I'm just dropping a link to this, because it ties into what I've been saying about letting people love you.
Notch on S.978
It's quite short, acknowledges the value of fan videos and the need to preserve them, and is well worth the read.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Broney Phenomenon 3: Analysis/Respect
Welcome to part 3 of my series on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Henceforth MLP:FiM)This one is taking a lot longer than Introspection, because introspection is cheap, and you have to do it quick before the moment fades, while analysis is time consuming and you have to do real research.
This one is less about my personal experience, and more about the collective experience and it's influence on popular culture, the blogosphere, the Chans, et cereta, and as such there is the matter of disclaiming that I have not seen the entire elephant. I have not read the entire internet; deal with it.
From where I sit, here's how it is:
It's all about respect. People want it, need it, and crave it, and if you give it to them they will, ironically, be more than happy to debase themselves for your amusement (See: reality television, the Jackass series and wannabe actresses trying to get a break).
There are two demographics that modern media tends to treat like predictable, drooling imbeciles, who will buy anything that panders to their desire for pink dresses and fiery explosions. Exposing these people to quality products is like exposing a dead-fall knotted stand of jungle, that hasn't seen fire in a hundred years, to an incendiary grenade.
You'll get a lot of flash out of that, and with a little guidance that flash will turn into a firestorm.
First, the creator must express their respect for the audience from first contact; either in the work itself, or in pre-release marketing (This thought inspires a train that will form a later post on the life cycle of the post-WoW MMO). The creator takes the initiative in this dialogue, and it's important to start things off on the right foot.
Likewise, you have to show that respect from square one, so new prospects don't have to wade through no-effort crap to get to the good stuff. Opening MLP:FiM with a two part episode was a ballsy move; what if kids didn't become invested quickly enough to take an interest in the resolution? Could kids even learn all the major characters in that span of time?
Once you've shown your audience some respect, and earned their respect in return, you have to maintain that respect, and keep pushing out quality product. Even Naruto understands that every third season must contain content, or the fans will stop coming back to see if it's gotten good again (It seems that even DBZ fans oft lack the patience for Naruto's pacing).
You might get a flash following with pandering and fluff, but pandering is cheap, and that audience will abandon you the minute a new panderer appears. While it's possible to pander to an audience that you respect (an act indistinguishable from producing quality products), remember that cheap pandering will cost you the respect of your fans, who will feel betrayed and give you negative buzz.
This is a serious danger point for the way Hasbro is handling MLP:FiM. They got the brony fanbase as a free extra to the audience they wanted to reach --an audience with actual income, rather than an allowance-- but then overtly accepted the adulation of these free fans, and pledged to continue serving them. The potential threat here lies in the nature of the brony demographic, and the way this paradigm alters their reaction to the product.
Bronies, are media consumers, down to their black, culturally conflicted hearts. As such they have an intuitive grasp of context and presentation, that many of them are not even aware of. The physics and furniture in Ponyville are preposterous, but that's okay, because it's a show for children, and they know to turn those parts of their brains off when the show is on. When the show becomes "for grown-ups too" there's a risk that a significant portion of the fanbase will see the unnoticed shift in their expectations as a lower quality product. A lower quality product would be a betrayal of that new promise, even though it is only the promise, and not the perceived quality thereof that the producers have control over.
Thankfully, the movement has gravitated to charismatic, creative leadership, that clearly shows a solid understanding of consumerism, and a long haul philosophy toward sustaining a fandom. Not only do these grassroots leaders make great apologists, explaining this new need for logic back into the proverbial fridge, and making pink Celestia toys (Celestia is a White horse, but marketing knows pink is what catches the eye in the pink aisle) into a joke, rather than an endless flamewar.
They are also the best marketing team Hasbro could ask for. They are consumerist enough to know they can help this fledgling series survive, and Hasbro has allowed them to do just that.
Ponycraft 2 is a viral advertising dream, and with leadership and infrastructure to support the pony video trend it spawned, this has produced more minutes of viewed, free advertising than anyone has the capability to calculate. --and nobody is blocking these spots, they are seeking them out with a hunger for more. When you win over disaffected creatives with nothing to do but build monuments to your glory, you ensure your glory spreads so far and wide it gets banned from many major content distribution sites.
