Doox

It doesn’t matter how short time you put on something but if you do it everyday it really changes your life. It’s usually more effective to do something 1 hour a day for 7 days than doing it for 7 hours a day if it’s not urgent task. So what am I going to do? With what said, I should go ahead to put more diversity on my life. I need to constrain myself from indulging one thing too much. That naturally sets time limit and actually boost up the quality of every minute. I need to set limited amount time for one thing, do the best for that and forget about it to move onto next. I need to categorize things I need to do for the wholeness of my life and put at least little amount of time on every category of it. One of the most important category of them is evaluation part to constantly adjust those time budget for better outcome.

If you can estimate the time you need to finish a work and the benefit(or price) of the work, you can calculate the value of each hour in a more tangible way. We usually forget the simple fact that the most precious thing we have in our life is time. It’s rather appalling to realize that it’s another Saturday after one week has just been swifted away. Whenever I feel gloomy and feel myself started getting into the state of so called ‘waste of emotion’, I think about what kind of more productive thing I could possibly do using that time. And most importantly, and seriously no more thinking. I should act.

Especially when we read books, we easily notice that the speed of turning the pages is getting slower by our falling into the thoughts digressed from the book’s contents. For me, I found myself easily distracted out of the book’s main contents into my own imagination when my personal experience was projected by specific words from the book’s sentence. When it comes to stronger emotional experience, it tends to go deeper into re-generating the situtation and try to simulate it in a better way or more rewarding way.

Mixing things… is dangerous. Reading is one thing and projecting my personal experience which apparently doesn’t have anything to do with the actual keypoints of the book’s paragraphs is another. Also, there should be full of ‘purposeful’ tension when we read books, especially if it’s a technical book. Without that, we’re just lazy readers seeking certain entertainment out of a wrong book.

Detaching myself from me… is also trying not to mix the fact and the interpretation of it. I’ve been considering myself as an imaginative person but I realized that truth is I was having trouble in being fully lost in the imagination process because of self-recognition in the middle of it. Constantly having this self-awareness doesn’t really help to accept something as it is. Myself should be thrown away to fully appreciate the moment of learning and enjoy it. It’s joyful not because it’s related to myself but because it is truely free from myself.

Reading books or learning something is in the same line of this mechanism. While you’re inputting something in yourself, you should not be interrupted by your egotistical instinct to translate whatever you’re learning into something actually related to the result of it or application of it. It should be a pure process not blocked by any contaminated thoughts which is usually driven by self-awareness.

Whenever we’re putting certain amount time on a task, we often don’t realize how much time is actually used for the task. I tend to find myself digressing from the book’s contents to my imagination. It’s actually interesting to track back what part of the book I started branching out to my own deep thoughts. Time extends itself to use up whatever it’s given. I should also keep in mind that the purpose of reading book is to get the information not to study the English expression or read it line by line. It’s often more effecient to read the book trying to find what the author is trying to say rather than literally follow the way he wrote in sentences. I find it also useful to read through contents and start from the chapter of my interest or at least trying to have questions to myself on the buzzword in the contents. Questioning is the best way of learning something because it clearifies what I don’t know and what I need to focus when I’m reading.

I remember when my school collegue, Vincent Diamante, once mentioned that “To make the result beautiful , the process of it should be beautiful, too.” I don’t recall where he actually quoted it. As game creators we need to focus on the joy of making something rather than the hype of the result. We need to focus on the process of making something and actual quality of it rather than thinking about how it would be received by people. That’s why we should be totally truthful to ourself when it comes to making something we believe.

I want to live my life enjoying and feeling proud of every moment by putting honest efforts on my work rather than thinking about how to be successful out of it. The crazy hypes spoil the whole experience. Isn’t it enough by itself to create something you truely believe in? I mean really!

But , whether it is from the desire toward fame and fortune or not,  worst of all is not doing anything. There’s no excuse on being lazy, man!

Games are usually made by more than one person. Eventhough there are games that are from one-man-band, games are perfected when they are played by users and polished throughout their feedback and it should be done every step of the game development from the prototype until the shipping. All these are quite obvious. But what I want to say is there are processes that must be carefully designed/guided by an author who has a clear idea of the work. Apparently the person doesn’t have to do everything alone but should be able to decide which idea to pick to achieve the main goal of the work. Generally a person who has broad knowledge over different disciplines of game development is able to recognize the overlapped area of seperate categories to boost up the development process and naturally select ideas that stick to the core concept to keep it coherent. But most importantly, the author’s role is tremenously important in terms of maintaining the key idea of the game and doesn’t digress to the ideas that may weaken the uniqueness of the work. So to speak, the lowest common denominator effect.

I believe in colletive effort on a work of art but also I understand how it becomes exponentially complicated to stick to the innovative ideas when so many other non-work-related aspects of the game development have to be met to finish a game. Also I believe just increasing the number of people doesn’t guarantee to speed up the process or increase the quality of the work.

Basically, even without any speculation, games are considered to be for fun or at least has an aspect of entertainment in it. I want to use this appeal as an entertainment media to mainly invite users into the work in a more approachable way. There are not many games that go beyond the mere purpose of entertainment and acheive delivering a message, of the creator’s choice of subject matter, which is naturally emitting throughout the ‘fun’ play of the media. We, as game creators, should deeply ask ourselves one of the most important question.

“If the message you want to deliver out of your work of art could be delivered quite enough or even better through other type of medum such as movie, why would you choose game or interactive media?” I think apparently the answer should be interactivity. As creators of games, we need to find how to deliver our message through the interactivity itself. The interaction happening in the game should be carefully designed to reach the goal of your key ideas. The activity done in game should mean something by itself instead of being used to unlock certain kind of award which is usually cut scenes or more progression in narrative. In this kind of structure, the place where the key messages should be delivered is shifted from the actual interactive experience to a linear experience.