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Jon Michalik (.com)

Thought Bubble: The Perfect Performance

5/9/2019

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I'm a musician. Well, I think I'm a musician. Or was one? At some point, I changed my idea of what I was from a musician to an entertainer. I just happen to use music as a way to entertain others. When I perform for an audience, I don't really picture the music as the end goal. The end goal, to me, is being able to entertain others. I want, more than anything else, to transport that audience to a world where the music lives and breathes and tells a story.

This is inherently difficult. As a composer, as a performer, as a person trying to convey a thought. Even having just one person, yourself, myself, try to tell a consistent story is hard. Add others to the mix, with our own experiences, thoughts, strengths and weaknesses, motives, and tools. It's a wonder we come together with a coherent message by the end. It's hard.

But I argue that's what makes this great. Striving for a great performance.

Recently, at a rehearsal the night before a concert, I was approached with two ideals working on two different pieces. These kind of outline the two major ways I can see people approaching music, so it's always fun to see these present themselves so close to one another.


One Truth

On one hand, we kept stopping after hitting a certain part in a piece where not everyone was in agreement for where the pulse was. We'd all play around a certain part, and there was definitely some dissonance in our playing, if not in harmony then in time. After a bit of shedding, one of the group says:
 
“It's good that we're able to play through that part and end up together, but I really wanted to get a run where we all nailed it.” 

When I was in college training to be a professional musician, I would have agreed with this sentiment. The perfect run. It's what we all strive for as musicians. A immaculate capturing of the piece as it is notated. The composer knows best and they want it exactly as it was written. We want it to sound like that.

Fun part about notation is that it doesn't make sound. You can't hear notation. Interestingly, this one member has played this piece before. We've been using a recording of his when we've been approaching the piece. So I wonder, are we aiming for what is notated? Or are we aiming for what it sounded like when it was performed before? The rest of us are building our story, what the piece sounds like and means to us. We want to push and pull our phrasing and hear things happening at points that the others don't.

This group is not the group that played it before. The performance we use is a reference point to what 4 people interpreted the piece as many years ago. This group is not that group. And not being the same people comes with not having the same experiences, goals, and motives for playing this piece. This group's collective perception of perfect is different. Striving for what was done before is strictly not possible. If we wanted to convey that, the audience could listen to the recording instead.


Telling a Story

On the other hand, we are playing a piece with a guest artist and composer. She recognizes that we're not playing with the energy that we had been toward the beginning of rehearsal. This has been a pretty long day and everyone is becoming mentally taxed. She decides to tell us stories of how the music came to be written.

We all take a break from playing and just listen. She walks through the piece and tells us of her motivations, beyond the notation. The sounds of crowds cheering and chanting, of samba groups in the street, of capturing what she gathered as the positive force of energy surging through this community of people. This resonates with people. It resonated with us. The next time we play, we're not trying to play notes, we're trying to tell a story.

This is still difficult. The story is experienced by one person, and that story makes no sound. But humans are really, really good at interacting with a story. More than just directions, which is arguably what notation is. It gives you a map of what the music is structured like, but it offers no story. While it's insanely difficult to get more than one person to tell a story in the same way, being able to attach the energy that inspired the piece to the notes goes a long way to agreeing on where that energy goes.

She also said, and I like this:

“Notation is a wonderful thing. It really is. I love notation. But there's only so much it can do. We don't need humans to play notes. We need humans to make music.”

And that's kind of gets at the core of what this ideal of perfection in a performance is. While it doesn't say exactly what I'm thinking, it strongly hints at it.  If there were a perfect way to play something, why is a human necessary?

There is no perfect performance.


Telling Your Story

Okay, so what are we striving for then? What was I spending all this time trying to learn this thing as the composer intended for? What's the purpose of it all?

I'd argue that you need those skills. You need that time. When you get to a point that you're working on music you're choosing, you do it because you hear something that resonates with you in someone else's performance of that music. You want to take that piece and play it too. But there's more to it that just playing it. With everything I've chosen to play, I want to play it my way, with others whose experiences I want to infuse with my own into a collective narrative. I want to share a version of this music with the audience that only exists when we play.

