Game making at Kitacon

Playing at KitaconAt the weekend Grant and I were invited to give a NERF panel at Kitacon. We started out thinking we’d talk about story in Zombie LARP again, as the crowd there are mostly unaware of what we do and are pretty into their storytelling, retelling and reimagining, from what we know. But when we realised we had a whole hour and a room to ourselves, we wanted to do something a little more interactive.

These days Zombie is a pretty massive affair, with 130 or so players at each event and more different NERF guns than you can shake a stick at. Way back when we started, though, it consisted of about four of us running around each other’s tiny student digs waving two NERF Mavericks and a Buzz Bee Double Shot, and dying messily in kitchens while disapproving flatmates tried to make dinner.

The process of making the game was, in itself, playful. Fun. It’s fun to run around with NERF guns and pretend to be zombies, but it’s also fun to turn that into a game with rules, like we all did when we were young kids. Making a thing you can play with your mates is its own sort of play.

So, we thought, what if we turned that into a panel? 20 minutes to make a game, with everyone in the room taking part; 20 minutes to play, and then some time to clean up and debrief and work out how to make it better?

We put together a set of questions to act as a game machine – a series of decisions to help a group of people get from zero to minimum viable game in as little time as possible, then iterate quickly between short rounds of play. We stuck with NERF guns as a basic mechanic, because they provide an easy seed for ideas, and because we find their “toy” status makes adults more likely to forget they’re adults and get into playing in the real world. We tested the system with my nieces and nephews while on holiday and ended up with Teatowel Panic, a team-based capture-the-flag-style game with wandering monsters, which we thought was a pretty good sign. The players also developed an unexpected extra mechanic when my dad started wandering around picking up ammo and then giving it to the teams at random.

The folks at Kitacon were brilliant and got what we were trying to do very quickly. I think it helped that we were in a place where normal rules of behaviour were at least partially suspended, with people who were quite happy to play for the sake of playing. We ended up with a game tentatively titled “Make the Geneva Convention Cry” in which players had to get a bomb into each other’s team bases and the best way to win would be to kill as many medics as possible. After round 1 we introduced a couple of new mechanics, and the second one went well enough that we left it as it was for the third game. Team Laser Explosion won the first two, but Team Monkey Pirate were the last ones left alive in the third.

We’re going to do it again, I hope – possibly at Gamecamp as we had such fun with Zombie there last year, and possibly other places. I hope – and I’m pretty sure – we’ll end up with something completely different every time.

Stop blaming the internet for rubbish news content

Newspapers and newsrooms generally have always striven to publish stories that are important, interesting, informative and entertaining.  Not every one puts those in the same order or gives them the same importance. But the internet hasn’t changed that much.

The unbundling effects of the net mean that instead of relying on the front page to sell the whole bundle, each piece has to sell itself. That can be hard; suddenly the relative market sizes for different sorts of content are much starker, and for people who care more about important/interesting/informative than entertaining, that’s been a depressing flood of data. But the internet  didn’t create that demand – it just made it more obvious. Whether we should feed it or not is an editorial question. Personally, I think it’s fine to give people a little of what they want – as long as a newsroom is putting out informative and important stories, a few interesting and entertaining ones are good too, so long as they’re not lies, unethically acquired or vicious.

If you spend a lot of time online you will see a filter bubble effect, where stories from certain news organisations are not often shared by your friends and don’t often turn up in your sphere unless you actively go looking for them. That means the ones that break through will be those that outrage, titillate or carry such explosive revelations that they cannot be ignored. That does not mean those stories are the sum total output of a newsroom – any more than the 3AM Girls are the sum total of the Mirror in print – but those pieces attract a new audience and serve to put that wider smorgasbord of content in front of them (assuming the article pages are well designed).

Of course, some news organisations publish poor stories – false, misleading, purposefully aggravating or just badly written – in the name of chasing the trend. That’s also far from an internet-only phenomenon. The Express puts pictures of Diana on the front, and routinely lies for impact in its headlines. The Star splashes on Big Brother 10 weeks running. The editorial judgement about the biggest story for the front is about sales as much as it is newsworthiness. Sometimes those goals align. Sometimes they don’t, and editors make a choice.

It is ridiculous to blame the internet for the publishing of crap stories to chase search traffic or trend-based clicks – just as it’s ridiculous to blame the printing press for the existence of phone hacking. In both cases it’s the values and choices of the newsroom that should be questioned.

