Last week I met with SonicPicnic to discuss the artful audio game we’re planning to make, together with Monobanda.

I published my Emily’s True Love / Delicious article from some time ago on Bashers.nl. (It’s a spirited account of GameHouse Studio Eindhoven’s work on casual games for women.)

Additionally, my second PlayStation Memories column was published in Official PlayStation Magazine. (It’s a well-intended Crash Bandicoot bashing.)

I also wrote the third column, which turned out pretty well. (It connects the neighbourhood battles from my childhood with Destruction Derby.)

Then I went to Ikea, to get more furniture for my office.

I sold a copy of my debut novel Toiletten, for the first time in a while. Of the Dutch print run of 3200, there are now about 170 copies left. If you want one, be sure to give me a shout-out. I’m selling them for € 5, which doesn’t leave much of a profit after taxes and shipping, by the way.

Then, on Friday, I took the ICE to Berlin to join the Global Game Jam site there. After brainstorming the excellent Fractal Mario with two German dudes, I teamed up (as planned) with Dutch game developers Karel Millenaar, Hessel Bonenkamp, Alper Çuğun and Kars Alfrink.

We worked pretty much non-stop, even in the U-Bahn, and managed to develop Nakatomi Rider in 48 hours. Our game is played by two persons on one joypad, revolves around pushing and pulling, and will be presented at Control Gamelab 2 on February 14th. You can already try it out: Mac, PS3 controller and friend required. Or read about our experience in my piece for nrc.next.

When all was done, I had a White Russian, then went home.

Last Tuesday I went to the new year’s reception of the newspaper I write for, NRC (slash nrc.next), together with David Nieborg. I always feel like I’m doing something wrong at receptions. As a freelancer, I hardly ever see the people I work with, so I want to talk to all of them. But it’s tough to get into a conversation with someone, and as soon as you’re talking, it’s tough to get out (but you have to be vigilant if you want to strike everyone off your list).

Afterwards I had dinner with David, which was a lot easier.

On Wednesday I had a great all-hands meeting at Two Tribes. Almost everyone who is working on Toki Tori 2 (check out the new build and the first animations) was there, including most of SonicPicnic (who are doing the sound), and the entire story department (that’s me). The audio system was discussed, and I ran through the game’s ‘experience’ as it’s envisioned right now. Afterwards I was allowed to observe the sacred daily scrum ritual and we had bagels.

On Thursday I helped Kars Alfrink of Hubbub with some textual tweaks, then toured the Dutch Game Garden building and talked to some people.

Last week I also wrote about Eindbaas and the IGF Awards, in a column for nrc.next (which was also published on Bashers.nl). Then, in the first restyled edition of the paper, Rogier Kahlmann’s review of Dutch iPad game Fingle appeared. (I have an unhealthy fascination with makeovers of print publications. I get really excited.)

I wrote up what Nintendo should do for Gamer.nl: focus on one platform, make good games and forget about everything else.

I started watching Homeland, which is great – it’s like 24 with real people.

I finished interviews books with Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen (both on paper, as a Kindle edition was either not available or more expensive). Two eccentric moviemakers of Jewish descendance, born in New York City just seven years apart. But one made 13 films, the other made 45 (and counting). Both did (slash do) almost everything in the process themselves, but while one was a perfectionist, the other has an iterative approach where he just keeps churning out films, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.

Finally, On Sunday I dug through my backlog of administrative work. When it was done, I felt relieved.

Last week I visited the Amsterdam-based game development startup Glowforth, to take a look at their forthcoming Inuit platform/puzzle game Hiko. They still have a lot of work to do, but the game definitely shows promise. The character animation and some of the setpieces are wonderful. (Just look at that polar bear on their homepage.)

I also visited Sander van der Vegte, a game designer who’s been a friend for almost 15 years. We browsed through his mindblowing list of past and present game ideas, some of which, if you ask me, should definitely happen someday.

On Friday I attended the doctorate ceremony of game design researcher Joris Dormans. I was honored to discover that I’m quoted in his PhD dissertation, Engineering Emergence.

That night, we had drinks and lots of BBQ meat at an informal Bashers.nl meeting at Vlad Micu‘s house. Afterwards soms of us went to Eindbaas 8, a chiptunes party in the Utrecht-based club Ekko. This lead to a newspaper column this week.