I want to tell a story. Our story.  My story.

I think this goes beyond music. When you understand your tools, your motives, your goals, you can start to find ways to put your own spin some existing work, model, or structure. One of my favorite thoughts with this applies to reading books. The author may put those words to paper, and they are telling their story, but it largely, if not completely, leaves their hands once it's released. Those characters become the reader's characters. Those settings become the reader's settings. That story becomes the reader's story. Their experiences will reflect differently on that structure than the author's, and that's amazing.


A Mirror

It occurs to me that creative medium, especially those consumed and performed by others are special. When you start, they're always encased in stone. You're reading what's strong enough to see through that hard surface.

You eventually get to a point where your skills allow you to pierce the rock. You see more than just the name of the creator of that piece. It's soft like sand and you see more of the words, more of the faces, more of the meaning.

As you hone your skills and learn to look at the piece with nuance, you're able to brush away the dust without changing the piece underneath. You can see that there's a picture there. You can look at it for days, in awe of all these vivid details that have long gone unnoticed.

Then one day, you feel skilled enough to move this piece. You have to show others. And when you do, when you move it for the first time, the picture moves. This has never been a picture. It's a mirror. Engraved with the details of the piece. But how much it pops, where it's subtle, where it's big and small, light and dark, is completely dependent on how you're looking at it. Every angle, every setting, every person will see it differently, will share it differently, will experience it differently. Each of these provides a new and fascinating perspective against that engraved surface. No one of them the same. No one of them greater than the rest. All of them wonderful in their own respect.

And knowing that, to me...is perfect.
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Travelog: Taking the Scenic Route

9/16/2018

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This particular series of Travelog is a record of activities, thoughts, and stories that I recall from my and Heather's trip to South Africa in summer of 2018. Land of the lion, the sunset, and despite popular belief, not much rain! I hope some of the stories and pictures inspire interest in this beautiful continent and encourage others to travel there as well. Enjoy!

Breakfast & Coffee

I'm not even sure that we slept in that much, but, holy hell, just laying in a bed is night and day compared to sitting in an airplane for most of the day!

This being the only place that I'd consider a hotel that we're staying at for the entire trip, we decide to make the most of it and take advantage of a breakfast bar that they have near the gate. Again, really conveniently located to the room we were staying at. We walk down the hall leading outside and down a flight of stairs into the open. We find the breakfast area pretty easily. I'm about to learn a few things here that are pretty common in South Africa.

First off, there aren't too many people in the area. We are up fairly early and this location is close enough to the airport that I imagine tourists stay quite often. They're likely not the early to rise types that we would find commonplace throughout the rest of the trip. Of the few people that we see, we are immediately greeted with a collage of language! This is something that I kind of get used to later, but every group here is speaking a different language. They all know some English, but it's only ever used as a way to bridge gaps with other people. They all quickly go back to their chosen language as soon as they're done interacting with people from outside their group. This will continue to fascinate me throughout the journey, but this was the first realization that we were different than most of the people here as far as ability to communicate.

We make a round about the breakfast bar, where we find fairly typical fair. Some dry cereals, breads, oats, meats, and beverages. They did have a spot where someone would make eggs for you, which was a bit more than I was expecting. Normally, I'd expect a container full of scrambled eggs to help yourself from. I grab some bacon and sausages, much more closely aligned with a British English preparation than what we're used to in America. Much thicker cuts of meat and not as crispy.

I'll learn two other things here as well. Muffins are commonplace. I'm not sure why I was surprised by this, but I've been having a taste for muffins recently, back home, and this was a welcomed discovery! The other is how to order coffee. This was just a machine, but looking at the options that it could brew, the most closely relevant one to me was “coffee with milk.” I drink my coffee with milk, after all. I choose that option.

I'm immediately taken aback by the machine brewing what appears to be just milk! I'm thinking to myself, “certainly it's just putting a little milk in before adding the coffee.” This was far from the case. I'm standing there for what feels like forever, watching this cup fill over halfway with milk before it adds the coffee. And even then, the coffee wasn't black coffee! It added a coffee mixed with either milk or creamer on top of that! I was thinking this was going to taste awful.

