I have been recovering from an extremely long day lasting from 9AM-7AM (22 hour), during which I worked on the September 9 Groundhog Day Resolutions Report. While not all of it was strictly spent writing, I was fully awake and engaged the entire day on related tasks like tweaking the website and responding to relevant threads on the coworking discord. The long day had an unfortunate side effect: it destroyed my body clock synchronization with the local time zone. On Saturday I woke at 2PM and went back to sleep at 5AM. Today on Sunday, I woke up at 330PM and finally got to my desk at 445PM.
Playing Games
I designated Saturday as being a day of rest, with no plans. I played a new-to-me video game, No Man's Sky, for several hours. This was probably a mistake because I ended up staying up late trying to get to the Space Station and acquiring a Hyper Drive to see what would happen. I'm at a point now that I'm a little bored of it because I think I see what the game mechanic is from here on out: travel from planet to planet acquiring resources to acquire more gear so you can go acquire more resources more efficiently. The in-game experience hasn't captured my imagination in the way that a similar-but-newer game like Valheim has.
Is GHDR a Game World in the Making?
The hours lost to playing No Man's Sky are not a total loss, though! I made a connection between how I'm rebooted GHDR and my proclivity to systemize concepts into a whole; I'm doing game design work across all my processes and interests that---if I can hold it together---will culminate in a productivity system that is not unlike persistent world multiplayer RPG with a strong cooperative community of co-creators. This is not surprising, as I focused most of attention on game design and development weill into my 30s. I can't remember who said this (maybe it was Jane McGonigal, but game developers tend to have the mindset of world building architects and have the skills and tools to do just that.
This is an interesting connection, and suggests that I can add a unique spin on gamification to my GHDR/Productivity system reboot. That said, I do take a dim view of most material I've read about gamification in the mainstream business and educational media; while these "experts" can readily identify the benefits of having something "fun and engaging" to improve productivity, they really don't understand how really caring about the person who will experience it. Instead, they emphasize abstract metrics like "point systems" and "visible progression" as a quantifiable metric that lends some pseudo-scientific credibility to the theory. I think this is short sighted, akin to saying, "a great action movie should last between 70-80 minutes, have one recognizeable star, and these story beats". This alone does not guarantee a great action movie; they are merely aspects of movies that may have sold very well at the box office. Applying the same logic to games is equally shallow.
But I digress...I'm trying to rest!
Tomorrow's Reminders
It's 7:15PM now, and I'm going to take the remainder of the day to just take it easy, not obsessing over getting anything in particular done. But thinking ahead to tomorrow, I will remind myself of my main strategic pushes. They are the same as last week, but I am flipping the priority:
- More Physical Space - It occured to me that the clutter in my house is entirely unfinished or unstarted projects. Let's try to dump stuff by project category and likelihood to proceed.
- Printed Products - Narrow deliverable scope to confirming Amazon inventory, and having some ETP8511 packaged, priced, and ready to fulfill.