Sadly, much of this content will be porn, or of poor quality, or both. That's user published content; them's the breaks. Thankfully, with consumerist leadership that wants you to succeed your fans will construct infrastructure to help the quality producers to succeed, which helps your free advertising spread faster and be more effective.
"--But Felblood!" I hear some of you cry, "All this happened on it's own! Hasbro didn't do any of that stuff; the bronies did it. What can marketers learn form this act of God?"
I reply, "Who is Hasbo?"
The people at Hasbro have fostered this movement in some way at every turn. There have been missteps to be sure, but after step one (Introduce quality products respectfully) and step two (keep feeding them quality products), they hit step three out of the park.
Let people love you.
Acknowledge their respect respectfully, not just with the quality of your work, but with your marketing and corporate messages. You don't want to create a perceived conflict between the creatives, and marketing and management, as the fans will side with the creatives over the stuffed suits, and blast your company internet wide (causing the unemployment of the folks they were white-knighting for).
Your creative people are respected by the people who consume their works. Let them show a reciprocal respect, by interacting with the fanbase and consuming feedback. So long as it's made clear that your people take suggestions, and not orders, this will add to your pool of grassroots respect and internet buzz, without overly empowering the overly self-entitled crybabies who are the enemy of all positive buzz (these people are what makes "kid's stuff" that has become "for grownups too" such a risky maneuver. See also: Comic Books). Bonus: also tricks your creatives into working for you for free, whenever they blog or tweet.
Encourage fanworks, but don't attempt to control them. Any attempt to tune the signal sends a very sinister message, and destroys the credibility of your free advertising agencies. However, you can still use your position as the actual owner of the IP as a bully pulpit to issue requests from, rather than ultimatums. (This saves you millions in suing your own fans, and is in many respects more effective.)
Actively encourage fans to create responsibly; you want them to build systems that promote quality fanworks over poor ones (to reflect the quality of your product) and that allow users from all of your demographics to have a positive web experience. This means that pornographic fanart should have a place to exist apart from everything else, so people who aren't looking for it can avoid it.
You can't build this yourself, because your control over that system would compromise it's supposed neutrality (Remember that your fans want you to stay in business, too.). However, if you start handing out respectful suggestions for features, these types will often drink up that feedback. --It means that you acknowledge their existence amenably, and feel their work is worthy of further development.
Of course, if you respect your customers, all of this comes naturally. They're probably smart enough to ask you for it, if you know how to listen.
This one is less about my personal experience, and more about the collective experience and it's influence on popular culture, the blogosphere, the Chans, et cereta, and as such there is the matter of disclaiming that I have not seen the entire elephant. I have not read the entire internet; deal with it.
From where I sit, here's how it is:
It's all about respect. People want it, need it, and crave it, and if you give it to them they will, ironically, be more than happy to debase themselves for your amusement (See: reality television, the Jackass series and wannabe actresses trying to get a break).
There are two demographics that modern media tends to treat like predictable, drooling imbeciles, who will buy anything that panders to their desire for pink dresses and fiery explosions. Exposing these people to quality products is like exposing a dead-fall knotted stand of jungle, that hasn't seen fire in a hundred years, to an incendiary grenade.
You'll get a lot of flash out of that, and with a little guidance that flash will turn into a firestorm.
First, the creator must express their respect for the audience from first contact; either in the work itself, or in pre-release marketing (This thought inspires a train that will form a later post on the life cycle of the post-WoW MMO). The creator takes the initiative in this dialogue, and it's important to start things off on the right foot.
Likewise, you have to show that respect from square one, so new prospects don't have to wade through no-effort crap to get to the good stuff. Opening MLP:FiM with a two part episode was a ballsy move; what if kids didn't become invested quickly enough to take an interest in the resolution? Could kids even learn all the major characters in that span of time?
Once you've shown your audience some respect, and earned their respect in return, you have to maintain that respect, and keep pushing out quality product. Even Naruto understands that every third season must contain content, or the fans will stop coming back to see if it's gotten good again (It seems that even DBZ fans oft lack the patience for Naruto's pacing).
