The Last Clockwinder: Refining the Writing

The Last Clockwinder's playtesting process provided an excellent means to probe and iterate on the narrative. With scratch audio we put together in the game, the managed playtests Pontoco ran were a chance to see how players were responding to the narrative.

A big focus for this process was comprehension. The story-world of the Clocktower, the Clockwinder, and the history of Jules and Edea in particular had a lot of different elements which we needed to get across without stating them too baldly or losing the charm and characterful dialogue. We were able to make a lot of well-reasoned changes in response to seeing playtesters actually play the game, at a stage when the script wasn't polished, the audio was scratch (e.g. me doing my best 'Alex from The Expanse' voice for Levi), and the game wasn't playable end-to-end.

This also gave us insight into the ways the players were interacting with the environment and the narrative elements, which helped us reposition or resequence the audiologs between and within rooms to manage that flow a little better.

Here are some key ways in which we responded to this feedback.

Simplifying the story

Things started off too complicated. This was mostly about the makeup of the story-world and 'rules' of the Clocktower. I think this was partly just a desire to make the story seem maximally interesting on paper during development, and partly as we tried to link together key threads from the story with what was being depicted in gameplay.

We did a lot of work, sometimes quite painful and difficult, to rationalise the story-world and the story itself. Collapsing or omitting plot beats; coming up with new explanations for things; working out what things could afford to be ambiguous to the player and what couldn't[^1]. The key here was not being attached to any one vision of it over time -- accepting the necessity that things would change (while still caring deeply about the story). Though it could be particularly difficult to really 'see' a new version of the story, since it was a kind of palimpsest of all the versions that had preceded it.

Being more explicit

I said before that we didn't want to state things too baldly or lose the character/charm and feel like we were hitting the player in the face with LORE and MOTIVATIONS. But there had to be some give in that. As always, what's obvious (or even banal and uninteresting) to the people immersed in a thing is not so to a first-time player. Recognising that was important, as was realising that some things that had become routine to us could be interesting revelations to the player taking their first steps into this world.

In practice, this equated to a) working out what these essential factors were ('the tree is called the Clocktower and is meant to safeguard endangered plants'), b) saying these more explicitly, and c) saying them enough times.

This could turn into quite a mechanistic process -- 'find 3 places to say that thing in the first five scenes' -- or inform revisions to ensure we weren't missing opportunities to underscore key details. Both get smoothed out in polish, but literally doing script passes where the goal is 'use Jules's name five times to ensure the player knows who they actually are' means you have the right bricks in place.

Cutting, cutting, cutting

I mentioned in the last post that I cut the script down to roughly 1/4 of 'average pages per scene'. That was vital. Too great a volume of material, no matter how good or characterful, can end up obscuring what you need them to know to understand the 101 version of the story. Slimming down the number of lines and how long each one is helps the most important stuff stand out to the player.

Obviously, there are limits to that, and you don't want to suck all the joy and whimsy out of the script, but the limit is usually much closer to the bone that one would naturally assume. To paraphrase something Stephen King says in On Writing: 'But it's good' isn't an argument against cutting something. It's supposed to be good -- that's your job as the writer. 'Good' should be the baseline.

Cutting is valuable for plenty of other reasons. It puts more trust in the voice actors: they can make a line that seems simple, even boring on paper sound great -- usually more easily than a complicated line. And short is usually just better -- I think knowing how much you can say in how little space is a foundational skill of the craft of writing.

Squint Factor and Overindexing

Two additional factors in the iteration process from playtesting. Playtesters and their feedback were invaluable, but we had to account for squint factor, particularly with regards to the voice acting. Our scratch audio was of servicable quality, but it was not recorded by professionals. The presentation and quality of it was also different from how it would be in the finished games. We had to consider what feedback might just be 'taken care of' by the switch to professional VO. (But also not let that stand as an excuse not to address something that could be improved in the draft.)

Likewise, it wasn't necessarily the right move to make a change in response to every single piece of feedback.

• Every player and playtester has their own unique context
• It's resource-intensive to be constantly making these changes
• Some feedback might contradict other feedback
• Our own vision of the game and its story was an anchor point worth protecting to some extent

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[^1]: And not 'ambiguous' in the sense of 'vague', but drawing the distinction between what we had to have them understand and where it would be okay if they got the wrong end of the stick/weren't clear on our own version of things.

The Last Clockwinder: Constructing the Narrative

One thing I skipped in the previous post on this was a description of The Last Clockwinder's story. You play Jules, a young engineer returning to her childhood home -- the Clocktower -- a giant tree in the middle of a waterlogged planet, and was previously tended by Edea, the Clockwinder. Jules returns with her friend and colleague Levi to save the Clocktower from sinking into the ocean. As she works on this problem, she encounters old recordings of her previous stay on the Clocktower -- when she was a wayward child crashing into Edea's solitude.

