Conventioneering
A couple times a year I get together with a few tens of thousands of friends-I-haven’t-met-yet at a shindig called PAX. I have the great pleasure of being an [E]nforcer with the Line Entertainment team, which is a great gig if you can get it. Bullying people (politely) into having fun while they wait for a panel? The best way to spend a weekend.
We have a few tricks up our sleeve for this. Trivia. Polls. Conversation.
Or the one thing no attendee can resist: Fabulous Prizes.
In years past one of my favorite ways to entertain a line was to run something vaguely like Dungeons and Dragons. In the first iteration of my design I had a spinny wheel with eight monsters on it of varying difficulty. Roll a d20, hit the DC, win a prize. Use a pipe cleaner to make your “class weapon” and earn a second roll. It worked pretty well, until we lost the d20. And the spinny thingy. And the pipe cleaners.
For the last six months or so I’ve been building a simple SaaS app in Django to solve some of the problems I’ve run into as a Line Entertainer. Not least of which, the missing spinny thingy and d20. It has a trivia module that seems to work pretty well, although I need to cram some more trivia into it. It’s got a polls app that also seems to work pretty well, at least in my testing.
My latest idea? I’m calling it a Grand Campaign, and it’s the natural evolution of my old D&D line trick.
Imagine, if you will, being presented with a choice:
- Punch the dragon.
- Marry the dragon.
- Steal the dragon.
How do you steal a dragon? Exactly.
You choose, you roll a die, and your roll plus those of three or four hundred of your closest friends controls the outcome, and the narrative progresses over the course of the weekend through a branching story that you can check in on any time you happen to be standing in line in desperate need of Entertainment.
It’s not the most complicated game in the world, but it scales to however many people are there. However many want to engage with it. And it’s a lot more interesting than whether or not Kobold B217 dies this round or next. So I’m kind of excited to see how it shapes up.
I’d like to put the finishing touches on this software by the end of next week, so that I can move on to other projects. But hey, if you’re at PAX Unplugged later this year maybe you’ll get to participate. I hope you do. I hope you have the best time ever. Or else.
Love What You Do
There goes a famous saying:
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Variously attributed to just about anyone smart who is both old and dead. Word on the street is Confucius said it, though my money’s on a random high school teacher who wanted his students to believe it came from someone wiser than him.
Or, alternatively:
Convince someone to pay you for the thing you wanted to do anyway.
Which is attributed to me, because I just said it. Right now.
Here’s the thing. I literally cannot stop inventing new games. Walk around the park? Invent a game. Cooking soup? Invent a game. Playing a game? Oh you better believe I’m inventing a game.
Or, if not inventing. Refining. I haven’t played a game in the last ten years that I didn’t immediately start attempting to improve.
Someone much smarter than me probably would have noticed this and thought to themselves, “self… Uh… Have you considered maybe doing something with games?”
And I mean, yeah, if you’ve read my first blog post I had. My response would have been “yeah, and the company I worked for was so abusive that I spent the next 20 years trying to figure out how to not do that again.”
But here’s the thing. It’s turned the eight hours of my day that I’m stuck at work into dead time. I spend every other waking hour trying to take on various creative projects to fill the gap.
Which means things that I would like to be purely leisurely pursuits get pushed into the cracks around the edge. I live in terror of looking back in three or four years and feeling like I wasted my nights and evenings by having fun or relaxing.
Here’s my hunch: if I had a so-called “day job” that I found creatively fulfilling, I wouldn’t feel the same pressure to be productive the rest of the time, and I would be able to let myself rest and relax on evenings and weekends. Or at least have hobbies other than starting another company.
My guiding light in this, and many things, are the fine folks at Penny Arcade who have managed to build a career out of doing what they wanted to do anyway. I’m sure it’s not all rainbows and unicorn farts, but I get the sense that they’re as close as anyone gets to having a job that doesn’t feel like work.
Which, in turn, tells me that it’s possible. With hard work and a bit of luck, there’s no reason to think I couldn’t swing for the fence and get there too.
A Little Bit About Me
A Little Bit About Me
It’s possible you might know me, but if you don’t: hi. I’m Professional Internet Wizard Contrariwise.
I was born in the late 20th century on the West coast of America, but currently live in the sparkling southern-flavored Midwest[^Texas.].
Over the years I’ve done lots of things. I started my career in video games, worked on an MMO, burned out, did spreadsheets for nonprofits, got back in like with computers. But like. Not in like like with them. Y’know?
I have a day job making the world a little bit better in small and non-obvious ways for people who will never know my name. Many people would be happy with that.
But I was meant to be an artist. An artiste, if you will. A visual philosopher if you’re nasty.
Which means that I’ve never actually been very satisfied with the entire concept of a day job. I’m not even convinced that it’s possible for me to be. Which gets us to this blog. And why I started another one.
I think. Maybe. I should have stayed in video games? It was deeply abusive. To many people it still is. Video games aren’t a field you work in because they pay well, or because you want to have a work-life balance.
You do it because you feel COMPELLED by the DEMON in your SPLEEN to make ART for PEOPLE.
Weird art. Where the people are also books somehow? Like books are alive and they have names and it’s colonial America and you need to do some resource management about it?
Or like. An RPG setting where the whole city is also kind of a clock but nobody knows how to wind it until one day it TICKS and everything changes?
But also maybe every website is secretly a monster you can collect and battle and none of them are Pikachu. Not even one.
And here’s the thing. Nobody else is going to make any of these. So if I don’t, the only version of them that ever gets to exist is the one that lives in my head. And also maybe now your head. Because if I’ve done my job maybe you’re infected by a tiny little crumb of my SPLEEN DEMON and you, too, need to know what it would be like if the Industrial Revolution had happened to ancient Egypt and now you have to build a space train to catch the sun.
So I made this blog to document the process. Of maybe putting down a very successful, very reasonable career, that lots of people I know would be much happier than I am to have, and instead trying to appease the SPLEEN DEMON.
Best case scenario, it becomes a living log of the process of becoming something new. Worst case scenario future archaeologists get to study it to try to figure out where my life went so, so wrong.
Either way, it’s probably going to be interesting. Why don’t you come along?