Saalon Muyo

This is the second article in a series inspired by Paul Lockhart’s essay “A Mathematician’s Lament.” It is a meditation on Art, Mathematics and Education. The first part, “Why Them Kids Don’t Learn Nothing,” is primarily about education. This second part talks about art as a process of discovery, and the third part, “How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love the Verse” is a story of my first experiences with poetry.

One of the things that always fascinated me about J.R.R. Tolkien’s work on Lord of the Rings was his attitude that he was not the creator of his stories, but the discoverer of them. He often attributed inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his works to this fact. The story was not inconsistent, he had just misunderstood what he was unearthing. This isn’t an uncommon view amongst artists. “The greatest artist has no single concept which a rough marble block does not contain already in its core,” Michelangelo wrote above sculpture, and J. Michael Straczynski has compared his writing to unearthing artifacts.

The idea that the artist’s work is more about discovering and communicating patterns and ideas already out there, somewhere, in the ether is one I share. Writing, to me, has always involved two major steps. The first is abstract, a sort of reaching out blindly and feeling out the overall shape of the story. When I describe this part I talk a lot about themes and scope and pace, but it’s really not that technical. By the end, the most I have is closer to a probability cloud than an outline. I can see the shape, and I can sense the feeling it gives me, but that’s about it. From there, it feels a lot like passing questions and ideas through the cloud and seeing how they fit. If they fit. If I’ve “created” anything at all, it was the initial cloud. After that, the only things I can take credit for are discovering the correct pieces. The things I create whole-cloth from that point are the ideas that are dead wrong and have no place in the story.

Trust me, I get that this is a hokey, dippy way of discussing the creative process, and it likely sounds as if I’m wearing a tin hat, waiting for the otherworldly transmissions to get through. That’s not what I mean, and this is exactly why talking about a creative process - any creative process - is either superficial and incorrect, or slightly less incorrect but sounds batshit insane.

I do believe that there’s an important, powerful process of discovery present in any artistic creation. It’s about finding something that vibrates at that perfect frequency. The one that, when someone else reads or views what you’ve made, comes across as more true than truth. Doing that is, I think, more alchemical than just making things up and slapping them down on the page.

But if art is just discovery, why are some people successful at it and others not? Are they just worse archaeologists? No, because it’s not just discovery. It’s only part of the process. The other part is communicating that idea. That’s where things get ugly.

The art is not in the “truth” but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant.

- Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

Before Paul Lockhart starts talking about how poorly we teach mathematics, he talks passionately about what mathematics is. It’s not, he states, about adding numbers together. It’s about finding patterns, the communicating them. As he says, the art of mathematics is not the fact itself, but how that fact is expressed. Two equations can express the same fact, but one can be superior by expressing it more beautifully.

The first thing I wrote about after taking in “Lockhart’s Lament” was a bunch of stuff about education, but it wasn’t the first thing that grabbed me while reading. What hit me like one of those Japanese war clubs you see Oni carrying in woodblock carvings was how similar Lockhart’s description of mathematics was to my own creative process. Is mathematics a purer art than the others? Maybe. For the moment, I don’t care. Better, purer, whatever - I finally got why people became mathematicians. The art of mathematics holds the same lure as the art of writing or painting: The siren call of bringing into the world a unique and beautiful argument about the very nature of the world.

This is a major theme in mathematics: things are what you want them to be. You have endless choices; there is no reality to get in your way.

- Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

When I look with skepticism upon stories whose primary objective is realism, I do so partly because I can’t understand why someone would part with the freedom the form has given them. Much as Lockhart decries the boiling of mathematics education down to a series of complicated but rote “proofs” of obvious things (like the angles of symmetrically crossed lines being equal), I chafe at the notion of writing’s primary function to be journalistic. While the chronicling of actual things is a noble pursuit, in writing - like mathematics - you have endless choices. As Lockhart points out about math classes: there are cases where 1 + 1 != 2.

And yet, even with complete freedom, there are rules. The trick with art, any art, is twofold. You must be boldly creative while conforming to the physics of your chosen playground. The real beauty of creating something is the duality of the process. Your imagination must run wild while your express the fruits of your imagination in a way that rings true. At its core, mathematics plays by sets of rules that cannot be ignored. Writing is the same way. So is painting. But those physics, those rules, change depending on where your imagination takes you. “Everything is relative and relational,” is how Lockhart puts it. Indeed.

Look at Michelangelo. Within his art, the art of creating images, his choices were limitless. All that mattered was the intended effect it would have on its audience. The hard work begins once he took his first step. Deciding to communicate through sculpture put certain boundaries, certain rules on how he could work. Everything is possible in art, perhaps, but stone carries certain, immutable properties. So does fresco, but those properties are almost entirely different than those of stone. Everything is relative and relational.

Doing mathematics should always mean discovering patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations.

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

I wish I could have described my own art form as beautifully as Lockhart describes his. The best I can do is take his statement and change “doing mathematics” to “writing.” The patterns we find as writers are different than those found by mathematicians, but no less important. They serve a different purpose to their audiences, but are no less in need of people to craft beautiful and meaningful explanations for them.

Until reading Lockhart’s essay, I never truly understood mathematics. It seemed to me a powerful and important scientific tool. I was wrong. Mathematics is no mere tool to express scientific fact just as writing is not simply a means of transmitting factual information. These are applications of wide and versatile art forms. That a writer can use his craft to record history as easily as he tells a faerie tale is a testament to its power. For the first time, I understand that math’s role in physics and chemistry is no different. We’re both finding our own patterns and struggling to master the means of expressing them.

Grasping a little of what makes math an art, I’m looking back to my own playground and understanding it a little better. As Lockhart and Tolkien and Michelangelo and Straczynski have explained in their own words, art is exploration and creation and discovery and communication all at once. If we talk about it like archaeologists unearthing artifacts, it’s not only because we’re crazy. It’s because we’re looking for a way to make you believe triangles can fly.

This is the first article in a series inspired by Paul Lockhart’s essay “A Mathematician’s Lament.” It is a meditation on Art, Mathematics and Education. This first part is primarily about education. The second part, “If Triangles Could Fly” talks about art as a process of discovery and the third part, “How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love the Verse” is a story of my first experiences with poetry.

I’m not sure if you noticed, but there are a lot of people who think our system of education is fundamentally broken. In fact, gallons of ink and billions of pixels have been conscripted to communicate how much danger we think we’re in and solutions we will never implement. It helps that every one of these thinkers and nearly everyone in the audience went through some version of the same story, giving us all common ground on which to debate. If nothing else proves the theory that we have educational problems, that everyone can read an article damning our system and nod their heads for most of it should do the trick. Unfortunately, a lot of those people nodding will suggest or support solutions that only escalate the problem. So it goes.

I’m one of the many who look back on my trip through school with cynicism, not just because of my own experienced, but because of what I watched the system do to my friends. I was lucky, too. I attended a well funded, middle-class public school. We didn’t have serious problems with violence to deal with, and we had enough money in the budget to keep our textbooks less than 10 years behind the times. I was able to join a marching band that provided school-owned instruments to the students going without, and the students in art class had, you know, art supplies. I could have had it a lot worse, yet most of the problems endemic in my school system were the same as those both above and below my school’s means. The blow was softened by economic factors, but we still got bludgeoned a bit.

Paul Lockhart’s excellent essay “Lockhart’s Lament” goes into (25 page) detail on the problem of our mathematics education in our school system, and he gets everything right except his assertion that our mathematics curriculum is more onerous than the rest. I understand why he thinks this; I would have said the same about my own art of choice while saying that at least in math, there’s occasionally a verifiable right or wrong answer to keep mean spirited teachers at bay. As Lockhart notes, though, the facade of absolute correctness in mathematics makes it that much easier to teach incorrectly. So it seems we’re both right; our subjects of interest are taught in the wrong way. The logical conclusion can only lead to depression: we aren’t teaching much of anything correctly.

