(If you are a teacher, this is where you make a face at the screen and say "no shit.")

Quickly, before I begin: My high school students know how to use Google. And a few know the quiet art of Googling someone's name to figure out more about them. So! Some of them are at least cursorily aware of this blog — some might even read this. In which case: Hello, there, young scholar. Mr. Knowles has a potty mouth. (They don't call me "Mr. Knowles." They also don't really call me "Josh." They prefer "Hey.")

I do hope some students check this out, actually. One of the most eye-opening parts of teaching, so far, has simply been seeing the classroom from the other side of the desk. Being a student is kind of a freaky experience — you're young, so your baseline is you sitting there stewing in fresh hormones. And then you're dumped into the deep end of topics that you might not give a particular shit about — but if you don't excel at them, well, then Your Future is in jeopardy. And you are judged. By teachers. By peers. By coaches. By parents. For me, at least, I had almost no headspace left over whatsoever to ponder what the teaching experience might be like. If I had, it probably would've relaxed me a bit. Which probably would've made me looser and more communicative in class. Less intimidated. Maybe one side-effect of this new communication culture in which we live is that current students can get a touch of insight into what's going on in their teachers' minds and outside lives. (At least those teachers who blog.) Which is humanizing. And good. (As long as the teacher isn't into stuff like flashing people on the subway or dismembering squirrels.)

Some of that constricted headspace is necessary. School is about molding brains. So sometimes you just have to sit someone down and lay out the facts for them and make sure they remember what you said. But. High schools need significantly more Montessori-style and collaboration-focused teaching. Especially since if you get someone excited about the possibilities of a Thing, then they'll naturally start asking questions about what that Thing is and how it works. And generating excitement is something that happens via play and exploration. And open conversation.

Which is kind of the over-arching goal of the game design class I'm co-teaching over at Bushwick High in Brooklyn. I'm trying to stoke their interest in making games (which isn't terribly hard) and convert it into playful exploration with game making tools. And then use that to stoke their interest in other related topics.

I am not achieving that goal, currently. By the way. Currently things are a bit of a mess.

Which is why I say teaching is hard.

I have been given the chance to have an unusual perspective on teaching. Last year I taught, for the first time, a high school class, an undergraduate class, and a graduate course. It's neat to be able to compare and contract students at these different levels. And there's no question: High school is the most challenging.

Part of that difficulty is simply that it's very, very hard to judge results — at least in a situation like mine where I'm trying to facilitate creativity (I can't just give 'em exams at the end). I try to communicate and, more importantly, I try to impart bigger perspectives and simply get them excited about something. And the students will superficially let you know what they think — they will, for example, drift off to YouTube the moment they get the littlest bit bored. But it's tough to know what's working at what's not: What sticks in their head in such a way that they ponder it on their walk home after school? That's extremely difficult for me to see. And, to put it in programmer terms, it makes it very difficult to optimize and debug my teaching.

Then there's this second issue. The easy part of teaching game design is getting kids interested. Computer games (anything played using a device with a microchip) have such a tight grip on a certain demographic. It's possibly the only subject these kids will have in high school where other teachers and parents will be concerned that they're spending too much time with the material outside of class. And, possibly, one of the few cases where a strong argument could be made that the students have a deeper relationship with the material than the teacher does. (At least when it comes to certain games.)

The hard part is kind of everything else that comes after that.

For example. Let me start with a question:

What can you use game design to teach? What disciplines are contained within or overlap game design?

• Computer programming. Obviously. (And, yes, "game design" encompasses more than just computer game or video game design — but that's the format we're dealing with in class.)

• Technology platforms.

• Math. Logic.

• Visual design.

• Sound design.

• User interface design. (Rescue the princess? How does a player even know that's the goal? What does the "A" button do? Why did I die when I touched that?(

• Storytelling.

• Social media.

• Cultural context and situation.

• Potentially all sorts of business stuff: Marketing. Sales. Money.

• And then whatever the content of the game itself is about.

If you're into games, none of this is new. (And I'm leaving out "game design" because, well, no shit.) But it creates a meta-design issue.

I'm trying to teach them how to make games themselves. Computer games. And when I taught this class last Summer I went through several tools before settling on YoYoGames' GameMaker software. Which was pretty good. Except that all of our time was spent on the first element above: Computer programming. It took an entire two hour class to just get a sprite on the screen that they could move with the arrow keys. For a short class, that's just way too long. Especially when they're making 2D sprite-based games. They all just wound up making erratic variations of bullet hell shooters: Top-down games where you use the arrow keys to move a sprite around and fire a blazing torrent of bullets every which way in order to kill some baddies.

We had zero opportunity to even begin to explore any of these other topics. And — speaking as someone who codes all day and loves it — I think the computer programming part is the necessary but otherwise least important piece of the game design puzzle. Storytelling. Visual design. Hell, just the general ability to have a vision of a feeling or effect you want to have on your players. "I want to scare them." "I want them to be so happy they can't contain themselves." "I want them to learn about how viruses mutate." "I want a two-player game that causes people to fall in love." That's the meat of any creative art. "I want several thousand lines of Objective C code sitting on my hard drive" — ugh, no.

And we were additionally hamstrung by the fact that GameMaker lives on the computer hard drives, along with all their files. So they couldn't work from home. And if they used a different machine the next week, they had to start over. And — critically — they had no way to be proud of the game at the end. No way to share. No way to see other people play it (beyond the few of us in class).

So I decided to be a hubristic coder and just develop my own game-making platform. Which — I don't know. I've been bothering everybody about this thing, so I feel weird getting into it, here. But let's go for it so I can do some thinking about what it is and where it needs to go. Because, as currently conceived, it is broken. But there is a spark of a core idea inside of it which is solid. It's heart is in the right place. I think.

Oh: GT7K. Gametron 7000. That's the name. Background: I made a simple level-editor tool as a project while at ITP. It let you make levels on the web and then play them on your mobile phone. (J2ME, bitches. 2006.) There's very little overlap, otherwise, between these projects. But I kind of like the name, so I reused it.

(And you're welcomed to sign up for a GT7K invite, but I'm not opening up the actual tool to everyone. It's very undercooked at the moment.)

So. GT7K.

The whole idea behind GT7K is that I want to get the students from zero to simple game in five minutes. You sign in. I explain how it works. Click, click, click. Simple game. What took four weeks using GameMaker I want to compress into five minutes. Impossible, you say. But, no! Everything in GT7K is social. So if you want a space invaders game, you go find one that's already been made that's close to what you want. Copy it. Customize. Bam. You have a game.

And the thinking, here, isn't that I want the students to make 400 shitty space invader clones per hour. The thinking is that I want to compress the computer programming part of the equation down so that after that five minutes they're thinking of character design, level design, storytelling, etc. The other stuff. If they enjoy what they're doing, they'll dig into the coding side of things on their own. That's how it works, right? Isn't that how half of us (at least) learned to code in the first place? "That's really cool! How do I do that? How do I change that? How do I do more than that?" If I can get the code out of the way so they can explore the other creative elements in game design, maybe they'll unlock a deeper interest and appreciation and then they can go back and get excited by how the code works. (Or discover they love making graphics. Or playing with sound. Or writing stories. Coding is not the only thing people who make games do.)

One student exemplified this. Second class, I think. This semester (maybe a month ago). My approach to introducing my high school students to GT7K was simply to explain the overall philosophy of the app — what the different sorts of "objects" in the game were, how to edit them, etc — and then just let them explore. I'd answer any questions as they came up. By the second class, one student had already copied a simple platformer I made and had altered it to create a simple story. My platformer was mostly just a game engine test — making sure the sprites moved properly and that collisions worked and such. Not even a game. But he took it and took the random graphics I'd tossed into it (a girl character, a spaceship, some space invaders-like creatures), and created a story: You're the girl. You're on a planet. You have to fight through the aliens (jumping and shooting) to get to your spaceship so you can leave and get home. (Touching the spaceship ended the game with a "you win" message.)

This was very, very simple, obviously. Certainly the student who created it didn't melt any brain cells doing it. But. It was exactly what I was hoping to see. He shortcut past most of the programming stuff and got straight to the point where he could think about telling a story.

And GT7K is all online, so that game is accessible on any computer on the planet without having to upload it or publish it or anything. (Again, I'm not going to link to it right now because all of GT7K is under wraps until I'm comfortable opening it up.) And he could work on it from home. Etc.

And! If another student finds it inspiring, they can make a copy for themselves and change it up however they want. Click, click, click. New game. New ideas.

Hopefully I am — in my babbling way — communicating my overall goals with GT7K. (I've had a few beers — can you tell?)

And, so.

Now the bad news:

This is a huge design challenge. Oh, lord. Currently, like I said, GT7K has a glimmer of something good flickering at its core, but creating tools that feel engaging, inviting, fun, understandable, satisfying... Holy shit. It's not really any of those things at the moment. At least not as much I want it to be. And finding that point of balance between flexibility and ease-of-use is very hard. These kids with no programming skills need to be able to get their hands dirty with it and have success. But how do I balance between "understandable but restrictive" and "complicated but flexible?" I don't know where that point it. It's quite possible I'm in completely over my head.

(And, although my current audience is high school kids — how do I build this thing with an eye on the general population? I could see it being of interest to all sorts of people.)

This is where it gets all confusing and murky to me. Firstly, I'm not some epic game designer myself. The universe of game design is so rich and dynamic at the moment, every time I look there's some fascinating new game or some interesting new tool for game making. Just last week, for example, Valve released their Portal 2 level editor called "Perpetual Testing Initiative." I haven't played with it yet, but wow. It looks amazing. And, of course, projects like GameStar Mechanic. Which, when it comes to thinking about the educational use of game-making platforms, I've put about 1/10th of 1% of the thought and creativity into it that those folks have. So I'm trying to navigate this narrow space where I'm allowing myself to build something inferior to other products in many ways just so I can learn and potentially have a revelation or two that will let it evolve in a new and distinctive direction.

Six months in, I'm just getting the first tastes of what those things might be. Though, the ideas aren't well-formed enough to really write about here, except to say that restrictive tools can actually lead to creative power — that's nothing new — so I'm beginning to hone in on how to turn the necessarily restrictive nature of a project like this into a feature, not a bug.

Well, and there's a vary obvious differentiator, which has been a part of the idea from the start: All objects within GT7K are completely open and shareable between users. See something you like? Copy it and use it. As far as I know, I haven't seen anything quite as molecularly shareable like this. It's funny. That part of GT7K has been so baked in from day one that I kind of lose sight of it.

Anyway. That's a couple thousand words, so let's wrap up. Hopefully I've given a little insight into my thinking on teaching and game design. Both teaching and the attempt at creating this game design tool have been mind-expanding. (Hopefully for the students, as well!)

If you are interested in GT7K, please sign up so I have your e-mail address. The opening-up process will be slow, but I would love to get feedback from everyone I can. I'm not a spammer and I won't do anything weird. I'll probably just get a little over-excited if I think I'm stumbled upon something compelling.

Thanks for reading!

I spend my Thanksgivings out in Pennsylvania with my 94-year-old grandmother (my mom's mom, the PA Dutch former kindergarten teacher). For various reasons, including that I have a tiny extended family none of whom live particularly close to one another, it's usually just her and I for this particular holiday. My parents stick in Texas. We usually do the obligatory "Happy Thanksgiving" call with them, which is fine.

This year I decided to try something a bit different. I had my laptop handy (natch), and since my parents had recently discovered the brave new world of video calling with Skype, I figured I'd see what happened when I cranked up Skype and stuck my grandmother in front of it to talk with the family.

My grandmother is, I should note, mostly deaf. And blind to a certain degree. Speaking with her is a relatively slow and deliberate process of picking simple sentences and enunciating them clearly a couple times until she gets what you're saying. The blindness I'm not as clear about, but she claims that faces are mostly blurry — although she apparently reads lips to a certain degree to help with the hearing issue. And she's hit and miss being able to see what's happening when she watches TV. (Hits: Horse racing and sports when the teams are wearing distinctive enough colors. Misses: Anything with text on the screen or that changes too quickly, as far as I can tell — although she has a standard-def TV set which can't possibly be helping.)

Anyway: Skype was a hit. She claimed to be able to see my parents quite clearly on my 15" MacBook Pro screen and I could tell she had a very easy time hearing them — a definite surprise considering the relatively weak quality of the laptop's speakers. But they held their conversation and then did the sort of usual first time Skype user tricks of aiming the laptop camera at different things and showing off the cat.

Now. For me — and for you — this is nothing new. In fact, it's easy to slip into a weird sort of elitist "oh, crap — the family found Skype" thing, as if (as with e-mail and online chat) this going to lead to some increased level of annoyance as the noobs start using these things all wrong. And Skype itself as both a (former) company and as a software service has all this baggage attached to it, and blah blah blah.

But grandmother's mind was blown.