Otherwise, lots of deep winter cleaning last week. I know it’s mostly in my head, but I still feel like I’m really behind with everything. I really need to get some bookcases and finish decorating my home office, so I can finally reorganize all my paperwork. That should help getting a sense of being on top of things again.

Last week was intended as an extended holiday, so Bashers.nl was on a break. But somehow I was still doing things, most of the time.

To celebrate the release of the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, I wrote about Star Wars as a transmedia property, using the great book Droidmaker by Michael Rubin. My article was published in both nrc.next and NRC Handelsblad. In nrc.next, a review by Harry Hol was published alongside the piece. (Both will be on Bashers.nl soon.)

nrc.next also published my Next Level column on Stephen King, Jonathan Blow, time travel and game mechanics, as I said I planned to do the week before.

I had meetings with Bram Ruiter (about a documentary we’re planning to make), with Two Tribes (about a game we’re planning to make making) and with the Ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie.

I downloaded Pixen and Unity and played around with them, in preparation for my Berlin Global Game Jam trip later this month. I also ordered the Glif from Studio Neat, and bought a light tripod, so I can use my iPhone 4 to capture that adventure in a simple video.

Finally, Bright Magazine allowed me to offer a downloadable PDF of my Dutch Game Design report.

I took the week off, but still got some stuff done.

I finished my interview with Michel Maas of GameHouse Studio Eindhoven, about the Delicious series of restaurant time management games and the recent new episode, which was published in nrc.next. It turned out well, I think, though it was perhaps skewed a bit towards GameHouse – of course they’re enthousiastic about what they do! Luckily my story was balanced with a sharp Harry Hol review. We’ll probably publish both articles on Bashers.nl next week.

Secondly, I gave this website a (tiny yet fresh) lick of paint. You can actually navigate to my weeknotes now! I’m always going back and forth between Dutch and English for the front page, and settled for English this time. Let’s see for how long that’ll stick.

As I was tweaking HTML anyway, I also fiddled with the Bashers.nl and Bashers Beat sites. Just some small changes before I start building an entirely new version of the main site, which will integrate the various parts. (Three big Bashers projects are planned for the first half of 2012: the iPad app, the revamped podcast and the new site.)

Additionally, I finished 11/22/63, the recently published time travel novel by Stephen King. After the Steve Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson, this is the second book I’ve read on my Kindle. I have to say I like it, even for fiction, despite the nagging sense that I really should own a physical copy and display it on a shelf in my house. A false sentiment – when was the last time someone checked out my book collection in detail?

Instead of mourning my old-fashioned, dust-gathering carbon artifacts, I should spend energy on more constructive things. Like actively reflecting on what I’m reading, analysing what I’m learning, then somehow using the newly gained insights and knowledge. In short, one of the few new year’s resolutions I have is to regularly write about the books I read.

Starting off, 11/22/63 got me thinking about recursivity in these kinds of stories, and about the game-like puzzle mechanics of a character figuring out the rules of time travel. That could very well become my next newspaper column.

Finally, I’m not even sure whether this happened last week, but I recently decided to join the Global Game Jam again. Only this time I’ll head to Berlin to make my 48 hour game prototype.

I’m not going alone – four colleagues slash friends are coming too. All of them are more experienced game builders than I am, so I’m trying to invest some time in brushing up my pixel animation skills beforehand. (See this 32×32 pixel John McClane sprite. Made it today while watching over the kids, in the excellent iPad app Sprite Something.)

Anyway, we’re on the list at the venue and our train tickets have been booked, so there’s no way back. The Global Game Jam will commence worldwide during the last weekend of January, and I can’t wait.

What’s curious about these weeknotes (or really about me, or my work, or maybe about people and work in general) is that I always sit down to write them feeling I didn’t do much. Then, once I start piecing together what I actually produced, it turns out to be a pretty decent list.

Last week was no different. I felt tired and unorganized, coming out of my trip to Istanbul. By Friday, I’d caught a cold and needed to catch up on sleep badly. I neglected my Wordfeud matches. Even canceled a meeting. Then, to make matters worse, my Wii broke down, dashing the hopes my wife and I had left for us to finish Skyward Sword anytime soon. So surely, my productivity had been low.

