Oh wow, it’s October. I’m actually doing it. I’m actually going to make it to the end of this Depth Year with my promises to myself (mostly) intact. That’s genuinely amazing – I had expected to crumble in maybe April. That’s the reason I wrote the first post – as a way of making a public commitment out of a private notion. I feel like writing this diary series has been a big help in keeping me on the wagon. By extension, you’re all doing a sterling job in keeping me honest.
To be fair, I have bought and played some board games that I didn’t own before 2019 began… but the thing about running a review site with a Patreon is, for various reasons, you kinda have to carefully manage your bank balance if you don’t want The Man getting a slice of the money you need to do the job. I’ve talked about all that in previous diary entries, so I won’t rehash it. Suffice to say that I think at the end of December I’ll be able to pat myself on the back and say ‘Good job, buddy’. Hopefully this extended shock therapy will have done a lot of good in realigning myself with a healthier relationship with consumerism. That though remains to be seen.
I say all this not as a clumsy introduction to the post but to lead into one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot this month – what happens when the depth year ends? I actually really enjoy doing these posts. I’ve never been one to keep a journal, but the commitment I made to you all has actually resulted in a set of posts that maybe do decent second-service duty in that capacity. I can look back at them and reflect on some of the more personal and intimate stuff that never ends up in our public blog posts. I don’t want to lose that, but also I don’t want to extend this depth year indefinitely. It’s been a good experience, one I might well repeat in the future, but I don’t want to overdo it.
The thing is – the audience for these posts is relatively small. You may have seen from some previous posts on the site that I’ve basically gone back on my original plans to make all these posts free-to-access a year after publication. Honestly, it turns out I like the intimacy of these patron only posts more than I would like the extra hits to the site. I think of these, in part, as a diary. I don’t want any internet rando being able to read them. They’ll go to the $1 tier level a year after publication instead, and stay there.
But I won’t be doing these diaries entries for much longer. Three more after this, and the series is done. I want to keep doing something, but the original impetus will be gone and I kinda feel like twelve posts on this topic is plenty in any case. So, what’s going to replace it?
I actually have a couple of ideas.
The first is to continue this erratic monthly journal but just change the theme. If there were some kind of big life event coming up I could maybe smoothly pivot to another focus. The thing is, you need a big upcoming life event to do something like that and I don’t have one ready to roll.
Oh wait, yes I do!
Moving to a new country is going to be a big deal, both for myself and Mrs Meeple but also for the site. You know some of the reasons for that already. Perhaps then there’s scope here for a Gaming in Gothenburg series that discusses what it’s like to move to Sweden and integrate into the local (and national) gaming community. Since I’m going to have a big official academic focus on games when I arrive at Chalmers it seems like I could even give people a window into the work I’m doing there. Course design, Swedish students, research bids being considered and drafted, that kind of thing. I think I could get a lot of mileage out of a series like that, but it depends on whether or not anyone else would find it worthwhile.
Would you all be interested?
The other idea I have is based on the love and affection I instantly generated for A Canticle for Leibowitz. You’ll know from the newsletter that I read that for the first time this month and I adored it. It was magical – the best book I have read all year. I was so inspired by it that I started to design a game based on the theme. The idea would be that you’re playing the part of post-apocalypse monastic orders, searching the wastelands for pre-war texts and then gradually preserving them as illuminated manuscripts within the cloisters of your abbey. Every round of play each order would get a chance to influence the world outside their doors by spending some of their illuminated wisdom to play secret scoring cards that would come to be revealed in the future. You’d never show the scoring cards you were playing, but you could negotiate with other players. ‘I have put in place an age of enlightenment, so we’ll all score based on the sum of philosophy we have transcribed’. Only it might later turn out you played a scoring card that ensured it was the person with the largest science preservation that scored individually.
I don’t know, it’s a rough idea that still needs a lot of work shopping, and while I can currently see a pretty decent game in this idea I wouldn’t really want to devote a year to it unless I could see an extraordinary game in there. A point I have made many times in the blog is that we don’t need more good games. Good enough isn’t good enough.