What is a blog, anyway?

This post by Andy Boyle seems to have struck a nerve on Twitter today. It exhorts news organisations to stop referring to things they produce as blogs just because they use different CMS or are branded differently to regular content. While I don’t think it quite applies across the board – this, for instance, is definitely a blog – Andy makes some very good points.

Sadly, blogs brought along a stigma that people still use  – which is wrong — that they’re done by people in their pajamas in a basement somewhere. Blogs are not the same as regular news content, some media folks thought, because they weren’t in your “main” CMS. They had a wall between them and they are different. They may even be branded differently, with a different header and logo. They weren’t the same as regular content because they were in a different system! Right?

Wrong.

It’s time to stop bifurcating your content as blogs and news because they run on separate systems. It is all content, so why not call it that? Even if you have outside people writing posts on your website that are unmoderated by your staff — that’s still content that’s part of your media outlet’s website. I don’t have any research proving this, but in my short journalism career many media outlets just slapped the name “blog” on something because it lived in a different CMS. We should stop this. Please.

While I don’t have any hard stats or user testing data on how readers react to the word “blog”, my gut instinct is that their readings are very different from the way news organisations tend to use the term. To a newsroom, the word blog might signify a lighter tone than news or feature. It might imply a home for specialised subject matter that might not fit with the rest of the site. It might be used to signify a linked, ongoing set of posts like the word “series”. It might mean “something done through WordPress” or “something put online without subbing first” or “a side project we give the juniors to prove themselves”. To some, in some newsrooms, it almost certainly means “not proper journalism”, despite the (somehow, still ongoing) conversations about whether bloggers can be journalists.

The question is what it means to our readers. My fear is that for them it may have more resonance with the meanings towards the end of that little list than the ones at the start. Blog shouldn’t be a dirty word or one that’s used to put down the effort of the people creating something – but in the minds of many, at the moment it still is. It’s important to set readers’ expectations by what’s on the page, but we don’t need to distinguish web-only or web-first or even tone in this way – there are other words that might make just as much sense to us, and even more to readers.

Pasties, horses and duck houses: the power of symbolic objects

The world famous GreggsWhen is a pasty not just a pasty? When it’s a metaphor for class divide, of course.

In literature, symbolic objects transcend their physical limits to embody themes or carry metaphors. Pandora’s Box, to take a very obvious one, is not only a functional, fundamental element of the story but also a powerful metaphor for the confusion and chaos released by curiosity. It’s an integral element of the myth but it also carries meaning beyond its origin story.

As news stories run and run, twisting and turning often in far more fanciful ways than any fiction, sometimes these sorts of symbolic objects turn up. My favourite for a long time now has been the duck house, made famous during the MPs’ expenses scandal. More so than any of the other ludicrous things paid for by MPS out of their expenses, the duck house came to symbolise the lavishness, the detachment from reality and the sheer unadulterated silliness of the whole affair. It’s hard to sum up all of that with a news story, or even with a pithy quote, but a symbolic object can do the heavy lifting that no amount of text can quite manage. The duck house even manages to subtly imply a bunch of waddling, quacking MPs into the bargain. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Then a couple of weeks ago we had the horse. Phone hacking as a news story has gotten so convoluted and complex that it’s impossible for anyone but the most dedicated news junkie to follow in full. There’s a (necessarily) slow-moving inquiry that hasn’t yet brought politicians into the picture, and there’s an ongoing feeling that the cosy relationships between principle actors in the drama are not going to be publicly revealed.

Hence, the horse: a wonderful symbolic proxy for power, passed back and forth between the police, the Brooks family and Cameron himself. Horsegate played out in microcosm the larger drama, with denials, memory lapses and an eventual, half-hearted confession after which precisely nothing changed. It was a gift for cartoonists, too, especially in its connotations of servility – and a physical reminder of the closeness of Cameron in class and in pastimes to the Chipping Norton set, and the vast chasm between that and most of the rest of the country.