Our main narrative units for The Last Clockwinder wound up being audiologs and radio conversations -- two gaming mainstays. The risk with both of these -- audiologs in particular -- is that they can end up making the story feel like an adjunct to the gameplay rather than a cohesive part of it. Story, then gameplay, then story. I found myself wondering at some late stages whether we'd missed the opportunity to try for something more 'interesting' in terms of narrative delivery.

But I don't think that was the case. Not that we couldn't have done anything differently (something I may cover in a future shard) -- but they're mainstays for a reason. They can achieve a lot within many of the resource constraints I mentioned in my last post.

What's more, it's been very validating to see various reviews (user and critical) which have mentioned the 'just enough' nature of the story and narrative delivery. One of the reasons we took this approach was that fourth constraint -- balancing the player's attention. A player could skip every audiolog, multitask while problem-solving, or give them more of their attention. We made sure that nothing in the audiologs was critical to playing the game or having an understanding of the story, even if it would be an underweight one.

The radio conversations were, for the most part, the 'narrative golden path' -- the 'sine qua non' of the story. They represented more of an interruption (though most of the time multitasking was still possible), but were more important to motivating the player, clarifying next action/objective, and moving the story forward. (That's a very 'plumbing focused' take on them; I hope they're also characterful and entertaining in their own right. But, as far as possible, every bit of material had to pull its weight.)

One affordance of both audiologs and radio conversations is that they allowed us to think in terms of short, discrete scenes. That's not always a good thing in games, but the internal structure and placement of these scenes were very clear tools to play with for pacing out the narrative.

Here are a few further snippets that feel relevant here:

• Before we knew more about Jules and how she'd map (or not) onto the player character, we knew things would lack a certain dynamism/interplay if there was only one speaking character in the present on the Clocktower. Levi (the 'old hand') was an early addition with this in mind, to provide a foil to Jules and/or the player character. (An alternative would have been to only tell the story through the audiologs -- but this would have wound up remote and unsatisfying, and limited the scope for shaping an emotional arc across the game.)

• The original concept for the story was more 'hands off' and about striking mood and tone than about interfacing so closely with what the player was doing and motivating/directing them more explicit. I'm glad we didn't pursue this route in the end, for a host of different reasons -- iteration through playtesting was a key step in validating this. Moving away from that made it easier to give the player more of an emotional anchor on and understanding of the characters and world and better support the gameplay (helping motivate and direct them as the game unfolded). But there are a bunch of details of the world and characters that got left on the cutting room floor for that reason. 100% the right decision, but still interesting to reflect on now.

• My original script for the game was significantly overlong. I'll definitely write this up as its own post and maybe even do some side-by-side comparisons on my cuts. The first complete script draft I remember averaged about 4 pages per scene. I got the scythe out and cut that in half, and things still felt too long, so I had to cut it in half again. Really interesting (and vital!) process to undertake.

• We underwent several iterations of the script before the game was playable end to end -- all fine and normal. We had to get things down on paper and sometimes with scratch audio before knowing final decisions on various elements (sometimes so that those drafts could inform the decisions themselves). But it was also vital that we actually allowed time for several 'match passes' amid the polish when things were playable. This didn't just mean fixing things that were straightforwardly inconsistent with final game flow -- it meant looking for specific opportunities to exploit that connected the script (which always risked feeling 'remote' and removed from the player's reality due to our constraints) to what the player was seeing and doing in a given space. Again, something I can perhaps showcase in a script comparison, but often it meant replacing a general detail in a line of dialogue -- something that declared or implied something about the wider world, for instance, or a joke -- with something that filled the same role in the dialogue but was rooted in what the player would be seeing or doing at the time. This was another way in which we could mitigate some of the common downsides with our narrative units.

The Last Clockwinder: Core Constraints

The Last Clockwinder came out on VR platforms last week. I worked on the game, on-and-off, from January 2020 through to right near the end. Specifically, my role (alongside Olivia Wood) was developing the narrative background for the game, iterating on that, and writing and polishing the game's script.

My plan now is to work up a series of these shards on aspects of the development from my perspective. In keeping with the nature of this blog, they're not meant to be finished, polished artefacts. I'm thinking of them more as 'thought sketches' -- a way for me to reflect roughly on the project as much as to surface anything externally. They may serve as a precursor to more developed posts elsewhere or pitches for talks.

One of our main early discussions for The Last Clockwinder was over how to tell the story within the project's constraints. In the main and in no particular order, these were:

Affordances of VR

Representing any text-heavy content in the game, for example, didn't seem like a viable approach. This also informed things like expected play session duration in terms of parcelling out content.

Development resources

These priorities, for instance, made it unrealistic for narrative to demand character models or custom animations. Written story could inform aspects of the art and mechanical design, particularly in terms of influencing things that had yet to be designed, but the visual and mechanical design would need to have a heavy influence on the written story.

(I'm drawing a false distinction here between 'written story content' and the narrative of the game as a whole, because the art direction, environment design, etc. are not separate from the narrative and storytelling; they are it. But: see my original disclaimer around this being a 'thought sketch'...)