You might get a flash following with pandering and fluff, but pandering is cheap, and that audience will abandon you the minute a new panderer appears. While it's possible to pander to an audience that you respect (an act indistinguishable from producing quality products), remember that cheap pandering will cost you the respect of your fans, who will feel betrayed and give you negative buzz.
This is a serious danger point for the way Hasbro is handling MLP:FiM. They got the brony fanbase as a free extra to the audience they wanted to reach --an audience with actual income, rather than an allowance-- but then overtly accepted the adulation of these free fans, and pledged to continue serving them. The potential threat here lies in the nature of the brony demographic, and the way this paradigm alters their reaction to the product.
Bronies, are media consumers, down to their black, culturally conflicted hearts. As such they have an intuitive grasp of context and presentation, that many of them are not even aware of. The physics and furniture in Ponyville are preposterous, but that's okay, because it's a show for children, and they know to turn those parts of their brains off when the show is on. When the show becomes "for grown-ups too" there's a risk that a significant portion of the fanbase will see the unnoticed shift in their expectations as a lower quality product. A lower quality product would be a betrayal of that new promise, even though it is only the promise, and not the perceived quality thereof that the producers have control over.
Thankfully, the movement has gravitated to charismatic, creative leadership, that clearly shows a solid understanding of consumerism, and a long haul philosophy toward sustaining a fandom. Not only do these grassroots leaders make great apologists, explaining this new need for logic back into the proverbial fridge, and making pink Celestia toys (Celestia is a White horse, but marketing knows pink is what catches the eye in the pink aisle) into a joke, rather than an endless flamewar.
They are also the best marketing team Hasbro could ask for. They are consumerist enough to know they can help this fledgling series survive, and Hasbro has allowed them to do just that.
Ponycraft 2 is a viral advertising dream, and with leadership and infrastructure to support the pony video trend it spawned, this has produced more minutes of viewed, free advertising than anyone has the capability to calculate. --and nobody is blocking these spots, they are seeking them out with a hunger for more. When you win over disaffected creatives with nothing to do but build monuments to your glory, you ensure your glory spreads so far and wide it gets banned from many major content distribution sites.
Sadly, much of this content will be porn, or of poor quality, or both. That's user published content; them's the breaks. Thankfully, with consumerist leadership that wants you to succeed your fans will construct infrastructure to help the quality producers to succeed, which helps your free advertising spread faster and be more effective.
"--But Felblood!" I hear some of you cry, "All this happened on it's own! Hasbro didn't do any of that stuff; the bronies did it. What can marketers learn form this act of God?"
I reply, "Who is Hasbo?"
The people at Hasbro have fostered this movement in some way at every turn. There have been missteps to be sure, but after step one (Introduce quality products respectfully) and step two (keep feeding them quality products), they hit step three out of the park.
Let people love you.
Acknowledge their respect respectfully, not just with the quality of your work, but with your marketing and corporate messages. You don't want to create a perceived conflict between the creatives, and marketing and management, as the fans will side with the creatives over the stuffed suits, and blast your company internet wide (causing the unemployment of the folks they were white-knighting for).
Your creative people are respected by the people who consume their works. Let them show a reciprocal respect, by interacting with the fanbase and consuming feedback. So long as it's made clear that your people take suggestions, and not orders, this will add to your pool of grassroots respect and internet buzz, without overly empowering the overly self-entitled crybabies who are the enemy of all positive buzz (these people are what makes "kid's stuff" that has become "for grownups too" such a risky maneuver. See also: Comic Books). Bonus: also tricks your creatives into working for you for free, whenever they blog or tweet.
Encourage fanworks, but don't attempt to control them. Any attempt to tune the signal sends a very sinister message, and destroys the credibility of your free advertising agencies. However, you can still use your position as the actual owner of the IP as a bully pulpit to issue requests from, rather than ultimatums. (This saves you millions in suing your own fans, and is in many respects more effective.)
Actively encourage fans to create responsibly; you want them to build systems that promote quality fanworks over poor ones (to reflect the quality of your product) and that allow users from all of your demographics to have a positive web experience. This means that pornographic fanart should have a place to exist apart from everything else, so people who aren't looking for it can avoid it.