So today, to the pasty. It’s not a sausage roll tax or a hot food tax; it’s a pasty tax. A regional delicacy beloved of workers and students, both of whom have been walloped pretty hard since the coalition came to power. It’s a working lunch, a travelling lunch, a cheap, hot lunch eaten on the go by busy, normal people. It’s sustenance for hard days. In its Cornish origins it has subtle echoes of resistance, of regional pride; it’s determinedly non-London, as is Greggs, which has its origins in Newcastle. Greggs is on every high street; it’s well loved for what it does; and it’s almost impossible to imagine Cameron or Osborne there.

It is no coincidence that these symbolic objects are all about class. British national discourse is fairly bad at talking about class, thinking about class, examining unspoken opinions or getting a good sense of the realities of social stratification. The definition of “middle” class has vastly expanded and encompasses everyone not wearing a tiara or a hoody. But the duck house is so far out of everyday experience that it can’t be packaged as anything other than a symbol of wealth. Horse riding is a pricy pastime that carries Victorian, upper-class connotations. And the humble pasty is something an awful lot of people have eaten in the last few years – the sort of people who’ve been hit badly by the economics of austerity. The sort of people who aren’t Cameron.

These things surface an undercurrent, a class divide that doesn’t often get publicly debated outside of riots-based moralising. That we latch onto these symbols shows how hard it is to talk about class, equality and social mobility in the UK without resorting to stereotype or self-delusion, especially at present, when the optimistic view is that we are all headed for difficulty. Almost everyone is braced for the worst, counting pennies, fearing redundancy or more price rises. We are all so terribly nervous about what happens next. We have to have a pasty to focus on instead.

News SEO: optimising for robots is all about the people

Some people in the news business get very wary of SEO in general. There seems to be a perception that content farming and low-quality stories are a sort of natural consequence of making sure your stories can be found via Google. But in fact there is a wide spectrum of approaches here, and news organisations make editorial judgements over whether to cover something that’s interesting to the public just because the public is interested. No Google robot forces a newsroom to make that choice, just as no print-sales-bot forces the Daily Star to splash on scantily-clad women and celebrity gossip.

If your editorial strategy is to chase search terms, then you’re not optimising for robots – you’re optimising for the millions of people online who search for certain sorts of stories. Websites like Gawker and the Mail Online create content to attract the potential millions who read celebrity gossip or who want the light relief of weird Chinese goats – and many of those people also care about the budget or the war in Afghanistan, because people are multi-faceted and have many, many interests at the same time.

If your production strategy includes making sure your headlines accurately describe your content, make sense out of context and use words people would actually use in real life, then you are optimising your content for search. Not for robots, again, but for people – potential and actual readers or viewers – some of whom happen to use search engines to find out about the news.

For example, search optimised headlines may well have the keywords for the story right at the beginning. Google lends greater weight to words at the start of a headline than at the end. But it does so because so do people. If you’re scanning a Google search results page, you tend to read in an F shape, taking account of the first few words of an item before either engaging further or moving on. [Edit: via @badams on Twitter, a more recent study backing up the F-shape reading pattern.] Google’s algorithm mimics how people work, because it wants to give people what they’re going to find most relevant. Optimising for the robot is the same thing as optimising for human behaviour – just as we do in print, taking time to design pages attractively, and taking account of the way people scan pages and spend time on images and headlines in certain ways.

News SEO is a very different beast from, say, e-commerce SEO or SEO for a small business that wants to pick up some leads online. Once you get beyond the basics it does not follow the same rules or require the same strategies. Link building for breaking news articles is worse than pointless, for example; your news piece has a halflife of a day, or an hour, or perhaps a whole week if you’re lucky and it really hits a nerve. Social sharing has a completely different impact for news organisations that want their content read than for, say, a company that wants to sell shoes online. For retailers, optimising for the algorithm might start to make some sense – if the only difference between you and your competitors is your website, then jostling for position in the search results on particular pages gets competitive in a way that news doesn’t. For news, though, optimising for robots always means optimising for humans. It’s just a matter of choosing which ones.

Is just writing a story enough, any more?

What exactly is it that writers do, now stories can be told in so many ways? This post by @moongolfer links The Story, CERN and journalistic storytelling robots to come to the conclusion:

And writers? Well, they need to find a use for what they do, I guess. Because a story for its own sake written from a single point of view – digital or otherwise – is increasingly looking like it isn’t enough.