I'd be wrong again! I'm going to make the guess that, no matter where you get milk from here, it's whole milk. Little did I know this machine also taught me a couple other things. One, humans make their coffee with milk the same way (loads of milk with some coffee). Two, you can request cold or warm milk for these brews. Having had both over the course of the trip, I can say both are fine. I'm no coffee connoisseur, but both tasted great. So there's a bit of coffee culture for those who like coffee!
On the Road

We head back to our room and pack up what little of our things that we left out from the night before. That's another thing that was interesting for this trip. We didn't stay in one place very often. Every stay was really just to sleep and the road felt more like home than any of our lodging. If it's within your ability to be moving this much on a trip, I'd recommend it. It's an oddly nice sensation constantly picking up everything you own just about every night. Never much to clean up before you leave!

We get everything into the car, open the garage for our room, back out, close the garage, drop off the room key, and head out. And almost immediately get into an accident. I was aware that I'd be driving on the left, but I hadn't adjusted my brain to which way traffic would be coming from yet. I made a sloppy check for oncoming traffic, start to pull out onto the road, and the Heather alarm sounds with a resounding “UHHHHHHH!” I slam on the brakes and let the traffic go by. I turn to Heather and say “I appreciate the a safety system, but maybe try something a little more distressing than “uhhhh” next time!”

Off to a fantastic start, we hit the road to the northeastern reaches of South Africa. From where we were at, this drive takes about 5 hours. For a sense of scale, here's what that route looks like compared to the whole of South Africa:
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Route from Boksburg to Hazyview
Yeah, South Africa is massive. All of Africa is massive. Something I underestimated until having to fly and drive through it.

The first large stretch of the drive was primarily highway. There were two things that stood out to me during this drive. One, there are a ton of hitchhikers. And it's clear that this is a fairly typical way to successfully get to where you want to go. The distance between towns is really long to just walk, and during the summer months, I imagine it's ferocious outside. So, next to the slow lane (the left lane), there are dozens of people, usually situated around exits looking for rides. For a number of that, we could tell they were waiting for someone they knew. For others, the vehicles looked like carpool/taxi services. But some of them just looked like ordinary cars and the people were not really familiar with each other. The closer we were to Johannesburg, the more prevalent this custom was. Definitely something we're not used to seeing.

The second thing is the apparent lack of advertising on the road. I couldn't be certain if it's a testament to the danger that distracting drivers on the highway with advertisements is inherently dangerous or if corporations in South Africa realize the amount of traffic on the highway isn't worth it. In either case, they do take advantage of the space with more helpful signage than I'm used to. The amount of signs pointing to points of interest was greater than back home. The other type of sign I liked was this set:
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Highway exit countdown markers
These are exit countdown markers. Each tick represents 100 meters, and they appears ahead of any exit near the city. This was really helpful for being aware of when a turn might be coming up, when merging traffic might be entering, and where people might start standing while looking for a ride. I know when I'm traveling on highways I'm unfamiliar with back home, I get a little stressed out when I know I'm close to an exit I'm looking for, but not exactly sure where it's at. These signs helped a bunch with mitigating that, especially since I was stressed enough driving in a new country!

I guess there is a third thing that stood out, and it was the passing culture on the highway. There may be stretches of road where the highway is one lane in each direction. This happened quite a lot the further we got from the city. To allow faster traffic through, drivers would inch onto the shoulder to give the cars behind them more space to pass without endangering themselves using the opposing traffic lane to pass. Whenever someone would do this, the passing driver would always flash their emergency lights once in front of the car using the shoulder. After realizing this was a “thank you” gesture, I started using it whenever someone was letting me pass. Little differences like that are kind of fun to discover.
Panorama Route

Once we got far enough away from the city, we were able to turn off into mountain territory. There's route out this way aptly named the Panorama Route. Very much a scenic road to take instead of the highway around the mountains, this road has you winding your way up and down the mountainside. Aside from the amazing views from the mountains, there were also a number of orchards and agricultural zones growing all sorts of trees that managed to be flowering beautiful shades of blue and purple in what is the country's late winter.