Which expressed itself in a couple of ways:

1) The degree of connection it gave her with my parents amazed her. She was right there. They were right here. She could see their house. My mom could comment on her turkey sweater. Grandma even said at one point, "You could just put a bunch of these around the table to have everyone over for dinner." This sounds simplistic, but grandma does not do much brainstorming about technological innovations in her day-to-day. And she had a little melancholic emotional moment when we shut down the chat, like she had been dropped back into the real world where the family was actually a couple thousand miles away in Texas and not just sitting across the table.

2) After the Skype call she asked me all about what just happened. Again: Grandma decided a while back that she Just Doesn't Understand Computers, so this was a rather rare occurrence, having to get into explaining how, exactly, we just did this rather futuristic thing on her dining room table. I did my best, but we're talking about someone with an extremely low level of technological literacy.

She clearly wanted something like this, so one question was: "How much does a device like this cost?" "Well, it's a piece of software that runs on my computer. This is the same computer I use for work and other stuff." Confusion. She doesn't seem to understand the distinction between a computer as a piece of hardware and application software that runs on the computer. She thinks in terms of unified devices. Like the telephone, TV set, or dishwasher. "So the software and that call were free," I continued. Again, confusion. "And do the neighbors use something like this?" "Yeah, probably." Anyway: This sort of conversation continued.

It's nice to occasionally be reminded that we're living in a bizarre future, and that it's pretty cool. I do things regularly that feel so pedestrian — and yet would shock someone just ten or twenty years ago. Remember those AT&T "You Will" ads from the mid-90s? Go back and watch them. Video calls? On-demand movies? Checking e-mail on the beach? Sci-fi concepts. Now imagine you were born before radio became a thing.

(As a quick aside: I have a feeling that text messages seem like some kind of psychic connection from my grandmother's vantage. Like, we're taking a walk and I blurt out, "Oh, Christin's having burgers with her dad in Florida." But she didn't see me check my phone or anything (remember, hard of sight). I don't know exactly how she envisions I got that transmitted nugget of info, but (to wear out a term) let's go with "magic.")

(Another quick aside: I suspect my mom will get around to reading this post to her. It's happened before. Surely grandma has no concept of a "blog," as she doesn't use the web. So he may not realize that damned near anyone on this planet can read what I write here instantly, just a second after I publish it. Obvious to you and I. But not necessarily to her. And quite amazing, again, once you kind of step back and appreciate the technology. Even though Twitter was totally down for, like, fifteen minutes the other day and it totally sucked why can't they get their act together the internet is so fucking stupid.)

So, yeah. Not sure how much grandma actually understood about how the tech worked. But clearly the call was a huge success, so I started considering how to get grandma access to Skype more regularly. My thought: Get grandma an iMac with Apple Remote Desktop. Set it up. She literally never has to touch the thing — I just get into her computer remotely and bring up Skype. We may instead use an old laptop, which she'd have to at least touch to open the lid, but would otherwise work the same. We're considering getting her a new flat-screen TV, and some of those have apps (including Skype). But I just don't trust the user experience and there's almost no way (I think) the grandma would be able to navigate any kind of menus or whatever to make it work. But. After a couple years of trying to get her to agree to let us buy her a new, nice flat-screen TV — I think she finally acquiesced. And my theory is that she saw things well on my laptop screen and the whole experience of "living in the future" kid of jostled her a bit. Maybe the new things do work a bit nicer than the older things.

And so on.

PS. And only very obliquely related: I eventually have to write up at least a little something about my other teaching experiences this autumn. I've been teaching a web programming class at ITP (NYU) and co-teaching with Bob Giraldi a more conceptual class over at SVA called "The Interactive Idea." And they're not exactly the same as the above, obviously, but I have sort of similarly been forced to retrace my own steps a bit and break down what I know about technology into digestible chunks for my students and it's a pretty revealing experience, for sure.

Our friends Nick and Nancy had their wedding down in Hilton Head, South Carolina on Saturday. (Congratulations!) I've never spent any time in that part of the country, so Christin and spent a few days in Charleston, as well. We went out last Wednesday and were supposed to come back Monday night, but crappy weather in the Northeast caused our flight to be cancelled and we wound up getting home yesterday, Tuesday. Apart from that flub, we had an awesome time. Charleston is very charming. Hilton Head doesn't have quite the urban charm, but the beach is gorgeous and we got some solid R&R time on the beach and by the pool.

Anyway, I'm not going to get too much into the gritty details, here — but I thought I'd post some photos for everyone. Not a full account of everything we did. Just some... stuff.

First: Some photos from our first day walking around Charleston:

In Charleston, we stayed at Two Meeting Street Inn (in the Music Room) — possibly my best hotel/lodging experience ever. The building had previously been an old home and they left it furnished as such. And the staff were the utmost of southern hospitality. And the porch was perfect for hanging out on while drinking iced tea and eating whatever little sweets they happened to have out.

That first night we ate at Husk, which we enjoyed.

And Thursday we took the ferry out to Fort Sumter. By the way: The weather through our entire trip was hot and sticky. Especially at Fort Sumter, but all over Charleston and Hilton Head. Whew.

And, of course, the wedding — our reason for being out there in the first place. Nick's family had a home on the beach, so they held the ceremony right there. Gorgeous spot! We even had a few spectators...

And the reception... Some teenage rock band played covers for the first few hours down kind of in some park. Pretty good, especially considering that they looked to be around 15. "Barracuda" was a hit, of course. Otherwise: More drinks, some food, toasts, dancing, and such!

We had a rental car for the drive back to the airport at Charleston, so we took some time after lunch to visit an Boone Hall Plantation. The house itself had been rebuilt in the 1920s, but there were original slave homes and other buildings scattered about. Interesting stuff (and the home itself — currently someone's real home, by the way — was pretty cool).

And so that's that! We're back home in Brooklyn, now. Back to work...

I did it. I bought Civilization V. Off of Steam (which I quite like, by the way). They had it discounted as a part of their Summer Camp Sale promotion. And, honestly, I've been reading about the game for months and I just couldn't help myself. Don't judge me.

My experience with the Civilization series of games goes way, way back. I actually remember the first time I heard about it: Two friends (Jason and Yirong) were talking about the original game on the bus home after school one day during what must've been 9th grade (circa 1992). An odd conversation about playing as the Germans or Aztecs or whatever and fighting battles and dealing with barbarians and such. "I realized they had settled on the other end of my continent!" It all seemed kind of mysterious, and even at age 14 or 15 these terms of history and culture carried enough weight that hearing them mixed up into bizarre and unreal configurations seemed pretty novel. Enough so that I still kind of remember the conversation (loosely).

Anyway, somehow I got my hands on a version for my little old black-and-white Mac Classic. Probably from Floppy Joe's, Austin's computer game rental place that eventually folded (I suspect) after lawyers got involved and accused them of facilitating exactly what I did to get a copy of Civ for myself: Piracy.

(I should make a side note about Floppy Joe's. First, I really can totally bring to mind the feel and layout of the place as I sit here just now. It sat up near 29th and Guadalupe in Austin TX, right next door to where the famous Toy Joy now sits. It's a place my mom probably remembers, as well, since she took me there fairly often after I got my first Mac. They rented computer games, which really kind of meant that the games with decent copy protection got rented and the ones without got pirated. And most Mac games back then didn't have very good copy protection. So that's how I wound up with stuff like Civilization, Kid Pix, Spectre, Oids, Prince of Persia, Zork Zero — games I could never have afforded to buy. Piracy is one of those very hard topics to deal with because on one hand, yes, I knew that my behavior skated on the bad side of the law. But I had so many seminal moments with games and just interactive "stuff" in general that I got from Floppy Joe's — I think there's a good chance that I wouldn't be where I'm at today as far as working creatively with technology if I hadn't had those experiences. I also remember being exposed there to stuff like shareware for the first time (back when shareware came on floppies you'd buy for a few bucks (yes, yes, yes — and BBSes)) and, of course, the vast world of PC gaming which I had no way to really participate in — although I could check out the boxes and try to imagine what was going on.)

Anyway, I played the hell out of it. Civilization's a remarkably addictive game. I remember phases of playing this game to the point of having dreams about military units moving around on the square grid and forming boundaries and blockades and skirmishing, building cities, trading, etc. On the one hand, I feel like surely there must've been something better I could've been doing with my time (I'm going to guess that this impacted my schoolwork). But then, looking back, I don't think Civilization is quite the worst game a kid could spend his or her time glued to. For one thing, every single element of the game has some sort of historical underpinning. For example (and, honestly, I could be talking about Civ 1 or Civ 5 twenty years later — the core game is almost identical): You start with one single band of settlers in 4000BC and play the game on a randomized planet full of islands and continents with a collection of competing civilizations. You might, say, play the Romans. And in this random world a bunch of other civilizations — the Germans, Americans, Zulu, Indians, etc — are also trying to grow and flourish. But the game tries to make the world "feel" like the world as it stood circa 4000BC and later 1AD and 1500AD and 1996AD not by flashing a title card and announcing "Now You're in the Industrial Age!" but by incrementally taking you from one phase of history to the next with things like the technology tree (where you must first spend some years researching agriculture which then lets you research horseback riding and eventually on to other more advanced technologies like gunpowder and semiconductors). So in a sense it kind of was a game about how resources and the sort of random arrangements of land and the starting points of civilizations along with their tendencies towards things like science or war can lead to different results for different people thousands of years down the line — kind of a gamified version of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Which may sound obvious. (I'm certainly not the first person to make that connection.) So I do wonder how much this one game might've influenced my outlook on how the general flow of global history works. I did, after all, play it well before I ever read Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I also remember picking up a certain amount of vocabulary from the game. "Phalanx" and "trireme," for example, are words which I first saw in Civilization which I them went and looked up and learned what meant. (The Extra Credit video series has a great piece up about this called "Tangential Learning" — written by the same James Portnow as the previous link.) This stuff does also seem important (and literally, like I said, the entire damned game is packed with historic and cultural references — there's so much to tangentially learn). To me, though, it feels kind of secondary to the bigger picture stuff about learning a perspective on how history "works" on a more fundamental level. But interesting, nevertheless. And healthy, no doubt. I'm going to guess that one major reasons kids do poorly in school — especially in subjects like history — is that they're expected to memorize the information, but not really use it beyond regurgitation in some way. When you need to know what a phalanx is in order to prevent Napoleon from barging in conquering your cities — you'll remember what the hell a phalanx is.

And I'm not going to argue that the version of how history works presented in Civilization is really the Way History Really Works. No one has that figured out. But it does present a picture, and I feel like if nothing else it put into my head a starting point — something which I could knock other ideas and experiences up against.

Anyway — that was then. I did pick up Civilization II (at Floppy Joe's, no doubt) a few years later (still in high school) and played the hell out of that, as well. And that was more-or-less the end of my life with the game.

Until.

They released a kind of lite version of Civilization IV for the iPad last year. Which I couldn't resist and played around with for a bit. Fun fact: It's great for flights because it doesn't necessarily take much thought (or reflexes, since it's turn-based) but is addictive enough that I can burn through an entire five hour flight playing with it — exactly what someone like me who fucking hates flying needs.

And so I saw Civilization V at a discount on Steam and decided to grab it. And I knew what would happen. Last weekend I kind of felt crappy, so I just played Civ for, like, ten hours over the course of a couple days. Until my brain started viewing everything in my real world fixed into a hexagonal lattice (Civ V uses hexes instead of squares — the most radical change in the game in 20 years, I think). And I made a mental agreement with myself to not play during the work day, but I've been sneaking an hour or two here and there while Christin's out or doing other things in the evenings. And I played about an hour earlier today. (And might play a bit more before dinner!) I don't have a ton of time and my brain just works differently than in did in the early nineties, so I'm not quite as compelled to just sit for hours and hours and hours playing with it — but certainly if all of my other engagements went away for a weekend I could probably fall into that trap.

So, yeah. One thing I've been thinking about during this play-through is just why it's so crack-like and addictive — if not to everyone, than at least to me. I guess I have a few ideas...

My first idea is simply that when I play Civilization, I'm not just fighting battles and trying to win the game or whatever. My mind constructs a story around the whole thing — a story of my own creation, mostly. And this isn't really done consciously — at least, I don't feel like I do something like "Well, now I'm going to sit down and create a narrative." I think it does have to do with the fact that the names of the peoples, cities, and such are real: I've been playing as the Americans, and when you found a city called Philadelphia, immediately my brain has some kind of resonance with that city, even though it has basically nothing to do with the real-world Philadelphia. (My Philly's landlocked mid-continent and on the edge of a desert.) But I guess it subtly makes you care about these things (or at least have an opinion on them) and it makes the differences between the fake and real cities kind of stick out in starker contrast. My Philly's on a desert. My Washington has city walls and the Brandenburg Gate. My Atlanta is just about the southernmost city in the world. It gives some connection to the game and it pokes that "what if?" part of my brain. And I guess that pulls me into caring about this new alternate reality history I'm building. I do find the alt history that is created over the course of playing a game to be very engaging and interesting.

