gewgaw

Ok so I probably put too much thought into my answers on Everbody Votes. I’m probably way too careful trying to guess what the average person will guess, in the interest of keeping my perfect score. But even then – I still felt super super disappointed when I checked in a week or two ago and found my record tarnished by the following question:

And not just my fellow earthlings – my fellow ladies:

… and Americans:

Maybe if we lived someplace a little closer to ground zero w/r/t climate change, we would feel a bit differently?

At least I’m one of the very few who doesn’t know the truth. That says something, right?

: (

A while back Made to Stick was recommended to me by a preview reader. Why? Because a designer’s job is to communicate clearly, effectively, and credibly to many people over the course of a project. Lo and behold, I got an email from another designer this week about the same book… complete with a handy summary!

I was going to read it, but then I found out that this is one of those books where everything is encapsulated into a nice little list, so poo on reading some big stinky book. Here is the book in a nutshell:

SIMPLICITY – Find the core of the idea.

UNEXPECTEDNESS – Attract people’s attention through surprise.

CONCRETENESS – Use specifics.

CREDIBILITY – Be honest. Quote supporters and deniers both.

EMOTIONS – Get people emotionally involved.

STORIES – Use stories.

It’s that last one that really works, at least, for me. Right now, I’m looking at the story of different players and using that to communicate how different people might experience alternate tunings. Sure – the data can be crunched from save files and displayed in beautiful graphs with the help of spreadsheets and so on… but it’s the story that makes people nod and smile. Even when I’m talking about a player very different from them.

What makes stories so effective – even when they sell the wrong information? Something about us just loves the way they wrap everything up into an explainable phenomenon, I suppose.

Perhaps it’s better to take the time to read The Black Swan instead:

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.

Perhaps it’s my University of Chicago background, but the idea of applying ancient skeptic techniques to deal with concepts like terrorism somehow makes me feel a bit more grounded. We don’t know much about what will happen – but some of us knew that long long ago. Maybe it’s time for a story that helps *that* stick!

While I’m sure it’s obvious, I’ll go ahead and state it for the record: I’ve been working a lot lately.

Things are in full gear, and there’s so much to do. Time goes by so fast that I sometimes wake up and wonder what day it is. The months are marked by peaks in stress and sadness (I miss you so much, Sabine!), or fleeting moments of rest and joy.

Sitting here at my desk on a Saturday morning, I’m relishing the quiet time in front of my monitors. That probably sounds terrible, but it’s true. No meetings to attend, no one asking for clarification about a system or a number. Headphones on, comfortable in my weekend clothes… with plenty of time to play the game, modify my tuning spreadsheets, and think about “the big picture”.

And then my mind wanders. What will it be like when the game is done?

I’m so much about getting to the finish line these days, and it’s hard to understand what life looks like on the other side. A bit like having a baby, I suppose. As the deadlines approach and pass, things takes shape, and I can almost imagine its final form.

*Anticipation*

Lulu is wrapping up her werk shmerk and has begun drawing comix again!

You are awesome, Lulu!

After 17 years of being awfully darn cute, Sabine has left the building.

You will be missed, little one.

Craig Sherman has been thinking what the value-proposition of his site in the era of MySpace or Facebook. “In a world where teens are constantly branding and packaging themselves” on sites like those, he points out, “Gaia is where you get away from it all.”

That has to be the saddest thing I’ve read all week.

How awesome was it to arrive at work this morning and see Boom Boom Rocket on the big screen in the EARS entryway?? While I enjoy the music in the games we put up there – it isn’t usually the tap-feet-and-shake-head-in-time type. That… and the fireworks are sooo sparkly….

That and Rock Band announcement both have me smiling this week. Can’t WAIT to see that one up in the lobby!

So well done!

The Develop 100 is an interesting concept: 100 major studios ranked by revenues. I wonder if you ranked the same studios by Quality of Life standards (company-wide survey, show % returned for total population in each studio) how they would measure up. When you balance productivity/wealth with job satisfaction – which studios move up… and which move down?

I wish somenone would do something like this – but I’m sure it’s impossible just do to legal crap. Boo.

PS: Congrats to Amaze and Crystal for making the top 15!!!

And the site is cool, too.

See??.

Best comment on this so far: “Weird – it’s like a young George W. Bush!”

Team HP hosted a great dinner at headquarters this weekend – looking for the Flickr pix I found Marxie’s article on the rise & fall of Bape as a brand/culture meme. Fascinating stuff!

Just got this link in reference to a prior post on game design as a profession/job description. Wow!

It makes me wonder: is “vision” really the only word we have for what designers do? What part of that vision is shared? How does it get tracked, measured and evaluated? How do designers?