What other subject shuns its primary sources— beautiful works of art by some of the most creative minds in history— in favor of third-rate textbook bastardizations?

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

The answer is: all of them. Much as I thought that forcing the Pythagorean Theorum on kids at least taught a true thing, Lockhart believes forcing every high school student to progress through the same three Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet) at least does not shun some of the most important literature written. He’s correct in a way, but much as requiring the memorization of the Pythagorean Theorum is inferior to allowing children to explore why triangles work the way they do, memorizing facts about a work they must agree is good before they’ve read it is inferior to allowing children to discover what makes art great - and to define greatness on their own terms.

The same can be said for every discipline we teach, save for, perhaps, graphic arts and music. These subjects are not on a standardized test and have not been reduced to a series of educational milestones, and so the teachers of them have more latitude. The flip side is that these are the first subjects to lose their funding for precisely the same reasons. The people who went through band or chorus or art got something out of it. It’s just not available to kids in every school.

English teachers know that spelling and pronunciation are best learned in a context of reading and writing. History teachers know that names and dates are uninteresting when removed from the unfolding backstory of events. Why does mathematics education remain stuck in the nineteenth century?

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

I wish to God Lockhart was right. The problems in our curriculum run as deep as they can, corrupting every subject the demons of standardization can get their hands on. If teachers knew that spelling and pronunciation were learned in the context of reading and writing, multiple years would not have been spent diagramming sentences. If history teachers knew that names and dates were uninteresting when removed from their narrative context, there would have been something on my history tests beyond names and dates. If social studies teachers cared about producing civil-minded students, we would have discussed the Declaration of Independence and not memorized it. Our entire educational system is stuck in the 19th century, and shows no sign of getting out.

When the No Child Left Behind act was passed, in all its Orwellian name-reversing glory, it calcified a system that puts plain facts above context, creativity and analysis. Encoding a silly, memorized equation within a poorly written word problem actually makes it more insidious than the initial trauma of memorization because it pretends to be about something other than rote fact-cramming. Beyond all arguments about how best to make students interested in subjects, and how to build context for them, fact-cramming simply does not work. Years ago on Saturday Night live, Father Guido Sarducci advertised his Five Minute University that would teach only the things you’re going to remember: Supply and Demand, “¿Como está usted?” and “Where is God?”. That’s it. And that’s about all people remember from a curriculum composed of fact-cramming.

No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a “mixed number,” while 5/2 is an “improper fraction.” They’re equal for crying out loud. They are the same exact numbers, and have the same exact properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

I’m reminded of my middle-school English classes, where we were tested on the definition of words like “gerund”, “participle” and “transitive verb” on a weekly basis. Outside of school - hell, outside of middle-school - no one proofreads a friend or colleague’s work and writes about their use of a dangling participle. They comment on words and punctuation that decrease its readability. That’s how we approach writing: how well does it express what it means to say? No one diagrams a sentence during proofreading, and the time spent diagramming sentences in fifth grade does not produce more readable work. The word “gerund” will likely never pass the lips of 90% of the people out of school.

Much as Lockhart is disturbed by the redundant nomenclature in math curriculum, I look back at my time in English classes and shudder at how they nearly destroyed the curiosity and love I had for language. 2 1/2 and 5/2 are equal in the same way “John watched as his soup boiled over.” and “John watched the pot as soup boiled over the edge.” mean the same thing. That one uses a transitive and one uses an intransitive verb is unimportant. The differences lie in clarity and impact, just as they do when you choose to write a fraction as 2 1/2 or 5/2. Learning names for the differences before discussing how they read is counterintuitive.

High School Geometry: Instrument of the Devil

-Paul Lockhart, “A Mathematician’s Lament”

Why is our education system failing? Every subject in our curriculum reaches some point analogous to High School Geometry. Literature has Composition, Social Studies gives us Civics and Science teaches us Physics. Each of these classes take a core idea in its discipline and strip away everything save for rules without context that must be memorized and applied across the same sequence of homework problems, over and over again.

Composition is the damned art of putting words on paper, yet the class does little save forcing students to work through predefined style templates on a limited list of topics. Physics is the study of how the universe functions, but is taught the same way as Lockhart describes Geometry: lots of symbology, little crashing objects into one another. And as for Civics, a class which purports to cover the implications of the American Experiment, it can’t bother to do more than require its students memorize the names of our court systems. My civics class could be passed using nothing other than the Awesome Notebook passed down from classes past. Yours could as well, I’d wager.

I wish Lockhart was right. I wish that only mathematics was so corrupted as to teach its students effectively nothing. He’s not, and it’s not. Our system of education is built on principles so faulty that it should have collapsed years ago. We condemn buildings this unsafe and then we implode the things so that they won’t accidentally crush their occupants. Until we do the same to our schools, students will continue to emerge with their curiosity and creativity left as little more than splatters on the Chemistry Lab floor.

It’s been two weeks since our last talk.  Welcome back to the spotlight.

thanks, eric … yikes, two weeks already?

Scary, isn’t it?  We’re almost to the finish line.  I’d like to talk a little about your interaction with the community this time.  But first, the important question: Are you going to make it to 14 and a half?

that’s looking grim, man…. on the plus side, i got the half-song done last night. but i’m cutting it really close. i have only 8 completed songs, and there are just 5 days and change left before official event cut-off… ok, let’s say YES. yes, i will make it to 14. but take that with a big grain of “i hope.”

I have faith in you.  Your writing, to me, seems to be getting stronger and more confident as the month goes on.  Is that just my perception?

well it’s interesting that you should say so, cause any changes you might see in my writing over the course of this month stem from a complete deficit of confidence.

i keep having ideas that are about 10 x more ambitious than my skill on any given instrument, and end up feeling so awful about the whole thing that i’m really stripping it down to basics. of the last 5 songs i posted, 4 have had simpler arrangements than anything i’ve done before

that might come across as me being more confident in the songs themselves, or my voice, or whatever, but in the spirit of full disclosure, i’m arranging within my instrumental prowess.

that being said, i’m becoming more enamored with the stripped down isaac sound, and i just may carry on in that vein after this torturous month is over.

It’s funny you should mention the simpler stylings.  I challenged you earlier this month to produce a stripped-down song, and was surprised to see not 1, but 3 far simpler arrangements.  Did I cross a journalistic line?

hahah i’m so totally your bitch

well as you saw on the site, i originally wrote a piano and vocal piece based on your challenge, although i did put in some sound effects. after that, i found that things just seemed to work better with the bare-bones instrumentation. i do have a song in progress that’s in-your-face loud and elaborate, so i haven’t given up on that aesthetic…. but yeah, i’d say your challenge opened me up to what i’ve been doing over the last week for sure.

but you were my friend and an artistic inspiration long before you became my interviewer anyway. if anything, this journalism gig is crossing a friendship line.

Touche, and thanks for the segue to community involvement.  What effect does the feedback from the community have on your writing?  In such a compressed time frame with such a small social circle it must carry a different impact than normal critique.

indeed it does.

comments on one’s early FAWM songs can really inform the creation of future ones.

last year, i set out to make a bunch of pop songs, and it was people’s response to my branching out that led to fawm 2007’s output being a mishmash of genres and mood experiments.

this year, i’ve found that the feedback has influenced me in slightly different ways.

i’m not so much striving to capture more sounds or more styles…. but rather i want to write more honestly.

i never noticed how many people comment primarily on lyrics.

obviously lyrics hold a place of supreme importance in music, and have differing value to every music listener.

but it’s almost like i didn’t discover until fawm 2008 that i could use lyrics to actually move people, instead of just making them laugh or roll their eyes or whatever.

some people in the community picked up on the poignancy behind some lines in my first few songs, so that kind of drove me off that cliff of “too much information”

and i posted this ridiculously revealing song about my relationship with my father. well there was no turning back from there. i’ve still been posting a mixture of fictional songs with autobiographical songs, but i feel like everything has been more raw and emotional.