You can't build this yourself, because your control over that system would compromise it's supposed neutrality (Remember that your fans want you to stay in business, too.). However, if you start handing out respectful suggestions for features, these types will often drink up that feedback. --It means that you acknowledge their existence amenably, and feel their work is worthy of further development.
Of course, if you respect your customers, all of this comes naturally. They're probably smart enough to ask you for it, if you know how to listen.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
The Broney Phenomenon 2: Introspection
NOTE: There's one more question that I forgot to mention in the closing of the previous entry, "How can I use this for personal gain/evil?" Personal gain and evil are the two things I know the most about, so there will be a special entry devoted to this, to cap the end of this series.
On with the show.
Today's topic: "WHAT IS HAPPENING!? IT FEELS LIKE MY SOUL IS DYING!"
Those are my own words, and I meant them. My existing conceptions about my own psychology have been sorely tested by these past three weeks. Watching My Little Pony has induced a crisis of faith that shook me deeply. (Believe it or not, I am actually going to recommend trying it yourself later in this article.)
The American culture is a culture built on marketing. From an early age, numerous groups attempt to influence what type of person we will become, and what sorts of ideals we will strive for, and none of them are as insidious as marketing. In this environment, parents wisely try to teach their offspring to be string willed, independent people, who can resist the mind altering onslaught of Saturday morning's marketing blitz.
I thought my parents had been pretty successful in teaching me to be my own person, and to thumb my nose at other people's ideas of who I should be. They made sure there were dolls mixed in with my collection of toy cars and action figures, and taught me that it was virtuous to be beaten by my peers for failing to fit in(something I did quite often as a kid anyway, so it's good that they approved, at least).
I thought I was immune to peer pressure. However, I see now that I was wrong, and even this aggressive campaign of pro-open-mindedness propaganda could not prevent certain prejudices from taking root in my mind, so deeply that letting them go was almost physically painful.
Here's how it went down.
It all started with a funny YouTube link from my brother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJbAT1wzS8U
From there, it was trivial to find the actual first episodes of the new series Friendship is Magic (It is YouTube).
You know, so I could see the raw material from which the editor crafted his hilarious trailer re-imagining. Surely, it was some artifice on his part that made this look like it could be interesting, right?
So, I didn't exactly go into this with good faith. I clicked on that link the way a gawker runs to the window when he hears a particularly moist motorcycle accident. It was my intention to watch this video so I could laugh at it, and tell other people how bad it was later.
Then something literally incredible happened.
I didn't hate it.
In fact, I enjoyed it, for what it was. I could address the work on it's own terms, and I had a good time.
There was something even stranger, though: I was absolutely horrified by my own enjoyment of this product, and even more deeply horrified by that horror itself.
"If a product is good," I told myself as I buffered up another episode, "why shouldn't a savvy consumer be able to recognize and absorb that good?"
Nevertheless, I could no longer deny my prejudice. I expected this show to be bad, and I was wrong, and that doesn't seem so bad -- bad that expectation had come from a part of my psyche that said that it was okay for me to love GI Joe Resolute (which was also pretty cool) but that My Little Pony was and would always be bad and ineffable. Somewhere inside my mind, there lived and eight year old sexist, and watching this show brought him screaming out of his hidey hole, to throw a massive tantrum.
That's when I decided to kill him.
I've never been a fan of children.
Seriously though, finding this childish pride and prejudice in myself was pretty disturbing. Real men don't need to fret that their actions are childish, or unmanly, and getting hung up on a childish thing like that triggered an infinite loop of childish shame. Clearly this had to stop.
So, I psychically ripped out my cultural shame circuits, and went back to watching my show. "I like it and there's nothing wrong with that, so what else matters!?"
My little brothers think I'm insane.
I've decided to deploy the fact that I like MLP more tactically, in the future. It's one thing to not be ashamed of your media of choice, and it's quite another to tell your co-workers about them. I mean, I don't tell random about my love of Picasso either, but that's about other people's closed-minded hangups, not mine.
On with the show.
Today's topic: "WHAT IS HAPPENING!? IT FEELS LIKE MY SOUL IS DYING!"
Those are my own words, and I meant them. My existing conceptions about my own psychology have been sorely tested by these past three weeks. Watching My Little Pony has induced a crisis of faith that shook me deeply. (Believe it or not, I am actually going to recommend trying it yourself later in this article.)