In a way, I suppose that’s what the original post was all about (however rambly). What would a more formal understanding of the role do for us as a culture? Why don’t we have one? Is the fact that there are so few of us part of the problem – in that special cases are ok in small doses? How does having so little commonality across teams (even within a company) impact our ability to evaluate our contributions, understand our progress, and … keep sane?

A while back I stopped reading Charles’ blog because he was playing poker all the time in a kind of obsessive-yet-boring way (like so many people who picked up poker in the last couple of years)… and I just got tired of reading about it.

Now that he’s moved into the city, he’s been cooking a lot more, talking about his life, and analyzing all sorts of things in that immediately-aggro, yet flatly unemotional manner that hardcore rationalist, programmer-intellectuals tend to have.

Here’s some stuff from a day in February:

02-08-07
My mom is over 50 now, and in all those years she has not lost her shock and disgust at the gross stupidity of common man. She’s a school teacher, and I recall one time recently when her school’s principal sent out a memo that was chock full of spelling and grammar errors, and she was shocked and outraged “I mean for god’s sake, the principal should at least be able to compose a sentence in English!”. She lives on “Quebec” street, and I recall one time we went to a post office place to mail something and she told her address and they said “spell it please” and she did her sort of double-take “are you kidding me” look and said “like the Canadian province” and the person was just like “spell it please”, and my mom rolled her eyes.

This is interesting to me because I lost my shock & disgust at these things when I was like 18 or so. Now I’m not at all surprised when people around me are gob-smackingly stupid. I think her way is borderline insane, but is a much better way to live – keep assuming that people are okay and just constantly be shocked to find out they’re not.

One thing I’ve been noticing recently is that people do completely moronic things even when they’re a major part of their everyday life and not something that needs to be taught in school or anything like that.

For example, the Trader Joe’s I go to has a two level parking lot. The bottom level is almost always full, or maybe has one or two spots empty, and the top level is almost always near empty. There’s always a traffic jam in the bottom with people circling around looking for spots. If these people had an ounce of sense they would just go to the upper level right away, but they seem to be completely without consideration of basic logic in their daily lives. Now, when you do go up to the upper level, the ramp takes you to one side of the lot. The stairs & elevator to get down to the shop is on the opposite side of the lot. If you had any sense, you would park near the stairs/elevator. Instead I usually find the cars bunched up at the side of the lot where the ramp is. This is like 5 cars in a lot for 200 and they all decided to park right next to each other on the wrong side of the lot. Sure sure, maybe a few are first time shoppers who don’t know what’s up, but the majority are regulars who come every week and still haven’t thought about the basics of what they do.

I guess you have even more blatant ones all the time in a business setting. Running a good meeting is a key basic activity in business (and how to do it is trivially obvious) but probably 90% of meetings are run badly.

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02-08-07
The cute girl at Trader Joe’s asked me to get something for her from the back of a high shelf. I’m tall, I did it for her and she thanked me. It made me feel happy. Wow, look what I can do, mommy are you proud of me? I think I’m ridiculous laughable scum that this is what it takes to make me happy.

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02-08-07
99% of humans for the last 200 years have lived the “salaryman” life, which is basically working full time at a job that’s sort of okay, perhaps getting ahead so their children have more advantages than they did, perhaps in comfort, perhaps not, filling their free time with various different time wasters like hobbies, TV, politics, or children. I’ve come to realize that the difference between a very poor salaryman and a very rich one is really not a very big difference as long as they’re both living the salaryman existence. The rich one has a much easier time getting out of the salaryman existence, but almost never takes advantage of that and simply lives the same life in slightly more luxury. Luxury is grossly over-rated and does little for happiness.

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02-08-07
Pets and children fill very much the same emotional void. They take up a lot of time, which distracts you from the emptiness of life; they are very entertaining in a purile way – you mainly laugh *at* them because they are so dumb, like haha my dog is chasing its own tail, how stupid, haha, or haha my kid just stuck a stapler in the peanut butter, haha what a moron. There are pros & cons to each, of course, pets are much easier, but children are much more sophisticated versions of the toy.

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02-08-07
Part of the problem that I have with long term relationships is that I like myself a lot better when I’m in dating mode. I’m more interesting, I go out more, when I’m in seduction mode I’m confident, I pretend to have a life and be dynamic and all that. It’s exhausting, but I prefer being around myself when I’m like that. Over time in a relationship I relax and act more like my real self, which is a pretty awful person to live with.

Good reading, and fast becasue he’s pretty curt. Not always something you’d agree with – but thought provoking.

I think he should run a restaurant. Reading the blog makes me hungry!