(hopefully without being trite or cloying…. feedback thusfar looks like i pulled it off, knock on wood)

How about other people’s music?  Do you find that’s an important influence as the month stretches on?

in some ways it is. to be completely honest, commenting slows to a crawl at this time of the month. basically, you have hundreds of fawmers desperately hurrying to reach the quota of 14.5 songs, and the total number of streamable demos has grown so large (2,428 as i type this) that every individual song starts receiving less and less attention.

but up until that turning point where people stop listening as much and focus primarily on writing (usually mid-week 3), people take tons of inspiration from others’ music.

i know that for me, hearing another person do something unexpected is the most inspirational for me.

i mean, there are lots of amazing songs posted by some very talented people… but when someone breaks free from their creative comfort zone and does something risky or reckless, that’s when i look over at jackie t (that’s my electric) and start wanting to write.

Do you have a tight circle within the community who you keep in contact with?

i wouldn’t say it’s tight. you see the same names recur on the same FAWMers’ songs a lot, mostly because of the way they have the site set up with a “watchlist” of your favourite songwriters.

there’s a few people on there whose music i appreciate so much (and it seems to be mutual) that we interact a bit more personally than with others. and a handful of FAWMers have ended up on my chat software.

your question actually shines a light on the biggest thing i would want to tell an outsider about FAWM… and that is, the community will give back to you whatever you put into the community. someone who joins FAWM, posts a bunch of songs but never comments on other people’s songs, and the only time they post on the forum is to put up a whiny message like, “how come [name]’s songs have 20 comments apiece, but nobody’s even listened to mine?” well, that guy isn’t going to be too welcome.

but if you’re there to have fun, and you’re sharing your thoughts on other people’s ideas and music, they’ll listen to yours. it all sounds very obvious, but every year i’m surprised to see that some people just don’t get it.

You mentioned you were planning on collaborating this time.  Has that happened?

it has! i had a collaboration planned out with elaine dimasi, the FAWMer from new york who covered my “nisku” song. but i ended up begging off until next month because of the tight deadlines, etc.

then last night, i received an IM from burr, the guy who runs the site (the “founding FAWMer”), and he invited me to contribute to a song he’d written.

it’s interesting, i’m actually quite self-conscious about the creation process itself. i very rarely let anybody hear anything until it’s in a state i consider presentable… so for my very first collaboration to be so spontaneous, and for it to be with the guy who runs this whole shebang… well, i’m impressed that i didn’t get all flustered or flake out.

it’s a good song! he had a killer riff to begin with, and after i added my verses, he went back and put the whole thing together. so while my contribution was minimal, it was a great introduction to the world of collaboration.

now i’m itchin’ to do more…. after FAWM, of course.

Does a collaboration count for both of you?  How does that work?

only one person is supposed to put a collaboration up (so it only counts towards one person’s “total” ticker), but they put the collaborator’s name in the song title so it comes up in searches.

so our collab shows under burr’s songs, as “talking in code (with Isaac Quatorze)”

but we can both count it as our half song

How about your non-FAWM life?  Is it surviving the month?

it’s surviving. i can’t remember if this came up during our last interview, but there’s a term on the site for the spouses / significant others of those participating in the event: FAWM widows. it’s sadly appropriate. i’ve been seeing my honey for brief 3-hour visits on saturdays, and i can barely focus on work these days.

Are the loved ones understanding of what the month does to your relationship?  Any tension?

well my family has been annoyed but they put up with it. and my very own best beloved FAWM widow has been nothing but supportive through it all, even offering to play any instruments for me while i carry on to writing the next song.

the biggest tension would be with work.

the timing is just so unfortunate. i was put on a new special project from february to april, which is very brain-intensive and requires frequent interruptions to meet with the group and share information, so i constantly have to fight the urge to start writing lyrics at work, and if i do fall into that trap, then my work suffers as a result.

Is it worse this year than last?

it is worse… much worse, for some reason. last year i had days and nights where i could sit at the piano or guitar for hours without anything coming to me. this year, i’ve had 3-4 day periods where i didn’t even want to see an instrument. it’s strange, i made a conscious effort not to let myself feel pressured by FAWM this year, and instead i’ve probably felt more pressure than i did in ‘07. AND i’m further behind by far.

I don’t want to keep you from your final sprint, so let’s wrap things up with this:  How bad is he last week of February going to be?

only time will tell…. i did, however, have the foresight to book off work on the 28th and 29th, so those will be two long days of the mad sprint. thanks for your encouragement eric, and for these thought-provoking interviews

And thank you for humoring me. Good luck!

When I last spoke to Denys about his participation in FAWM 2008, we were hours away from its start.  Now we’re a week in and songs have been written, which gave me the chance to talk a little about his writing process and what being a part of an event like FAWM feels like.  Read the full interview below.

One week down.  How are you feeling?

you’re leading with a biggie. ok… well in terms of my own writing, i’m feeling mostly-still-good … the panic hasn’t set in, although i haven’t completed a song since tuesday night.

as far as the whole event goes, i’ve got that euphoria i remember from last year, from the plentiful interactions with other participants, and especially from taking in all the great music being written by folks from all over.

big picture: i’m fine, thanks…

How about the small picture? Are the doubts starting to creep in yet?

indeed they are… but they haven’t reached that intolerable point yet.

Tuesday night i posted a song without being completely happy with it…. the intent was to move on, as i’d been working on that song for 4 days straight and i knew i would obsess over it forever if i didn’t force myself to call it a “done demo” for february and turn my attentions to new ideas.

the nasty surprise that followed was a drought of ideas. or rather, tons of things to say but no inclination to say them musically, hahah!

i took an intentional break from writing on wednesday, sat at the piano all evening thursday, played guitar all night friday… and nothing to show for those three days’ work, really.

i have a couple more songs in progress, but they’re very far from done.

How’s the caffeine ban holding up?  Had any more mochas?

that first weekend i blasted my body with three straight nights of caffeine, and was up until 3:30am on saturday.

haven’t touched caffeine since then, which — hmmmm — also happens to be the period of dried up musical output

i think you’re onto something, eric… the mochas might hold the key.

Well, well all know that drug induced states are the key to creativity, right?

what does it say about me (or my music) that i garner creative bursts from a maxwell house tin?

I think that puts you in the same boat as me, for whatever that’s worth.  What are you working on right now?

one of the songs i have in progress is a piano dirge which i sing in french… that one was inspired by a challenge you made earlier this week. you had essentially dared me to record something completely naked. i.e. take off the layers and layers of instruments and production i usually drench my songs with, and make something bare.

well that one’s just me and a reverbed piano… although i might not be able to resist putting a wind sound effect behind it.

a couple other ideas i’m working on are sort of on hold while grant partridge records some bass parts for me. i can’t play the bass or the drums, so he records parts based on demo clips i send him, and then i use his performances to build the tracks i end up completing.

Let’s talk about your work so far.  You’ve gotten 3 songs done .  Tell me a little about them.

sure, i’ll go in chronological order.

the first song — which veritably burst out of me like pent up ejaculate — was a bit of an eccentric slow-building piece built on repeated phrases, polyrhythmic guitars, claps and tambourine. it starts out a circular folk song with acoustic power chords, and by the end it’s almost a live drum ‘n bass track (around 160bpm with chirping synths). i started off strong, i think. the response to that song has been quite positive!

next i took my first dip in the “novelty/humor” category of the site’s offerings, something i never would have done last year. i wrote a sunny beach-pop tune about finding a severed leg in the snow and needing to call CSI Winnipeg to come investigate. it is what it is, i guess. it made people laugh, and i had fun recording it. can’t deny that recording anything tagged as “novelty” does feel a little bit hollow.

lastly, the song i spent four whole days on… it’s called “hoop of fire” and it basically turns the concept of johnny cash’s “ring of fire” on its ass, using the titular metaphor instead to represent the shoddiness of sexual hookups… and it examines the aftermath of such a hookup from a few years’ hindsight vantage point. musically, i’m really proud of where this one went, although i could still tool with it at length i’m sure. it’s a bouncy, jazzy pop number, sort of explodes from the speakers with organ slides and spiky guitars, and grant on the drums.