The American culture is a culture built on marketing. From an early age, numerous groups attempt to influence what type of person we will become, and what sorts of ideals we will strive for, and none of them are as insidious as marketing. In this environment, parents wisely try to teach their offspring to be string willed, independent people, who can resist the mind altering onslaught of Saturday morning's marketing blitz.
I thought my parents had been pretty successful in teaching me to be my own person, and to thumb my nose at other people's ideas of who I should be. They made sure there were dolls mixed in with my collection of toy cars and action figures, and taught me that it was virtuous to be beaten by my peers for failing to fit in(something I did quite often as a kid anyway, so it's good that they approved, at least).
I thought I was immune to peer pressure. However, I see now that I was wrong, and even this aggressive campaign of pro-open-mindedness propaganda could not prevent certain prejudices from taking root in my mind, so deeply that letting them go was almost physically painful.
Here's how it went down.
It all started with a funny YouTube link from my brother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJbAT1wzS8U
From there, it was trivial to find the actual first episodes of the new series Friendship is Magic (It is YouTube).
You know, so I could see the raw material from which the editor crafted his hilarious trailer re-imagining. Surely, it was some artifice on his part that made this look like it could be interesting, right?
So, I didn't exactly go into this with good faith. I clicked on that link the way a gawker runs to the window when he hears a particularly moist motorcycle accident. It was my intention to watch this video so I could laugh at it, and tell other people how bad it was later.
Then something literally incredible happened.
I didn't hate it.
In fact, I enjoyed it, for what it was. I could address the work on it's own terms, and I had a good time.
There was something even stranger, though: I was absolutely horrified by my own enjoyment of this product, and even more deeply horrified by that horror itself.
"If a product is good," I told myself as I buffered up another episode, "why shouldn't a savvy consumer be able to recognize and absorb that good?"
Nevertheless, I could no longer deny my prejudice. I expected this show to be bad, and I was wrong, and that doesn't seem so bad -- bad that expectation had come from a part of my psyche that said that it was okay for me to love GI Joe Resolute (which was also pretty cool) but that My Little Pony was and would always be bad and ineffable. Somewhere inside my mind, there lived and eight year old sexist, and watching this show brought him screaming out of his hidey hole, to throw a massive tantrum.
That's when I decided to kill him.
I've never been a fan of children.
Seriously though, finding this childish pride and prejudice in myself was pretty disturbing. Real men don't need to fret that their actions are childish, or unmanly, and getting hung up on a childish thing like that triggered an infinite loop of childish shame. Clearly this had to stop.
So, I psychically ripped out my cultural shame circuits, and went back to watching my show. "I like it and there's nothing wrong with that, so what else matters!?"
My little brothers think I'm insane.
I've decided to deploy the fact that I like MLP more tactically, in the future. It's one thing to not be ashamed of your media of choice, and it's quite another to tell your co-workers about them. I mean, I don't tell random about my love of Picasso either, but that's about other people's closed-minded hangups, not mine.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
The Broney Phenomenon: Introduction
This idea will probably be broken up into several sections. I'll start with the high concept stuff, and then get down into my personal observations and predictions as the series continues.
Popular culture is a mysterious thing; scientists are still, quite literally, trying to figure it out. Trends spring up in days, and with a little nourishment, can snowball into an edifice to endure or even define a decade.
A trend will is born in silence, with isolated people discovering an ability to enjoy something new--often something nobody would have predicted--but once those people find that they are not alone, and that there are others who share their enthusiasm, a fandom is formed and the trend becomes visible.
Fandoms are iceberg like things, with only the most prominent parts being visible without careful study. Also, like icebergs, they can be dangerous, if you assume you understand the whole thing, by looking at a part of it; many a marketing push has been crippled by a decision based on an overly small sample of the audience. Each has a unique raver to lurker ratio, based on a million unique factors, but each one signifies a deeper trend in the overarching culture, and can be used to collect valuable data points about the trends in that culture. Many of these factors are yet mysteries to marketing science, and new insights into the matter are valuable (for making money, if nothing else) in the right hands.