The second idea about why I get so hooked isn't quite as high-minded. In Civ, there's just never any end to anything. There's always something in the middle of being built, or in the middle of being fought, or whatever. Since there's never a clear stopping point mid-game, like there might be in an FPS between levels or scenes or whatever, it's easy to get locked into an extended period of "oh, just one more thing." I know I'm susceptible to this because I do the exact same damned thing with the web sometimes: I get locked into these extended cycles of "oh, let me just see what's on Gawker — then that's it" through twenty-ish sites that'll last hours. In a way, the game does play itself to a certain degree, only bothering the player when it's time to make an important decision. So you can get locked into a trance-like period of pointing and clicking and responding. It's a game you can watch TV while playing. I'm not sure if this part of the game is good or bad or what, but I do feel like the designers have mastered the art of doling out little rewards at just the perfect rate to make it difficult for people like me to escape the game. (But at least I'm learning about triremes.)

Anyway. These are just a few thoughts on Civilization. I'm enjoying Civ 5, although I'll probably just finish with this run-though and then shelve it. I don't need to spend hundreds of hours at it. But it is nice to be reminded of these other bits of my personal history with the Civilization series and games in general...

So. Class #2. Werewolf didn't happen. I had my fresh deck of cards and everything. But. Only four kids turned up for class due to a field trip -- simply too few to play the game with. Sadly. Because I still think it's a useful educational game because it's so easily modified and extended. But it looks like I might not have a chance to test that idea since we're rapidly moving into the actual "make your own game" part of the class. And now that we're officially into learning GameMaker, I don't think we can turn back.

GameMaker. Since Werewolf fizzled, we spent most of our second class learning the basics of this mostly drag-and-drop game-making software. (This after another round of get-to-know-yas and a recap of our general definition of what a game is and a review of some terms from the first class.)

Teaching GameMaker is both easier and more complicated to teach than I expected. Easier because all four of the kids got it that first class. We downloaded it, along with a little pack of graphics and sounds that I put together for them to use -- mostly simple Nintendo sprites and a selection of sound effects that come pre-packaged with Mac OS X. And we got it installed in nothing flat on the four machines the kids were using. Great. And then I took them through the basic first steps. First, we made our player character. I had them make a sprite (and reviewed the definition -- something that appears on the screen and moves). I had them make an object that used that sprite. I had them make a room. I had them put the object in the room and attach a set of events that made it move in different directions when they pushed the arrow keys on their keyboards. Run. No problem. The kids know how to use computers quite well.

("Sprite" and "event" are two of our big vocabulary words, by the way.)

I found it a bit difficult to read their reactions, but I think they felt a nice little "whoa" moment when they saw their creations (as simple as they may have been) on screen and were able to interact with them. Processing, the Java-based tool used at ITP to teach programming, sort of had that same philosophy: The faster they can go from zero to seeing something move on the screen, the more students will be willing to learn. I know from personal experience that on professional programming projects there's a whole list of steps you have to go through before you even get to the point of seeing a blank screen when you run what you're working on. As experienced as I am, my first time playing around with GameMaker I felt it quite satisfying to just open the software, click on a few things, and poof -- simple game that runs right there. Took me five minutes. Took us as a class about maybe 15 minute to get to this first point -- really quick, honestly. That was the easy part.

The hard part will be on-going through the remainder of the class. It only consciously occurred to me during our second class that these kids would not be working on their games at home. This ain't grad school. Or undergrad. Or even, really, normal high school. And when it comes to talking about games and computer stuff at home... Well, okay. This may sound weird for a second, but might as well write about it and see what it looks like on the screen...

I'm a white boy from Texas. My high school happened to be largely black and somewhat hispanic, but there was definitely an unfortunate barrier, for the most part, between the Science Academy kids (mostly white, including me) and the normal student body (mostly not). And maybe that has nothing to do with anything. But -- it's inarguably true that I've never been in a high school outside of Texas. Certainly not one in Bushwick. So I feel like I don't have a clear grasp of what, really, the home lives of these kids might be like. It's not a huge deal -- they all seem reasonably smart, happy, and well-adjusted -- but I don't know what growing up in a minority community in Bushwick is like and so I find myself tripping on my tongue when I ask about things like computers at home. There actually may also be zero racial or geographic element to it -- I'm a very hardcore computer user and I'm surrounded by people who are nearly all very hardcore computer users of one flavor or another. Regardless of our incomes, we all have fancy computers and mobile phones and all variety of digital doodads. Maybe this isn't an issue of me not having a grasp on what the kids tech lives at home might be like -- it might be more of an issue of me simply not knowing what the average American's tech life at home is like. I don't know. This paragraph feels all sorts of weird and rambling, but I'll leave it in. I had no solid idea what the kids would be like before I first stepped into the classroom a few weeks ago, but the reality (so far) appears to be that this group of kids is not unlike my little group of nerd-friends in high school. So there's not a huge cultural bump, but these are all minority kids living in a very different sort of urban environment and that must have some impact on their outlook. Maybe I'm making more out of this than I ought to, but I feel it's worth being alert about. Anyway.

My point: It dawned on me that I couldn't assign them homework. So suddenly we're talking about a total of maybe eight or ten hours to learn enough of GameMaker for them to still have time to make their final project games. Which is the complicated part of teaching GameMaker, because one kid has already started talking about making his own version of RollerCoaster Tycoon (which, as a sim game, is already kind of a make-your-own-game game). And I'm already fielding questions about doing things with GameMaker which I'm sure are possible, but I don't know if we'll get to. (Especially given that I'm more-or-less learning this tool along with them.)

But they do seem to pick up what I teach them very quickly and all of them took the reigns and began playing around and experimenting with the software after I taught them each thing. The other stuff we did that first class included making enemies that walk around the screen, making walls to contain the level, and making collision events between the player, enemies, and walls. Basic top-down Legend of Zelda-style stuff.

So. Fast-forward one week to this past Tuesday. Five kids. And computer science teacher Andrew "Mr. Drozd" Drozd assisted instead of the usual Lisa Kletjian (although she stuck around for the first bit of class). More GameMaker. We started with a review of terms, which I think will be the new thing for each class. For those of you playing along at home, our current vocabulary list:

• Strategy
• Interactive
• Triple-A Games
• Indie Games (Interesting to note: Mr. Drozd asked if any of the kids new what "indie" meant. They didn't. So I had to clarify.)
• Sprite (The non-lemon-lime soda definition.)
• Event
• If-Then
• Loop
• Variable
• Relative (In a mathematical sense, because GameMaker always asks if you, for example, want something position in a fixed place on the screen or relative to something else.)
• XY Coordinates

So we're getting in a solid set of programming terms, which I like.

Alright. So that happened. And then back to GameMaker.

We had one new kid who missed the previous week, so I felt a little bit of a confusion as to get him up-to-speed without boring everyone else. But two kids immediately opened up their previous projects and started messing around with them (in a good way) and the other two kinda seemed to need a review, anyway, so I just took the new kid and that pair through the steps from the previous week. Funny thing though: One kid -- I swear she was just barely awake through the previous week's class. And seemed kind of uninterested and I had to kind of push her through each step. Not her fault on the drowsiness thing -- it's a long class at the end of a long day for these kids (4-6pm on Tuesdays, remember). But. This past Tuesday when we cracked open GameMaker, she totally remembered how to do everything. And I think actually quite enjoyed working with it. A nice surprise. And the other one who I thought might need a review also didn't need much of one. And the new kid picked it up quickly. So. Success.

Fun story: During this part of the class I poured myself a glass of pink lemonade (Lisa always provides drinks and snacks for the kids). And then managed to spill it all over my crotch in front of everyone. Good times.

So, we moved on to the new stuff. This time I had on the agenda three things: 1) Bullets. 2) Multiple rooms. 3) Points. And talking about bullets forced me to introduce the term "instance." And points, of course, required a quick discussion about variables. (As for teaching variables in a computer science context, game lives and points would seem to be excellent hooks to get kids to understand the concept.) And we did get through all of this by the end of class. One kid -- the new kid -- even got a crazy multi-leveled reverse bullet-hell shooter thing happening with a screen full of enemies and bullets flying absolutely everywhere. Another kid made a maze-like game where one had to maneuver around the level to get to the door to move on. I mean, they only had a few tools at their disposal, so they weren't going to create a wide range of games, but I was pleased to see they were coming up with different approaches.

Oh: And one kid found a sort of top-down zombie defense game made with GameMaker. And rather well-polished, as well, with good graphics and sounds. Like the zombie level in Call of Duty: World at War (but top-down): You're in a house with a gun and zombies are trying to break in and you have to kill them before you're overwhelmed by the flood. Definitely a game like games they had enjoyed before. But. Since made with GameMaker, I could prompt them to think about how the maker of that game might've built it. The kids knew how to make a player. They knew walls. Enemies. Bullets. Points. They had all of the pieces to make something like this zombie game. I think it was interesting for them to make that connection.

Another observation: For a couple of the kids, I don't think they had quite formed in their mind a difference between player and designer. On kid, especially -- the bullet-hell kid -- seemed to kind of treat the bullets and points as things you might upgrade as a player in a game like Call of Duty. So he made a million bad guys. And then kept increasing the bullet spray until he cold kind of wipe them out no problem. And then he made them each worth some massive amount of points and showed off his, like, 16-digit score. Which is fine -- nothing wrong with that sort of experimentation at all. But. Definitely funny. And a little insight into how these kids might think about making games, just the idea that they might need to develop a bit more of a designer's mentality as something distinct from a player's mentality. But. Game designers also aim to make experiences that are satisfying. And clearing off a whole screen of hundreds of enemies with a massive barrage of bullets is, indeed, satisfying.

What else? Oh, yeah. I set up the blog on its own domain (hidden from the world, for now, because of privacy concerns -- sorry) as to bypass the school's, ahem, dumb restriction on Tumblr. But we ran out of time and I didn't get a chance to get the kids going with it. I'm getting worried about this part of the class. I very much wanted to have them contribute to the blog, especially since so much of our in-class time will go towards GameMaker. But it may not come to pass. I'll give it another shot next week.

So that's about it. I haven't fully decided on what we're going to do next week. I'm guessing a vocabulary run-down, because that's become our thing to do at the beginning of a class. Might add a couple of new terms in there for 'em. And then more GameMaker. I've tentatively got a few things on the agenda, there: 1) Lives. 2) Scrolling levels. 3) General variables (like having a limited number of bullets and picking up new supplies). 4) Something else I'm forgetting right now.

Actually, I'm like half-sick right now. And sitting up on my roof writing in the dark because the fresh air is nice (and the wifi works up here, which is convenient). So my thinking may be a little generally muddled. But there you have it.

Onward.

So, yeah. We had our class. And it went very well, happy to report. We had about nine kids turn up altogether, and they kind of trickled out over the course of our two hours so by the end we had four present. Apparently it'll take another class or so before they get into the rhythm of staying the entire time. The class is a bit of an elective -- and it's from 4-6pm on Tuesdays through the summer, which is... odd for kids of that age. And that class schedule really feeds into my feeling that I'm teaching a graduate school class for 15 and 16-year-old. Or, at least, an ITP class for kids that age: The first class was definitely very conversational and I'm trying to let the kids guide me as much as possible towards what they want to learn. And like an ITP class, everyone's going to have a group project due at the end... We're going to make simple games with YoYo Games' GameMaker software, a fun little casual game-making tool I've been playing with for the past few days. Perfect for building some early-era Nintendo-style 2D creations. (And which Brad Hargreaves over at General Assembly actually recommended to me -- good call on that!) I think the kids will have fun with that.

Anyway: More about this first class. Before we started, one kid introduced himself and mentioned that he'd googled me and watched my Ignite talk -- a good sign. And during the class he talked and talked about games -- very engaged, and even a little self-conscious that he was chattering too much. I was pretty excited at the engagement. And to see that the other kids were mostly into it, as well -- especially the ones who remained as the class went along. Everyone talked. Everyone seemed more-or-less comfortable, although these are high school kids and prone to goofy awkwardness (something I've tooooootally grown out of). But I felt a good vibe and nice energy as we went along.

So what did we do? Well. I had very neatly picked out a few casual online games for us to play together a lead-in to some conversations about different kinds of games. (See my last post on the matter.) Two things happened, though:

1. Fun fact: Schools have content blockers. And those content blockers block games. (And Twitter. But not Facebook or YouTube, which surprised me.) So my game selections we a no-go.

2. Honestly, after getting to know them a bit... These kids mostly seemed to have XBOXes and Wiis. Or, at the very least, they had spent a fair amount of time playing games online. My game selections felt kind of dinky and a bit below what they were already used to. I don't need to introduce teenagers to video games. They pretty well know them.

