Love Stories

I've spent many nights alone now. Recently those nights involve an indeterminate period of staring up at the cold concrete ceiling, marveling at the slabs that were poured in forms at ground level, then hoisted by cranes 22.9 floors into the air before being fitted together with their new neighbors by a network of protruding rebar to be forever sealed to each other with a bead of wet cement, drawn closer by nuts and bolts. It strikes me how much finality there is in the process. It's that finality that I find so lacking in creative writing.

I love creating, and I love writing. Code, mostly, but sometimes creatively as well. The problem I have with creative writing that programming doesn't touch on is the infinite flexibility and fluidity that the written word can have. Code has that too, but the flexibility and fluidity are always available with a purpose. When I write programs, I have a set goal. A point. Something to drive towards. Creative writing has always been harder though. I can pre-plan a program with ease, but can I assemble a simple short-story plotline that's cohesive and interconnected? Not usually.

In the last two days I've spent twenty-four hours working on a coding project. I completed it during that time, writing 570 lines of code to perform a task that took 253 seconds. A task that, by hand, would have taken in the order of days for a single person to perform. I typed 18,809 characters over seven pages of PHP. I only had to stop and analyze a few times. Perhaps for a grand total of two hours during that entire period did I have to stop and figure out what I was supposed to have been doing, and how to make it happen.

Why is it then, that when I want to write a story, it never comes through like that?

I can have all the ideas in the world. Description can flow forth from my mind like steam bursting through the crack in a copper pipe stowed in a basement, but when it comes to a story, I lose track of my direction. Where to go, what to have them say, who needs to be involved. My characters all end up being a variation on me that leaves the story free of dialogue because they all know what the other me is thinking through the whole story. Many knowing glances are exchanged between them, as if they always know what the other would have said, but are the readers to be left in the dark too? Perhaps this communication flows in monologues inside each character's head, where they speak the dialogue of the other in self-reflective sentences uttered in the first-person narrative of the scene.

Perhaps in this lies the real problem. Perhaps I'm having such a hard time writing about what these characters would say and do is because they ARE a part of me. Is it that the part of me that flows onto the page is so bland and unnecessarily useless that nothing I can do can usher this character into action? Maybe it's just my depression leaking out into the world. I've heard depression likes paper.

What if it was, though? What if it is the depression that seems to have slowly crept into my life that's causing this void of imagination and creativity that I so often steep in. If that's the case, then the longing itself is also self-defeating, as there's nothing more disheartening than being down so far that I can't even write about it.

I've heard it said that some of the best love-story writers are good at what they do because they're depressed. Happy, fulfilled people don't write good love stories. They don't have anything to write about. It's hard to write about how you feel right now, this moment. If you were to sit down and ask yourself to write about a character that's in your same mood, and passed that on to someone else, unless you are among the pantheon of emotional description, they likely wouldn't have any idea what you're talking about. The writing would likely be bland and uninspiring. The mood would probably be completely missed in the vocabulary and form that your writing took. But if you write about how it is to be happy, as someone who's depressed... You find that it's a lot easier to write about the feeling of relief, serenity, and wonder that accompanies true happiness. 

It doesn't really accompany happiness though, does it? A person can read your description of happiness and determine that yes, that is how they feel, but they would never have been able to describe it for themselves.

So I suppose then that it's only logical that someone dealing with depression and loneliness would be the perfect person to write a love story. They know the kind of longing and tension that accompanies being alone. And they know how they want to feel. They know how they would want it to go. Maybe a chance meeting at a coffee shop spurred by a quick glance at a computer screen revealing that a person nearby shares an interest in some cult-film that nobody's ever heard of. They dream about the day where they casually walk by, point out the similarity and continue on, turning back to see a smirk in the face of the owner of the laptop. They dream about a chance circumstance in which they run into the person again, this time sticking around for a conversation. They feel the tension as they lead up to asking the person out, and the relief and excitement that comes from the accepted invitation. You can feel the throbbing of their pulse in their neck as they stress about what to wear, what they're going to say, what they want to order at dinner, whether they want to mention that they've always noticed their date at the coffee shop or not.

The date comes and you can again feel the tension and excitement creep slowly up your spine as they meet at the restaurant. You feel the anxiety as the main character looks around the room for their date, half knowing that they might not even be there, but hoping that out of the corner of their eye they'll spot a hand waving from a table. There it is. The anxiety lessens as the excitement rushes in. Disbelief leaves the pages as they describe to you the scene in front of them. The busy restaurant, the noisy clink and clank of pans and dishes being rearranged in the kitchen off in the distance as the world slowly drifts away. The restaurant gently drifts out of periphery as the main character's gaze fixes squarely on the subject of their affection, dressed exactly as they've always imagined they would be.

The story continues exactly how it would go if they would have their way. If they'd just run into the perfect person at the coffee shop tomorrow instead of spending the whole day tucked into a corner with their laptop browsing Facebook and grumbling about people posting "couples" pictures and changing relationship statuses. They write the story they want their life to be, leaving the happy writer at a disadvantage.

