5 posts tagged “brainstorming”

Alright, really, let's face it.  There's nothing really life or death on my plate right now, and the only thing that's going to get the gears in my brain to spin up is to start writing about something that's been bouncing around in there for weeks.  Since I don't have a "trusted system" in the GTD sense of the word, it's just been eating up processor time.

You might have noticed that I've been pretty vocal about how much I'd been digging PMOG in the last few weeks.  You might have also noticed a sudden, sharp drop in my nattering.  This is mostly because I felt like I hit a wall with PMOG where the signal to noise ratio tipped too far in the wrong direction.  Or maybe not the signal to noise ratio.  Maybe the possibility for interaction. 

The geeks and early adopters that pick up on sites like PMOG have plenty of suggestions about what they want to see on PMOG, and they have a forum that's chock full of posts about.  Maybe it's just me, but I have a serious aversion to bulletin boards as a way of producing meaningful discourse.  I mean, talk about terrified sequential monologues, especially when no one wants to bother reading a thread that's gone out of control before they add their two cents.  But I digress.  The fact that you can't get any sort of notification if someone posts to a topic you've created, or a topic you've chosen to monitor is exemplar of the sort of basic interaction nuts and bolts that PMOG is currently missing.

PMOG is mainly a bank of "Missions" which are analogous to PowerPoint presentations that span multiple web pages.  A nicer way of saying it is that they're like picture books.  And like a good Richard Scarry book, the folks who read them should want to come back to the sites you've marked along the way to look for the informational equivalent of Gold Bug (a precursor to Waldo) on every page.  The people who take your missions get points for every site they visit, and you get points for every person who completes a mission that you've constructed.  Players can rate missions, and leave comments.  If someone rates a mission you've made or leaves a comment about it, you also receive no notification, so you're left to go back through your missions to check for new comments.  Tedious at best.

They also didn't really bother with any kind of comment threading on PMOG (something I still dislike about VOX, even if their "Reply To" option almost does the trick), so if someone asks a question or makes an interesting remark about something you've built, you can't respond to it except through a private message.  It seems to me that discussing a thought-provoking or otherwise interesting mission would be the best way to get players to interact.  They are, after all, the crux of game play.

I've also gotten frustrated by the fact that once a mission has been created, a few folks will take it and then it will basically fade into obscurity.  Missions are always being made about a few of the same topics, webcomics being one of the most glaring examples.  One of two things would be nice: I would like to be able to tweak and refine my missions and keep them in the public eye; I also think it would be an awesome game element if players could argue over and make adjustments to missions that didn't belong to them.  That case always reminds me of memory palaces, and I love the thought of spinning off an entirely different system (an entirely different game?) that builds a glittering city of memory palaces which players fight over, mark up, knock down, and rebuild.  I'd like to build that game, actually.

There's an entire subgenre of PMOG hackers who try to build missions with branching paths, but I've heard scuttlebutt that there's something in the works for that, so I won't go into it much here.

You can build a list of acquaintances, allies, and rivals and see what they're up to.  Unfortunately, although it seems to show you if they've stashed a crate or foiled a mine (actions which are just about as meaningless as they sound), you don't see if they've built a new mission.  At least I don't think you do. 

While we're on the topic, though, there isn't really a lot of point to making someone an ally or a rival.  More to the point, the main mode of conflict in the game focuses around devices that take away the number of points you have.  Points are currency, points can buy you stuff to build missions, take away other people's points, or protect yourself or others from people who want to steal your points.  Sure, sure, whuffie is the currency of the internet (although losing these points doesn't mean that someone else gains your reputation points or that you lose yours), but at this point, we're still just watching numbers go up and down. 

There are "levels" which are (so far) meaningless.  We've heard several times that there's some meaning coming at some point, and thus far, whenever the PMOG staff makes updates, they are usually pretty awesome (unlike certain other sites I could mention... *cough* *cough* VOX *cough*), but I really think that if you want to encourage even a playful sense of warfare between your users, you've got to come up with something better than making points go up and down.  Nerds are a prankish lot, and I think there ought to be some sort of hypertextual equivalent of a "kick me" sign that would really get your gall up and make you plot some serious revenge.  Literally being able to draw bunny ears onto a user's MySpace profile (visible only to other PMOGers, of course) or possibly turning them into a YTMND would probably be good options.  The second one, though, relies on being able to get the word out that so-and-so has been YTMND'd in order to maximize the need for revenge.