I had to do something, though, so Lisa (the woman who helped me teach that day) and I clicked around trying to find some games that the blocker had missed. Found some terrible ones clearly for elementary schoolers which just sucked. But during this one of the kids found an HTML 5 version of Lemmings that someone had created, so we wound up playing that, each kid pulling it up on their computer screen and playing for 10-15 minutes. And then discussion. Which led into the meat of the class:

What is a game?

This is when things got interesting. I started doing my thing, prompting them to think about games they'd played and what made them different from a non-game. And it really didn't take them any time to hit on the key things. Goals. Rules. Strategy. Etc. We went through and talked about the features of games and I tried to push the boundaries of their thinking a bit, toward things like: What makes a game bad (which one kid entertainingly hijacked into an elaborate rant against ET for the Atari 2600, which came out when he was, like, -14)? And we talked about level design. Like, when playing Lemmings, how were the levels ordered? You have all of these powers and controls... Did you start out with access to all of them or just some? That kind of thing. Again, they got it very quickly. They play games all the time. They know about increasing difficulty.

And this was one of the major takeaways, I think. And why I think this is an important sort of class. These kids do play games all the time. And they put a fair amount of thinking into them and I'm sure that almost every kid there has had moments when they've mentally stepped back a bit and considered in a more abstract sense what they're doing when they're playing a game. But. I don't think they ever get to talk about this stuff, at least not in a way where they're allowed to think about it and get a little bit of direction from an adult. Or validation that it's not a flat-out waste of time. Almost certainly not at school. At least not in an official sense -- I bet there are teachers who play games and talk about them a bit with the kids. Maybe? I don't know. At any rate, I felt like I had a subject at my disposal that the kids both wanted to talk about and were already, to a certain degree, experts on. Just without realizing it.

And in a broader sense, I want to see more classes like this taught in high schools because I know that kids have different sorts of brains and I feel like game design (like computer science) appeals to a kind of systems thinking which brains like mine do very well with. I happened to be smart enough to skate by and do reasonably well in high school, but I felt like my classes very rarely connected with the way my brain really liked to learn. Most of the stuff I really enjoyed learning about I kind of just did on my own. I definitely kind of created my own personal curriculum during high school and definitely college, not limited to technology by any means, but certainly that's where I picked up my mad computer skills. I'm good with computers.

Anyway: I think there's room, here, to appeal to some kids who might not've connected to a subject yet at school and get them excited. And slip in some computer programming, geometry, and art talk while we're at it.

Big picture stuff.

Tomorrow is class #2. Werewolf day. More reports afterwards, I'm sure.

Yeah, so it looks like I've got an exciting week coming up. (I also think I sort of broke the "s" key on my laptop's keyboard -- it sometimes doesn't trigger when I hit it. And until I have evidence to the contrary, I�m going to blame the cat. But that�s an issue for another day.)

So. I�m leading two classes next week, in two very different educational contexts. On Tuesday, I'm doing my first day of a class called "Play" -- an eight-week summer class for high school kids about game design. Then on Thursday I'm doing a talk over at General Assembly on my usual subject of the past year-or-so, game design and social media. A couple hours with 9th and 10th graders. A couple hours with industry people. I'm expecting that by Friday I will have another interesting blog post rarin' to go...

Anyway. Let's take these one by one.

Tuesday. I�m honestly most nervous about this one. I�ve done professional talks before, and they�re fairly nerve-wracking (especially Ignite -- yes). But. I essentially know my audience, I know what they want, and I can at least predict how I think they�re going to respond to me. For example, I know I can go and talk for about an hour straight on a fairly esoteric topic and people will sit there and politely lend me their ears (I hope). I will be confident that I can just blab what�s on my mind and people will be basically on my same page a far as context. We�re all social media players, we know what the big issues and common complaints of the day are, we know most of the same memes. We all spend our days sitting in front of the same internet.

But. I do not think this is going to be the case on Tuesday, with this group of kids. Now, I expect them to be reasonably tech-savvy. In fact, I sat in on fifteen-twenty minutes of Andrew "Mr. Drozd" Drozd�s computer class last Wednesday and got a taste of what their level of sophistication is. Just saying this makes me feel like grandpa, but: They�re already well beyond where the average high schooler was when I was in high school. Granted, there�s way more stuff for them to explore -- I�m not saying my peers were tech-dumb. But I think these kids will have a basic knowledge of what, say, Facebook is and how social networking online works. They might even have some programmer-mindset sorts of mental stuff going on -- I�m sort of convinced that if you enjoy using technology at a young enough age there�s almost no way you can�t develop a programmer�s mentality about computers. As you explore and push the boundaries of Facebook, for example, you�ll get to understand computer logic and flow and how things fit together conceptually. I think. Maybe I�ll be wrong, here. Which is part of the reason I�m so excited to teach this -- I just want to see how kids use technology. I know how tech nerds use technology.

I�m also hoping that this "programmer mindset" thing is happening with some of these kids simply because I think the game designer mentality is very, very similar. Game design is all about creating complex and purposeful systems and making sure those system work as intended, while making sure there are no holes or exploits that will break them or make them un-fun. You may not need to explicitly know what a for-loop is, but you do need to be able to mentally run through many, many "what ifs" and think about how the players are going to interactive with whatever you create.

So, yeah. I think this first class on Tuesday will be a couple of things. The biggest: Simply me feeling them out so I can get a read on what their mindset about gaming is already. They play games. That I�m confident of. They doubtless play many more games than they even realize, and I think game design is also a very interesting subject to talk to kids about because it�s quite possible that they play more different games for longer periods of time than almost any adult does. They probably play sports. Basketball or baseball or whatever. And some Xbox. (Maybe too much Xbox.) And they seem to have Facebook accounts, so I�d be surprised if some weren�t into social games like Farmville. No doubt they get distracted while online and find casual games to mess with, as well. They might play board games. Checkers? Chess? There�s probably some casual gambling of some sort happening. Who knows. But this is the kind of stuff I want to get a read on. Before I do, I don�t think I can make any sort of concrete plan of action for the coming weeks.

I�ve also found a handful of online games for us to play together (with special thanks to the fine folks at ask.Metafilter for their many suggestions). I don�t think we�ll get through them all, and I�m really hoping that they�ll have some games in mind to play in class -- but I�ll list �em here, anyway. Maybe you�ll find something you enjoy. These are, by the way, games I�m hoping they can play in five or ten minutes and get the essence of the experience.

Casual games:

• Canabalt
• Bejeweled

Strategy games:

• Desktop Tower Defense

Games as art or personal expression:

• Passage
• Every Day the Same Dream

Cooperative games:

• Fire Boy & Water Girl

Puzzlers:

• notpron. (Although, jeez -- a name like that makes me nervous about using it in class.)

Anyway -- you may know much better examples of these kinds of games (or other kinds of games I�m missing altogether). Hit me up in the comments, please, if you have ideas. But you get where I�m kind of going. And I hope to take the class through a few of these games during our couple of hours.

One final comment: The part that makes me the most nervous is simply the possibility that some kids just won�t care. That I�ll have to fight to get some to pay attention or that I�ll be exhausted just keeping conduct in line or whatever. I�m going into this assuming that the topic will be enticing enough that I can rely on the kids being fairly interested. If nothing else, if I sense that I�m losing them, I can totally switch gears. It�s nice not having to teach against a prescribed curriculum. But we�ll see.

It�s all a big experiment.

And then, yeah: Thursday. At General Assembly.

So Mike Dory put Brad Hargreaves over there in touch with me (thanks!) -- they wanted someone to come talk about game design, I�m always willing to talk about game design, so here we are. The talk has been put together quickly, but I�ve been pondering this topic long enough that I kind of had a nice set of points I knew I wanted to make.

I�m talking about how game design impacts social media design. My grouchy pitch: I�m really tired of all of this "gamification" crap because it�s vastly oversimplifying why game design is so important for people who design other kinds of interactive products. So many people seem caught up in their points and badges -- 90% inspired by Foursquare, it feels like. And there�s been this happy-hippie GAMES WILL SAVE THE WORLD thread of conversation which I�m getting tired of because it�s letting people who don�t really have much to say grab everyone�s attention simply and get everyone all excited by just listing all of the things that we can now suddenly fix with a few simple game mechanics: Global warming! Solved. The economy! Fixed. Social inequality! Easy-cheezy. Education! Fixed over my lunch break.

Obviously I�m kind of overstating the case, but I do thing there�s tremendous room in here for a much more nuanced conversation about game design and interactive design. I�m hardly a ground-breaking genius on the subject of either games or social media, but I think I have the right attitude and I�m hoping that I can at least try to point some people in the right direction. It�s all about opening up people�s minds to possibilities. My own, included. I love doing talks mostly because of the amount of research and thinking I am forced to do leading up to them. Even if they cancelled the actual talk, it would be worth it for me.

Brad had me tone down some of the bitchiness in my talk description -- with good reason. I promise: My talk will not full of complaints. And even though I get snarky about some game designers when they get all starry-eyed about this sort of stuff, I�m very pleased that this line of conversation has become popular. I do think there�s a lot to learn, here, and I appreciate the idea of people having this conversation amongst themselves -- even if they�re sometimes amateurs or just people shooting the shit.

Anyway. More on that later, as well. I�m going to post my talking notes online as I did with my SXSW 2010 talk.

It�s 2am.

Goodnight.

I've certainly been packing away the books this year. It's probably a combination of things: 1) I've got free time. 2) I'm becoming a better developer (maybe), so that takes less mental energy and I'm looking for other outlets. 3) I own an iPad which at least removes most of the overhead of having to go out and buy physical books (and eBooks are cheaper). But really: Who knows.

And so, here's a selection of reviews I've left on Shelfari the first three months of this year:

The 25th Hour by David Benioff

"It's good. I like the set-up: Monty's last 24hrs before heading off for a stretch in federal prison. And the characters are very well-painted. But it fizzles a little bit at the end and doesn't wrap things up in a totally satisfying way, which is a bit disappointing. But I like Benioff's style. City of Thieves is definitely a better work of his, though." ✭✭✭✭

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

"I don't know... I kind of hazily cruised through this one. I liked the character of Pnin and the depiction of Waindell but wasn't really gripped by the story." ✭✭✭

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

"Hm. So I read this simply because I'm working on a project where we're throwing around the term "whuffie" quite often. I wanted to make sure I understood where the term came from. And Magic Kingdom is a short read -- and free -- so why not?

"Overall: I like some of the ideas. I like exploring what happens when people live in a world of total abundance -- when they don't die, they don't starve, they can totally remake their bodies at a whim, etc. But this book kind of suffers from existing in this universe where Nothing Really Matters: Magic Kingdom is way too light. There's almost no substance to it. The central plot feels utterly inconsequential. The hundred-plus year-old characters have the wisdom of teenagers. And the moments when the story should take us aside and really explore some of the implications of all of this life-extension, social-currency ("whuffie") economy, etc stuff -- it doesn't. Which is a shame.

"Anyway: It's a fun read. A quick read. Just lacking in substance." ✭✭✭

American Splendor by Harvey Pekar

"This is really the kind of storytelling I like best, the sort of slice-of-life stuff. I guess it's the depiction of the little moments of beauty or epiphany in plain life... It helps me step back and appreciate the details in my own mundane world a bit more. Good stuff." ✭✭✭✭✭

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

"Just a guy talking about life and stuff. A mellow read. Good for getting a little perspective." ✭✭✭✭✭

Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson

"I enjoy reading about physics and astrophysics. And while I don't have much of a mathematical background in those sciences (beyond the basics), I took enough classes in high school and undergrad (and have read enough books with interest) that I feel like I know a thing or two about what goes on up there.

"Tyson (whom I find utterly charming on television) doesn't break any new ground in science -- this isn't a book about string theory or any other single cutting-edge topic. (Most of it's not even about black holes.) What this book is, rather, is a series of science essays, each one tackling one specific piece of the astrophysics puzzle and explaining it in a very approachable, understandable way. In doing this, Tyson builds up a fairly detailed picture of how the universe works without ever getting too complicated or dull.

"So while I felt like I had been exposed to much of this information in the past (in a liberal arts sort of way), I really appreciated the science refresher and I appreciated being taken away from my mundane day-to-day back to a place where I could appreciate space and science. It's something I used to enjoy -- but it's hard to find the time to fit into an otherwise rather busy life.

"My only criticism is about the last two sections, which were mostly about earthly concerns such as lack of public scientific literacy and the place of religion and intelligent design in science. Tyson and I are on the exact same page on these issues and he, of course, can make his arguments much more elegantly than I could. But. I really don't need to be convinced of these issues and I really just wanted to hear more about the actual science. And it ended the book on a kind of oddly combative note.