Journalists are facing down this problem online, now, as well as creative writers and other sorts of digital storytellers. In a way, it’s comforting to remember it’s not just written news but all sorts of writing that’s wrestling with these questions. And it’s also comforting to remember that things like Instapaper, the Long Good Read, Longreads and a vast array of others are whirring away, proving that for many people, yes, a written story is enough.

Distribution: journalism’s current (and next) big upheaval

the best free paper bag everThis month’s Carnival of Journalism post is late, because I’ve had my head busy in other places for the last few days – but as per the rules, there shall be no apologies. This month Steve Outing asks what technology or digital trend will up-end journalism next.

I want to pick apart the notion of trends for a minute. Trends aren’t about technology. Technology turns up because people create it, sometimes to fulfill needs or because of ideas about the future, but mostly because something that already exists just isn’t good enough. Innovations are born out of frustrations. If enough people have a particular frustration, and something comes along that fixes it, it’ll be widely adopted. Or if something designed to fix a particular frustration turns out to make life just that little bit better for lots of other people, lots of other people will most likely want to use it. Trends are about people, not things.

We’re in the middle of a massive upheaval in how distribution works, and media organisations for the most part are lagging behind in understanding and taking advantage of the changes. Online, the news is centrally hosted, unbundled, available in discrete chunks, accessible from anywhere; news pieces online are not just things to consume, but stations in ongoing journeys, spaces for conversation, and reference points for wider conversation. They’re used in many different ways, not all of which involve actually consuming the content on the page.

But most organisations are very much bound into a model where readers must come to us, rather than one where the news gets to people wherever they happen to be. This is one of the dominant trends at present: distribution models changing from top-down to peer-to-peer, both for news stories (in the sense of content created by journalists and hosted on a single URL) and for news itself (in the sense of the raw informational building-blocks of that content). This is true on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Delicious, and most other social media that offers link-sharing capability: we’re already a long way down this road.

The long, difficult road for news organisations is understanding that they can actually be distribution platforms, as well as reporting the news. It’s moving into peer-to-peer news networks, personalised and sociable. Letting people pick what they care about and customise their own experiences on our sites, and making it very easy to get our news wherever they happen to be online. It’s ceding control to the users, trusting them to know what they want, and understanding that they do value journalism enough to consume it voraciously, so long as it turns up at the right time and in the right place.

People are all made of stories

The Story program in chocolate
The Story program in chocolate, by Liz Henry

I promised myself I wouldn’t eat The Story until I was done digesting it.

I’m not sure that’s happened yet, but I’m getting there, and I think it’s time to start eating Meg Pickard. Maybe by the time I get to Danny O’Brien I’ll be finished putting all the pieces into place in my head. Maybe not. But I will at least be full of chocolate.

Last year I didn’t have the sort of perspective on The Story that I do this year. For one thing, I was speaking at it, which made it harder to think sensibly about the day, and brought me too close to one bit of it.

This time I got to relax and enjoy one of the best events I’ve ever been to. I tweeted – a lot – and I’ve pulled together a chronological run-through of the day in tweets on Storify. I suspect it may not mean enough for people who weren’t there to be able to decode the day; it was a busy day with a lot of astonishing ideas and people in it.

There are stories we tell ourselves, and stories we tell other people about ourselves. Often, it seems, they’re the same story. Last.fm’s model of frictionless sharing lets people build identity by doing stuff – the way we would before the internet, before fast fashion and the Kindle, with clothes, class and consumption habits the most available elements of our outward-facing selves.

On the other hand, Ellie Harrison‘s early work quantifying her habits and activities seems to almost reverse that process – aiming to learn more about precisely who you are by meticulously chronicling everything you do. (Though she did also build a vending machine that vends crisps every time the BBC website mentions news about the recession. I’m not sure that quite fits this particular thesis. But the Bring Back British Rail T-shirt definitely does.) The End‘s series of philosophical questions about death also lets you build up an identity around your actions – crystallising things you might not otherwise think about, then plotting you on a grid that includes your friends and major thinkers.

Tom Watson and Emily Bell discussing phone hacking was illuminating, and my most anticipated talk of the day (for obvious reasons). Another big theme that ran through many of the talks was the collision of reality and story – a junction where everyone in news media works, and where the phone hacking discussion and Liz Henry’s talk about fake lesbians provided strong, cautionary tales about what happens when the story takes over. Henry made an incredibly strong point that when someone’s fake identity takes over, people’s real struggles get lost; by attempting to speak for others, we drown their voices.