The happy writer writes the story that's already been, driven by the smile of the one they love, or while being reassured that all is in order with only the slightest murmur of a sentence in the other room from the voice they long to hear when they're alone.

And here I lay, describing how a group of cement slabs became my ceiling.

Maybe I should stick to code.

Code isn't ever depressing, it just works.

Gamify ALL THE THINGS!

So, last night I had a bit of a revelation: I'm not getting enough done. Well, okay so that's not much of a revelation, especially if you know how much stuff I get done on a regular basis (it's sad really, especially with all my aspirations).

But I had an idea, brought about by all my favorite TED talks that speak on making everything into a game with the purpose of making it fun. Do Stuff, Get Points, Receive Bacon(Or some other such reward).

Here's what I'm thinking: days dedicated to specific tasks.
Mondays are going to be creative days. Tuesdays, a personal "do whatever" day. Wednesday and Thursday Production and Social/relaxation days respectively. Friday dedicated to other people, friends/family/etc. Saturday dedicated to team-building things with whatever group of co-workers are available, and Sunday free for catching up on the previous week's missed points.

For each day, there's a different point goal, and for each specific task, a different number of points. Like this blog post, this is a personal blog post, so for this week, that would be one point towards Wednesday's "Production Budget" of points.

My preliminary list of Creative things for Mondays include:
Starting or Finishing a short-story - 1 point
Write based off of a new Writing Prompt/Storymatic pair - 1 point
1000 words for H+ - 3 points
Practice drawing, trace/analyze a character - 1 point
Practice Animation - Vector Trace a character concept, animate 12 frames of walking/talking motion - 2 points
Draw/paint a new landscape - 3 points
Draw a new character pose - 3 points
Record H+ Project video blog - 5 points
Write a COMPLETE short story - 2 points

Right now, I'm looking to do 5 points of creativity every Monday.

This is just a preliminary idea, so it might not stick, but I think it's a bit of an interesting idea considering the push toward gamification. Maybe I'll code a web application to track points for people, if they think this is a cool idea. Anyway. 1 point down for Wednesday, now to work on Monday's points.

The SimCity Snafu, Why I'm proud of Maxis

Since the release of SimCity, there's been a constant struggle for stability that EA and Maxis hasn't quite managed to fix. Maxis is trying their hardest, as seen by the numerous updates and additional servers they've brought online since the game launch, but they also know they aren't quite up to snuff yet, and are still working hard to make their customers happy. They've even offered a free EA game to anyone that's registered their copy of SimCity at this point. So why are gamers still so mad?

Well, let's take a look at the traditional SimCity editions. When you look back, you see games in which cities had to be pretty well self-sufficient. Cities which, without your careful planning and attention, would be horribly ill-conceived blobs of zones with not enough fire, police, and hospital coverage, and if you weren't bussing around the ill in your hard-to-drive ambulance, you sometimes weren't able to make ends meet in the grander scheme of things. Running a city in SimCity 4 wasn't easy, and that was kind of the point.

The fun thing about the city was seeing how far you could get before you failed. That's really what the game is about, if you look at it objectively. It's a strategy game where you have to figure out how to get your city to work. If you somehow manage to get the city to run on its own, making more money than you were spending, it became a rewarding screen saver to look at... at least, until the aliens descended from the heavens and blasted your city with their giant laser, destroying half of your buildings, and your world wonder, and setting another quarter of your city on fire. And then you'd rebuild.

But you know, Maxis is one of those companies that, much like Valve, are constantly striving for better and more interesting gameplay. In this instance of SimCity, they found that through the power of the internet. This is the primary thing that people are complaining about, but if you look at the game and how it has progressed since it's first release, taking it to the internet is the most obvious next step. What Maxis is trying to do here is make the game a little bit more like running a real city, and the only way to do that is with a real working economy, and the only way to achieve that fairly is online.

While yes, you can set up your own region, leave it private, and run all of the cities in the region by itself, that's not really the point. The reason the game is online only isn't because of some silly DRM scheme implemented by EA, and no number of angry anti-DRM gamers are going to convince me of that. And while yes, I can see how having the game online only does help protect against game piracy, the point of the system isn't that. The point is that you are supposed to be playing this game WITH OTHER PEOPLE. If it weren't so hard to manage a world economy with the number of players Maxis was expecting to get with their new title, I'd even say that we wouldn't be limited to regions, but instead all placing cities on one really big world map.

To me, the vision Maxis was going for in creating SimCity is a smaller-scale attempt at creating a global community of cities. I'd even posit to say that the next Maxis title might be more akin to an MMO, with cities being created as cities in states that interact with each other in countries that then interact with the rest of the world. SimCity: Planets?

What I'm really trying to say here is that I believe the gamers crying out for the ability to play offline, single-player only, no internet connection required, are completely missing the point. SimCity 4 was pretty close to the best single-player SimCity experience I could hope for, and I'm ready to step into the realm of online, multi-player, region based gameplay, and I think that the gamer population as a whole should take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Maxis has been a company I've respected for what they do, and for that, I trust that they are following their vision. If that means that SimCity is going to remain online only, so be it, I'm going to continue to play and enjoy crafting regions with other players, and I'm going to love it.