"So: Great book! It's a relatively quick and easy read given the subject matter and Tyson's almost as charming on the printed page as he is on TV." ✭✭✭✭✭

Earlier this year I was approached to join a social media start-up as a developer. I'm not going to get into any details about it except to say that I would've been developer #1, tasked with taking the software from zero to beta (and beyond, presumably). And the founder of this company had plans to go through what seems to be the standard-issue VC funding and growth process. So. Before receiving an offer for compensation, I knew next to nothing about how start-up economics work for developers (or, really, for anyone). I still am certainly no expert, but I tried my best to do my research and talk to people who know about this stuff -- and a picture did begin to form in my head of how it works and of what metrics I should use to judge whether joining a start-up is worth my time.

I'm going to share that thinking with you, here. And the goal isn't to share specific information about that start-up or what compensation I was offered: The numbers I'm going to use are not real. But my logic and thinking is. And if you're considering an offer to join a start-up (or starting one yourself), I'm hoping this might be of use to you. At least for some perspective.

(Also: I'm fully expecting to come back to this post in a few years/months/days and think, "Christ, what a noob.")

So.

Here are my steps for deciding whether the opportunity to join a start-up makes economic sense for you as a developer (or any other hire, really).

1. Assess what your base yearly income is (or would be).

To start: I feel developers oftentimes undervalue themselves. If you know how to code or otherwise create using technology, you have something that's immensely valuable right now. If you can sit down at a computer and make a thing, even if simple, and even if done in a clumsy way: That's valuable. Many people in our industry cannot do that. And it's not just valuable because you can do for yourself for free what someone else needs to pay for. It's valuable because if you can manipulate technology, you can get dirty with the tools of the trade, play with them, and learn more about what possibilities they contain.

So, Mr. or Ms. Developer, the first (obvious) step when making a decision like this is to assess what you're worth. If you're already full-time employed, use that as a base. I work on contract projects, so my income fluctuates radically year-to-year. But let's say you're worth $100,000 per year as a full-time employee. (Again, this is not the number I chose for myself. But it's a nice, round number that will be easy to plug-in below.)

On thing to think about, here: For my number, I factored in my income but I also kept in mind quality-of-life issues. As an independent developer I can take as many holidays as I want. I work at home with my cat. I can be very selective about the projects I take on and I can vary my income on a whim if needed. These perks are very important to me and I would need to be paid more that just my standard yearly income to pull me away from them. If you're working a desk job you don't care for in a cinderblock room with no windows and a single 40 Watt lightbulb to keep you company, you might adjust your numbers the opposite direction.

So: Pick your yearly value. $100k, for example.

2. Understand the offer.

Again, not using real numbers, here. My offer came in the form of a yearly salary plus options. Let's pretend this was $3,000 per month (a low number designed more to help keep start-up employee afloat while the company gets its wings) and 3% stock options vesting over four years with a one year cliff (common vesting and cliff numbers). First, make sure you know some terms:

Vesting. This means you will slowly accrue these options over the course of four years. If you quit after two years, for example, you only get 1.5% of your 3%.

Cliff. This means you won't accrue any options until a certain amount of time has passed. So in this case you would see no options until after one year, but on the one year mark, 0.75% of your 3% would immediately vest -- your entire first year's worth. Does that make sense? It's a little weird.

And finally you absolutely must understand dilution.If you fail to factor in dilution, you run the risk of grossly overestimating how much stock you will have when your options vest. Dilution is this, in essence (again, using very round numbers for easy math): When a VC invests in the company, she usually doesn't buy existing stock (as I understand it). She makes new stock, so your stock will be worth less. Say there are 10,000,000 shares. If a VC puts $10,000,000 into the company, they might add another 10,000,000 shares to the pool. If you had 3% of the company, you now own 1.5% of the company. You have the same number of shares, but now there are twice as many shares total. (Although hopefully your shares are each worth more!)

My math on dilution (which more experienced friends have agreed with), is that a few rounds of VC funding might reduce your stake in the company down by 50%-75%. These are the real numbers I used for calculation. And, of course, numbers like these are wildly speculative. But to run the math, you will need to figure out what expected dilution you are comfortable using as an estimate. A 75% dilution means your 3% would actually be 0.75% of the company after several VC rounds. Granted, if you've gone through three rounds of funding, your start-up's probably doing well and that 0.75% may be valuable. But you need to know what dilution means.

Finally, stock options I'm not going to get into the details, here, but be aware of what that means. It doesn't exactly mean immediate ownership. Fred Wilson has much more elegant descriptions of how this sort of stuff works.

So: You've been offered $36k/yr with 3% stock options on a four year vest with a one year cliff. And you know what that means.

3. Understand the gamble.

Math time.

You are making a gamble.

You are joining a start-up and will make significantly less money that you would otherwise make. For maybe a year or two. Possibly longer. And you're a responsible adult, so you're not just doing this for the sheer joy of working in a crazy start-up environment. The gamble must have a financial upside: If you do a great job and the cards turn up in your favor, you want a nice pay-off for your sacrifices today. That is the essence of entrepreneurship.

To understand this gamble, you must understand your investment and the nature of the possible pay-off.

My friend Jason Cohen made this argument to me when we discussed this:

Imagine you were being hired at your standard yearly income (see step #1 above -- $100k/yr). The founder of the start-up would need to find an angel investor to pay for you. And that person would expect a return of 300% over three years of 1000% over five years to make it worth their while. But! In this case, you are being offered $36k/yr. So you're, in essence, putting $64k of seed money into the company that first year. After one year, you will be down $64,000 from what you otherwise would have earned. So you want to see that investment grow. And you might as well use 300% growth in three years and 1000% growth in five years. Meaning, if there's an exit in three years, you want $64k times 3: $192,000 return. If that exit's in five years, you want to see $640,000 come back to you.

Big numbers can seem crazy or greedy or whatever, especially if you're like me and used to smaller projects. But use them. Like I said, if you think you're worth $100k/yr and they're offering a base of $36k/yr -- that's a massive difference. Like, a couple or three new automobiles worth of difference. Do not give that up lightly.

In my case, there was also no guarantee that I would go up to my natural salary point anytime soon, so I doubled this first year investment to give myself a number that felt comfortable stretching over the course of three to five years. In this case, that would double your $64k investment to $128k. Which would make the return you'd like to see $384,000 after three years or $1,280,000 after five. Let's knock this down to $300k and $1m even to account for the fact that you're not putting this in as cash right at the beginning -- it's spread over time.

I know: These numbers aren't perfect. You're going to have to make your best estimates given the information you have. If you're very confident in the idea behind the start-up, for example, you might be willing to accept a gamble with less pay-off. Or if there are other reasons to join such as getting exposure to an industry in which you'd like to work. But if you are going to invest yourself in this start-up project (especially if it's as an employee), you need to establish what levels of returns your comfortable seeing in return for the gamble of time and money you're putting in up front.

So: Let's say, given the numbers I've been using so far, that you consider your risk to be $100k over the years you'd be working on the start-up and you'd like to see $300,000 after three years or $1,000,000 after five. And let's say $500,000 after four years, when all of your options vest. I'm fudging the numbers down a bit to make them more round and just to pretend I'm factoring in some other stuff when doing this math.

4. Spreadsheet time.

Let's plug all of these numbers into a spreadsheet and see where we're at.

What this means:

Yearly Income: How much the start-up is offering you in salary.

Your Cost (4yrs): A ballpark of what you're giving up in cash over four years to work at the start-up, based on the thinking described above.

Stock Options: What percentage of the company's value in options are you being offered?

Dilution: The ballpark percentage of reduction in your ownership in the company after several rounds of funding.

Exit (mil): Let's say the company has an exit right after all of your options vest -- after four years. Let's pretend it has exited at five different valuations, just to run some numbers.

Full Vest: What are your options worth at that exit point, after this hypothetical four years. Which equals Stock Options minus Dilution (which leaves you with 1.2% options) multiplied by the Exit.

Gain $: What's your profit? Equals Full Vest minus Your Cost.

Gain %: The percentage of return you would see in this case (to compare to the numbers an angel investor might want to see, as described above).

Okay. Whew.

What you want to look at is Gain $ and Gain %. In this case, to get a good return on your investment, you'd like to see the company exit in the $30m-$60m range. $100m would be wonderful. A $10m exit would give you a terrible return, a mere $20k bonus after the years of risk you just took. These are your magic numbers. Given what you know about the industry and the start-up's idea, do you think it can reach a $50m valuation? Is it even possible? Is it probable? Would you do this if there was a 10% chance of that? What about a 1% chance of that? We're now in the range of questions only you can answer. This is where your professional judgment comes into play.

And be honest with yourself. My philosophy regarding optimism and pessimism is this: When you're being creative and making things and throwing around ideas and making the business happen, be optimistic. Be joyous. Get excited. Have fun. Rock out. When you're dealing with financial numbers you need to be realistic, sober -- which for me means concentrating on the negatives. Being more pessimistic than I usually like to be. It can be a little uncomfortable, especially during negotiations when you have to talk with founders about dark crap like what happens if the business flat-out fails after a year.

So: Run that math. Think about the various possibilities and make your judgment about whether the gamble is worth it.

Caveats.

In my situation, I was talking to a founder who had essentially no code and no users and for whom I would be developer #1 and employee #1. So I didn't factor in stuff like the current value of the stock options. Meaning: If the company were already worth $10,000,000, 3% of options could be considered to be worth $300,000 right from the start (a massive amount -- I doubt a developer would get an offer like that, unless they're someone really special). So be aware of that difference. But — it's not hard to incorporate these numbers into the math above.

Also, I must say this once again: I'm a start-up business noob. I'm giving you my experience and I'm running through my rationale when understanding and making a judgment about my situation. If you'd like real advice, these are the two blogs which I read the most of and game me the most solid, usable information: Fred Wilson's A VC and Jason Cohen's A Smart Bear. Paul Graham has some good articles, as well.

My conclusion.

I turned down the offer I received. Which saddened me because a friend was making the offer. But, the money had to be right before I could get on board. And I'll be honest: I feel like solid developers in New York City at the moment have tremendous opportunities. There are plenty of jobs out there, if nothing else.

Also, y'know: I consider myself a pretty creative guy with an entrepreneurial bent. I haven't started a company any larger than my one-person contracting biz, but I've got years and years of experience working independently. I've met all sorts of people and have had all sorts of experiences. Why not brainstorm my own idea? Why just take some small percentage of someone else's? Especially if I'm doing all of the development, anyway: Why not fit it around my life and start with 100% equity in a project -- no vesting, no cliffs. One could start a relatively small business and with a little pluck and luck possibly walk away with more cash than one would get taking the deal above with a company that eventually had a $50m or even $100m exit.

I think this is a strong argument for that kind of philosophy. I can't say I'd never join a start-up like this, but I do think this is a very good argument for cultivating one's own ideas and learning how to make them valuable rather than jumping in on someone else's thing. I have a strong independent streak, anyway. I like working at home. I like small projects with at most a couple of people working on them. I prefer working with friends. I'm not a big fan of business for business' sake: I like to make things. And I like to be able to say things I make are mine, not that they belong to someone else. These are my tendencies -- very much non-economic issues which I had to consider when working out my decision on this issue.

Anyway. I hope this brain-dump helps someone out there. I am not an expert. So if there's something wrong about my thinking, please let me know in a comment. I feel like I've just scratched the surface on this and I would love to know more.

Thanks for reading!

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

"Nice! Shirky pulls together great social media anecdotes and research and assembles them into a very clear description of where we're at and where we may be heading... It's a must-read for anyone in the industry and a should-probably-read for any avid Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media service user." ✭✭✭✭✭

The Scott Pilgrim Series by Bryan Lee O'Malley

"A cute little story about indie rocker kids, but with a weird sort of Japanese superhero challenge twist. Fun, but a *really* fast read. Which makes the entire series kind of expensive if you can go through all six $12 volumes in an hour or so apiece. (This desperately needs to be available in cheaper form on a digital book service -- Amazon Kindle or Comixology or something.)" ✭✭✭✭

The Invention of Air by Steven Berlin Johnson

"I don't believe I'd ever heard of Joseph Priestly previous to reading this. Which kind of shocks me. Johnson portrays him as an integral part of both the founding of the United States and the founding of modern chemistry and environmental science. The first 2/3rds of the book, describing his "hot hand" decade as an "electrician" in the company of Ben Franklin and then during his research into plant respiration and isolating oxygen are exciting and placed very nicely into historical context. Johnson doesn't just tell the story of Priestly, here, or even just the story of the science -- he places it in the full cultural context of the huge shift in the worldview of people in general that occurred during this time. The book lost some energy in the final third, but I liked the optimistic tone that is struck at the very end.