But  Scott Burnham provided a strong counterpoint, with a glorious tale about an art project in which dozens of people laid out hundreds of thousands of pennies to spell ‘Obsessions make my life worse and my work better’ on an Amsterdam pavement. As time passed people began to play with it, making new words out of the pennies, turning them over. And then the police cleared it up to stop it being stolen. His final point was that the things we do will always disappear, but the stories we create will always remain.

The more I think on it, the more I come back to Karen‘s talk as being the heart of the event, though I didn’t see it at the time. She talked about making something she was interested in, a story just for her – a whole magazine of it, in fact. But the magazine is also an extension of her self, a story she’s telling the world about who she is and how she operates. An externally constructed identity as well as a document of interest – like Matt Sheret‘s playlists, or (on a group level) Scott Burnham’s penny art, or The End’s philosophical mindmaps, or Amina‘s blog. Jeremy Deller tried to heal the wounds of a whole community by recreating events that changed its identity forever, by putting on costumes and playing with being something we’re not, something we used to be. Fiona Raby told stories about a collective future where not just our identities but our bodies were changed. Danny O’Brien talked about – well, about everything, frankly, very fast and with huge energy and expansiveness, but also about delusion and identity and what happens when group identities collide.

And Matthew Herbert made an album out of a pig, in an act which says something about the artist as well as the pig. He talked about the process of art, the investigation and discovery involved in making sound this way, finding out that pig labour is quiet and that tractors are natural bass tones. He talked about recording the sound of towers falling on 9/11, and being sent a recording of someone in Palestine being shot against a wall, and the ethics of making those things, those lives and deaths, into stories in sound.

We are all made of stories. Some of them are our own creations, some we own, some we tell inadvertently through action and through accretion, and some belong to other people, a long way outside our control.

Changing the drapes

Blue Tiger butterfly emergingAs previously mentioned, I’ve been redesigning this site over the last couple of weeks – lots of stuff on the back end, lots of experimenting with plugins and mucking about with caching and the like, and manually retagging everything (still not finished with that, but getting there). I’ve completely rebuilt the taxonomies for the site, hopefully into a form that can accommodate the many half-finished blog posts in my drafts folder more easily.

This is part of a wider re-evaluation of my online life. I’ve been blogging and writing online in various forms since 2002 (actually, since the mid-90s if you count Geocities, forums and bad Manic Street Preachers fan sites…), but you’d never guess it to look at this place. Most of my best (and worst) work is pseudonymous and some years old now, or has been taken offline for various reasons, or is behind privacy walls due to its personal nature. I don’t want to drag everything out from behind those locked doors, but I do want to make sure that in future I don’t end up in this position again. For me, that means creating a single space in which I can have a multifaceted identity, where those facets meet and combine to create new insights, and where I can draw my various threads together in a way that makes some sense.

This has been a fantastic opportunity to go dig back through this site, and see how my ideas have changed over the last few years. It’s also been a great spring-cleaning exercise. I’ve taken down posts that were pointless, or didn’t belong, or that now make no sense; I’ve tried to be kind rather than brutal, but really no one is ever going to read old linkspam or listen to imported Audioboos here, because I didn’t put the effort into making them valuable in this context when I first published them. That’s a useful lesson for the future.

I’ve scrapped my metadata scheme and started again. When I started this blog I had no idea what it was going to become – my categorisation system was very ad-hoc and was more a way of learning WordPress than actual useful data. That’s changed, now – my categories are built around broad subjects, and my tags narrow down to more specific topics. There are RSS feeds set up for each category: Metamedia for news and journalism, Story for narrative theory and storytelling, People for communication, psychology and community, Games for play, gaming and talk of Zombie LARP, Political, Personal and Wordweaving, just in case I find the guts to publish creative work here again.

The clean-up is also giving me the opportunity to find new ways of doing things. Link-blogging, for instance, if all I want to do is share a quote or a headline, is easiest and best done for me on Twitter, or very occasionally Tumblr if what I’m sharing is right for that space. I still haven’t found a perfect solution for links, but I’ve been exploring Delicious, Pinboard, Evernote, Diigo and River to see how they all work, and learning about running a server in the process.

