What’s happening around here in 2010? Well, I’ve set a few goals for myself.
Read More: Pretty straightforward, no? I reread a lot of the old classics last year, and got to enjoy some of them for the first time. This year, I’m going to continue that trend and read half again my usual quantity.
Write More: My writing output suffered quantitatively a little bit in 2009, mostly because it was such a big year personally. We bought a house, which, as any homeowner knows, takes up a lot of time both in the search and in the ownership. Additonally, it’s taken me a little bit of time and effort to warm up to my office. With the office feeling more like, well, home, I really want to take advantage of having an entire room devoted to being the place where I go to “be creative.”
Blog More: Part of writing more means writing more consumable material. This blog is a great place for me to not only practice writing, but to open discussions and to solicit feedback on things I’ve been thinking about or working on. Granted, with a lot of my professional material still under wraps, I’m sort of limited in what I can put up here, but blogging more will mean expanding more on what I do talk about here. Hopefully it’s useful to readers as well as me as a writer.
Game More: I need more time at the tabletop. I ran a handful of tabletop games over the course of the year and fiddled a bit with some brief scenarios played over lunches sporadically, but I want to get back into a regular group. It’s harder than ever to coordinate the schedules of busy players in my regular group, but it needs to be done. I also want more time in online games and forums, working with community and building things — worlds, games, experiences and stories — collaboratively. Whether it’s dusting off an old project and taking it public or starting something new from the ground up, it’s time to play by new rules.
There’s Always Room to Get Better: I’ve spent fifteen years of my professional life working on storytelling games. I’m enjoying the challenge at work of taking those lessons learned and adapting them to video games and MMOs in particular. Not much of it is visible right now because we’re developing internally, but it’ll be openly available at some point, and I really want it to be something the players enjoy. To that end, I’m reading books on design, testing designs in practice, and pushing the boundaries of what once was the boundary of my skill. That’s something I want to continue to do.
Fatherhood: More than anything else, I want to be a good father to my daughter. It presents challenges, in that it’s changed my old priorities, enforced new limitations, and given me something new and wonderful to undertake. It’s a road I’m really enjoying walking, because there’s nothing quite like the smile of someone who’s in the world because of you to make the world fresh and new again.
Those are some damn fine goals.
The future is never ‘now’ – by definition. There is only now. ;-)
Soon the future will one day be now again.
[...] players matter, playtesting, RPGs, v20, vampire by jachilli Last year, one of my goals was to undertake a collaborative project. I had a start or two, none of which panned out — I wanted something to happen with CLIO, but it [...]