Well, first, on Tuesday night, I visited the refurbished Gamelab at Pakhuis de Zwijger, presented by Control, which was entertaining. Personal highlight: the interview with John van der Aart, who’s excellent at telling what it was like to make Commodore 64 games.

On Wednesday I wrote my Next Level column about Istanbul, which was published in nrc.next on Thursday. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out: while the daily reports on Bashers.nl focused on the details of the game jam, here I zoomed out and wrote about the Turkish games industry and its potential.

(On Friday, the paper printed Alper Çuğun‘s review of charming Danish indie puzzler Where is my Heart?, which I commissioned and edited. Just yesterday, Alper blogged about cultural criticism — I agree with his points.)

On Wednesday I also delivered a new edition of the games section for Schiphol Magazine, together with Niels Peuchen.

Speaking of Niels, he invited me to the School voor Journalistiek in Utrecht, for a bonus program in which students interview journalists they find interesting. So on Thursday afternoon, I was asked about games, journalism and everything inbetween. Not too many people showed up, but those in attendance were intrigued.

On Thursday I finished my second column for the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine, too, even though the first one is not yet in print. (Or perhaps it just came out.) Print magazines feel ancient when you’re used to the web and newspapers, where the lead time is either ‘milliseconds’ or ‘half a day’.

Last week’s highlight was probably the release of Items Magazine issue 6/2011, featuring my 6-page interview with Bernie DeKoven and Eric Zimmerman. It’s the first time I wrote in-depth about the broad concept of playfulness, and I’m proud of the result.

Finally, on Sunday, I spent some time wrestling with the Game Maker tutorials by Derek Yu. One thread running through my work, especially when I write about game jams, is that I don’t get what programmers do (and that I’m trying to make sense of this). Slowly, I’m starting to see that I won’t really understand until I learn to program myself.

Game Maker was recommended to me as a simple way to get started. And indeed, I’ve wrapped my head around its basics and slapped together the space shooter from Yu’s teachings in one afternoon. However, while Game Maker seems to be a pretty powerful game-making tool (which is attractive by itself), I still don’t have an answer to my fundamental question: how programmers go from 100 PRINT “HELLO WORLD” to an insanely detailed 3D game.

I guess I should just delve deeper.

Last week, some effort went into preparations for an item on Entertainment Experience, a TV program about a crowdsourcing multimedia project headlined by Paul Verhoeven (which I am critical of). I was asked to talk about the crossover of games and movies, and my item was broadcast in two parts: part 1, part 2.

Judging by the amount of comments I got, a lot of folks are still watching TV. Even an obscure station like Veronica. This never ceases to amaze me – when do these people read books? Also, judging by the amount of comments from acquaintances I hadn’t spoken to in a while, seeing someone on TV feels special and noteworthy. Finally, I really need to trim my beard.

Additionally, I published a new column at Gamer.nl, this one about making games as a journalist, and the insights that has given me.

On Tuesday, I visited GameHouse Studio Eindhoven, the Dutch development group of casual games giant Zylom / Real Games. The goal: to interview creative director Michel Maas about his latest game Emily’s True Love. It was great to hear him talk passionately about a popular and lovingly crafted series of games that’s off the traditonal hardcore gaming radar. My interview will become an article in nrc.next.

On Wednesday, I had another good story slash design session at Two Tribes, where I’m helping out with the development of Toki Tori 2.

On the Bashers.nl front, we published what was perhaps Rogier Kahlmann’s funniest parody video yet (though even better stuff is coming up, I’m happy to report). I also spent Thursday morning hashing out the basics of our forthcoming tablet app with the developers.

Finally, I left on Friday for Istanbul, where I joined the Cultures@Play Game Jam with Dutch and Turkish students. Interaction designers, programmers, sound designers and others were challenged to build games around local culture within 48 hours. I was there by invitation of the Utrecht School of the Arts and joined one of three teams.

I reported on this in three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3. In the sense of succesfully making what we set out to do, this was my most succesful game jam so far. Also good: my silver medal, and the fact that I had a couple of hours for sightseeing.

Last week, I received the illustration for my column in the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine. The column will be called PlayStation Memories and will combine personal recollections with the history of Sony’s game consoles. Disclaimer: while the magazine is ‘official’, I’ll write whatever I want to write. The drawing (below) was done by Yasmin Sheikh.