Do you have a favorite among the 3?

definitely “hoop of fire,” which incidentally is the demo i’m least satisfied with. but i never even knew i had a song like that in me. it’s basically…. grown up isaac quatorze, if that makes any sense. i feel like it’s musically more mature than i have made in the past.

Tell me a little bit about the anatomy of writing a single song.  When do you name it?  Where does it start?  What lets you know you’re onto a good idea and not a dead end?

generally, i don’t name a song until it’s almost done. most of my ideas start either with a phrase, or a pair of chords that sound real nice together. occasionally i’ll start with a melody, too. i’m very fortunate to be able to leap off from various starting points, so if i find i’m getting stuck with one idea, i can move to another instrument (or another language, apparently) and build another idea from scratch.

as for good ideas vs. dead ends, i can’t say i’ve mastered that distinction yet. as vague as this sounds, when something doesn’t work you just KNOW. it’s like putting your shoe on the wrong foot.

each of the 3 completed songs this year developed in a different way. “showered in nisku” assembled itself sonically without much help from me. “csi winnipeg” kind of grew out of those two words, and the song bloomed in my head before i even sat at the synth. “hoop of fire” came about from hours of toying with a capo and fucked up chord fingering.

Is this year feeling different than last year?

yes, in a number of ways…. i feel less pressured. all my moaning above about writer’s block notwithstanding, i really don’t mind if the month ends and i only have these 3 songs, as i’m enjoying myself and hearing lots of great music.

on another level, my interaction on the site is very different from last year. i was new blood in fawm 2007, kinda shy and didn’t really know what to say or how to draw attention to my songs. well this year, after having one of my songs featured on the FAWMpilation cd, and having my album up for free download since last year’s event, i almost feel like a mini-celebrity on the FAWM site.

two songs so far have been written that reference my own songs, and one of my 2008 songs has already been covered! go to youtube and search for “showered in nisku”… a really rad girl named elaine covered it with a live looper.

so the differences from last year are not in the writing, but in the community. i’m really enjoying that.

Your work seems more whimsical this year.  Is that intentional?

i haven’t really been in a serious place this month… but just you wait, i got 11 more up my sleeve….. (knock on wood)

How has the reaction to your work been so far?

surprisingly positive, actually… i did actually worry that people who enjoyed the “sin of the summer” album would be scared off by some of the directions i’ve gone in, but so far everyone seems to be coming along for the ride. most of the constructive criticism i’ve received (both on and off the site) are production- or performance-related, rather than songwriting-related.

it can be hard not to obsess over the feedback. they have the site set up so you have a “my fawm” page, almost like a dashboard you start out from, and it updates instantly whenever you get a new comment.

you almost get to the point where you go all OCD on that “my fawm” page, checking and rechecking, even if only a few minutes have passed, because the feeling of positive feedback is so uplifting.

What about the nonconstructive criticism?  Are you getting much of that?

no, i haven’t myself. there have been a few incidents on the site with one participant in particular being rather harsh in his reviews of other people’s work (including rating them 1/10 and 2/10, or telling them they have “no business doing this”)… people like that are usually chastised politely.

in this one person’s case, it led to a big debate about why people sign up for an event like fawm if they don’t want to make their music more marketable, which then led to a debate about the music industry, and whether it should bend to accomodate creativity, or songwriters should adapt to pop “rules”

You said you won’t mind having only the 3 songs at the end of the month.   Do you have something you want to accomplish before this FAWM is over?  Or have you already done it?

i still have that 14 song goal in my mind, don’t get me wrong… but no, i have no other accomplishments or targets in mind. in a way, that was the whole point for me this year. i’ll do what i can do, and not push any harder than that. erm, perhaps that makes me a boring interview subject!!

Take comfort in the fact that you’re more interesting than the interviewer, at least. Good luck, and we’ll talk again mid-month.

good luck with your own challenges, friend.

They have one of the worst reputations of all games now, but there was a time when the Adventure Game was king. It wasn’t a short time, either. One of the earliest Big Adventure Games was the Zork series which launched in 1980. Even as it was dying, classics of the genre continued to come out as late as 1999. The genre as it was is all but gone, but its reign was long and glorious.

There are a lot of reasons why it was so successful at one time and why it’s become nigh reviled now, but I’m not going to waste a lot of time on that. A lot of pixels have been rendered discussing the merits and failings of the Classic Adventure Game, and I doubt I can add anything to that debate. I’m here to talk about what they meant personally to me, and why no other genre has ever been able to match what the Adventure Game did for me.

Late to the Party

I’m not an Old Skooler when it comes to the genre. I didn’t play many text adventure games, and the ones I did play I got angry with after a few

• > Get Ye Flask
• You can’t get Ye Flask!

exchanges. Something about the semantic requirements of those text adventures just infuriated me. So while I know what Zork is, I don’t get the references and I can’t claim to have been a fan of them in the least. Yeah, I know. Heresy.

A lot of this may have had to do with what computers were in my house and when they got there. I had an old Atari PC whose designation I can no longer recall, and that was all I had until my dad picked up our very first 386. By this time, the grand old age of text adventures had largely passed, as had the first round of graphical adventure games that were really just text adventure moving billboards, such as the early King’s Quest games. No, I didn’t get involved until the advent of Point And Click.

I wish I could remember what the first Adventure Game I played was. You’d think that was important, but those early games of my youth blur together. If I had to guess, I’d say it was King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! So yes, I was a latecomer, but once I was hooked, I was totally fished in.

<Something> Quest

If anyone is responsible for cementing my gaming tastes, it would be the developers of Sierra. There may have been single better games created by LucasArts, but it was Sierra that kept the adventure flowing. They had a series for every taste. King’s Quest was lighthearted, slightly Disney-ish adventure. Space Quest parodied any science fiction it could get its hands on. The more action-oriented Quest for Glory (which started as Hero’s Quest) was like playing through a straightforward sword and sorcery yarn. And let’s not forget the less successful but still sorta-interesting Police Quest, which tried (and occasionally succeeded) to tie the game’s puzzles to investigative police work.

There was something that the Sierra machine pumped out that was always missing in the other games I played. Story. These things were written. Not always well written and not usually deep, but they had a frickin’ plot behind them. One of the criticisms of the genre is that they attempted to be interactive stories, but failed; all you could interact with were the puzzles, which had a single solution. True, but that wasn’t why I loved them. I didn’t need an interactive story. I wanted an immersive story. I wanted to feel like I was there, but I still wanted someone to rip a yarn for me.

Were the puzzles annoying? Yeah. Was the gameplay largely following a pre-laid railroad track from puzzle to puzzle? Uh-huh. But at the end of it all, I had just experienced storytelling in a way nothing else could match. I might remember the way the lights flickered in Doom, but it can’t match the sense memory I have for the lion kingdom in Quest for Glory III.

And it definitely can’t match the emotional swell I still feel when someone mentions Gabriel Knight.

Jane Jensen - Queen Of All Game Writers

I wish I could say that I expected something extra out of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers when I picked it up, but I don’t think that’s true. I think the draw had something to do with the voice cast, which consisted of cult actors like Tim Curry, Michael Dorn and Mark Hamill. Plus it was a Sierra adventure game. I thought I knew what I was in for. It didn’t take long to realize I was in for something completely different. Later, when I got older and smarter and realized that writers were responsible for games just like they are for television, I’d come to realize that the Something Different was a writer named Jane Jensen.

