How can something so unbelieveable be so simultaneously unsurprising?

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I forgot to post on Monday about what I was planning to work on with UECA! this week. It just hasn’t been on my mind in a while. It’s been two weeks since I did any significant work on the game, and while I feel really guilty for not putting any time into it, I don’t feel the anxiety I used to feel when I was behind on comics. I’m not entirely sure that I miss the anxiety part.

When I was still doing TMABB, drawing every morning was a habit. I didn’t always enjoy it, but I ground away at those strips anyway, because I generally felt like shit when I didn’t. Yeah, that’s obviously the wrong reason to do something, but it kept me working and I rarely missed updates because of it. That’s a good thing, right?

I don’t have that same motivation with this game thing. There are no deadlines, no obligation to the readers. I don’t imagine many people are offended that I’ve missed a few UECA! posts. Yet, nothing is getting done. It’s retarded. I like doing the work once I start doing it. The only problem I have is the starting. I’ve always been like this. I just have this weird anxiety about getting to work on something. It’s the main source of my procrastination habit. And so here we are, thirteen weeks into the project, and I barely feel like I’ve done a week’s worth of work. I don’t stress about it like I did with comics, sure, but I’m also a lot less productive.

How can I get my producitivity back without reintroducing the constant worrying that came with having a webcomic?

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Do you do this? You see it all the time in the blog world: authors who set off their most salient points in big, beautiful boldface. It makes an article easier to skim, a boon to web surfers trying to cram as much content into their information addicted brains in as little time as possible. And y’know what? I detest the practice. It’s like with sitcoms. They either tape in front of an audience, or they dub in a laugh track, so the viewer knows which parts were supposed to be funny. Bloggers do the same thing with Ctrl+B.

I hereby name such writers, Boldgers.

Boldfacing has the same effect as putting up big signs that say, “Here’s the important bit. You don’t have to read the rest unless you really feel like it.” Why neuter such a large portion of your work like this? Instead of hitting a few talking points and then adding a heaping helping of foamy fluff, why not just write a shorter article? Or better yet, why not get your writing abilities to the point where people will want to read everything?

I think I might start boldfacing random sentence fragments, just out of spite. What do you bloggers think of that?

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One of those most insightful game-related sites on the Internet, The Escapist, is focusing on sex in games for this week’s set of editorial features. One article in particular stood out for me: Pressing The Right Buttons.

The author presents some mid-to-high level game concepts on how sex might be worked into a game context. He contends that, thus far in games, sex, in those rare instances where a developer is brave enough to weather the political backlash that always follows its portrayal, has been limited to either non-interactive cut scenes, such as in Mass Effect, or timed sequences of button presses, such as in God of War (which is a terrible example, but the best I could think of). His argument is that this removes the emotional involvement from the encounter, furthering the already cheap perception of sex that pervades the major gaming demographic of teenagers and young adults.

The author’s ideas for how to create in-depth gameplay around sex are quite interesting, and I’ll leave those points to his article. What I want to present here is a minor counterpoint to his argument against the way sex is currently presented in games. I say minor because, while I agree with his main point, I want to give a justification for why sex shows up in such a noninteractive context. I don’t necessarily believe it to be right.

Let’s look at sexuality as what all things as emotionally charged as sex fundamentally are: biological imperatives. Just as we get depressed and uncomfortable when we don’t get enough food, so too do we get when we don’t have enough sex. Remember that emotions exist to provide an instinctive impetus for us to perform certain beneficial actions, such as fighting for one’s life, sleeping, and eating. In the case of sex, we tend to form emotional bonds with sexual partners because it increases the likelihood of reproduction (or rather, those of our ancestors who did so tended to reproduce more effectively).

How are biological needs handled in games? You walk over a plate of food to eat it. You click a button to make your Sim go to the bathroom. You choose a menu item to have your character rest for the night. If we look at sex as just another biological imperative, then it makes sense that it show up in the same manner as the others, by viewing the act as given and moving on to the more interesting and less ordinary parts of life.

On the other hand, perhaps the Escapist author’s idea could be applied to other biological mundanities. We could use shoulder triggers to move a character’s jaw up and down while using an analog stick to make the character’s tongue move the food in his mouth around to improve chewing. We could time changes in sleeping positions during the night to optimize the amount of rest the character gets. We could use rhythmic button presses to relax the character’s bowels so he can go to the bathroom. Okay, maybe not everything needs to be a game.

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They just came out with a Wordpress app for the iPhone, and I’m just trying it out right now. I guess I’ll have to go over to my computer if I want to link to it. I kinda feel like the mobile admin plugin is better. Plus, this app keeps triggering my Twitter plugin. That’s annoying.

Aww man, mobile admin isn’t compatible with the most recent version of Wordpress anyway. Weak.

Anyway, link: http://iphone.wordpress.org/

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