In retrospect, we found that we didn't take too many pictures while we were on this route. I know Heather was upset with how the camera couldn't really catch what we were seeing with our eyes. Later in the trip, when I'd get a chance at some photography, I'd come to realize the same thing. The views we'd see of the land stretching out for seemingly ever came out looking foggy at regular distance intervals in photos. It was nice being able to just roll down the windows and take in this view that is oh so different than what we're used to at home. Even the smells were different. Not as heavy, for certain. I can't be sure whether that's less pollution or humidity, though. Probably a little of both!

One thing we did take a record of is that traffic jams still exist. I'm surprised how quickly people responded to the accident, which looked to be caused by a truck running over a fallen tree. It was hard to tell exactly what happened, but there was basically a tree under the heavy vehicle's tires. Surprisingly the truck was still upright, just seemingly incapable of moving. It was enough to stop traffic in both directions. And for long enough that all of us were getting out of our cars to stretch and try to figure out what that going on. That much doesn't change between countries!
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Traffic jam!
God's Window

Before we headed over to Hazyview, where our lodging was for the night, we wanted to try a little hiking at a spot we found while routing the trip. The location is called God's Window, and has a normal path that most visitors travel on (there were a lot of folks taking pictures at the closer overlooks) and the path continues for quite a bit further, but it becomes a lot less convenient to travel.

We arrived at the spot, and quickly discovered that if there is a place where people will visit, if it doesn't have a gift shop, people will make their own! A number of street vendors set up shop, peddling wares ranging from figurines to clothes to tapestry to instruments. A lot of it looked pretty interesting, but we weren't really looking to shop. At least not then. We headed to the trail's start.

As we hiked, we came across a number of wonderful overlooks. The higher we got, the less protected the overlooks were. I would imagine South African authorities are sure people, tourist and otherwise, would visit this place and were sure to put fences in place for the first few, but beyond the reasonable trail, it was much more open. It was neat being able to get that close to the edge of a cliff side. To see out as far as you could as close to the edge as possible. Strangely exhilarating.

We did take a number of pictures here, so I'll let some of my favorites do the talking for me.
I'll point out the picture of the plateau that we reached after hiking up as far as we could. When we reached that summit, it felt eerily quiet. I've never felt the feeling I did there, or if I have, it's been a long time since I've felt that way. In talking about it, the closest I could come to describing it, was being someplace I knew I shouldn't be. Like this was a place humans stop being defaulted to the top of the food chain. In a place like this, you're only only as good as your survival instinct, and mine was feeling very out of place up there. Such a fascinating sensation.

To Hazyview!

We made our way back down the trail. We were able to take a route different than what took us up to that summit, which was nice too. The feeling of lost-ness was able to last a wee bit longer! We manage to make it back to where most people stop taking the trail, and finally back to the trail entrance. We browse a few of the vendor's stalls as we walk back, not picking up anything, still not in a shopping mood, get in the car, and head out.

Hazyview is up next. We'll be spending the next two nights in a cabin in a wooded area just outside of the town. Hazyview is pretty close to the Kruger National Reserve and a number of other tourist locations, so it's not like we'll be out in the middle of nowhere, but it is a bit away from the hustle and bustle of the town. We stop for a bit of fuel and food, and make our way to the cabin.

Slight injection before talking about the cabin! We stopped at a shopping plaza in Hazyview for food, where they had a number of restaurants lined up. Heather and I thought we'd try some of their faster foods to see how they stack up. Naturally, we stick out like a sore thumb here. One of the locals comes up to me and opens with a “Howzit.” Not that the word isn't intuitive enough, but I did read that was a common way to greet someone in South Africa. But then he extends his hand. I'm the worst at informal handshakes! I'm pretty sure I looked like a total idiot! I'm too ingrained in business greetings now that I don't think I'll ever greet like a normal person again...