In this series, I'll be making observations on the growth and nature of the newborn "Brony" clique, and what they can tell us about the unexpected ways that Lauren Faust's My Little Pony reboot is trending in general, as well as what those trends tell us about society and modern marketing.
For those of you who haven't heard, a lot of red blooded, American males, aged 18-35, of both sexualities, are finding themselves unexpectedly enjoying My little Pony. (That's right, you're not alone.) For many, this has been an earth shattering revelation. One group of these fans call themselves "Bronies," keying off the irony that men normally expected to only be interested in beer, boobs and ballgames are unexpectedly finding themselves liking something that was intended to appeal to little girls.
People are asking, "Why is this happening!?" "What is happening?!" "Is this even okay!?" Nobody is asking these questions more than the bronies themselves. The men in question often find themselves horrified by their own lack of irrational bias, or dismissive pomposity. Leading the following question to often be, "If it's actually good, why shouldn't men be able to enjoy it?" or more succinctly, "Why not?"
I'll address each of those three questions in a subsequent entry.
Popular culture is a mysterious thing; scientists are still, quite literally, trying to figure it out. Trends spring up in days, and with a little nourishment, can snowball into an edifice to endure or even define a decade.
A trend will is born in silence, with isolated people discovering an ability to enjoy something new--often something nobody would have predicted--but once those people find that they are not alone, and that there are others who share their enthusiasm, a fandom is formed and the trend becomes visible.
Fandoms are iceberg like things, with only the most prominent parts being visible without careful study. Also, like icebergs, they can be dangerous, if you assume you understand the whole thing, by looking at a part of it; many a marketing push has been crippled by a decision based on an overly small sample of the audience. Each has a unique raver to lurker ratio, based on a million unique factors, but each one signifies a deeper trend in the overarching culture, and can be used to collect valuable data points about the trends in that culture. Many of these factors are yet mysteries to marketing science, and new insights into the matter are valuable (for making money, if nothing else) in the right hands.
In this series, I'll be making observations on the growth and nature of the newborn "Brony" clique, and what they can tell us about the unexpected ways that Lauren Faust's My Little Pony reboot is trending in general, as well as what those trends tell us about society and modern marketing.
For those of you who haven't heard, a lot of red blooded, American males, aged 18-35, of both sexualities, are finding themselves unexpectedly enjoying My little Pony. (That's right, you're not alone.) For many, this has been an earth shattering revelation. One group of these fans call themselves "Bronies," keying off the irony that men normally expected to only be interested in beer, boobs and ballgames are unexpectedly finding themselves liking something that was intended to appeal to little girls.
People are asking, "Why is this happening!?" "What is happening?!" "Is this even okay!?" Nobody is asking these questions more than the bronies themselves. The men in question often find themselves horrified by their own lack of irrational bias, or dismissive pomposity. Leading the following question to often be, "If it's actually good, why shouldn't men be able to enjoy it?" or more succinctly, "Why not?"
I'll address each of those three questions in a subsequent entry.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Why a Toymaker Dreams
So far as I'm aware, the name isn't taken yet, for one thing.
However, as you've probably guessed, the name runs a little deeper than that. It's an oblique reference to an old essay I wrote that nobody, other than my mother, read.
In said essay I make the assertion that when society wants to make little of someone's profession they call him a toymaker. This is most common in this era with the art nearest and dearest to my heart, that of designing games.
Furthermore, I went on to declare that all artists are really toymakers, and we should stop being offended when a so-called intellectual attempts to rob our work of meaning by calling it a toy. As art engages the mind of an adult, a toy must engage the mind of a child, but the line between children and adults is not so clear as we might like to make it. The distinction between the two is necessarily blurred, and the very best toys are works of master artists.
Thus, as a man who spends his free hours contemplating and laboring on the interplay of rules and playstyles, I embrace the title of "Toymaker." I'm proud to be a toymaker, and hope to someday be able to make a profession out of it, so I can quit my day job and make games all day. It isn't easy, but I love it.
Then, I created this blog to air out various ideas that I don't yet have a grander system to work them into. These aren't so much fully realized design documents so much as passing figments that I feel deserve to be preserved for later use. I've filled dozens of notebooks with these over the years, but I recently decided to share these rough concepts with the world. If I live to be a hundred, I won't be able to build an entire game around every concept that ever pops into my head, and it's a shame to waste an idea that might complete the puzzle for someone else's system.