The thing about the Gabriel Knight series was that the gameplay was almost secondary to the experience. You didn’t solve the puzzles because you wanted to solve puzzles, you did it because it was part of the story to take the next step. That next bit of plot wasn’t coming without solving the puzzle, and many of the puzzles were tied into the plot in such a way that solving them and solving a mystery were tied together. Sure, like all Adventure Games, the puzzles were often arbitrary and perplexing. It was a weakness of the genre. Never had I played through a game with a story like this one, though. Never.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was the first chapter in a supernatural detective series. The title character, through the course of the first game (I almost typed novel there, no joke), learns of his ancestor, a former Schattenjäger. That means Shadow Hunter, but in another language, which is what we fantasy writers do to make things sound less hokey. It’s a journey of discovery, as a self centered loser detective learns that he’s meant for greater things, if only he is willing to reach for them. The core mystery of the game weaves through the New Orleans underground, voodoo cults and a tragedy sealed by the failings of those who came before us.

It was only the first in a series of games that became an obsession of mine. The world of Gabriel Knight was so tangible, so immersive, that I wanted to go back as soon as possible. I did what I almost never do: I played through the thing, from front to back, multiple times. Just to take in the story again. When the sequel, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery hit, I didn’t even care that the contracting Adventure Game market had forced a silly all-live-actors engine onto the series. I mean, it was a modern detective story about werewolves!

If I hadn’t been so enamored with the storytelling, perhaps I would have seen the writing on the wall. Stupid game engine changes are the first sign of morbidity. It didn’t matter that Jane Jensen was a canny enough writer and producer to shoehorn lots of useless live-action video into a playable adventure game with a moving story. The writing was definitely on the wall.

But the writing - the real writing, not the metaphorical kind - was so good it didn’t matter. The sequel let us split our time between Gabriel and his partner, Grace Nakimura. Grace was the Partner With Sexual Tension, a hoary chestnut of a plot device that still works when someone cares enough about it to make us care. And they did. And so came the second thing I had never seen in a game: a legitimate romance. One that made my heart beat a little bit the same way it did when a read a novel.

By the time Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned hit, the Adventure Game was nearly dead. Unfortunately, despite the best writing of the series (and a far superior version of the story The Da-Vinci Code would later use to huge success) , the gameplay didn’t help the genre any. Many people have torn apart the infamous Cat-Hair-Mustache-Puzzle, and rightly so. The constant changing-engine game Sierra was playing made it even more of a mess from a gameplay perspective. It missed the point. Adventure Games were not keeping up with the advancement of how interactive games had become. It had nothing to do with whether it was 2D or 3D.

Yet my love for the series, and for the genre, was only sealed by Gabriel Knight 3. Never before, and never since, have I been so moved by the story in a video game. When people talk about the stories in most action games, I can only sigh. They’ve got nothing on my girl Jensen. As the mystery of the third Gabriel Knight wrapped up, we watched Gabriel and Grace sleep together for the first time. Then, confused and unsure of whether Gabriel and she could work, Grace slipped away quietly, leaving to study with another man in another country. And all Gabriel, matured by the revelation of the origin of the Schattenjägers, could do was read her goodbye letter helplessly. And that’s how we left him. Alone.

All Things Must Pass

Gabriel Knight 3 is the last Adventure Game of any note. Some of its ideas and concepts have been absorbed into other genres, but the very particular feel that the Adventure Game left me with has never been replicated. I can’t argue with the charges leveled against its outmoded gameplay, but I also can’t get behind the belief that there wasn’t something right about that style of game.

Sure, you can put plot into a first person shooter or an RPG, but both of those require combat, and demand a certain type of strategy that runs counter to the style of writing the Adventure Game was known for. Not all heroes carry guns or fight hoards of goblins, and no combat-based game (which accounts for the vast majority of what comes out) can really stick us into the shoes of some of our favorite character archetypes using that model. The Adventure Game met the needs of a certain kind of gamer, and the intent of that genre was never wrong. They just got stuck on an implementation that got old.

I still fantasize about some resurgence of the genre, some update of the gaming model that makes it all work again. It’s a fantasy that leads directly to Jane Jensen writing another Gabriel Knight game, that lets me follow Gabriel and Grace through their evolving relationship and solve a hinted at mystery about ghosts in Scotland. I believe it can happen. There’s a hole in the gaming market. People like me, who want a game that’s centered around story, atmosphere and discovery, minus the combat and twitch-gaming required in everything else, are not being served.

I still game, but I haven’t enjoyed it in the way I used to in a long, long time. When I think back to the last time I was truly passionate about a game, I think of Gabriel Knight 3, and I realize with the death of the Adventure Game what made me a gamer in the first place died as well.

You may have seen something like this before. A bunch of artists descend upon a particular month and choose it for their own. This month, they decide, will be the month they complete a Single Work In a Short Amount of Time. Novelists chose November. Musicians? Their month starts tomorrow.

Isaac Quatorze, better known to me as Denys Gareau, was one of the participants in last year’s FAWM: February Album Writing Month. The work that came out of it was called Sin of the Summer, and it’s not just my friendship speaking when I say it’s got some killer work on it. The crucible that is insane-deadline writing can produce some amazing work. Even when it doesn’t, the experience is no less worth the time.

I sat down to talk with Denys today, on the eve of this Leap FAWM, to see how he was feeling about his second run through the gauntlet. I’ll continue to check in with him through the month and see what an album in a month looks like from the inside.

So the marathon starts tonight, does it?

ostensibly at midnight…..

here’s the thing

i quit caffeine about a year ago due to some anxiety problems, and my usual bedtime is around 8:30pm these days due to early work days. i have tomorrow off, and i went and got a large strong caffé mocha and just downed it…

so it’ll either be a writing marathon until 3-4 in the morning or i’ll have a heart attack

And this will be your second FAWM, right? Did you quit caffeine after the last one?

shortly before, i think… yes, this is FAWM number 2 after a really successful go at it in 2007

How are you feeling about it?

well i couldn’t use a single word to describe the feeling, that’s for sure…. of course i’m excited. there are a lot of amazing people on the FAWM site, musicians and writers with incredible ideas and helpful comments. that’s something i’ve looked forward to for 11 months, and i’ve already been rekindling some of those “relationships” on the FAWM forums this month

on the other hand, i’m shit-scared. things aren’t as…. serene for me as they were last february. work is insane, my family is having some challenges, and i haven’t touched a guitar or keyboard since last summer

i do foresee a struggle reaching that number 14 this year. hell, it was a struggle last year… so this should definitely be uphill.

What got you to participate last year? What drew you to it?

I looked up FAWM last year after hearing about a friend of a friend who was doing something called the RPM challenge. it’s another online speed challenge that also runs in february, but with RPM, the idea is to record and produce an entire album in the month of february. the songs can be pre-written, you just have to make them sound pretty.

well after looking it up, i realized i couldn’t do the RPM cause i didn’t have an album of songs written and ready to record. but my search pulled up the FAWM site, and that one looked more my speed. the focus in this case was to write 14 songs. recording was optional, as long as you posted at least 14 song titles, and if possible lyrics and/or demos.

i decided to do it because i hadn’t written a decent song in several months, and because the number 14 has always spoken to me (hence the pseudonym)…

The album that came out of it was called Sin of the Summer. Can you tell me a little bit about what influenced you when you were writing it?

a little bit of everything, eric. at the start of the month, i was influenced by the music i listen to, which is all over the map. as the weeks went by and i started running out of steam, i took influence from stranger places… little snippets of t.v. dialogue i’d written in a notepad… the cool sound of a keyboard preset slowed down to 10% of its actual speed…

they also have weekly challenges on FAWM to help those with writer’s block… for example, one week was a challenge to write a song about a colour (that inspired ‘violet’). other weekly challenges were to write a 2-chord song (’right-wing cowboy’), a duet (’déjà-vu’), and a song about a street (’hamel’ and ’st-jean baptiste’)

i took inspiration wherever it popped up, as hokey as that probably sounds. in a challenge like FAWM, you kinda have to run with whatever you’ve got.