"The one flaw of the book, I think, is that Johnson touches on a few deeper questions that could've used a bit of a lengthier treatment. Maybe a minor quibble. At any rate: It's got plenty of starting points for further investigation." ✭✭✭✭

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

(I didn't review this right after I read it, but it warrants a mention. It's great. It stars the eponymous Oscar, a Domincan kid growing up New Jersey. It mixes his story with that of his family and finds a great tone that's a mix of Dominican culture and nerd culture -- Lord of the Rings and other fantasy and sci-fi language litters the book. But it really comes together nicely.) ✭✭✭✭✭

1776 by David McCullough

(Another great one I didn't review at the time. But very much worth reading. Watching the John Adams miniseries kind of kicked off a little American history jaunt for me last fall. The miniseries left me lukewarm, but it led to me picking up this book which was a very interesting look at the first year of the American Revolution from an on-the-ground perspective. And it's somewhat different from the grade school depiction of the Revolution: McCullough very clearly depicts the ambiguities, the difficulties, and real sort of mess, for lack of a better term, that constituted that first year of revolt. It humanizes it. Makes some of the achievements that might seem mundane seem much more heroic when you think of them in light of the fact that real humans not unlike ourselves were doing them, not Superhero George Washington from textbooks and Tea Party rallies.) ✭✭✭✭✭

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

"Excellent! Worth reading just to get to know Longstreet and Chamberlain." ✭✭✭✭✭

Final Thoughts

I just didn't have enough reading time during the second half of 2010. And I think it impacted my thinking, there, especially towards the end. My brain just requires frequent "loosening up" via books like this, I guess...

At any rate, a couple of months into 2011 I've already read about half of the total number of books I read in 2010. A very good sign. Feels healthy.

I've been using Shelfari as a way of keeping track of what I read. It's cool. I like the interface. And since I try to put thought into the reviews I write after reading something, I'm going to collect those reviews here more often. Which should blast their readership up from about none to about two (my parents).

This isn't an exhaustive list of everything I read in 2010, but it's some interesting selections with my notes from Shelfari. They're in chronological order, to note, from January 2010 to June 2010. I'll follow up with another with books I read during the second half of the year.

And so:

City of Thieves by David Benioff

"I really enjoyed this. I guess there's not too much to say about it that's not found on the book jacket -- it's about two kids who wind up tasked with hunting down a dozen eggs for a Russian general at the peak (nadir) of the Leningrad Blockade during World War II. I'm utterly fascinated by that theater of the war -- eastern Germany, Poland, northwest Russia -- and I felt this captured that sense of emptiness and exhaustion very well. Beyond that, though, I loved the depictions of the characters and Benioff packs a good amount of suspense in. So, yeah. I don't have anything genius to say about this except that I'm sorry it ended. Very good stuff. Maybe I'll pick up one of Benioff's other books..." ✭✭✭✭✭

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

"Americans, at least, seem to think of butlers as kind of comic figures -- pointy-nosed Jeeves "at your service" sorts. The Remains of the Day kind of inflates that stereotype and uses it as a launching off point for a deeper discussion about loyalty and service over the course of a life. It reminds me a bit of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, except instead of boosterism, bulterism. Certainly it touches on good topics for someone at my point in life -- trying to figure out work-life balances and deciding which kinds of professional loyalties to pursue. It's a good read! (Later...) And I want to amend this to say that I didn't take this to be a sad story. A lot of people do. Ishiguro may have intended it to be. The movie may have painted it that way. But I felt Stevens' seemingly odd desire to continue on his pursuit of learning how to jest with his odd new American master right at the end of the novel kind of illuminated the idea that his life had not misguided. His job was his puzzle. It fit him. He felt satisfaction. This is acceptable. Just because he missed Ms. Kenton's signals and may have felt pangs of regret over it doesn't mean that was the path he should've taken. Anyway, the fact that I've come back to this book to add to my review probably indicates how much I enjoyed it. Stevens is a nerd. He enjoys rules and systems. I definitely see shades of myself in him." ✭✭✭✭✭

The Cleanest Race by B.R. Myers

"I'm fascinated by North Korea. Unlike most of the other stuff I've read about the DPRK, this book attempts to paint a full picture of the Text -- Myer's term for the official story of Korean history, the Kims, and their views of South Korea, the US, and the rest of the world. Myer's is very direct: North Korea is not like Stalinist Russia, the former Soviet Eastern Bloc, or Nazi Germany. It's something very distinct that can only be understood by understanding what North Koreans believe about themselves. Myer's book is very well written and very easy to absorb. Fascinating stuff." ✭✭✭✭✭

A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster

"This is a cute book -- kind of reminded me of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics or Martin Gardner's Aha! The title mostly refers to the first part of the book during which Koster gives a quick overview of his take on a theory of how "fun" works. The second half of the book is more of a manifesto on games as art. People deep in the world of game design might not get much out of this directly -- although it's nice to just see an important game designer's take on the subject. But this book would be great for folks just digging into the theory and practice of game design for the first time. It almost begs to be on the reading list in college classes about game design, interactive media, or art theory in general." ✭✭✭✭

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

"Hm. So I loved Jaron's talk at SXSW this year -- it's why I bought this book in the first place. Jaron's clearly a very smart and thoughtful guy and I appreciated hearing his concerns about how our digitally-mediated culture might cause us problems as people. That's what the first half of this book is about: How lock-in works and why it might be bad if people begin to believe their Facebook pages and think of themselves as selections on a pull-down list or nodes in the collective digital consciousness. I agree with Jaron -- there are many questions that need to be asked about how digital social tools will integrate with our culture. And many of these questions aren't being properly asked. The first half of the book does a great job of opening up discussion. I don't always agree with Jaron's answers, but I appreciate his questions.

"The second half of the book, sadly, gets weird. He spends a lot of effort complaining about the state of modern music as being largely derivative and non-innovative -- something which I totally, totally disagree with. My personal story as a musician is totally enabled by the internet and digital culture, so I am not willing to dismiss what's been going on in the past ten-or-twenty years in the world of music. He later, then veers off into discussions of virtual reality -- which is mildly interesting but also seems kind of weirdly dated and off-topic from the rest of the book.

"Anyway, the first half is definitely worth a read." ✭✭✭✭

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

"So, I read B. R. Myer's book The Cleanest Race a few months ago. This is a great follow-up. The Myer's book concentrated on the Official Story of North Korea -- their government-sanctioned origin story, history, and outlook. Nothing to Envy is about the actual lives of the people, constructed from interviews with a handful of defectors, mostly from the Chongjin area. It's a good read. Tragic, but well-constructed with moments of tension, surprise, and even a bit of humor. I flew through it quickly. If you find North Korea interesting, I'd recommend it. (Oddly, it's the second book I've read this year where everyone's starving through most of the story -- the other being City of Thieves.)" ✭✭✭✭✭

Final Thoughts

Yeah, so the first part of the year books relating to SXSW and my game design in UX talk dominated -- as did a couple of books about North Korea which were not career-related. And a smattering of fiction, when I had the time. And after SXSW (March) or so, I didn't have that much time.

More coming up...

We've spent most of the day at Rocio's place, again. Which, y'know. We're doing plenty while we're down here and we don't want to get back to New York just as exhausted as we left. And between the patio, the stereo, the warm air, and the cat -- there are definitely worse places in the world to spend the day. Rocio arrived home a few hours earlier and the three of us chatted while she cleaned up the patio. There may or may not be an evening dinner plan.

So. Uruguay.

Before planning this trip, I must admit that I hadn't ever put a whole lot of thought into Uruguay. I knew the capitol: Montevideo -- although I guess I thought they pronounced it "Monte Video" (like, a video store run by someone named Monte) instead of the proper "Montevi-DAY-o" (like Harry Belafonte). That was about it. And, y'know, since I wasn't able to fully participate in the planning side of this excursion I was still a bit in the dark as to what to expect when we arrived.

So Monday afternoon last week we got a ticket on the ferry -- the Buquebus -- from Buenos Aires to Montevi-DAY-o and made the trip. The ferry ride was enjoyable. About three hours long. Maybe 3 1/2. The main area felt like the cabin of a very wide jetliner. We sat in airplane seats with tray tables at the lot, arranged about twenty across. Except instead of facing a cockpit, we faced a wide cafeteria that served mediocre sandwiches and junk food items. The back side of the ferry offered a duty free shop (and, let me say: it's difficult to shop on a boat that's rocking about in in the ocean). First class (or whatever they call it) was upstairs. Surprisingly there was no place on the ferry to stand outside and get a bit of fresh air. I'd been expecting something a bit more like the Staten Island Ferry with a bit more access to windows or railings where one could watch the seascape passing by. Not really the case, though. So I mostly just stuck in my seat and finished reading my book (The 25th Hour by Michael Benioff -- not as good as City of Thieves, but a good read). And played games on my iPhone.

In Montevideo we stayed at Ermitage Hotel, a nice spot just a few blocks from the beach. The whole town is spread along the beach, just to note. It has a great coastline and they really seem to put it to good use -- a wide boardwalk/corniche runs for miles along the sand. Buenos Aires waterfront seems to be mostly industrial -- that's not at all the case in Montevideo. Which Christin loved. The whole town had a much mellower vibe than BA, as well, which I enjoyed. Walking around that first evening in the neighborhood of the hotel, it honestly just reminded me of some of the neighborhoods in downtown Austin, specifically that zone kind of to the northeast of where Lamar and 6th Street intersect. Tree-lined streets. A wide mixture of building styles, much more English and German-style architecture than we found in BA. With smatterings of chill little businesses, bars, and restaurants. And we did find a very nice restaurant in which we finally had our first fully-awesome meal of the trip (that first weekend we were just having bad luck in BA). More on that in a moment.

First, let me get this out of the way: The UN or the OAS or someone needs to step in and take control of the one issue that harmed our experience more than anything in Uruguay. Maybe there's an opening for some entrepreneur to come in and work with the government to fix this. It messed us up in Montevideo, in our drive through the wine country, and in Jose Ignacio. Street signs. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Imagine having this conversation about eighty times a day: "What street is this?" "I don't know. There's no sign." Especially when you're trying to drive on the highway... @$#%@#.

Anyway. The restaurant. La Otra, which is a parrilla (grill) right around the corner from Ermitage. A really comfortable spot. The decor is kind of rustic adobe -- cream colored walls and heavy wooden furniture. We actually went twice -- the first time getting a table upstairs and the second time (the next night) eating downstairs. So the first night I ordered a ribeye and Christin the ribs and for appetizers we got some chorizo and a gigantic candied yam and something else I forget what. I'm sure Christin took pictures (she's been photo-documenting most of our meals, looking for some culinary inspiration for 2011). At any rate: Food's fairly cheap around here, so we don't have the usual pocketbook constraint against ordering way more food that we can handle. Everything tasted great, but we wound up with food for four people and I, honestly, could barely walk the few blocks back home. If you know me, you are probably aware that it takes a significant amount of food to really make me full. That second night we kept things a bit more under control. I ordered another steak and we didn't do much in the way of sides. Still wound up a bit over-full. But worth it. La Otra's a pretty damned good place.

Between these two evenings gorging on meat, during the day on Tuesday, we rented a car and attempted to go tour the wine country north of Montevideo. The actual car rental process was a small adventure (which I won't say too much about except we would up talking to a very nice older couple from Alberta) -- and getting out of the city was stressful (see above: very few street signs). But we did get out and found the highway (#5) that went through the area. We didn't have much in the way of maps -- just a map of the entire country that we grabbed at the rental car place and some notes Christin took about how to find the vineyards. There are also little signs periodically along the highway (signs?!) pointing out nearby vineyards, but in good Uruguay fashion hey kind of indicated that a vineyard was near but not always exactly where said vineyard may be. So we engaged in a fair amount of driving around on dusty side roads through quiet little villages going no where in particular. I did really enjoy the landscape. That part of Uruguay is hilly, but not mountainous. It's got trees, but not too many. And they're mixed in with a good amount of drier, scruffier vegetation. A dry Mediterranean climate, not terribly different than central Texas. About as far south as Dallas is north, it turns out. The little clusters of civilization ranged from clumps of very poor-looking cinderblock homes with corrugated steel roofs to actually fairly upscale-looking ranch homes. There is, for sure, a good amount of poverty in Uruguay. But, it turns out, the country is actually quite liberal and doing very well economically. Wikipedia notes that they are the first country to provide a laptop to every child. They are fairly progressive about drugs and gay rights. And they have lower income inequality than the Estados Unidos. And didn't experience a recession between 2007 and 2009. How about this: Instead of paraphrasing the entire damned article on Uruguay, I'll just leave this here for you.

Anyway, we did get two three vineyards. The first: Closed. Although not closed off: We were able to park and roam around a bit. Christin picked and ate a grape. I took photos of everything. The second vineyard: Also closed (and it kind of started to rain a bit). But also not closed off. We, again, moseyed around the property a bit and looked around. But at this one a little older Uruguayan man wearing jeans and a dirty t-shirt eventually came out. He spoke almost no English. And, as noted, our Spanish sucks. But we did get along and he opened up the building and gave us a little tour. We saw the laboratory where, I guess, the oenologists work with the actual wine. We saw the main dining room and tasting areas. The place was great -- very old and rustic. And the man was extremely nice. And very talkative -- a huge shame we couldn't have understood him better. After a half-hour of that we hopped back in our little sedan-pickup truck combo rental car (like a 2000's take on an El Camino, really) and headed on our way.