As an added bonus, this will give me something I can point to when I claim that I had an idea years before it became the dominant feature in it's genre, and I just didn't have the funding to make it real.
Anyway, some of these ideas will clearly grow out of projects I'm working on, while others will be one-offs. Obviously, it would be desperately wicked to swipe a full game design, but if I can provide the inspiration to get you past a major hurtle in your project, I'm glad to help. --just mention me next time someone you know is looking for creative people. ;P
However, as you've probably guessed, the name runs a little deeper than that. It's an oblique reference to an old essay I wrote that nobody, other than my mother, read.
In said essay I make the assertion that when society wants to make little of someone's profession they call him a toymaker. This is most common in this era with the art nearest and dearest to my heart, that of designing games.
Furthermore, I went on to declare that all artists are really toymakers, and we should stop being offended when a so-called intellectual attempts to rob our work of meaning by calling it a toy. As art engages the mind of an adult, a toy must engage the mind of a child, but the line between children and adults is not so clear as we might like to make it. The distinction between the two is necessarily blurred, and the very best toys are works of master artists.
Thus, as a man who spends his free hours contemplating and laboring on the interplay of rules and playstyles, I embrace the title of "Toymaker." I'm proud to be a toymaker, and hope to someday be able to make a profession out of it, so I can quit my day job and make games all day. It isn't easy, but I love it.
Then, I created this blog to air out various ideas that I don't yet have a grander system to work them into. These aren't so much fully realized design documents so much as passing figments that I feel deserve to be preserved for later use. I've filled dozens of notebooks with these over the years, but I recently decided to share these rough concepts with the world. If I live to be a hundred, I won't be able to build an entire game around every concept that ever pops into my head, and it's a shame to waste an idea that might complete the puzzle for someone else's system.
As an added bonus, this will give me something I can point to when I claim that I had an idea years before it became the dominant feature in it's genre, and I just didn't have the funding to make it real.
Anyway, some of these ideas will clearly grow out of projects I'm working on, while others will be one-offs. Obviously, it would be desperately wicked to swipe a full game design, but if I can provide the inspiration to get you past a major hurtle in your project, I'm glad to help. --just mention me next time someone you know is looking for creative people. ;P
Monday, March 7, 2011
Hydraulic Sea Elevators
A post explaining what this blog will be about will come next, but in the meantime, I have to tell this idea to somebody.
I've always wanted to build an underwater city, so it's something that occupies a lot of my otherwise unused brain power. Being sick at home today, I was lying in the bath, when I suddenly came up with a solution to one of the problems that has been plaguing me.
Moving things up and down in an underwater city is a major concern. Naturally, you'll want to establish trade with the land dwellers, or send boats to other underwater cities. That means that transporting people and goods up (to the cheaper to operate surface ships) and down (into the bowels of the city) is going to be a major part of life in an underwater town.
Some goods are not a problem really, just attach them to something buoyant enough and they'll shoot strait to the surface. Likewise, the right amount of weight will sink them slowly down the a landing platform. Some guide-wires and other safety precautions would be necessary, but it could be done with a little planning and regulation.
People, on the other hand, are generally going to be a problem. Moving them up and down too quickly, or too often can be very bad for them, especially if you are designing your cities to be able to exist in a large percentage of the ocean. The ocean is really deep in most places, and the pressure is a lot higher down below.
To a certain extent, the pressure inside the habitat can be a little lower than that of the ocean, but there comes a point where the folks upstairs have air thin enough that rapidly changing floors would be harmful or even fatal.
To resolve this problem, I propose an elevator that automatically adjusts the internal pressure over time, as it rise and falls, and has safety limiters in place to prevent people from traveling to new pressure zones more quickly than would be safe.
The design of the elevator itself is the main item today, but there are some logistical concerns that I will address as well.
The elevator car is a cylindrical plug, which separates a long tube into two sealed sections. The tube is allowed to fill with sea water by a series of valves. The car is considerably taller than the passenger compartment itself, as it is designed to compress somewhat as the water pressure increases, and we don't want people freaking out as the ceiling descends.