What was writing 14 songs in a month like? How often did you feel like quitting?

my feeling about the 14-song goal changed from day to day, depending how the writing was going. i’d say i never felt like quitting, but i did get pretty down on myself at one point. i had written 2 songs in a row that i felt were subpar, and my fingers were starting to hurt like hell from guitar playing (i have arthritis in my hands). i never thought “shit, i’m gonna quit this.” but i did feel like i was sucking, and that i would continue to suck.

fortunately, the other participants on the site always have constructive feedback. those two subpar songs had their good points, as i came to realize, and with other FAWMers suggestions, i was able to retool them and actually use them on the final album. the songwriting also got better, and some of my favourite songs actually came in the last few days of february!

What about your writing style had to change to accommodate such a compressed schedule?

the second-guessing. writing for FAWM opened my eyes to the fact that i had always spent about 10% of my songwriting time actually writing, and the other 90% second-guessing myself and trying to edit and write simultaneously. as you have no doubt discovered by now, that’s a recipe for a fruitless process.

I’m listening to the album as we speak, and one thing that’s impressive is how polished it sounds. Did you finish songs as you went, or was there a mad scramble to polish things after everything was written?

Thanks for that compliment! i know that “polished” sound can be a good thing or a bad thing, and my goal was always to make something that didn’t sound radio-ready, while still avoiding too much lo-fi ugliness.

your question is actually really interesting, cause in retrospect i did spend too much time “polishing” during FAWM 2007. they are very clear on the site about the fact that any songs posted are demos. nobody is expected to put out a phil spector wall of sound. sometimes i think the reason my songs got so much attention on the site is because they were more fleshed-out demos than a lot of other participants were posting, which is kind of unfair to the others.

in response to your question, about half the post-production was done during FAWM, and half in march, as i was preparing ’sin of the summer’ for release.

this year i plan on making my demos more off the cuff, and then letting the songs stew past february, and take my time with post-production after the hectic event is over.

You mentioned relationships with other FAWMers. Can you talk a little bit about the support you get from the other participants? Is there a lot of talk between people as the month goes on?

The whole event is built around those relationships and that support. in fact, some of the logged-on FAWMers aren’t even songwriters, but friends, spouses, acquaintances and past-FAWMers who are just there to listen to the demos and give feedback. i’d say there is a fair amount of ass-kissing, in all honesty…. there are those FAWMers who will leave nothing but positive comments on a song that’s definitely lacking.

i mean, who am i to say? maybe the same song that struck me as a piece of crap really touched someone else. but i’ve seen songs where the writer truthfully wrote “my guitar isn’t tuned very well, and i missed the high note in verse 2″, and you’ll always have a couple people leaving comments like, “oh no, the guitar sounds great, and that high note was perfect!”

but for the most part, people are truthful. some are brutally honest, which can be helpful, or in some cases just obnoxious. one guy last year left comments on at least a dozen people’s songs telling them they had serious timing issues, none of which were noticed by anybody else. it’s all so subjective.

but what more could you ask for than a soundboard of very different people, from different musical backgrounds, to listen to your songs and give you instant feedback?

Anything in particular on your mind going into this year’s FAWM? Do you have a sense of what you want this album to feel like?

well first of all, i’m not aiming for an actual album this time around. they use “album” in the event name, but they’re pretty clear about the fact that the goal is just 14 songs. whether or not you want to base your writing around an “album” structure is optional.
one of the reasons i got stressed last year is that i decided from the onset that i wanted to make an album out of my FAWM songs. so every idea that didn’t feel up to par freaked me out. i would kind of panic, think “jeez, i don’t want this shit on my record!” and that contributed to the lower points.

this year i want to have more fun.

i plan to collaborate with a few other FAWMers, in what capacity i don’t know yet, but there have already been collaboration offers made and accepted on both sides.
i also want to go with those questionable ideas i would have panned last year.

if i end up writing circus techno, then so be it.

Thank you for your time. We’ll talk again next week to see how things are going. Good luck!

thanks, eric! happy february…

I used to view poetry and prose as literary forms on opposite ends of some imagined spectrum. At one end, the Severely Poetic end, were the kinds of experimental, dissociated poems I couldn’t understand. The literary equivalent of a concert using only the sound of dripping water and squealing brakes. At the other end was Utilitarian Prose, like much of what gets written on blogs such and mine. All content, little to no concern for form. Beside each of these extremes I imagined popular poetry and popular literary prose. The poetry beautiful, perhaps, but built of words for their own sake. The prose subservient to the story it was used to tell. On this continuum I would place the writers I knew. ee cummings close to the Severely Poetic, David Eddings stuck within the confines of Utilitarian Prose, Guy Gavriel Kay a crossover artist, living in both worlds at once.

This spectrum was bullshit, but not bullshit entirely of my creation. The world of modern literature adheres largely to some version of this spectrum. Prose and poetry are separate entities, both built of words but using those words to different ends. One man can write in both styles, but not at once. Mixing styles may be possible, but results in prose that is poetic but is still prose. It’s a perceptual divide that wasn’t built entirely by one group, nor was it built suddenly. In fact, I think writers may be most to blame.

For much of history, there was no real difference between poetry and prose. At least, not when it came to fiction. Nearly every great work of ancient fiction was written in one meter or another. Most religious works were metered as well, including sizable chunks of the Bible. I’m no linguistic historian, but I think it’s safe to say this is due to storytelling’s origins as an oral form. The spoken word always works best when there’s a rhythm and consistent phrasing to it, and that’s basically meter. Prose as we know it was more often used for non-fiction, where the effect of meter and phrasing wasn’t a factor and where an oral tradition wasn’t as strong. In other words, the intended effect dictated the style, not the content itself.

There’s a trend in an art form to define itself more and more fully. When an art form begins, it often happens subconsciously, as an expression of the time and culture and intended audience and available materials. They don’t start off trying to be a specific form of art. They just start off trying to have a different effect than the other forms out there. It’s not until later that names and definitions get applied. Once the setting of boundaries begins, the rules and regulations become more important than the effect of the art. To be classical music is to use a specific kind of phrase variation. To be ballet is to adhere to certain postures and movements.

After a while, the lines on the chalkboard become the art form, and the everyone - artists included - accept them as fact. That style starts to become inbred, producing no important new works because that would require something crossing one of those lines. After a while, artists start producing a form only for other artists of that form. Then it dies. Classical music is a historical artifact to be appreciated but not reproduced. The same can be said for most forms of Opera, ballet and Gregorian chant. I fear it’s happening to poetry.

Through self infliction and the market forces of the publishing industry, poetry has become an art form separate from others. Poetry isn’t a way of telling stories or delivering a message, but a funny collection of short lines and (sometimes) rhyming words. The part in people that respond to verse has been usurped by popular music, leaving the broader form of poetry out in the cold. Poets write for other poets. I know, because I had this opinion myself, engaging in discussions of the perils of free verse poetry and pointless abstraction, missing the more important point that meter and structure carries a power other forms don’t. Poetry isn’t a point on a spectrum of literary styles. There is no spectrum in the first place.

The art of using words is too complicated to be restricted by simple styles. Styles are important. They’re a kind of cognitive contract between writer and reader, giving them a hint as to what they’re in for. Taken too far, though, and they lead to someone sitting in a classroom bemoaning poetry and wanting to just read another book, never noticing that the two are cut from the same cloth. They lead to me.