But also… it’s not enough for the game to be extraordinary. It also has to be accessible. I couldn’t possibly attempt to design and release a game that didn’t do a good job in the accessibility stakes. So this alternative series would be an attempt to design an accessible, extraordinary game. The problem with this series is that I can’t guarantee that I’d have a month of progress to report every year. Moving to a new job means that a lot of time needs to be spent simply on building those resources that you get for free in a job where you’re well established. Meeting people, making connections, understanding the environment, and so on. Social capital takes time to build, and it’s vital to do build it.
With the Gaming in Gothenburg series I could guarantee something to talk about every month. The Game Design Diary would, of necessity, be a lot more erratic. Perhaps that’s one to think about not for this coming year, but the year after? That’d also give me time to really think about what an extraordinary game looks like. Also, If the game ever got released it would be under a pseudonym. I could trust you with that, right?
There’s another reason right there to make sure that these diaries don’t fall into the hands of non-patrons.
I’m still doing reasonably well with keeping off of Twitter, just because it’s inconvenient to access now. I’m considering taking the next step and deleting it entirely from devices – block it from my phone and tablet the same way I did for my computer. To be honest, I’m tempted to do the same with Reddit. Both sites are increasingly coming across as bizarre and ridiculous. Every so often I recount some Twitter Virality to Real People and they find it impossibly baffling. I did that a couple of times during the hobbyist media code of conduct furor that resulted in my being declared a pariah by so many Social Media Worthies. Literally every single person stumbled at the first hurdle with ‘Okay, can you explain again why ethical codes are bad?’. Twitter personalities are often like parodies of real people, because the platform contorts opinions into weird facsimiles full of moon logic and over-simplifications. Twitter is its own weird and unhealthy community where the entire design requires you to emphasis the weird and unhealthy if you want to be noticed.
I saw someone remark on this a while ago, saying essentially ‘On Twitter, last week is as distant to me as the Fall of Rome’. Wow, that resonates. There is so much frantic, and usually ephemeral, activity on Twitter that it feels emotionally hefty even if nothing actually happens. It’s all white noise, retweeting white noise, for the benefit of generating ever more reactionary white noise. I’ve spoken about the idea of ‘Virtue Gazumping’ before – that it’s not enough to be virtuous but you often need to negate the virtue of others by pointing out how problematic their lesser virtue is. It’s like a playing top trumps where the purity of enlightenment is a zero sum game.
- ‘Look at my new dog! She is called Puffles and she is the cutest thing I have ever seen! Here is a picture!’
- ‘Oh, you bought a dog from a breeder? Let me give a twitter lecture on why you should have saved a rescue dog instead’.
- ‘Oh, you got a rescue dog? Did you get it from a shelter that doesn’t euthanise? You’re worse than Hitler if you didn’t’
- ‘Wait, your shelter doesn’t euthanise? That’s incredibly evil. Let me explain in 100 tweets why euthanasia is the only way to curtail harmful patterns of dog behaviour in rescues…’
- ‘Hang on, you’re putting your convenience over the life of a dog? Honestly, I’m going to report your account to Twitter for hate-speech’
- ‘I taught my child to poke every dog she sees to find out which are well behaved, and the ones that aren’t I report to be destroyed. You’re risking my child’s life by not killing aggressive dogs’
And so on…
I’m not even being flippant here. Not really. There is such a thing as extremism in dog rescue circles, like any circle. Anyone who has seen extracts from Mumsnet (in my case, via a Twitter account that shows some of the weirder aspects of the site) will see some realism in the fictional argument above. The problem with Twitter is that it makes the transmission of extremism into something convenient and frictionless. And, frequently, something that is socially rewarded. The end result is that you are constantly having your feed filled with the online equivalent of the pub bore, except everyone is applauding and encouraging their nonsense with regular cries of ‘Yaas queen’.