Finally, I’ve published more prominently a list of blogging principles. I first wrote this back in 2009 – I’ve updated it by adding a couple of new thoughts, but taken nothing away. It remains a useful guide for what I’m hoping to achieve here, and – crucially – it gives me permission to experiment, to play, and to do stupid things in public in order to find out what happens next. I think that’s the freedom I need.

Story in games: lean forward, lean back, meet in the middle

100 Cupcakes GameMost stories in video games are pretty rubbish. Yes, there are exceptions, but that’s why I said most. I mean, most of everything is rubbish, but stories in games tend to be particularly bad. Even Kingdoms of Amalur, which has Proper Named Writers on the cover and everything, has pretty bad stories, in part because the stories aren’t well woven into the game. (Also because the poetry is doggerel and the accents sound like everyone’s been punched in the throat, but I digress.) They’re poorly conveyed in conversation segments that break the flow of the game and are Not Fun. Much like Assassin’s Creed cut scenes and Final Fantasy cut scenes and all the other cut scenes pretty much ever – a story that isn’t embedded in the game itself feels like a pretty bad story, even if it’d be a pretty awesome story in a film or TV series or book.

There’s an inherent conflict in videogames between lean-back and lean-forward interaction. Generally the game itself is lean-forward. We’re doing something interesting with our hands (or whole bodies) that’s affecting what’s on the screen. We’re physically invested in making a thing happen. But story is more of a lean-back affair – it’s something we want to absorb and be entertained by. Modern video games spend a lot of time trying to integrate the two. Bioshock had partial success with this – make story something you come across as part of the scenery – and some failures too (scattered diary pages are not a good storytelling technique, even if the pages are audio recordings for some reason). Not many video games have much success, and most have a lot of fail.

Cut scenes are the best example of this – they literally make you stop playing in order to absorb the story. Some cut scenes are so lean-back that they make you leave the room to make a cup of tea while the game gets on with talking to itself, so you can come back and do the fun bits. It’s a jarring, completely bizarre experience to go from a big boss battle where you’re really engaged in pushing buttons and seeing Stuff Happen as a direct result, to a scene where you’re expected to just sit there and absorb as control is taken away from you completely.

But story matters. Without a story of some kind, events are just events. Luckily, humans are hard-wired to make stories out of pretty much everything we experience. Pong is fun not just because of its mechanics but also because you can make up a story about playing tennis on your computer. Pacman is fun in part because of the story you tell in your head about getting the power pill and eating the ghosts. But neither of those things are stories told by the game; they’re stories that emerge from the game as you play it – from the intersection of player with technology/rule systems. Emergent stories are my favourite kind of story, because they’re the ones that games sustain really well. (Not just video games either. Live, card, tabletop and more. Board games have been doing emergent story well since Go was invented.)

Emergent stories can be far more engaging than the stories designers try to put into games. Beating your mates at Soul Calibur is a better story than the Soul Calibur story mode (not hard, I know). But emergent stories don’t actually have storytellers while they’re happening. Game designers can’t actually design the emergent stories they want players to have, because those are born from context and from the physical places and ways people are playing and stuff designers just can’t control. You can build a really good framework for generating stories, but you can’t force the stories to happen. Often emergent stories don’t actually get told, in any real sense, until after the events of the game; they’re reconstructed from divergent events in retrospect, not in real time. That’d make the player the storyteller.

What I think I’m getting at here is that story, like all meaning, is not contained within the cultural artefact itself but instead is created anew at every reading at the nexus between the artefact, the viewer and the contextual forces that surround both. The problem with a lot of video game stories is that story is fundamentally separated from gameplay, and often gameplay actively works against story or makes story unbelievable (LA Noire, Uncharted, GTAIV, to name a few). In tabletop gaming one of the marks of a bad session is that the players feel railroaded into taking certain pathways or choices because of the GM’s conception of how things should go. But that’s exactly what most video games do – even those with pretty branching endings and multiple pathways and meaningful choices that affect the game world.

I’m not a ludologist. I like my games chock-full of story, but I want story that’s meaningful in the context of gameplay and delivered in a way that isn’t head-snappingly oblique to the rest of the play experience. I just don’t know if that’s actually something video games can do.

This post is part of an ongoing conversation with Si Lumb and Mark Sorrell, and is written at some speed, because my thinking is slippery and if I stop to think about it for too long I’ll start disagreeing with myself.