We also knew from the start that we wouldn’t be implementing any kind of complex underlying narrative systems. We weren’t going to incorporate branching narrative or have space for the player to make any significant choice in the story. That’s not a good or a bad thing; it was a reality of the game as it could be made, and so it was our job to make the story as satisfying as possible within that frame. Which is to say: making the player still feel like an agent in that story where the nature of their agency had these constraints.

Financial resources

Into which I lump: funding levels, general budget constraints in indie games, and prioritisation of investment narrative vs parts of development that were more critical to realising the core vision of the game. This is relevant in as much as it determined the available 'narrative resourcing' as a function of Olivia's time and mine plus the available time from other members of the team to dedicate attention to narrative. Which, of course, has an effect on what can realistically be delivered.

Balancing the player's attention

This always is (or should be) an important factor in narrative and game design. But specifically here, the heaviest emphasis was on the strength of the core mechanic and puzzle design. Those elements would be giving the player a lot to think about (and marvel at), and the core audience the game was targeting wasn't necessarily one who were automatically invested in narrative. 'Storytelling vs mechanics' is a false dichotomy, but we also wanted to be realistic about the game's audience and bring that mindset to decisions around the storytelling.

In the next post, I'll look at our approach to some of these constraints.

Generative Entropy

I make regular use of Oblique Strategies when working. For those unfamiliar, Oblique Strategies ('Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas') is a deck of cards created originally by Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno to complement music development. Each card is a somewhat gnomic statement or prompt. Wikipedia has some examples, and you can 'pull' from the deck via this site.

They aren't for everyone. Some folk find them frustratingly, useless gnomic. For me, that's part of the point -- rarely does what's written on the card directly answer a question (though sometimes it does, and that feels amazing). It's more about adding in a new factor that lets you reframe the problem or question.

I view this as a kind of creative entropy. So much of creativity for me is about structure and explicit tools. Sometimes, I need to inject something more chaotic to help break through to the next stage.

I find Oblique Strategies best for clearing a logjam -- when I'm choosing between a set of competing possibilities that all seem differently good. Failing that, I need to frame the problem or question as clearly as possible. Honestly, this is a huge part of the exercise, and a reason I like the physicality of the cards. I sit and shuffle them until it 'feels right', which is to say: until I'm focused on the actual problem and am holding a clear articulation of it in my mind. That way, even treating the deck like a glorified fidget spinner is impactful.

What the cards are less good at, though, is injecting something more substantive into the process, like introducing a new unexpected element (character, concept, setting, something of that nature) -- a more 'generative' form of entropy. I've started sniffing around for something to fill that purpose, but haven't chanced upon. with anything satisfying so far.

I imagine this is one reason creative people sometimes include Tarot in their processes. Likewise, it's a candidate for using machine learning systems as development 'partners'. But I might get more mileage at this point by cannibalising a Dixit deck.

The Last Clockwinder is Out Now

The Last Clockwinder came out for VR platforms last week. I've been working on these game -- on and off as a contractor -- since 20192020 (edited to fix date error!), and it's been incredible to see it take shape over that time.

The game puts you in the gloves of Jules, working to save her childhood home from sinking into the ocean. That home -- the Clocktower, happens to be a giant tree which serves as a kind of safe haven for imperilled plants. To save the Clocktower, Jules has to 'solve' a series of plant-based challenges that require her to record little clones of herself, copying a set of actions to form a kind of human machine.

It's an exceptionally fun mechanic that takes specific advantage of the affordances of VR to make something really compelling. It's been a genuine joy to see people take to the game so positively.

I plan to do a few posts around various aspects of the writing and narrative design process, but for now, if you're set up for VR, please go buy the game and dive into the world of the Clocktower.

Oculus Store: http://ocul.us/3xbsNbJ
Steam Store: http://s.team/a/1755100

Narrative is process; process, narrative

Having yesterday set my intent to write on here more about narrative, it would be churlish not to attempt that today!

My first thoughts on the 'what' leaned heavily into process -- how I actually go about putting together what I write. My first-blush response was 'no, that's just what you normally write about' (since a lot of what I put on here relates to self-management and 'workflows' in a more general sense). But I prodded that thought a little further, because, in large part, narrative is process.

I think the way people talk about writing and narrative has -- rightly -- become a lot more functional and prosaic in various ways (or maybe my perceptions have become better filtered over time). It is a craft -- or perhaps a collection of crafts -- with solid principles and rules, not a mystical process. There is a certain element of it which feels rather ineffable -- the haunted gaps between those pillars of craft -- but I think a lot of that comes down to honed implicit understanding and emergent thoughts, which develop as a function of the 'infrastructure' you make for yourself to actually do the work.

I'm a very structured thinker and creator. I have a set of tools I've picked up over time which I'm very good at selecting and deploying. For me, that is a huge part of the joy of creativity -- cultivating tools which develop with you over time, and still being surprised by the results. If I have a superpower, I'd say it was that (plus the ability to pick up, try out, and keep/discard new tools I find along the way), though it certainly leaves me with my share of weaknesses, too.