I guess what I’m saying here is that I wish we could get a dog.
This is the only dog I can realistically have
Twitter is a stressful platform as well because it requires people to care all the time about everything or be denounced as a callous, uncaring monster. Kickstarter’s opposition to unionisation is an issue doing the rounds at the moment, and yes – Kickstarter is an awful platform and people shouldn’t be so willing to back projects through it. My concerns about Kickstarter have been threaded through many posts for a long time now. Being anti-Kickstarter is fashionable now though, and if you’re not frantically tweeting about how you’re boycotting the platform suddenly you’re as bad as a collaborator. I’m a Union Guy. I have been everything from local rep to membership secretary to treasury secretary in my union. I’ve always volunteered for service duty, knowing that to do so is to basically cut yourself off from any possibility of promotion. But somehow if I’m not tweeting about it, I’m part of the problem because it’s the current temporary fixation that we all need to briefly make our ‘ride or die’ issue. ‘Funny thing about all the game media that are silent on this issue’, sneer online commentators, riding the wave of the collaborative fervor until it crashes into silence and the growing churn of the next issue of the day.
You probably know I’m a fan of the Raptitude blog – it’s why this diary series exists at all. This month, David published an excellent post on the topic of caring deeply, rather than passionately. Pick a few issues where you can actually shift the dial, and make them an actual focus of your life for a sustained period of time. Focus your efforts, don’t spread them too thin. Twitter outrage in many ways feels like what Slavoj Žižek talks about when he discusses the essential transgressive violence that is inherent in inactivity. That we engage in participatory protest because we are permitted to, and that activity is inherently selfish because it props up the system it is supposed to undermine while assuaging our own guilt. It makes us feel like we’re accomplishing something when all it really does is make us complicit with a system through visible and permitted ritualistic bloodletting.
That’s, for me, the role that Twitter has come to serve in society. For people to act like they care, like they want to change the world, but to do so absent the need to actually accomplish anything except provoking reaction. It’s a shame – Twitter at its best is a way to easily communicate with awesome people, but increasingly that communication is drowned out by performative progressiveness.
I know, I know – I cited Žižek. Yeah, he’s a darling of the alt-right but people are more complicated than the labels they are ascribed. He has a whole pile of terrible viewpoints, but that doesn’t mean his whole body of work is worthless.
Slavoj Zizek — “I Would Prefer Not To”
The idea of caring deeply is an extension of the depth year philosophy, and I was delighted to read it because it validated my own approach to life. I do care deeply about some issues, and they’re issues where I think I can do good. I care deeply about accessibility, especially in games. That’s obvious. I care about good ethical practice in professional conduct. Just this month I started teaching a module in Computer Law and Ethics, and it draws heavily from a lot of my writing on the topic. I want my students to engage not with fixed, ossified codes of ethics but with ethical thinking on a visceral level. I want them to make good, informed decisions in complicated scenarios. I care about that, and I care about it in every part of my life. I care(d) about Scottish Independence and poured many, many hours and days into fighting for that cause. In all of these things I feel like I am making a difference – at least, sometimes.
My passion for these things though is driven from within, and it’s been for the long term. Such things don’t have the virality of today’s new shiny causes of outrage though, and the more you follow Twitter’s endless cycle of banshee keening, the worse you feel about what you’re not doing . Keeping up with what’s going on is exhausting, angering, and makes me feel sad at my own inability to shape the world. That’s why I care deeply, not passionately. And it’s why Twitter’s gradual removal from my day is in my own best interests. I still fall into patterns of checking it when I shouldn’t, but I’m actively trying to break them. Twitter is incompatible with the depth I want to be cultivating.