In any case, the pizza there was alright! We ordered what they have as a variation on a stuffed crust pizza. They don't stuff their crust with cheese, though. They stuff it with AN ENTIRE SAUSAGE! I'm not sure what kind of meat it was, but the closest taste Heather and I could agree on was a hot dog. So our BBQ chicken pizza was also wrapped in a tasted vaguely of a corn dog. And honestly, it was pretty good!

Back to cabin though...

I shouldn't say that this place isn't without it's amenities, however. These cabins have a hot tub on their decks! There are only 6 of them in this area, but we were lucky enough to get one for the weekend. And there isn't much quite like relaxing your legs after a day of hiking in a hot bath under the African night sky, let me tell you! Looking up, you can see every star in the sky. With so little light being generated from the towns and our only light was a few candles on the deck, the night isn't just a faded bluish black, but a zen darkness where natural light can sparkle through. It was truly astounding.

Despite the warnings of hippos moseying about at night, we were lucky to not have a run-in. We did swear we heard a monkey scratching at our roof at some point in the night. I did see a handful of frogs as I was walking about, and thankfully no mosquitoes! After relaxing for a bit, we decide to turn in for the night. Getting to sleep might be kind of hard though...

Because tomorrow we get to meet elephants! :)
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Travelog: To Africa!

9/8/2018

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This particular series of Travelog is a record of activities, thoughts, and stories that I recall from my and Heather's trip to South Africa in summer of 2018. Land of the lion, the sunset, and despite popular belief, not much rain! I hope some of the stories and pictures inspire interest in this beautiful continent and encourage others to travel there as well. Enjoy!

A Little Background

So, I'm sure a number of people to whom I've talked about this trip have silently wondered, "Okay, but why Africa?" Well, this section is for you! After our trip to Europe in 2016, Heather and I realized that our favorite parts of the trip involved being around and interacting with animals and nature, particularly our day with the birds of prey at the Hawk Conservancy in Andover, Hampshire where we participated in shows and learned basic falconry. We thought it would be fun to plan a trip where we step away from the bustling cities and take in the natural surroundings.

After a bit of debate as to whether we go to Australia for a more underwater excursion or Africa for a land-based one, we opted for keeping our land legs. Despite all my desire to take in the culture of the cities and villages of Africa, we decided to stick to the plan and keep to a fair amount of roughing it to take in the areas where humans don't necessarily belong. I'm sure we'd go back to take in more of the culture for a future trip!

After a bit of research, we found a few choice hiking locations, a wonderful-looking elephant sanctuary, and Africa's oldest (and largest) natural reserve that allowed self-guided safaris. We planned out where we'd be heading and, before we knew it, we had over a week's worth of amazing things to do.

Also, since I've had a number of people asking about costs (and I personally think all of us should be more open about finances), the entire trip, from planning to landing back home, cost us $6,276.45. This includes purchases like medication (for malaria prevention) and utilities (like power converters) as well as everything on the trip itself, such as flight, food, lodging, souvenirs for family, etc. The largest chunk of that was the flight, which came in at $2,687.01. Some of this could have been scaled back, but we splurged on extra leg room seats since the flight from Chicago to Amsterdam is ~8 hours and the flight from Amsterdam to Johannesburg is 10+ hours. A small note is that traveling internationally makes exchange rates pretty important. For us, the South African Rand (ZAR) favored the dollar at 14 ZAR to 1 USD.

I'd highly recommend budgeting like this. I can't really take all the credit for it, though. While I help with ensuring all costs are accounted for, Heather manages all the actual data input. Doing this is great for seeing just what you can afford, and helps others understand just how feasible (or unfeasible) a trip of this scale can be, provided you're comfortable sharing financial information.


Flight to Amsterdam

Skipping right to leaving now! I did have a really good run on the morning that we left, but I'm pretty sure I was just full of excited energy that resulted in my best pace since I started running, but that's all I did besides packing. Not terribly exciting stuff. Not that flights are much more exciting either...