By sealing the valves, and then forcing water in or out of the separate sections of the tube, we can push the car up or down the pipe. Rails, or some similar measure would be needed to prevent the car from rotating as it rises and falls, so that the doors would line up.
Because the pressure inside the car is equal to the pressure on the current level, there is no need for an airlock at the elevator doors, only a bulkhead which can withstand the pressures inside the tube, which is assumed to be a solved problem by several aspects of this design. As the science of underwater engineering advances, elevators of this type will become viable at ever increasing depths.
To allow greater elevator speeds, it would be advisable to limit the number of floors that can be penetrated by a single elevator. Climbing five stories at a given speed is not the same ting as twenty and so-on. The number of floors varies depending on the speed of the elevator and the depth of the facility, so the safe height of an individual tube might vary considerably even within a given city.
At some point, it might be necessary to deny a person any further elevator travel until they have been examined by a medical expert. Medical facilities would need to be accessible from each level of the city, which isn't a bad idea anyway, as medical transport is a serious issue, and a staffed first-aid station on each floor, would allow for better triage.
This increases the amount of horizontal sprawl that is needed to make the city able to sustain itself economically, as nurses don't work at isolated research stations without compensation.
Now, I need to lie down some more.
I've always wanted to build an underwater city, so it's something that occupies a lot of my otherwise unused brain power. Being sick at home today, I was lying in the bath, when I suddenly came up with a solution to one of the problems that has been plaguing me.
Moving things up and down in an underwater city is a major concern. Naturally, you'll want to establish trade with the land dwellers, or send boats to other underwater cities. That means that transporting people and goods up (to the cheaper to operate surface ships) and down (into the bowels of the city) is going to be a major part of life in an underwater town.
Some goods are not a problem really, just attach them to something buoyant enough and they'll shoot strait to the surface. Likewise, the right amount of weight will sink them slowly down the a landing platform. Some guide-wires and other safety precautions would be necessary, but it could be done with a little planning and regulation.
People, on the other hand, are generally going to be a problem. Moving them up and down too quickly, or too often can be very bad for them, especially if you are designing your cities to be able to exist in a large percentage of the ocean. The ocean is really deep in most places, and the pressure is a lot higher down below.
To a certain extent, the pressure inside the habitat can be a little lower than that of the ocean, but there comes a point where the folks upstairs have air thin enough that rapidly changing floors would be harmful or even fatal.
To resolve this problem, I propose an elevator that automatically adjusts the internal pressure over time, as it rise and falls, and has safety limiters in place to prevent people from traveling to new pressure zones more quickly than would be safe.
The design of the elevator itself is the main item today, but there are some logistical concerns that I will address as well.
The elevator car is a cylindrical plug, which separates a long tube into two sealed sections. The tube is allowed to fill with sea water by a series of valves. The car is considerably taller than the passenger compartment itself, as it is designed to compress somewhat as the water pressure increases, and we don't want people freaking out as the ceiling descends.
By sealing the valves, and then forcing water in or out of the separate sections of the tube, we can push the car up or down the pipe. Rails, or some similar measure would be needed to prevent the car from rotating as it rises and falls, so that the doors would line up.
Because the pressure inside the car is equal to the pressure on the current level, there is no need for an airlock at the elevator doors, only a bulkhead which can withstand the pressures inside the tube, which is assumed to be a solved problem by several aspects of this design. As the science of underwater engineering advances, elevators of this type will become viable at ever increasing depths.
To allow greater elevator speeds, it would be advisable to limit the number of floors that can be penetrated by a single elevator. Climbing five stories at a given speed is not the same ting as twenty and so-on. The number of floors varies depending on the speed of the elevator and the depth of the facility, so the safe height of an individual tube might vary considerably even within a given city.
At some point, it might be necessary to deny a person any further elevator travel until they have been examined by a medical expert. Medical facilities would need to be accessible from each level of the city, which isn't a bad idea anyway, as medical transport is a serious issue, and a staffed first-aid station on each floor, would allow for better triage.
This increases the amount of horizontal sprawl that is needed to make the city able to sustain itself economically, as nurses don't work at isolated research stations without compensation.
Now, I need to lie down some more.
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