#6: Spinning plates and penning prose
“We are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to live in.”
Project update: Script week 1
Celebration! Ylaria and I had our first shared session last Wednesday, and we will have our second in two days’ time. Last week was both exactly what I needed, and what I hoped to get out of it. We started off with the elevator pitch, and then went through the guiding principles I’ve put together for the project. I’ve revised my elevator pitch to be much more powerful imbetween last week and now, but I’m not quite ready to share it yet - this is because there is going to be a lot of change between now and the end of this script writing, and I would like to share those public-facing changes in one big hit on my website. But hey, you can still get insights about the process here until then!
I repeated for Ylaria the presentation which I gave 18 months ago in Melbourne, the presentation which forms the starting point for the fictional story I’m creating. Sharing this presentation again was about as emotional an experience now as it was 18 months ago, for all the right reasons. It is an abridged version of 4 chapters in my life, all of which were instrumental in arriving at who and where I am today. We both had a few tears (how cathartic) and also a bit of a laugh when she said “Now I want to make this into a play!”
We then went through the setting, the themes, the overall arc of the story, and then talked through a one-page summary of the whole story. It was wonderful both to get so many poignant and genuinely interested questions from Ylaria, and my own responses to them were enlightening to myself. Most of them I had answers for, which you would hope you would when writing a story about your own life, but remember that this is a fictional adaptation, so that’s not guaranteed. There were also moments where I stopped and thought “Why have I decided that? Does that make sense?”. Outside voices are always of great value.
After talking through the overall story milestones (start, middle, end, major characters, etc), we got into the blocking of events and places for the first chapter. This was incredibly helpful. I’ve documented in the past that my approach is to gather the shape of the work and then fill things in from the outside in, and events and places just sort of fall into place when the framework is there. I feel like I managed to get my framework in place right in time to discuss what comes next, which is to start committing to specific content for the first draft, before coming back over it later. It’s probably important to say that this is not dialogue yet, this is blocking out lists of ‘character x needs to be in location a in order to fulfil purpose 1’, so that it’s clear what information needs to be articulated to the player, in what way, and by whom.
After that first day, I then spent Thursday to Saturday beavering away, and now the first of several block-outs of chapters 1 & 2 are now reasonably complete. Yay! In two days’ time Ylaria and I will meet again to revise what I refined and then we will buzz like bees through a block-out of chapters 3-5. After that, I will be left alone with my mind for a fortnight while I complete the block-out of chapters 3-5, and create as much of a first pass of dialogue as time permits. The first pass of dialogue is likely to just be lists of bullet points for what it is that will be conveyed, the subtext and purpose of the messaging, before coming back later and actually “voicing” it out.
I’m really excited for the next week. There’s a challenge in development between saving information as a surprise, and also sharing bits of it to generate excitement and insight into the process. I’m going to err on the side of sharing more rather than less, as far as possible. Watch this space.
Personal reflections
I can’t believe that last week came and went, and I missed the fact that it was the 2nd anniversary of my trip to Spain to undergo facial feminisation surgery. That trip changed my life in ways that if those experiences were described to me by others, I would be struck with wonder and perhaps a smidgeon of disbelief. Safe to say that Spain, and specifically Marbella, the town where I stayed, will forever hold a place in my heart. The trap was transformational not juts on a physical level, but a psychological and spiritual level too. Today’s blog photo is one of many that I took during my stay, and like the nature photos of mine I’ve been using so far, it too is one step on my own journey through life, and I knew I wanted to use them to chronicle this journey through time, too.
Over the last week I picked myself up a 4th extracurricular textbook to get through this year, and I have not been able to put it down. The book is The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. This is more than a book about videogames, it’s about games of all kinds ,whether they have cards, a keyboard, pieces, or no equipment at all, and includes everything from hide and seek to world championships of sport. What makes a game? What do we want from them? Why are we driven to play them, however defined? These are the types of questions that tickle me pink and I just love reading about, and taking notes to implement into my own practice. I’ve made leaps and strides this week on the script through the combination of external assistance, both in-person and from books.
I find that inspiration comes from anywhere, so I’ve been keeping my search far and wide. This week I’ve been revisiting audiobooks of seminars delivered by Alan Watts in the 60’s and early 70’s, which are littered with mind-blowing profundity to me, and many of the concepts will work their way into this game because they articulate so well the workings of the mind and body that are central to experiences such as my own. I have been reading through a collection of some of the romantic poets, such as Blake, Wordsworth and Keats, and the eloquence of delivery soothes my mind and helps me to focus on the essential experience that I am trying to share.
Games I played
Between returning to programming study, undertaking the first of these 2 game dev courses, writing the script, and two textbooks on the go, I didn’t get a chance to play any games this week. Next week, I will be sure to carve myself out some more time to get through 2-3 short games and keep up my log of lessons learnt!
Extracurricular game dev update
This week in my extracurricular game dev course, I have been performing a deep dive into what the course creator calls “attention magnets”. This is shorthand for a collection of phenomena, separated by meaningful categories such as “genre attention magnets” or “marketing attention magnets”, which are self-evident near-guarantees for best practice in game development. I say “self-evident” but like so many, many things in life, things that are self-evident are often so plain that the average person could not convey them if they tried. This is much the same - every avenue of ‘magnetism’ discussed is plain, but in aggregate they represent something like the work of 20 years to identify and codify subjective experience into a set of rules-of-thumb. It’s like an index of my own mind where all of a sudden I go “oh, yeah, if I see a game/video/movie that has that, that makes me super curious and want to know more!”. It’s been an utterly fascinating week, and there will be potentially significant changes to the game as a result.
In case you’re wondering, no, this is not an exercise in “selling out” or otherwise making my game something it would never have been but for a desire to increase marketability. The thing about marketing, as I see it, is that marketing is just all of the things you do to communicate your message. The whole point of this game is to change the player’s life by showing them that the life experience of trans people is perfectly comprehensible to them. By design, I want as many people as possible to learn that lesson, and to have the time of their life while doing it. I’m not trying to coerce people into buying something they don’t want or need; I want to make the world a better place, and I will do that by being the best possible communicator that I can, engaging you as effectively as possible, and giving you the most fun time you can possibly have while maybe shedding some tears. I’m reminded of this infamous Steve Irwin interview quote:
“You know what? Money’s great, I can’t get enough money. You know what I’m gonna do with it? I’m gonna buy wilderness areas with it, every single cent I get goes straight into conservation, and guess what? I don’t give a rip whose money it is, I’ll use it, and I’ll spend it on buying land.”
This quote seems to be a direct invitation to armchair philosophers who may opine on ends justifying means and such, but that invitation includes the following: we can talk, and talk, and talking is wonderful, but there is a vanishing point somewhere in the future which is forever getting closer, and when it arrives it will demand action from us. Where our actions in that moment are supported by the greatest resources we have available, the greater our chance of success in our mission. This is how I feel about marketing: When my mission is to soften hearts that might otherwise be full of misunderstanding, anger, even hate, I don’t care where that skillset comes from - if I can improve the lives of others like me and make them less susceptible to a world that may prey on them, I’m going to refine my skills to do that with every opportunity available.
Until next week, loves.