Anyway, that stuff is a lot more like taking the game in an entirely different direction, but it does focus on my core point.  I have a really hard time interacting with other PMOGers, which, I think, is the point of a game, right?

November is creeping up on all of us-- that time of year when I stand in naked awe of others' ability to unselfconsciously write reams of drek in the name of Ars Gratia Artis.  That's right, it's NaNoWriMo.  Alright, alright, some of it isn't drek, but that remains more or less the point of it, "Don't worry about writing well, just write because it is its own reward."

That's basically the driving philosophy behind a lot of the bands that I really dig (and why Half Japanese is inexorably wearing down my hardened heart to their autistic stylings).  And the reason it's such a vital impulse is because it is so shamefully impossible for me to be like that, especially where the written word is concerned.  With a few years of "higher education" under my belt, I've ended up like Twain reading the river* when I open a book.  Okay, okay, he uses books as a metaphor in this, so it's a little thick, but whatever.  You're just going to have to get over it.  The point is that I am acutely aware of how much my verbal skill have atrophied over the years, and I have big dreams and high standards in those regards.  Maybe I'll explain someday, but usually when I try, I just run circles around my point and end up sounding like a tool.

Anyway, I love the idea of a month of forced creativity.  It's cheap, and it's inspiring, and naturally I am always inclinded to put my own spin on these sorts of things.  In the weeks leading up to the event, I have come up with the following things I'd like to burn through:

• National Web Programming Month - I have always had a million ideas for sites I want to build, but I've never set aside the time.
• National Barrage of Short Writing Pieces Month - Try to match the NaNoWriMo word count in lots of smaller pieces.  I need to get back into writing for WHM, I promised several of you to teach you about web programming, etc.  I'm sure I could create a schedule of what kind of writing I had to do on any given day, and a word count to go with it.
• National RPG Writing Month - Yes, I want to write a tabletop game.  I've got several ideas that loll around in my head that have never made it out.  The trouble with this idea is mainly in that it's not world-writing I want to do, mainly, it's mechanics, and it's harder to just set quotas and go when doing stuff like that.

And, of course, I could just dive in and try to write a novel.  An incredibly crappy novel that I'd hate.

The overall odds of me having the time to really do any of this are shaky at best, considering that some nights I go to sleep before I even bother to check my email.  Still, I wish that things like the Write-Ins would happen all year 'round, providing the social equivalent of knitting groups to writers and web monkeys everywhere.  Something like Jelly for people who don't actually make a living at the stuff they're doing.  Amateur Jelly.  Google that and see where it takes you, I'm too scared to look.

On the other hand, maybe it's just a colossal excuse to get around the very real possibility that I should be spending an extra 20-25 hours a week working a cash register so that the end of a pay period didn't always signal such existential angst, triggered by a WASP-y identity problem associating fiscal solvency with personal merit.

*You'll have to scroll down to Chapter 9 yourself, sorry.

Everyone who might have something for me to do is unavailable for comment, so the Goulet level has been raised again.  As the new boss' five year old daughter reportedly said, of kindegarten: "It's hard being good all day."

The three day weekend is my excuse and I'm sticking to it.  Anyway, I've been kicking around another fun idea for a group and I wanted to get some feedback on interest and procedure.  In Wonder Boys (I speak of the film from experience, but I assume this is part of the book as well), Tripp and Terry have this game where they make up quick biographical sketches of characters they see around them in bars, on the street, etc.  Regardless of anything else I might have to say about the movie, I've always wanted to do something like that.

First of all, do you think that sounds like something you might want to do?

Second, there are a few logistical problems that I have to tackle in order to come up with some rules and procedures.

Where do we get the photos?

• Photos are supplied by members and the moderator (a.k.a. The Mook) picks from submissions - It's not a bad idea, but then members either have to be the sort of folks who go sneaking around taking photos of strangers, or they have to put their friends and relations up on the chopping block and we might feel a little bad about giving someone a particularly outlandish history.
• The moderator (a.k.a. the Mook) goes creeping around Flickr looking for interesting photos - This has the advantage that there are probably plenty of portrait shots and/or candids out there that we could find something interesting to say.  However, the photos wouldn't really be "ours" to make derivative work with.
• The members are left to their own devices to post whatever photos they find with no moderation - Also a possibility with some merit, but then, I suspect it would become more of a group about finding photos of interesting people, rather than writing about them.