Part of the joy for me is also the 'elephant eating' of it all. ('How do you eat an elephant...?'). Confidence with my tools gives me a certain sense of inevitability, as long as I have energy (attention + time). If something isn't working, I have other options, diagnostic approaches, and places to fall back to.

Not everyone thinks or works like I do, and that isn't to their detriment, but for me: narrative is process and process, narrative.

No updates tomorrow or Friday.

On Narrative (Or 'on on narrative')

One thing I've realised I don't do enough of on here (or in its predecessor, my currently dormant newsletter) is talk about: narrative -- i.e. my whole dang professional craft.

I was reflecting on why that might be -- why my instincts are to write about other things. Part of that is positive: I have other interests, things that fascinate me that aren't, strictly, within the gift of my craft. Pragmatically, I have less of an outlet to think and talk about those things in my day-to-day, so that affects what I write about on here.

But I finally managed to zero in on another element of it. It's not that I don't have anything to say on the subject. I have a lot to say -- it consumes a huge amount of my thinking day in, day out. The main snag, I realised, is that I don't have a clear sense of audience for those sorts of posts. I vacillate on whether I'm writing for an audience of peers, of those from other disciplines, or of altogether outsiders.

(Not that I strictly write these for the audience, whoever that might be -- they are for me, more than anything else. But I generally have an 'imagined reader' in my head which is lacking, here.)

There's also the angle of 'showing my whole professional ass' a.k.a. the eternal fear of talking crap about something I'm meant to know about. (Or the more insidious 'saying something banal and obvious like it's a revelation'.)

So, consider this a statement of intent to explore more narrative-related topics here. They'll be half-formed, underbaked, or wrong, but they will hopefully still be irregularly interesting, and certainly useful for me. (This blog is called 'Shards' for a reason -- they're jagged fragments rather than perfected truths.) My goal will be an exploratory, curious approach; I'll have an idea of an audience in my head for each post, though that audience will not be consistent over time.

Naïve Technosolutionism

Jack has a good piece from last month squinting at some of the common arguments for various uses of the blockchain.

The Crypto Absolutism Fallacy, or “CrAbs Fallacy”, applies when a proponent of a system suggests that some condition will be improved, without recognizing that that only happens if the system exists in isolation and/or if every actor is only using that system; if actors can use that system and other similar systems, then the condition actually stays the same or worsens.

Along with this comes a fallacy of 'naïve trust' where a system is built or talked of in such a way that it only works on 'the assumption that all actors are acting in good faith'.

Many of the examples tapped into something else for me, which I realise has become an unconscious heuristic for me when evaluating technology stories.

There's a particular technosolutionist mindset that's emblematic of Silicon Valley (but which is neither solely of that place nor fully defines that place). It generally asserts that whatever piece of technology is being touted today (blockchain, self-driving cars, undermoderated social networking) is going to solve [insert major problem of your choice], and it is going to solve it on its own merits, which are inherent to the technology, to the extent that any critical consideration of how we implement and use that technology is secondary.

This is exemplified in Facebook's old motto 'move fast and break things'. The technology is going to change the world for the better and bring about a huge amount of net good; therefore, any 'bad outcomes' produced along the way are seen as justifiable and incidental. And besides -- once we get to the 'point of the good', we'll be able to optimise away all of the 'bad' we've produced, and it'll all balance out, okay??

(This usually comes down to capitalism and growth in some form, even if in some cases this rationale remains honest in the mind of the creators -- if you believe what you're doing will change the world positively, but you need the resources to get it there, you can be willing to tolerate a whole host of negative externalities to ensure that you get them. Especially if you're mug enough to believe you can just 'fix them all later'.)

What usually runs through this, implicitly or explicitly, is that the technology supposedly negates the need for all that finnicky 'politics'. Which always make me laugh (bitterly), ever since I started conceiving of politics as 'the thing we do as an ongoing negotiation to try to stop ourselves killing each other' (which is not necessarily a 1:1 map onto e.g. national politics). Which brings us back to Jack's 'naïve trust' and CrAbs fallacies -- the idea that you could do away with politics (even if you wanted to) tends to be laughably naïve.

In practice, though, this underpins a lot of major contemporary 'technology' corporations, where the innovation isn't truly 'technological' in an 'interface with our physical environment' LeGuinian sense, but in laundering away the 'politics'... in the form of bypassing, say, labour regulations. (See: Tesla, Uber, many others.)

Shard Frequency and Post Notifications

I've shifted my intent for this blog slightly, so I'm trying to get a post written and out every weekday, rather than M/W/F. I may regret this and dial it back down, but I'm finding the exercise extremely gainful, and that higher frequency supports rather than hampers this. Making it that level of routine helps enforce the purpose of the blog, which is get thoughts out of my head -- advancing them slightly, but without setting myself unreasonable standards of development and polish which stifle me [in this context].