If art has a point, it’s found within the effect it has on its audience. That’s what matters. The effect. All of the stylistic choices we make are an expression of our emotional state or our opinions, fashioned in the hope of making someone else feel what we feel. I write prose because it’s a form I know how to manipulate. It’s a style I can use to a predictable effect. That’s as far as I should take it. It’s not prose vs. poetry. That’s simplifying something whose beauty is in its complexity. It’s time to challenge that enforced simplicity before we marginalize an important style of writing.

I’ve probably gone off the rails a few times in this one, making broad statements that don’t hold up. Fire back if I’m wrong. I’m just rolling this one around right now, trying to see where it leads me. That’s bound to lead down some dead ends.

Whoever decided that a realistic economics system is a vital component of a fun game, please dismiss yourself from the industry immediately. We’re stuck with your legacy, but at least you won’t be around to make things any worse.

I’m not just talking about video games, though it’s worse there than anywhere else. Any kind of game. Role playing games. Board games. LARPs. MMORPGs. If there’s a FPS out there with an economic system, I’ll bust some skulls, I swear. The curse of Economics affects all gaming, dragging otherwise fun games into the bean counting muck.

Before I go any further with this argument, let me lay out some justification. Think back to college, if you went. If you had to list your 10 least favorite classes, would Economics be on the list? Unless you were pre-med or pre-law, my guess is the answer is yes. If not, I still doubt you enjoyed the class much, and probably couldn’t tell me anything useful you got from it.

Ok, I’ll admit. An economics system is a necessary evil. Unless you’re making a total platformer like Super Mario Bros., where Item Acquisition is controlled by which level you happen to be on, you’re going to need some way of keeping players from getting everything at once. I’m not arguing against economic systems in game.

I’m just saying they aren’t any fun.

No one programs because they want to handle memory management. No one becomes a carpenter because they like to sand things. And no one plays a game to balance their checkbook.

Many games require an economic model. Some very realistic strategy games demand an extremely nuanced economic model. In fact, realistic strategy games may be somewhat exempt from this arguement. They’re a different beast.

Anyway, as I said earlier, you’re going to need one for many of the types of games you want to design. The trick is recognizing that it’s there to make the game work and is not a Feature of your game. Or rather, it’s only a feature of your game if it does its job without requiring your players to think more about the in game economy than they are about the, well…gameplay.

Two examples. Both Role Playing related. The first is not from a computer game at all, but from a LARP. Live Action Role Playing. I have a soft spot for LARPing, and due to that soft spot end up playing at this LARP called OGRE. I have a number of issues with their game system, but we’re talking about economic systems. OGRE is obsessed with creating an “in-game economy.” Unfortunately, as in most LARPs, the materials available in-game to cobble an economy out of are limited. Food and shelter are out, because you have to give your players shelter and they’ll just bring their own food if they have to. Same goes for clothes, since a bunch of naked people at a camp will do something other than LARP. So what can you do? What is your in-game money supposed to buy?

Depending on the system, lots of things. Things like spell scrolls, potions and other powerful items can be sold in-game easily. Also, while LARPers bring their own foam weapons, you can restrict the player’s use of those weapons by saying they need an in-game tag to make them “real” weapons. This way, you can at least increase the power of weapons by selling better tags. Given proper availability of money and items, you can nicely control the flow of power through the game using your economy. Great.

Then things go off the rails. In its desire for the dreaded realistic economy, OGRE starts making a lot of common mistakes. First, it doesn’t put much money into the game. Second, it set up an economy where everything costs more than you can reasonably pull in. A meal in the inn, if you want hot food, costs you 3 coins. Figure 4 meals in a weekend, and that a new player starts with 10 coins and you start to see the problem. Third, purchasable items rarely come into the game. Most items are only made by players (remember, it’s an “in-game economy”), and those players can only make items at the start of an event, because it’s more realistic that it would take time to make a sword. So if you don’t know who makes things, or you happen to use a weapon no one made before the game started, you can’t buy it even if you have the money. Fourth, weapons degrade over time, becoming unusable after a certain number of events, and weapons can be destroyed in-game using spells that cost less to use than a weapon costs to make. Also, many characters only have a single weapon they can use in combat, so having no weapon means you sit out every battle.

That this all adds up to is an economy so realistic that you can’t afford anything, and even when you can, you can’t find what you want to buy. Would the intention of some kind of in-game economy have made the game more fun if it was done right? Yes. Absolutely. But did anyone come to LARP to fret over whether they could afford to purchase a sword so their character would be able to do something that weekend? Did they pay real money they earned in the real economy to sit around doing nothing because no one has a spear tag?

On the other side of the same problem is World of Warcraft. In WoW, they wanted to have the same sort of in-game economy that ORGE went for. In game money is used to buy things, and the best things come from other players, allowing money to flow from one player to another for things. Or, better yet, for people to trade their respective skills for things from each other. WoW, as it was made by seasoned game designers, doesn’t make the beginner mistakes OGRE does. They make different mistakes that are just as bad.

Everything in WoW costs lots and lots of money. Just like in OGRE, weapons degrade and can fall apart. WoW lets you pay NPC smiths to repair your items, but if you die a lot it can get expensive, since death degrades your weapons (a realistic touch, no?). New weapons can break the bank. Even more expensive is the cost of training character skills. And let’s not even talk about the cost of player-made items or player-found items being sold at the Auction House.

The casual player is lucky if he can afford anything beyond base equipment. After spending hours getting to a new level, it’s disheartening to learn you must spend more hours getting the money to train the skills that gaining a new level only made available for purchase. Getting cool stuff in WoW means either finding it yourself (tedious), making it yourself (tedious and expensive) or having a friend who did one of the above two things feeling sorry for you and giving it to you.

How do you get money in WoW? Grinding. Spending hours killing stupid creatures, picking up their Cracked Horns or Slimy Eyeballs and selling them to NPC merchants. So basically, you get home from your real job to work for a couple of hours in the WoW spider-mines so you can afford to buy a new sword. You know what, Blizzard? I’m sure the reason people play your game is to simulate the crushing tedium of their real jobs, fancied up by letting the character be a Night Elf while they do it.

No one plays a game for an in-game economy. No one. Even strategy games that require them to be realistic aren’t played for the economies. They’re played for letting the player Pretend To Be A General. The game is creating a fantasy world for the player, and no one’s fantasy is to come home and be an accountant. Especially real accountants.

In game economies, at least the monetary side of them, should be invisible to the player. Look at Civilization, where the economy came down to Gold Coin, Books and Luxuries. The numbers of them didn’t even matter; as long as there was a positive number next to them in the world screen, you were safe. I didn’t even know what the Luxuries things were for years, and I was able to play the game. The economic model was part of Civilization. It wasn’t what made it fun.

An in-game economy should be a few things. It should be simple enough that the player never feels like they’re managing their bank account, and it should trade in an abstraction of money that’s easy to understand at a glance. It needs to be there to support the game and give the sense of a world that actually works without being as complicated as stock speculation.

It needs to be something else, too. See, where the bad in-game economies fail is that they revolve around purchasing the essentials. Food, weapons, healing. You earn money to spend them on things you need to play the game. You spend your entire time in game earning money just so you can keep playing the game. That’s what you do in life. When I hear “realistic in-game economy”, that’s code for “make you count pennies to buy food.” When players earn money, it shouldn’t be for essentials like weapons and skills.

It should be for a Batcave. Or a sidekick. Or an airship. The death of a game is when it asks you to simulate the parts of your life you hate. An in-game economy should assume the minutia of money management is going fine and let you spend that Gold Coin on something you’ll feel cool for having. A healthy in-game economy, at least in a multi-player game, isn’t fueled by abstract money going from person to person. It’s an economy of prestige. It’s someone seeing a character with an airship and joining his crew because someone who has an airship is just that cool. It’s item creation that requires more skill than time or currency, allowing people to trade something they made for something someone else made.