• Weekly - We give everyone a whole week to write as many biographies as they like on our photo of the week.  Good for people who have busy lives, but it would reduce the urgency of writing something off the cuff, which I think is going to be part of the fun, rather than crafting something really well thought out and brilliant.
• Weekly (with multiples) - On the other hand, I could post a weekly batch of a few photos and give everyone a week to write posts on any or all of them.  Again, this doesn't mean you have to be super quick on the draw, but could be a compromise.
  
• Daily - This, on the other hand, seems like it wouldn't be enough time to post and comment on a bunch of stories.
• Something else - Oh yeah?  If you're so clever, you come up with it.

• I have finally managed to reduce the amount of useless swag I have laying around my house, so the best I could manage would be a new vending machine prize every week, mailed to your home address, or a strangely photoshopped "award" photo. 
  
• I dig the anarchic structure of the Calliope, but this sort of suggests a competition with a single "best" entry.  Then again, maybe not.

Always a fan of wasting a bit of time, I've continued to use my Twitter account in a vaccum where no one's really watching.  However, in all this time I have come up with a few better ideas for what you can do with Twitter other than answer the rather lame question, "What are you doing?"

• Stuck... In... My... Head!  Post the lyric you're repeating over and over from the song that's stuck in your head.  Inflict it on someone else.
• Look, A Three Headed Monkey!  You've just seen something on the street that you can't believe.  Make a note of it.  I've also tried applying this to links to things from the web, when I don't want to pop them into del.icio.us
• [ lightbulb ] Something incredibly insightful (or so you think) has just occurred to you.  Declare it to the world.  I suspect this becomes even more fun when chemically altered.  And it will probably give your friends more things to make fun of you for.
• Punch the Clock For a while, I was using twitter to log my time, since our time clock web app cares mostly about the time you started working on a project and the time you finished, rather than just allowing you to enter a certain number of hours on a certain task.  Useful, but boring to your readers.
• Invectives Need to curse at the heavens?  Curse at Twitter!
  
• The Murakami Approach There's a Haruki Murakami story called "The Fall of the Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, And The Realm of Raging Winds" and you should read it.  In the Twitter implementation, this story would be four twitters, followed up the following weekend by four blog posts.  If it doesn't make sense now, read the story and it probably will.
  

Thousands of identical housing stations hung in orbit over a gas giant in the Liverpool cluster.  From the huge docking facility on one of its moons, they looked like someone had dashed a bowl of off-white rotini across a poached gull's egg.  As soon as the thought occurred to him, Ruben rolled over so he could vomit into the open trough of coolant where he had collapsed the night before, somewhere between the pub and the dance hall.

He watched the chunky mixture of sausage and gin whisked away, and as the faint preservative smell of the coolant wiggled its way into the edges of his senses, he gasped suddenly and vomited again.  Content that the volume of swill he'd just watch disappear into the trough was roughly the same as the size of his stomach, he flopped onto his back and started watching the glittering web of space stations and waited for the headache to set in.

-----

In a dark corner of a dark alehouse, a small man was intensely staring at his fingers.  As his wide shoulders rose and fell with long, deep breaths, his hands shifted from the pink of poppies to the white of carnations.  Over the course of a long hour and a stout that was taller than he was, the wild oscillations of color subsided into something that could pass in a crowd for somewhere in the regular spectrum of melanin.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, may be all he writes.  At least with this exact idea.  Wrenching that from my brain made me realize that I had no frame of reference for writing about hanging around in space.  The smells, the sights, the cultural associations.  I'd have to work that all out at the same time I was writing my story, and that there would be no natural flow.  So, as they might say, I yelled "Hard alee!" and changed course.

We're knocking the novel back to nineteenth century earth and instead of mixing it up with Joss Whedon sci-fi, we'll be mixing it up with Baz Lurhman/Julie Taymor anachronism/post-modernism.  That should match the flow of my thoughts pretty closely, and if I want to know what was going on in the South Seas in 1841 or some such, I will be able to look it up, rather than have to invent it out of whole cloth. I adore details, and a lot of times when I write these things, I go right to archetypes and there's no meat on the bones of my story.

Well, maybe this wouldn't stop untrained writers, but it stops me.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think my novel is going to be that much better than anyone else's, just that once you've got an English degree, certain things make you feel like such a failure that you can't even begin.  And I need to get past that roadblock.

You'll probably see this piece of text in a slightly modified form in the new story, too.  I just don't want to have to be thinking, "Would they have ever even seen a poppy?  Would they know what a gull's egg looks like?" every step of the way.