I find that, pursuant to some of Matt Webb's 15 rules for blogging, capturing ideas immediately and then, when it's time to write, working on whichever one has the most currency/appeal to what I'm thinking about, is transformative. I generate ideas routinely and amply, so there's -- for now -- always a surplus. Following the path of the lightning towards whatever's most on mind also makes it so that it doesn't feel like particular effort or work -- just a matter of finding that small amount of time required to get the words out in the right order.

Anyway, since I can't set up email alerts or anything on my current blog setup, I thought I'd throw out a few ways you can keep on top of what I'm posting here, if you're so inclined.

1) Follow me on Twitter @mastergeorge. I've set it up to tweet out a new post whenever one goes live.

2) Plug https://www.georgelockett.com/shards?format=rss into your RSS reader

3) Use IFTT to set up your own email alerts from the RSS. Thanks to Olivia for figuring this one out. Here are her instructions:

• https://ifttt.com/
• I already had an account, but if you don't have one you need to create one. You get 5 free triggers before you have to upgrade.
• Using the 'Create' button, click 'Add' on IF THIS.
• Search the services for RSS and click on the orange RSS feed it'll bring up.
• Click 'New Feed Item'
• Add: https://www.georgelockett.com/shards?format=rss into the Feed URL box.
• Press 'Create trigger'
• This takes you to a page where you can then press 'Add' on 'Then that'.
• Search for 'Email', click on Email (rather than Email digest).
• Then click on 'Send me an Email'.
• You can just press 'Create Action' on the next page, or add something like 'George's Brain:' to the beginning of the 'Subject' section, so you're reminded where the feed is pulling from when you get the email. (Press 'Create Action'.)
• Then press 'Continue'.
• On 'Review and Finish' press Finish and you're done.

Noisedialling

Social media, messenger apps, and notifications in general are a massive drain on my sanity and attention. That's almost definitely true for you, too, and odds are you either rationalise it as a necessary evil or have stopped noticing.

I've been very intentional about how I handle this problem for years now. It's probably made me difficult to deal with in some capacities (though I've also had comments on how it's changed other people's expectations around communication into a more positive mode). What I've found is that, while less noise is usually better for me, that's not universally true.

I've pared back what spaces I'm actually present on and participate in -- e.g. I've been off Facebook since 2018 or so. That's something that I have almost no qualms or regrets about, but I do notice the lack of a 'stable' (for a given value thereof) social network that's been constructed diachronically over the course of my life (vs spaces that have grown around a single interest or career). But I'd say that's still been almost entirely a good thing.

In practice, I often turn off or bury notifications from the messenging systems I actually use (e.g. WhatsApp and Discord), so that I have to go the them rather than having them come to me. There's a flipside to that, which is that sometimes (particularly when co-ordinating with someone or expecting to hear back on something), that leads to compulsive checking of those apps which is far more stressful and distracting than a push notification. That's usually a sign that I need to turn up the noise for a while. I could write a whole post of how I approach siloing off email, but that's for another time.

Rather than treating noiselessness as an end goal, I've come to regard it as something that happens in phase. Sometimes, I need to be in a high-noise state (active notifications, Twitter on phone if necessary, less use of focus modes) and at other times in a low-noise state (suppress notifications, no SoMe on phone or ideally at all, phone almost perpetually in a focus mode). The practice of switching is also useful, beyond the recognition of having multiple states -- the contrast of moving from one to the other makes each more effective, and feels like I've given myself another lever of active control.

That's all it's about really: living intentionally and modulating my signal and noise as required.

Personal Energy Budgets

I've been thinking a lot lately of 'energy budgets'. Not, I hasten to add, anything to do with energy-as-in-power-as-in-electricity generation and its current pricing crisis. I'm talking about personal energy – our available energy to get up and do things.

Spending a lot more time watching animals has also sharpened this thought process. It's a reductive way of seeing the natural world, but a very clarifying one. Many (most?) animals devote huge amounts of their lives to acquiring food -- their principle source of energy. It's interesting to view any action an animal takes through what it costs them and what it gains them in terms of energy.

Here is my current working model:

1) Energy = Attention + Time. The biggest discordance for me comes from wanting to do something and not being able to. It often feels like a function of pure time, but that's not true -- I have lots ('lots') of time, but more often lack the spare attention to do what specifically I want to with that time.
2) You need to be generating more than you're spending. In the longer term, at least. In theory, everyone has a personal threshold of activity beyond which they're draining their reserves rather than replenishing them. Which is okay in the short term, but is fundamentally not sustainable if that's the way you're living as a matter of course. Add to this that working above that limit means that you're not only not generating energy, you're spending more of it at the same time.
3) Rest and leisure is an active process. Broadly conceiving of rest and leisure time as being what generates energy and of work or work-adjacent time as consuming it, you need to be... actually putting the effort in to do rest and leisure well. They are not purely passive time in their conception, and not all versions of them are created equal. I also find that, when I'm getting overwhelmed with work, I rapidly lose my ability to adequately benefit from downtime, which leads to a feedback loop.