Otherwise, lots of stuff behind the scenes, such as pitching a bunch of nrc.next game stories for the coming weeks and months. There’s some quality writing coming up.

My Next Level column about the Virtual Boy was published on Thursday morning. That evening, the item I did with Javier Sancho about Nintendo’s VR relic took place at the Digital Antiques Roadshow during Freemote, the Utrecht-based media art festival.

Finally, I got intense about Chris Kohler’s Shigeru Miyamoto reporting and about the new Twitter.com.

• The Miyamoto article: Yes, it was structured somewhat clumsily, so it was easy to misread. Still, the sites that reported the man was leaving Nintendo should’ve paid more attention. Then, when corporate PR tried to smooth everything over, almost everyone copy-pasted Nintendo’s statement without any critical reflection at all!
• Twitter.com: Many people disliked it, but I liked it a lot. To me, the division of Home, Connect and Discover (especially the incorporation of @ and #) is at the same time clever and profound.

My physical state was pretty terrible. On Monday I took the day off to recover from Sinterklaas damages. Barely made it through the week, then on Saturday woke up with a stiff neck and couldn’t really move all day, making me feel very sorry for myself. Things are better now.

However, I did realize I have only 6 proper working days left this year, and panicked a little bit.

Like the week before, last week was short. On Friday I left for a long and exhausting Sinterklaas weekend with my family. My youngest daughter got sick and didn’t sleep much, so neither did my wife and I. At least I got my daily diary for 2012, so I don’t have to get one myself.

Otherwise: lots of meetings, not a lot of writing. There were no publications, as my Super Mario 3D Land review in nrc.next was postponed until yesterday.

I did help Kars Alfrink of Hubbub rewriting the voice-over for the video promo he’s doing of the project we worked on together. This didn’t take a lot of time, but the end result will be perceivably better.

I also spent some time importing my projects and notes into Workflowy, an intuitive web-based outlining tool. Don’t know if it’ll stick, but I’ll never know if I don’t try. Also, no tool (that I am aware of) helps me comb through all my stuff as well as feeding it all into something new.

So, meetings:

• Got acquainted with Tessa Sterkenburg of The Next Speaker. I’ve been building up the amount of speaking gigs I do, and want to do even more. Perhaps Tessa can help me with this.
• Prepared for our item during Freemote, with Javier Sancho. We decided to tackle the Virtual Boy, perhaps the most beautiful failure in video game history.
• Met with Yorick Goldewijk of SonicPicnic for our sensory game. The plan is to present our story proposal to the rest of the team before the end of the year.
• Met with Zuraida Buter for what will surely be an intensely literary and artistic games magazine. We came up with a theme for our zero issue, and some good ideas riffing off the theme.

In closing, I’m thinking I should take it slow for the rest of December. If all this stuff takes off, 2012 will be pretty wild.

Last week: another meeting at the Ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie, for my consultancy project with David Nieborg. This one was definitely the most interesting so far, involving a large number of applied games companies. All the big names were there.

On Wednesday I spoke with Jelle van der Ster of Setup, in preparation of the Freemote Festival, and specifically Tussen Kunst & Glitch on December 8. Together with Javier Sancho I will comment on an artifact of game culture (just 1 of 4 instances of media art that will be discussed during the evening).

On Friday, my column on a familiar trope was published in nrc.next: the many blockbuster games of November and the limited time to play them. This one was firmly in tongue-in-cheek territory, though it’s always tough to get my subtle brand of humour across.

I rewrote my Super Mario 3D Land review, which will be published in nrc.next this week. And I extended and finished my first column for Official PlayStation Magazine in more than 6 years, when I quit to join Power Unlimited. In the meantime OPM did publish my crazy serial in 12 parts, Ninja Gimmick Girl.

(For those who are curious: most, but not all of Ninja Gimmick Girl is available online. Hopefully I will someday get the chance to rewrite it somewhat and make it part of a story collection.)

Finally, I delivered a new edition of the Schiphol Magazine games section I make with Niels Peuchen.

This was a short week: I left early for a long weekend in Appelscha with friends. I had to skip Game in the City and the Dutch Game Awards, unfortunately, but got lots of bananenbollen, kabouterbier and walks through beautiful surroundings in return.