It’s good that Twitter is injecting less stress into my life, because there’s plenty of it coming from other sources. We announced our life situation changes this month, and it means that anyone that cares knows that we’re moving to Sweden. I’ve already been in contact with a few people in various parts of the country that are keen to introduce us to the gaming community there. Honestly the hardest part of this whole process is the waiting until things happen. I’d like to be there now, but academic contracts are often very restrictive with regards to resignations. My notice period is three months. If I was being fired, I’d think it was far too short. Because I’m choosing to leave, it feels unbearably long. I just want to get on with the next part of my life.
It creates a tension though where we’re too early to do stuff that needs to be done, and by the time we’re able it might be too late. House-hunting in Gothenburg is like a cruel test put in place by an angry God to punish humanity. It blows my mind that the vast majority of accommodation available is with a tiny window of viability. ‘Renting my apartment for two months’, ‘Lovely house available until May’. What the hell is this? How can people live with this kind of nomadic lifestyle?
I thought we’d cracked it though – I’d been in discussions with someone and was ready to take over an apartment on a ‘until further notice’ basis from the 1st of December. It was a bit pricier than I hoped, but that’s a secondary issue over ‘actually having somewhere to live’. Just as things seemed to have been decided, the landlord explodes a bombshell. ‘Oh, it might not actually be available when I said it would, but it definitely would be in January. Maybe it will be available when we agreed, but I don’t actually know’.
It’s not possible to arrange an international move around ‘maybe’, and taking out a month’s temporary accommodation means that I have exactly the same incredibly difficult search except made more painful by the fact I can only commit to a month somewhere. So either I pay £1800 for a room in an AirBnB for a month or… I don’t know, live in a ditch somewhere.
Seriously, I spend weeks negotiating with this guy and now I’m back to square one. Most apartments are looking for tenants sooner than the 1st of December, understandably. Ones that aren’t are often only available for a few months. You send messages to people and they don’t reply. I hate every minute of this process, because it heaps stresses and stresses onto me that until yesterday I thought had been dealt with. It will all get sorted. It’s frustrating to know that I’m too early to be able to get it done now because I would really like this issue to be off my plate like I thought it was a few days ago.
Right, enough of that. Let’s get on to the wishlist stuff.
A few things slipped onto my wishlist this month. I had no idea they were making another Joker movie, and the (typically temporary) Twitter outrage its mere existence set off put it on my radar. I dunno, it looks pretty interesting. I don’t think it’s fair to say art has no moral right exist because bad people might be inspired by it. It’s the whole ‘violence in video games’ argument, except the worst is assumed because the people the Joker film will inspire are perceived to be fundamentally evil and credulous. Of course, life, and people, are more complicated than that. Anyway, I’ll watch the Joker movie. It looks like an interesting take on the character.
Since I played Crypt of the Necrodancer to completion again, I’d like to pick up the Cadence of Hyrule which is basically the same game but incorporating Link and Zelda. It seems like an easy sell to me, and I’ll definitely give it a go. At least, I think at the moment I will definitely give it a go.
I also fancied watching the Dave Chapelle comedy show because I saw a clip of it on Youtube and it seemed to be interestingly provocative. I did have Chapelle’s Show on my ‘to watch’ list so I gave a couple of episodes a try and now… yeah, I don’t know if I care about his stand up. I can’t say his prior work raised much of a smile.
So, here’s where the wishlist was at the end of last month:
- Avengers Endgame
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Good Omens
- Captain Marvel
- Into the Spiderverse
- The Outer Worlds
- Astral Chain
It’s all pretty stable. I’m equally as interested in all of these things as I was last month, although the Outer Worlds is maybe on shakier footing than the rest. It grows a bit with some stuff in October.
- Cadence of Hyrule
- The Joker
- Avengers Endgame
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Good Omens
- Captain Marvel
- Into the Spiderverse
- The Outer Worlds
- Astral Chain
This seems like a solid list, and there isn’t much time now for things to drop off. We only have three months left in this depth year, and while I’m not passionately invested in anything I’ve got listed it also doesn’t feel like they’re going to suddenly fade from my thinking. We’ll see though!
Thank you all for reading, and I hope to see you all here again next month!