The third place was open. And amazing. Christin had actually set up a reservation before we left New York at a vineyard called Bouza to get a tour at 4pm that day. We had our notes about how to drive there but, again, the signage on he highway was horrible and we kept taking wrong turns and getting lost and things kept just simply not making sense until -- somehow -- we actually got on the right road and arrived at this place at 4pm on the nose. Just minutes before they gathered together a little group to tour the facilities. ("Bouza" is pronounced "Bowza," by the way. Like a Bostonian would say "Bowser." Not as Christin was saying it at first: "Booza." Like a Bostonian would call someone who drinks too much.)

Bouza Bodega is gorgeous. It's a handful of buildings on a wide piece of land with a little ranch with some chickens and livestock hanging out. The main visitor center (with a restaurant and gift shop) is very classy and modern. We poked around and then got a nice tour of the actual winemaking process and a bit of history about the place. We also got a tour of the collection of old automobiles they have at the vineyard. I guess one of the Bouza clan collects cars and a few years ago they decided to build a museum showing them off on the property. So wine and old cars. Good combo. We then got the tasting. They sat us at a high table in their very airy and sleek restaurant (Christin and I got the table -- other groups got other tables). We had four glasses and they gave us a white, a rose, and a couple of reds (in that order -- spaced out over time) along with some cheeses, sliced meats, crackers, breads, and such. The wines were good. The only one I distinctly remember, though, is actually the one I didn't care for -- a tannat. I had never (that I know) had a tannat wine. A tannat, it turns out, is a super dark red. Very heavy on the tannens and at least the couple that I've tried here seem to have very little other flavor. Not really my favorite. The one Christin picked up for the house, here, eventually I just had to stop drinking. Just too intense and bitter and chalky.

So, anyway, that was our day driving around looking for vineyards. Trying to think if I've left anything out. Eh, probably.

Because I may not have too many more chances to write while we're in South America, I'm going to push on and (even though this is already incredibly wordy) I'm going to talk about the second part of the Uruguay excurion: Jose Ignacio.

Jose Ignacio. It's kind of the Montauk of Uruguay. That's not a perfect comparison, but it's fairly apt. It's wealthy. Things are New York prices expensive. And it's a cute town about ten by ten blocks out on a peninsula that juts into the Atlanic Ocean. The architecture of the homes and businesses there is amazing. All sorts of beautiful buildings. Lots of beaches, obviously. And a cute little lighthouse that seems to feature in all of the travel literature about the area. We got settled into our hotel (more of a motel -- the Posada Paradiso, a rose-colored stucco place with a complex network of little art-and-ivy-covered patios and porches strung between a collection of smallish buildings, each with a few rooms for guests). We were in a small room at the top of a tower of about four stories -- the only room at that height, with windows on all four sides. And possibly, I think, the highest sleeping space in all of Jose Ignacio. There aren't any tall hotels or anything. The only thing significantly taller in the area is the lighthouse. A cool spot, for sure.

We kind of just bummed around. That first day we found a cafe on the main square and had some coffee and sandwiches. We then headed to the beach and checked out the water and read books in the sun. (I fell asleep and got a bit sunburned -- and whenever we got uncomfortable due to the sun or heat a quick "y'know, it's 30 degrees and snowy in New York" would get our spirits back up.) We climbed the lighthouse. Then, after a little nap at the hotel, drove out to a fancy restaurant in the forest back on the main part of the land and had a great dinner. Later that night we hung out at the hotel, drinking wine by the swimming pool outside. Quite nice.

The next day Christin headed out early to the beach and I followed a little while later, but managed to break my flip-flops en route and had to hobble back over rocky, half-paved, and insanely hot Jose Ignacio roads probably twenty minutes back to the hotel to grab my shoes. Not a good start to the day. We grabbed lunch at a trendy restaurant right on the beach, La Huella, and did a bit of people-watching. And then did all of our packing and bid Jose Ignacio our fond adieu and headed back to Montevideo to return the car and get our evening ferry back to Buenos Aires. On the drive back we took an hour and stopped at one of the beaches in Montevideo and hung out. I was in a little bit of an irritated mood -- probably a combination of a bit of travel fatigue and my feet really hurting from the broken flip-flop fire-walking episode earlier in the day and just being sweaty and dirty in the heat. But we coped. The car got dropped off. We grabbed a beer at a little cafe near the ferry terminal and successfully disembarked back to Buenos Aires about 8pm.

This ferry was a bit nicer than the one coming over, but otherwise it was more-or-less the same experience. Except they had a Playstation 2 set up by the cafeteria area with a bunch of kids gathered around playing, like, FIFA Soccer 2003 or something. A funny little scene. I played more iPhone games and read more of Nabokov's Pnin (which, honestly, I'm kind of just reading out of some odd urge to get through it at this point -- it's not the most gripping book I've ever cracked open). We got back to Rocio's place around 11pm or midnight.

Okay. I might write more tomorrow. I worry that I'm going to be out of vacation mode and back into stressed work-mode upon my return to New York, so gotta squeeze out as much as I can, here...

So, I'm in Buenos Aires with Christin. It's early afternoon Sunday and we've just been kind of slowly puttering around Rocio's house — drinking coffee; eating a small breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, toast, and ham; reading things on the internet (including a bunch about this whole, terrible Gabrielle Giffords shooting episode, which has spawned several long conversations). We're taking it easy. We mostly did this yesterday, as well (Saturday): Except for a sojourn out to grab a late lunch, we mostly just hung out at the house until dinnertime. Which was good, actually. Especially after a rather intense few days traveling around Uruguay last week. We have to balance being tourists out here with relaxing so we're not exhausted upon our return home.

Anyway — taking a step back... The flight out here on December 30th was a bit of a mess. New York had been snowed under, so our 11:30pm (December 29th) flight got pushed back and back and finally got off the ground at about 4:30am. Which. Wow. Let me say a couple things about LAN airlines. First: The flights themselves were fantastic. I'm not the best air traveller — I tend to feel really cramped up by the confined spaces and vaguely terrorized by the simply fact of hurtling through the air at high speeds. But. The LAN planes had great legroom and the flights were just very easy to get through, considering that we spent about twelve hours total in the air. The second thing about LAN, though: So we missed our connecting flight out of Santiago, Chile to Buenos Aires. Because of the delays in New York. Fine. It happens. But the people at the airports in both New York and in Santiago were on the edge of being useless. They did get us on a decent connecting flight (finally — after initially putting us on a flight that would've arrived in Buenos Aires at about midnight, December 31st). But not until we waited in long lines, battled people who gave us no good information, and just kind of worked our way through a half-dozen employees who just kind of leisurely didn't appear to give a shit about anything. Really frustrating. (One other American couple we met and commiserated with were repeatedly sent to the same gate, being told that their plane there was boarding. They went three times, I think. No plane. No people at the gate. Nothing. Frustrating.)

At any rate: We survived, got in at about 11pm local time on the 30th, and were greeted at the house by Rocio, her significant other Mariano, and a couple friends they happened to have over for drinks (and their wiry little 11-month-old pastel calico kitten, Kika). Very nice people, all of them, and we had a great time hanging out and relaxing (finally) in the warm night air on their patio (one of three this place has). We spoke mostly in English, as Christin and I chose to do our duty as freedom-loving Americans and not at all brush up on our Spanish before coming out here (though we are getting better — Christin, especially — and I can ask where the bathroom is like a champ). The also introduced us to Fernet (a liquor that is accurately described as "black licorice-flavored Listerine" — but in a good way), which Argentines apparently like mixing with Coke (or Coke Light) and drinking very, very cold. We had some. It's an acquired taste, for sure. It's a pretty intense flavor pairing with the soda, but we had some and enjoyed it. (I ordered some from a restaurant later and enjoyed it less — Fernet and Coke may not be for me, but I'm still kind of up in the air on it.)

Going to sleep that night and waking to the bright, bright, warm sun were kind of surreal given how stressful those final days of preparations and dealing with the Christmas holidays and squaring away work had been. I have been tinkering with work tasks here and there, but it's been so nice to simply have the time blocked out. I'm already feeling excited to get back home and get my fingers back in my projects — which is, I think, an excellent sign. I really enjoy the work I do, but I was experiencing pretty severe burnout the past few months. Now I no longer fantasize about throwing away my computer and getting a nice city job digging holes somewhere in Queens. In that regard, this trip has been a necessary break. Part of my New Year's Resolution, as well, is to improve my work-life balance. Just having some separation from New York allows my brain a bit of space to cogitate on how to make that happen... Anyway.

What else? So, yeah — despite the threat that we would have to fly in New Year's Eve, we did actually get here the night of the 30th and were able to celebrate NYE in the city. Rocio and Mariano have been traveling, as well, so they took off the morning of the 31st and we had the place to ourselves. We checked out the neighborhood that day. We're staying in the heart of Palermo Soho (a subsection of the much larger Palermo part of town). The "Soho" in the name isn't a coincidence — it's a sunny neighborhood full of clothing stores and gift shops and bars and restaurants and very much to Buenos Aires what SoHo is to New York. But, y'know, Buenos Aires is clearly a city in the process of turning into something nice. It's on its way, but not quite there yet. Even right around here it's kind of shocking how things can go from very, very nice to dirty and dilapidated in less than a block. And automotive emission standards are a libertarian dream come true: Many cars and buses pump out thick black clouds of smoke and the whole town smells of exhaust. So. We wandered the hood, poked our head into a few places, and moseyed around with an eye on places to be for the actual New Year's Eve celebration.

And here's where I made my most grievous error of the trip (so far — we've still got a week).

So. New Year's Eve. A trendy part of town. The equation in my mind led to the conclusion: There will be a bajillion people down here and it will be well-nigh impossible to get a table reservation. Especially since we don't have a phone and would need to either reserve in person or show up at dinnertime and cross our fingers. So. We walked by some Italian place that seemed open and suggested we just go in, see if we can make a reservation, and at least have a place to be. Christin kind of hemmed and hawed, not really into the idea, but also (like me) not really knowing exactly what to expect and worried that we might be left with no options at all. So we did it, and paid the stupid deposit. And kind of worriedly went on our way. Nothing else really presented itself, so when the time came later that evening, we just went for it.

And, honestly: This is the worst meal I've ever had at a restaurant. I don't even remember the name of this horrible place. On Honduras street near Godoy Cruz street. We sat outside along he street, which was nice. But let me describe this culinary adventure: It started with some kind of eggplant parmesan thing which had clearly been made earlier in the day and microwaved before being cut into squares. Kind of rubbery. Flavorless. The the main courses. I had some kind of cold meat. Christin had penne pasta in a sauce which tasted like ketchup. Also cold. And then desert, which was a plate with a few stale Jordan almonds and a variety of other shitty-looking sweet things they probably just picked up from the neighborhood supermercado earlier in the day. All for the reasonable price of U$S 50 (ish) apiece, prix fixe. Just awful. Sub TV dinner grade stuff. We did get through it, though. No one really did a countdown, so it just kind of suddenly was 2011 and then the much more interesting part of the night began.

Buenos Airians (? — "porteños?")... BA'ers love their fireworks. On my pre-dinner run across the neighborhood to pull some money from an ATM (fun fact: most places only take cash, but ATMs are extremely hard to come by and most of them that you do find are broken, anyway)... On my run to the ATM I passed by a couple handfuls of kids popping loud firecrackers in the streets. POP POP POP. Loud, but otherwise harmless. After dinner, the entire neighborhood went off. It sounded like a warzone, with firecrackers just going off seemingly on every street and every intersection. Sound everywhere. And mixed in, the occasion larger crashing KABANG like a dumpster exploding. And at regular intervals more traditional fireworks streaking into the sky and colorfully exploding. We walked back towards the house from The Horrible Place and just kind of took it in. On Borges street (where we're staying) a bunch of people had gathered around a large drum circle sort of event. We grabbed some beer and watched (and copiously videoed on our iDevices) the sea of people. A really good time, especially since the weather was so warm and we could be out and under the stars. We walked around a bit more and eventually wound up home.

A good night, overall. When traveling, things go wrong. I'm definitely of the opinion that you aim for the best when going to a new place, but you're going to screw up and you're going to have some uncomfortable moments, but to a certain degree that's just Part of the Experience and you have to relish it and not be too negative about it. There has been a lot of complaining in this post, but he trip has been great so far. And this only really takes us up to the New Year. I've got to wrap up here so we can go do some stuff with our day, but I'll write up more about our trip to Uruguay and other stuff when I get a chance in the next few days. And I'll post more photos.