Economics isn’t fun. Community is. Don’t confuse the former for the latter.

What skills should a video game require from a player?

Most games fall into one of a few categories when it comes to what the player has to be able to do in order to be successful. Your old school platform arcade games, and the games that have descended from them, asked nothing more than fast reaction time and good twitch control over your fingers. You see a group of colored pixels coming at you, you decide where you need to be to not get hit and how soon you need to get there and you twitch your thumb on the direction pad or the A-button. If you’re good at it, and you’ve learned the timing of the game, you survive to face more colored pixels. Fail and lose a life.

Then you have your old school RPG and strategy games. On these, your reaction time was nearly or completely irrelevant. Everything happened in turns, and success in combat was determined by predetermined stats and pseudo-random dice rolls. The skills required here are about the same as you need to enjoy a full season of baseball. You know the stats of your characters, of your items, of your enemies and of the terrain and you form a strategy to maximize your numbers and minimize theirs. Do it correctly, and you take power from the dice rolls and receive a higher probability of success. The better you know the game, and the better you are at juggling stats and how they affect each other, the better you do. Put a left handed batter against a right handed pitcher. Or whatever it is people do in baseball.

Finally, you have the Puzzle Games. These games require little to no Twitch Reflexes and often only rudimentary experience with the game mechanics. They’re Sudoku on a computer, and ask their players to use many of the same skills. Minesweeper is timed, but the same good puzzle solving skills that made you good in Memory as a child will make you good here. And don’t think these are just games like Bejeweled. The hoards of Myst-lovers used the same skills, leisurely moving through a sequence of pretty pictures as they tried to determine which levers needed turned in what order.

Modern games, having faster processors, more memory and infinite storage space, tend to mix these skills up a bit. Most Playstation games are essentially twitch games with more strategic number crunching elements mixed in to make your brain work a little bit. Real Time Strategy games like Command & Conquer take away the comfort (and required strategic acumen) from a turn based game like Civilization and add in a need for fast and accurate clicking. But when you get right down to it

For instance, there are the Simulation games, that require some mix of knowledge of the outside world and understanding of how the game’s model of that real world thing works. These games, if they’re built right, only require twitch reflexes or stat crunching unless it’s part of the real world thing being modeled. Compare, for instance, Flight Simulator to X-Wing. X-Wing requires fast reflexes and good hand-eye coordination. Flight Simulator requires you to know how planes work to some degree. This is also true of Sim City, The Sims and Second Life. While these games ask you to learn game mechanics, the idea is that you’re applying some kind of real-world knowledge to the game in order to succeed. Know something about Zoning, and you’ll have a rich city. Manage relationships well and you’ll have a happy Sim. Hone good color coordination and design skills and get lots of cybersex.

Some genres of games know exactly what skills their players should have. One of the most successful of these genres is the First Person Shooter. While there are a handful of sub genres that have their own, unique mechanics, they all work in the same way. You need to both agile and accurate with gun aiming. You have to know what weapons are good in what situations. You have to be good at learning and maneuvering through complicated 3D maps. A person who picks up a good FPS knows exactly what they’re getting into.

Other genres are more confused. None is more confused than the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. People call them MMORPGs. With great reluctance, I’ll call them the same thing. The MMORPG, frankly, has no idea what skills its players should have. It knows its players should have an active credit card to pay for their account. It knows they should have a lot of free time, without which they will progress too slowly to enjoy the game. It also knows its players should be willing to regularly deal with the crippling setbacks its game play model saddles them with. Once the requirements of Financing, Free Time and Saintly Patience have been met, most MMORPGs slap on an ill-thought out mix of Stat Crunching and intermittent Twitch Mechanics for players to learn. When you get right down to it, an MMORPG doesn’t require any real skills at all. If you read an online hint guide telling you exactly what to do in exactly what order, then put the necessary time in, you’ll be successful. And when you’re not successful? Usually that’s something completely random. Oops, I got stunned before I could cast Heal. Death. Lose XP. Run Back To My Body.

(Before going on, can I point out the irony of a game that demands you both to have a regular job to pay for playing the game, and 40+ hours a week in addition to your job to get your money’s worth out of the game? Of course I can.)

I bring all this up as roundabout way of asking what other skills can we expect players to bring to a game that would still let them be fun? An excellent essay (which I can’t find now, but will link here once I do) on MMORPGs suggested the real reason people play them is persistence. Your character lasts from one play session to the next, and retains all experience, items and changes from session to session. In other words, you get to build up a character. The problem is, game designers seem to assume that the numerical progression of statistics increasing and persisting from session to session is all that’s needed; progression of the player’s skills is severely undervalued. A game like Dance Dance Revolution demands a unique set of skills: rhythm and physical coordination. Basically, as you become a better dancer, you become a better player.

Can we add that to an MMORPG? Can we make item creation, magic, combat and exploration more dependent on the player and less dependent on numbers? And can we find a way to portray the player’s increased skill level in the game in some way? And then, having accomplished that, can we tie in-game progression more to player skill than to character levels and item quality, so that speed of learning trumps raw amount of time spent in game?

I have some thoughts on this, and I’m going to get into them in detail in future parts. For now, let’s take a break. Next stop, Aenroth.

I may have mentioned this before, but I don’t have the time to go back and look through old posts. I might be giving unnecessary background information. If so, I apologize.

When I started working on the new novel, Sunshine Alley, the first problem I needed to solve was something that had plagued Broken Magic. I don’t do all of my writing on one computer. Sometimes I work on my desktop and sometimes I use the laptop. This isn’t just an “Am I at home or on the road?” thing. I use the laptop at home sometimes when I want to sit with Erin instead of hiding in my office. Also, there are days when things are dead at work and I want to make an edit that’s been on my mind. That’s three computers I need to use to work on one document. The problem is how to make sure I’ve always got the most recent version with me, and how to ensure that the version I think is the most recent actually is.

Recently, Brent got me up to speed on a great version control application called Subversion. For those of you who aren’t programmers, version control programs allow you to keep your source code in a central repository from which items can be checked out of and worked on, then checked back in. It serves two purposes: first, it keeps the most updated code in one place, so you know where the current stuff is. Second, it saves a version of the source at every change, so if you need to go back to an earlier version, you can do so easily.

So I thought, if this works for source code, why not try it with fiction? They’re both just text documents. Just like in coding, occasionally you make a change that you regret, and it would be nice to be able to recover an old version of your document without having to rewrite it by hand and figure out exactly what had been there before and what was new. And this central source thing is something I was basically maintaining by hand with Broken Magic, only I used a Cruzer flash drive that I carried from computer to computer.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of months now, and the success I’m having with it is making me feel pretty good. Using Subversion, I’ve been able to keep not only the actual novel document, but all of the notes and character outlines that go with it in one place. No matter where I’m working, as long as I have a computer with Subversion I can get both the novel and my notes in a couple of seconds, do what I need to do, and send the changes back to the server. If I decide that I’ve hit a dead end because the whole chapter I’m writing is garbage, I can delete it completely, giving me a clean slate without worry; I can always get that chapter back if I need to.

I’m sure there are fancier document management utilities out there that do the same thing, but with fancy web front ends and crazy features, but the fact is all I really need is the ability to check out documents and commit changes. That’s it. Subversion gives me simply and easily.

Using Subversion has cleared up one of my biggest headaches when writing. I can write whenever and wherever I want, knowing I’ve got the most current version of my work. Syncing the changes with my other machines is as simple as committing from one machine and checking out from another. I don’t have to think about whether I’m working on the right copy, and I don’t have to keep arcanely named backup copies spread across my hard drive that I’ll just lose track of and be afraid to delete when I find them later.

If you’re working on something that you edit on different computers, try using a source control tool like Subversion. It’s cheaper than the Advil you’ll need when you try to hand-combine two versions of the same document that both have important stuff in them.