves. The future for video games blogging is a mass audience. And hopefully better pay along with it.

[I can’t make the iframe link list to the other BoRT blogs work here – but you should go here and read the others too.]

Procrastiworking and the joy of side projects

A team of explorers fighting a zombie
The sort of thing that happens when side projects get seriously out of hand.

Between Zombie, games like The Trial, random charity projects, writing and other miscellaneous activities, on average I get a great deal done, outside of work, despite having the sort of work life that normally means it consumes everything else you do.

Side projects are some of my favourite things. I like to have as many as possible on the go at once, ideally some complicated ones with multiple moving parts as well as a few really simple ones that I can get sorted quickly. Some of the latter expand into the former. Most of them never get finished at all. They’re great.

Part of the reason I do this, when I’m really honest, is about mental health. I’ve dealt with crippling depression for my whole life; sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It was worst when I was in my late teens, but it still fluctuates periodically, and in the late autumn and winter when the nights draw in so do my energy levels and capacity to do things. Any things. At all. In the summer, when energy is boundless and I have relatively few fears of over-stretching myself, I do as much as I can in the time available. Sometimes in overcompensating I push extremely hard. When I am well I want to do everything, as hard as I can, because I am terrified that next time the depression claims that part of me it will be permanent and I will not get it back. It lends great joy to simply doing.

But there are plenty of other factors too. Like everyone in the world, I am not just one set of interests or hobbies; I contain multitudes. I like to explore and to create. I am lucky that work gives me space and money to do so in some areas, but – again, like most of the world – there are plenty of impulses that work can’t satisfy. So I get stuff done around the edges, through the application of a slightly unusual technique.

The system here is to get so busy that literally everything you are doing is procrastinating from something else. I jokingly called it “procrastiworking” once, and the name has sort of stuck. It consists of having a list of tasks that are interesting and engaging on their own merits, but also sorta kinda count as work. Productive tasks, rather than consumptive ones. Things that are sort of working towards something else. Examples: write a short short story every day for two weeks. Organise a live game. Blog for ten days straight. Make a Twine game that teaches you how to use Twine. Learn HTML. Make a website. Clear your Steam unplayed list before the next sale.

Once you have slightly too many of these, many of them interlinked, most of them satisfying to complete even if they’re tricky or annoying to actually do (partnership tax return, I am looking at you here) you can successfully procrastiwork by doing one of them, in the knowledge you are not doing any of the others. This is a blatant psychological trick, but for me it works rather well. It’s amazing how much you can get done when you’re not doing something else even more pressing.

The down side – and there is definitely a down side – is that you start to feel guilty for doing things that aren’t productive. You have to be able to put everything aside and focus on your friends, on activities that relax you and do not carry expectations of a finished product. If you’re not careful you begin over-emphasising the results, rather than the process. But really, the vast majority of side projects aren’t about what you end up with. They’re about broadening you out, exploring things you can’t do at work, learning new skills, discovering things you’re good (and bad!) at, creating for the sake of the joy of being creative. They’re about failing, not finishing and being half-assed without fear. They let you play. And being able to play well, as an adult, is a skill no one should be without.