Resonant Frequencies

Another strand of my thought about Umwelt, specifically in the context of visualising the 'experience' of a self-driving car. I was thinking about Alvin Lucier's 'I Am Sitting in a Room'. This is an experimental audio work that features Lucier, as you might guess, sitting in a room. He reads from a script into a recorder ('I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now...'), then plays back that recording into the recorder, then plays back that recording into the... etc. You can listen to the piece on YouTube here.

You can look at the effect from a physical or experiential point of view. Physically, each new cycle amplifies specific things about the recording -- in particular, the resonant frequencies of the room, though presumably also other elements like imperfections in the recording medium. The experiential side is the slow dissolution of signal into noise -- a recognisable speech that begins to buzz and echo, steadily losing coherency until it's something alien and atonal. Even then, we can still hear something of the original -- the cadence and rhythm of Lucier's speech. Until at last, we don't, and we're left with something haunting and ethereal.

There's an intersection with a couple of things here. First off is where I started this note -- the idea of Umwelt and the visualisation of the self-driving car. Reinforcing what's demarcated as important and taking away what isn't gets us closer -- in a very limited way -- to the car's Umwelt. Does Lucier bring us closer, even a little, to the theoretical Umwelt of a room experiencing sounds?

(See here for a snapshot of James Bridle's visualisations, titled 'Activations'.)

The other is writing, where the process of revision is taking away everything that is not the thing and reinforcing the stuff that is the thing. That's my highly unsophisticated description of 'theme' and resonance in writing, but it's often the part of revision that makes a work really shine. Finding the resonant frequencies of the piece and looping through them until we have something new and interesting, or even haunting and ethereal.

Last thought: this is an example of encoding a property of physical space into an audio medium. I Am Sitting in a Room has fascinated for years, and continues to do so.

The Umwelt of Birds

I talk about birds a lot at the moment. They've been somewhat of a pandemic obsession and form of relief. But it's more than that -- it's about connecting with nature and the other living beings with which we share our environments.

Someone asked me last week how I felt about the extent to which birds are just fundamentally unknowable. No matter what emotions or interiority we put onto them, those are just fragments of our own experience and identity we're projecting. No matter what form of relationship we cultivate with any animal, there's a fundamental barrier there that we cannot cross.

My answer was that, for me, that's of the interest. Yes, I feel that barrier, but sometimes, it feels thin -- in those shared moments of seeing, where you feel like you are looking and being looked back at. I've had this with both crows and pigeons -- the two birds I've spent most time around during the pandemic. It's been abundantly clear that they are observing and responding to your behaviour in complex ways, beyond the most common mode of interaction of flight (in both the evasive/aversive and airborne sense) in response to your presence.

James Bridle's new book, Ways of Being, talks about umwelt -- the interior, existential experience -- in reference to non-human intelligences. He describes the process of training his own self-driving car and, while the umwelt of that intelligence is fundamentally unknowable to us, through visualisation of data we can 'see', in a sense, a little of how it does, by virtue of rendering what elements of an image it has designated as 'significant'.

This struck me with relation to the question about birds. We can't know what's happening inside of their own experience -- their umwelt -- but there is still something to be gaining from finding those places where our experiences of the outside world connect with one another. The horn of a passing car spooks the crows; makes me jump, spikes my heart rate, triggers my tic. I feel the peanut between my fingers; the crows watch hungrily, open their mouths in anticipation -- perhaps in request? Is it for me, or for them? Regardless, it is something they do in front of me when I am there. I fluff the throw, the peanut doesn't leave my hand as I intend. They watch. I wonder if they think I'm toying with them, whether they recognise the error. I don't get to know. They don't seem to mind.

"If anything good comes out of web3, I expect it will emerge despite the technologies rather than as a result of them"

When I went to look up what “web3” even was, I found no end of articles talking about how one company or another was doing something with web3, or how some venture capital firm was setting up a web3 fund, or how all the problems with the current web were going to be solved by web3… but very few that would actually succinctly describe what the term even meant. ... This definitely set off the first alarm bells for me: it’s concerning to me when people are trying extremely hard to get people to buy into some new idea but aren’t particularly willing (or even able) to describe what it is they’re doing.
...
In a lot of ways, people are also tying themselves to the technology in ways that I haven’t really seen before. You don’t see a lot of people pick a type of data model—say a linked list—and say “okay, how can I solve [x problem] with a linked list?” But that’s exactly what’s happening in web3: “How can I solve selling real estate with a blockchain?” “How can I solve voting integrity with a blockchain?” And inevitably some of these people are more tied to the idea of blockchains than they are to solving their chosen problems in a good way.
...
As far as specific projects, if anything good comes out of web3, I expect it will emerge despite the technologies rather than as a result of them. There are all kinds of people trying to solve very real problems, but they are putting all their eggs in the one basket: a type of datastore that’s often very expensive and inefficient, and which introduces complexities around decentralization, immutability, and privacy that many projects will find impossible to overcome.

Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto at The Verge

Excellent interview with Molly White, creator of the site Web3 Is Going Just Great.

Making Timeboxing Work for You

One of my absolute most powerful tools for getting things done is timeboxing. This one is well-known and well documented, so I make no claim to novelty on this, but that's not what this space is about (recall Matt Webb's 15 rules for blogging #6: Give up on saying anything new. Most people haven’t read my old stuff. Play the hits.).

Here's an abbreviated list of ways I deploy timeboxing in my day-to-day.

• Fixed Schedule Productivity. Cal Newport's term. The idea of being rigid in your daily working hours, meaning you start and stop at specific times (almost) no matter what. The idea being that you get more done if you take away any tendency to extend your working hours (because, for instance, you haven't been effective enough during the day). Worked brilliantly for me as a freelancer and I consistently tracked more high-quality work hours in a shorter period.
• Paper Schedule. I've seen this one in a few places over the years. Every morning as part of my morning startup routine, I prepare a paper schedule where I plan out what I'm working on that day and when. I make this with reference to my calendar and task management software, and try to consistently allocate appropriate amount of times to different things (which makes me better at estimating task durations). Paper because the act of preparing it is important, and it has an air of impermanence and flexibility. This is also where I decide whether this is a deep, lossy, or hybrid day.
• Pomodoros or other sprints. Pomodoros are mostly a measure of last resort for me now, but I do longer 90- and 60-minute sprints on deep work days, using some of the same principles. The ideal is that they're spent working intently on one thing for a fixed period, with any excess time spent overlearning, but I keep things more flexible than that when I need to. I use the same principle in my morning routine, spending a fixed period of time working on admin, stopping when the timer goes off.

Several threads that run through all of this:

• Being intentional about my time. Making proactive decisions about what I'm working on and when, being realistic about how much I can fit in, and developing and reinforcing the knowledge over time of how long it actually takes me to do different things.
• Parkinson's law. 'Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.' Giving yourself a constrained period of time to complete a task makes it much more likely the task actually gets done, usually without any material compromise in the quality of the output. (But also remember Hofstadter's law.) There are limits, obviously. You can't time-hack your way to writing a novel in an hour. But as you develop a clearer sense of how long different tasks actually take you (which requires being intentional about your time, see above), you can also hone a sense of where the lines are that meaningfully impact the quality of the output (Will a novel I take a decade to write be better than one I write in a year? Almost definitely. Will it be ten times better? Hard to quantify, though it feels doubtful. Will it be better than the combined output of writing ten novels in that same decade? Unlikely.).

I've fallen into a rough habit of three posts a week on here, targeting Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which I'm aiming to maintain. Next week will likely be quiet, though, as I'm away at an event.

Morning Startup

Increasing my capacity to do things and actually exist successfully has mostly been a practice of building a Operations Manual for myself. For instance, having a specific morning routine to shift into work is something I find both emotionally stabilising and immensely practical.

Right now, I actually perform that by getting to my desk at a specific time each day (currently an hour before I start my day job) and running a batch file on my desktop which creates a dated copy of a checklist template. Then, I work through that checklist, deleting lines when they're done.

This features a mixture of self-focused things ('meditate, or do a functional equivalent', 'read for at least 5 minutes') and practical, forward-looking things ('look at your calendar and task management software and write your daily paper schedule', 'fetch the physical files and books you know you'll need').

Once this is done, I shift into another protocol for cracking through my comms and admin. This is another batch file which opens a bunch of tabs and windows. I set a 30 minute time and just work through each, closing them when I'm done. The end of that time is spent working through the Trello board that contains all my admin/admin-adjacent tasks.

When the timer goes off, I finish up what I'm doing, and stop. Then, I usually have enough time to make a coffee before starting the day job.

The batch triggers are the key here -- doing them as a matter of course. That way, the content of each can vary (I changed out my morning checklist to better match my current day-to-day), while the fundamental habit remains.

Energetic Reserves

While I started my new job a few weeks ago, I banned myself from working on any side projects for a given period. It's unheard of for me to not be working on about five things at once, but I've been overstretched for the past while and in a cycle of energetic depletion, so this was a sensible step.

A week or so ago was the first time in a while where I felt very aware of having the surplus of time and energy to work on things. Usually, the mismatch is between my impulse to work on things and the available time and energy, so this was a good sign -- though I'll continue sitting on my hands for a while longer, as I want to actually feel like I have reserves of energy.

I realise also that what I'm doing partly is replicating my feeling around a longish holiday where I'm travelling -- something I did rarely before the pandemic, and haven't done at all since. While I'm all for relaxation and travel, I do find that, after about a week at most, I'm itching to have sit-down time at a desk to at least get all of the things out of my head. Returning to my office with that sort of energy -- where I'm desperate to get out the gate and moving -- has always been a good feeling when it's happened.