Security and waiting for the flight was pretty typical. We left out of O'Hare. This is the flight we were anticipating to sleep on, but I just can't sleep on planes. It's a realization I'm slowly coming to grips with that I probably need to take something that will force me to sleep. Even with extra leg room, what I really need is extra butt cushions! Maybe one of these days, I'll think that business class is worth the expense, but for now that still seems too extravagant. So the first leg was essentially me pretending to sleep. Fun stuff. At least they give out meals every once in a while!

Leaving Chicago at 4:00PM, the flight lasted a bit over 7 hours, and we landed in Amsterdam at about 6:15AM. Yes, I'm using local time for both locations for dramatic effect! This is why we wanted to sleep on that flight, since we'd be arriving in the morning, Amsterdam time. Now we were on a ~4 hour layover. Thankfully, the airline (KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, for those interested) took care of moving our luggage to our connecting flight.

Schiphol

I think other international airports could learn from Schiphol. Beyond the collection of shops and restaurants that are typical in airport terminals, there were also a ton of comfortable places to rest. They had a library so people could read while waiting for flights. Play areas for families traveling with their kids. Really nice massage chairs sprinkled about. A small museum for local culture. They even had an spot for renting time in a quieted area with a bed and shower. In retrospect, I could've really used the shower!

Heather and I tried to get some sleep, sprawling out on one of the many colorful couches in their lounge areas, but I just couldn't get comfortable. Something about being in an airport still made it feel like a flight to me, and I just couldn't sleep. I decided to get up and walk around a bit, and I found something interesting. A piano. With a sign saying that it's there for anyone to use!

Now I may be a zombie from lack of sleep, but apparently I can still improvise in that half-dead state. Even though my hands were shaking from exhaustion (and the low Ab wasn't responding), I pulled a small crowd together. I think I played for somewhere around half an hour. Folks would come by and listen, take short videos, or just say "thanks!" in passing. It was a nice little experience being able to help others relax while they were waiting for their flights.

With our flight time approaching, I decided to accept that I was not sleeping and get some coffee. I might have gotten a pastry of some kind, too. I can't remember. And I was too tired to taste anything anyways. Despite all this, my brain is still super excited to set out again for Africa!


Flight to Johannesburg

Johannesburg is our next stop. I'll learn later that the locals call it Joburg, for short. Which is a nice thing, since Jo-han-nes-burg feels like a lot to say when you're in the middle of saying it.

Not thinking I would fall asleep at all on this flight, I went straight to checking out in-flight movies this time. They had a surprising number of movies in their collection. I ended up watching The Greatest Showman which I was reluctant to see in theaters. Not because I didn't think the movie would be really well-produced, but because I'm not a big supporter of circuses. I even considered not watching it on the flight, but then my brain was like, "Dude, it's Hugh Jackman. Just watch the movie!" So I obeyed my brain's apparent infatuation Australia's gift to the human race, and was not disappointed. The musical numbers were all catchy and wonderfully choreographed. Even for a very sleep-deprived me.

I think I did end up nodding off for maybe an hour or so after that. I know I watched a portion of a David Attenborough documentary at some point. There was still about another 5 hours left to the flight though...

Looking through the movie collection, again, I saw Goodbye, Christopher Robin in there. I figured I might as well watch something new if I was going to watch something, and this was more situated as a biography of A.A. Milne's adult life and the beginnings of the stories and residents of the Hundred Acre Wood, which interested me. It was a very touching movie that gives a nice insight into what drove Milne to create Winnie the Pooh. Long story short, he was tired of war, and having to suffer through his own battles with PTSD, wanted to write something that deromanticizes the concept of war in human society. After a number of failed attempts, he writes stories revolving around his son's imagination that give society a look into the friendly, comfortable surroundings of the world away from the bloodshed of war. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in that universe's beginnings. Just don't expect it to be about Winnie the Pooh!


Landing in Joburg!

I'm pretty sure I just sat in the plane, blankly staring at the back of the seat in front of me for the rest of the flight. I take that back, actually. I did that AND listened to a collection of popular African music that they had on the flight to pseudo-prepare me for landing.