I've never seen these things before, although Cory mentioned they're popular in Thailand... Flying lanterns. We picked three up at some junk shop for kids in Montauk proper on a whim — and they turned out to be quite beautiful. We successfully put two aloft and watched them drift off slowly off into deep space over the ocean, fading fading fading until we couldn't make them out anymore against the stars. The third experienced a mis-launch and wound up pretty much immediately in the surf. Anyway: Some photos of the event.

IgniteNYC finally posted my video from their event during Internet Week here in New York. It's a condensed version of the talk I gave at SXSW'10 called "Add Some XBOX to Your UX." I don't have a video of that, but I wrote up the entire talk in article format which you are invited to check out here.

Update: Vote for my SXSW 2011 talk!

If you liked the talk above, please make sure to go vote for my SXSW'11 submission, +10! Level Up! Games and Social Media. It's going to be an expansion on some of the ideas touched on in this talk and in my talk at SXSW'10. And leave a comment, if you feel just so inclined. Thanks!

Over the years I have been lead developer on myriad projects. And I often find myself having to interpret and build from user experience design documents that you might call, well, novice. Now, UX is an art. There's some science behind it, but it's an art at its core — you have to feel it a bit. It's like music. There's a science and math behind the tones and structures, but to really make music you have to kind of know that stuff but, maybe more importantly, you just kind of have to feel the music. Novices can "feel the music" with UX and produce really great stuff. And there are a million ways to get creative with UX. Apple shows us this. Some of their little micro-UX innovations have similar cultural impact of pop songs — small user experience brainworms that you can't get out of your head after you experience them once. Think of how well your iPhone has trained you. Pinch zoom. The home button.

And like any form of art, I think user experience design actually benefits from the participation of novices — people who haven't been fully brought up to speed on the orthodoxy who will dig in and make new things, even if they're kind of weird or "wrong" in the professional sense or whatever. The tools of UX are not hard — you can use a paper and pen (I do!). And anyone can look at something — a website, an app — and think about how it has been designed with the user in mind. I'm not at all elitist about music or writing and I'm certainly not going to get elitist on someone for experimenting with design. These things improve when the masses start creating and the technical vernacular becomes common language.

So I love when new people get involved with user experience design and I'm a complete advocate of new designers getting their hands messy with new ideas. But. I would like to offer one major suggestion to help bridge the gap from novice user experience designer to professional. It's one idea that will improve the quality of your work if you're new to the field. It will also help the developers who will implement your idea be able to do so efficiently and with as few headaches as possible.

Learn the "inherent nature" of the platform you are designing for. Let's use iPhone as an example. Hold it. Play with it. Think about each action you take to do something and how each element looks and works. The tabs. How those tabs look and work. Navigation bars along the top (those bars with "page" titles and sometimes "back" buttons). Tables. Surely you're very familiar with how those work on the iPhone, those things that slide up and down with a list of options and when you select one it slides out to the left and whatever you selected slides in from the right. Even real basic stuff. Helvetica. It's everywhere. White backgrounds are very common. Buttons and icons. Notice the consistency (at least across Apple's apps). That's the "inherent nature" of the device. That's what it was designed to be like. Bland, maybe. But. That is what you will be building from when you design your app. There's no getting around it. Apple has gone out of their way to create solid solutions to common UX problems. And users have been well-trained. They know how tab bars along the bottom of the screen work. They know how tables work. They know what a button looks like. Etc.

I am a minimalist designer at heart. Every design element needs to have a reason for existing or else it's noise. ("It looks better" can sometimes be a good reason — see below. "It looks better even though it confuses people" is a bad reason.) My advice to you, the novice UX designer, is to build on top of the "inherent nature" of the device. Be boring, but be crystal clear. Change things only when absolutely necessary. Establish the bare minimum difference between your UX design and the out-of-the-box UX design that the iPhone ships with — the bare minimum that still allows your app to do what it needs to do. Do not reinvent wheels. Do not succumb to the need to show off or do something differently just because you're a badass. Reinventing some existing UX paradigm in a flashy way is generally the hallmark of an amateur. Amatuers do not understand UX with much depth and confuse wanton rearrangement with actual innovation. Don't innovate! It's okay. User experience design is not about innovation, it's about creating clarity for your users. Don't sacrifice the latter for the former.

If you start from the "inherent nature" of the platform and design your app (or website or whatever) from that starting point, deviating only when necessary, will accomplish two things right away:

1. Users will not have to relearn how your app works! They'll already know, because they already know how an iPhone works.

2. Developers will have a much easier time building your creation. They will do it faster. Cheaper. And because you are being more clear, they will understand better what you're after. Keep in mind, most development platforms have built into them very easy ways to do all of the basic building-block sorts of tasks. Let your developers use these! Do not make them rebuild something from the ground up for no good reason.

Now.

I know that you do not want a generic iPhone app or website that's just black and white and full of boring Helvetica. Especially brands. They want their iPhone app to look like their branding! Which is great!

But here's how that works. You do the above. Make the boring thing. Make it usable and easy for your developers. (Developer ease takes a backseat way, way behind usability, of course — but unless you're very lucky, you probably don't have an unlimited budget for your project, so developer effort can be important.) Do these things. Only then, as a last step, should you look at what you have and take a very critical look at how you might apply a visual theme to the user experience design without interrupting that design. You can do easy things like applying graphics or changing the colors of elements without interfering with their visibility or the overall visual hierarchy. (Interrupting the visual hierarchry would be, for example, making the brightest thing on the screen the least important thing to the user. Websites do this all the fucking time when they decide to make an article headline blend into the background while four million ads, a giant header graphic, and several dozen little "share this!" widgets jump around on screen. Apps do this, too! Here's a fun little user experience game you can play at home! The next time you're using some app (or website), stop for a second. Think of two things: 1) What's the most important thing here? Why am I using this app or reading this page? 2) what's the most visually striking thing? What gets my attention first? Are these two things the same thing? They usually should be. They're often not.) Ahem. As I was saying, when making decisions about modifying the look of your initial UX design or applying a visual theme, you need to be aware of not diminishing the quality of the user experience. It's amazing how often this happens.

Remember, also, that design elements like this are communication. Do what you need to communicate your brand clearly. Nothing more. Every single design element needs a reason for existing. Extra design is the same as extra UX: unnecessary noise.

One final point. Understanding the inherent nature of the platform you're designing for will save you from making really amateur and obvious mistakes. Think text fields in iPhone apps. What always happens when a user selects a text field on an iPhone that might affect how you place that field on the screen? How does one type letters on a device with no hardware keyboard? Right. Plan for that. Text field on the bottom half of the screen? Is that the best place for that? Pay attention to this kind of stuff. It's important.

So this is my rant. I've kind of focused on iPhone UX, here, but all of this goes for web UX, as well. Or any platform. iPad. Android. Desktop applications. Know the inherent nature of the platform! Really get in there. Think about how the designers of the core operating system or platform intended for it to be used. Stray from that, but intelligently. And not just for the sake of being weird or as a way to show your client what a rockstar you are. (Nobody cares if you're a rockstar.) The user comes first. I know what I'm talking about. Pay attention to the above. You'll get much better results all around.

Thank you. Goodnight.

Thrillist for iPhone has launched. Get it in the App Store. Check it out. Find a new place to eat or someplace to get drinks this weekend. It's good for that!

I lead development of this sucker — along with Zoe Roman, Jesse Boyes, and Cam BenBassat. We're quite proud. Rawk.

So, yes, SXSW 2010 is upon us. I arrived in Austin Tuesday evening and have been madly hammering out the last updates to my talk, Add Some XBOX To Your UX. I'm really looking forward to finally getting it out there — I feel like I've been working on it forever. I started taking notes on it soon after I first submitted it way back in, what, May or something? June? Wow. Anyway, I hope it'll come off well. I'm confident.

So. After the talk, I'm going to put up, here, a version of my notes edited for easier reading — along with a few outtakes from the talk which I think are interesting but just didn't fit in. The original full version of the talk clocked in way too long, so some good stuff had to go. I'll also post some links to books and blog posts and such — my bibliography, of sorts. (Check out the books in my Shelfari shelf widget to the right, as well, to get an idea of what I've been reading.) Hopefully SXSW will record some audio or video or something.

Anyway: Check out my talk! Add Some XOBX To Your UX. Saturday morning, 9:30am. Bring a cup of coffee and a breakfast taco.

I really enjoyed this. It looks at game design from the perspective of the design of the Atari VCS (2600) system itself — how the limitations and quirks of that game console led to certain design decisions (good and bad) that affected some very seminal games.

I'm a programmer, so when I think about game design it's very hard for me to completely distance myself from thinking about what would be easy or difficult (or impossible) to actually implement. Sometimes laziness prevents me from making design choices that would be harder to execute. But I like to think that having an intimate understanding of the platform (say, iPhone) gives me a more refined sense of how to make something good particularly for that platform. I can avoid getting mired in things that just won't work. Like how painters study their brushes so they know what the possibilities as as far as texture, stroke weight, etc. So talking about game design from exactly this perspective clicked with me very nicely.

Also: I am just a bit young to have experienced the Atari 2600. I've seen them and probably poked at a game or two as a kid, but I'm of the Nintendo generation. Reading this book with the internet handy to watch some of these games in action gave a really great introduction to the Atari 2600 (or, at least, as good as one could get without really playing one). And this book contains a lot of info about the history of Atari (and Activision and other 3rd party devs) as well as the historical context of all of this.

Finally, this book seems like a great introduction to the hardware history of computers. The book talks about the chips, the design of the motherboard (if that's what it's called), and how the hardware impacted the platform. And get to learn a bit how TVs work. Electrical engineers won't be impressed, but I learned some stuff.

So, yeah — even though this book can get fairly technical (on an introductory level, at least), it's still a very easy read. Well organized. Fun. Very interesting. Great book!

Crossposted to Game Design Advance.

1. I'm still kind of mildly uncomfortable putting thoughts into sites like Shelfari. Maybe it's a fear that they'll drop dead one day and I'll loose my notes. So might as well duplicate them on my own server.

2. It's as much of a snapshot as to what's on my mind as anything, so I might as well toss those notes onto this jumbled scrapbook, as well.

A side effect of using Shelfari has been that it's hooked into my OCD need to mark things "complete" which has given me a little extra juice to finish books I might otherwise drift away from. And having the widget on my blog gives me a little extra kick to pick up and read new books in lieu of other time-killing hobbies like whipping up on junior high schoolers in Modern Warfare 2 or spending hours mindlessly poking around Reddit.

(This isn't everything I've read this year, to note.)

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

"A very good read, and despite being 20 years old (or so) quite illuminating as to our current financial crisis." ✭✭✭✭✭

Columbine by David Cullen

"I hadn't thought too much about the Columbine massacre since first hearing about it and then around the time Bowling for Columbine came out. I enjoyed this book, though (as much as one can enjoy the story of something so horrible). Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are painted in very vivid colors and Dave Cullen does, for the first time that I've heard, really get to the core cause of the tragedy. And very interesting to hear about the effect on the community over time." ✭✭✭✭✭

The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante

"One of the few Fante books I haven't read. It's good. Like the other Arturo Bandini books it's tense and tightly wound, the fantasies of a young writer ramming up against the indignities of real life." ✭✭✭✭✭

Chuck Klosterman IV by Chuck Klosterman

"Fun. Like sugary cereal or a donut." ✭✭✭✭✭

The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe

"David Plouffe is a good writer and even though I followed this election pretty closely, I enjoyed hearing the events strung together into a narrative from his perspective. It's an exciting read (despite knowing the outcome!) and, as always, Obama's an inspiring guy." ✭✭✭✭✭

When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish by Martin Gardner

"I grew up reading Martin Gardner's math books. Loved 'em. So I was excited to give his new collection a shot. And it has a few good essays. I enjoyed learning about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum and the poem Evolution (from where the title of the book comes). And I'm always game for a good thrashing of Ann Coulter. Sadly, though, the math chapters were way too elementary and have been covered by Gardner himself on many occasions. And the chapters dealing with faith and skepticism are so basic and so much like shooting fish in barrels that I started skipping them altogether. So. I think this book might be wonderful for a high school student, but there's just not really enough there for an adult reader. I still have great respect for Martin Gardner, but either I've outgrown him or this isn't his greatest effort. Possibly a combination." ✭✭✭✩✩

Final Thoughts

Lots of 5-star reviews, right? I guess two factors are at play: Since I don't read that much, I tend to be highly selective about which books I'll even crack open. And I think I have pretty decent "book radar" as far as selecting good reads. Especially with authors like Michael Lewis and John Fante who I've enjoyed in the past.

Oh, and I tried for the second time in my life to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest this summer. And you know what? It's not for me, I'm pretty sure. I gave up about halfway through. Too much effort. Not enough payoff. Which is sad, because it has some truly amazing sections. But I just lost the energy/will to dig through DFW's massive, dense disgorgement to pick out the diamonds. So it goes. Maybe I'll resume next summer.