Fiction-First TTRPGs

I've been doing a bunch of reading recently into more 'narrative-first' TTRPGs. The moniker has never quite sat right for me -- I've always had the sense that people were never quite happy with how to refer to them and set them against other offerings in the TTRPG space. So: I'm talking about your PbtA ('Powered by the Apocalypse') and FitD ('Forged in the Dark') type games, as opposed to the D&Ds of the world.

The term's never quite stuck for me in part because I have tended to run pretty narrative-heavy D&D games. It's still pretty accurate to call these other games 'narrative-first', in that that's where the bulk of the systems and mechanics -- where the game is directing its attention and where it's asking you to direct yours -- fall. But I've started thinking of them as 'fiction-first' games.

My nascent theory is that a game like D&D, rooted more in a wargaming/tabletop battle-gaming history, is focused on simulating [aspects of] the actions, characters, and environments of the world within a setting. The 'fiction-first' games are focused on simulating, well, the fiction, and so often take the form of a careful deconstruction of the tropes, structures, and story beats of the relevant genre, and then turn them into interesting and fun game mechanics.

To be clear: neither is strictly superior in what it's doing, but this is what's made it 'click' for me. Also, it turns out Monster of the Week is pretty much the exact TTRPG void I've been looking for (at least on paper).

It's Complicated

Many concepts can be explained concisely, in simple language, and we should all strive for clarity. But the aphorism [“If you can't explain it to a 6-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.”] is a mistake, for a number of thoughts approximate the carpenter’s craft, and to meaningfully reveal them requires time and attention. Sometimes these cannot simply be told to another at all, they must be grown. For a topical example, we know that maturity itself cannot be imparted to a six year old, no matter how good a summary we might give. Despite our understanding, we know it is something that can only come to each of us in time. This pattern is more common than we think. True things are disclosed slowly.

Articulating ideas as simply as possible is attractive, not least because getting people to agree with us is attractive. But we have a tendency to overrate ideas that can be shared easily, with the most apparent advantages. By constant simplifying, we may be lulled into abridging our own ideas a little too much, and sooner or later our audience—or ourselves—might come to expect only these truncated thoughts. What is easy to explain is not necessarily what is best. What is easy to understand is not necessarily what is true.

—Quote from Long Distance Thinking by Simon Sarris

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. There's a growing tendency to treat simplicity as a proxy for correctness (the thesis of Sarris's post above), and I think that's being entrenched through people's presence in spaces like Twitter.

Twitter encourages an abbreviated style -- both as an obvious artefact of form, and because of the culture of Twitter. There's a wildly disproportionate expectation of perfect purity and precision in a space that is by design pretty hostile to that. So on the one hand some people present things as categorical and simple (when they generally aren't) and on the other, people who try for nuance are attacked for not framing things perfectly and fully capturing all the subtleties.

Which is not to say Twitter has no value -- I just see it more and more as a means to learn about a thing in broad terms and then go away and seek to understand that thing elsewhere. The problem I've found (in myself) is when Twitter starts to infiltrate my way of thinking.

(I am, myself, simplifying here by using Twitter as a proxy for this way of thinking, but I think it's a pretty solid example of it.)

What it boils down to for me is that: many things are complicated. Not so much so that we can choose intellectual nihilism and abandon any sense of good, bad, right, and wrong. But Twitter rewards -- explicitly and implicitly -- oversimplifications that can't tolerate a thing being good and bad at the same time. To have it be a key lens on the world habituates one away from thinking in terms of complexity. And if we let that mindset overly influence our view on the world...

Well, we'd probably be about where we are.

These are the Rules

I love rules. Languages, systems, models. I make my own, I pick up ones I find lying around, twiddle, adapt, iterate.

I think it says something (probably a bit too much) about how my brain works. But I'm always looking for ways of framing things in these terms. There are obvious ways in which this manifests -- I write and design games, which in one way or another are a representation of something else through rules -- but it's also a big reason I love writing more generally.

There are sets of rules, models, tools, and heuristics that form the craft at every level. You have technical minutiae like grammar or punctuation. There are shortcuts and mental filters you can apply at the level of the scene, in fiction, to assess and elevate the drama. Rhetorical devices to make your point land better.

It's a nexus of interlocking rulesets, each serving a purpose and linking to one another. A lex scriptandi of rules and tools. All can be bent or discarded, but understanding the system as a whole is what gives me the confidence to actually do anything. This is not intended as a prescription, but the practice of making the implicit (because the system is there whether we perceive it or not) explicit, and then internalising that explicitness as informed intuition, is a kind of euphoria for me.

This bleeds through into 'real life' as well. I mentioned last week several connected lens on explicit understanding in conversation. It's why books like Thanks for the Feedback resonate so much with me -- they render explicit the hidden rules of parts of life (or: they form a rendering of them). And when we understand something explicitly, we are far better equipped to deal with it.