As we started our final descent, I was really surprised by how dark it was near the ground. I'm so used to the overbearing light pollution that comes out of American cities, and was internally expecting a similar shine to come out of Johannesburg. But the city was very dim. The landing strip was really dim too. It was definitely a city down there though. Still a decent amount of moving traffic and numerous buildings. This is the largest city in South Africa, so that much is to be expected.

We land, leave the plane, and step into the OR Tambo International Airport. At night. This place is dead! A few security guards walking around, but just about everything here but the bathrooms is closed for the day. We make our way to the carousel to pick up our luggage and find our way to the place we're picking up our rental vehicle for the trip. I thought this went pretty well considering I'm going on about 48 hours with maybe 1 hour of sleep! We find the rental company, sign a bunch of papers, and get our key.


Driving...On the Left Side...

Okay. So we get to the car. A Ford EcoSport, for those interested. White. Which is basically brown with dirt by the time we bring it back, but that's for later! I'm pretty sure Heather went to what she thought would be the passenger seat, despite knowing that it's the opposite here. We're reminded that driving should be a fun puzzle, at least for a little while!

South Africa, historically, was a British colony, so I suppose some of that culture bled into their roadways when they were being developed. The driver is on the right, while the passenger is on the left. Forward traffic is situated on the left, opposite traffic on the right. Your wide turn is a right turn, and the close turn is left. I'm honestly surprised we didn't have more close calls with traffic accidents! Also, the turn signal is on the right side of the steering wheel. I can't begin to tell you how many times I went to signal a turn and the windshield wipers started smearing bug guts all over!

We head out to our hotel (the only hotel we actually stay at on the trip). Night driving is interesting around Joburg. There's definitely light, but it's so much dimmer than in the States. I should've thought that'd be the case when we saw the city from the plane, but I'll chalk that up to the sleep deprivation. I didn't have much energy to expend on looking around, so I really just remember tightly grasping the wheel and overthinking about how far I need to turn when turning right!


Finally a Bed!

We make it the the hotel, a gated community in a suburb of Joburg called Boksburg. At least, I think they call them suburbs. Comparatively speaking, this felt like a suburb. More distance between buildings, occasional gas stations, and shopping plazas. The stoplights are very similar to the stoplights we see in Chicago. The turning lights are right turning lights, and they usually appear to the right of the 3 primary lights. Aside from that, the major difference I noticed was that the lights blink when changing as opposed to remaining constantly lit. Fun fact, the locals call stoplights "robots" as they are effectively automated traffic controllers.

We talk to the attendant at the gate, they let us in, hand us a card, and we're on our merry way. For like a second. The room we're staying at was literally right in front of the gate. And then we were confused. This hotel (I'm not sure if this is typical in the area) had an attached garage for each unit. So you'd open the garage door, drive your car in, close the garage, and walk up some stairs to your hotel room. It's pretty widely known that Joburg is a high crime area. It's why so many of the communities are gated. One of their biggest issues is stealing things from cars, attended and unattended. I imagine the garages help to disguise just how many vehicles are actually in the community to deter theft. In any case, it was pretty neat, whatever the reason.

We head up the stairs after grabbing our luggage. Having a shower for the first time in like 2 days felt like the most revitalizing thing in the world! Being mindful of current events, I make sure not to spend too much time in there (South Africa has been experiencing frequent droughts, and not just the typical winter ones). I flop on the bed, smile, and think, "we made it." I couldn't wait for what the rest of the trip would bring, now that we're officially in Africa. But no amount of excitement could keep me awake, and I was out in a matter of minutes.
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Thought Bubble: Music and Personality

7/14/2018

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I really like thinking about what influences humans to become the person they are today. I've thought about this topic for as long as I can remember thinking about my place in the world. I think about what has made me the person I am, and, if given the opportunity, if I could share those aspects with others, would they adopt some of my personality.

After thinking on this for decades, I ultimately think that isn't completely possible. Humans, while the same in many ways, differ a bunch when it comes to experiences. Experiences and culture, together, are what form who a human ultimately becomes. And depending on the set of experiences they have, the effect of the surrounding culture can be drastically different.

That said, I do enjoy the thought of sharing our experiences and culture to better understand each other, even if a complete understanding is nigh impossible. One of the biggest influences on my personality comes from music. I absolutely love sharing music that has moved me with others with the hope that their impact on me may have an impact on them as well. While I can't say what kind of impact these bits of culture will have, they may very well open up new avenues of thought, understanding, and analysis for someone.

So, without much further ado, I'd like to share some of the music that has impacted me from when I started consuming music to now. These are in chronological order, and there are so many others like these that I could include, but these particular ones were the first to shape my mind in new ways when I first listened to them.
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Some pretty album, game, and anime covers!
River of Dreams – Billy Joel
River of Dreams was the first album that I'd say I "actually listened to." I would often hear music on the radio, when out with my family, or playing with friends, but this was the first time I actively looked into listening to an album once I heard it the first time. I think I was about 9-10 years old when I first heard a song on this CD when my mom was playing it, and it's what encouraged me to ask for my first CD player.

This is probably a weird album for a kid to listen to, in all honesty. I listen to the lyrics now, and the themes still resonate today as an acknowledgement of issues that plague the world and how humans just don't seem to care. Songs about potential, but never realizing it. Songs about relentless contentment. Songs about love and death. Pretty heavy stuff.

Listening to these topics as a kid helped me understand that my world isn't the whole world. Even at that age, I would question my place in the world. Whether the things I experience are worth complaining about. These songs encouraged me to think outside myself, which is something I've carried with me since then. I still go back to this album to see if the issues raised are still relevant. For better or worse, these seem like topics that never go out of style.

Tigerlily – Natalie Merchant
Tigerlily is another example of finding music just rummaging through my parents' albums. Interestingly, this was one of my dad's, which always surprised me since he was way more into rock music. Natalie Merchant is certainly capable of rock-ish moments, but her most alluring sounds were gentle and more in country territory. In any case, I heard her voice once, and needed to listen to more.

Unlike River of Dreams, I think I was more captivated by the artist when I started listening to this album. I love Billy Joel's voice, but Natalie's was so much more, I don't know...normal? She reminded me of a normal person when I'd hear her sing. Her music, while commenting on the world and culture around her, felt more like a layman's commentary. And her songs felt much more personal. Like she's right there singing with you. The album is full of songs of the earth, of miracles, of hope, of love, and of remembrance. They still want to call attention to issues, but in a much more inwardly reflective way.

When I'd listen to these songs, I'd always look to myself. I realize that I don't need to just look to the world outside my own, but accept that my own world has its own share of beauty and problems. While internal conflict is one of the hardest to face, having a soft, yet powerful, voice accompanying my thoughts helped me find that I'm not the only person who reflects, learns, accepts, and moves on.

Californication – Red Hot Chili Peppers
A bit of a shift from the previous brain-changers is Californication. This was one of the first albums I picked up on my own in my pre-teen years. One song I really liked on the radio, at the time, was Under the Bridge by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, so I decided to give their latest music a shot. Bear in mind, these decisions carried a ton of weight since I was working on kid money (i.e. birthday and holiday money) and everything was a major purchase. I was in for a bit of a surprise when I first listened to the album.

Californication is full of really raunchy stuff! Sex, drugs, scandals, you name it. And it was perfect for where I was in life. I generally lead a secluded life as a child. It wasn't until high school that I really talked to people. I thought a lot about the world and life, and struggled with my place in it. This brought me to a lot of self-doubt and feelings of worthlessness. My world was full of trying to meet high expectations and dealing with people who bullied me day in and day out. I'd hide myself in music and video games. Californication, oddly, created a platform that showed me what others turn to when their life is out of control, and had the effect of me thinking about these topics, but never actually turning to them myself.

The album showed me some of the dirtier sides of the world outside my own. Stories of these band members' struggles and experiences with these things helped me cope with my own experiences. Sharing stories through music isn't something I'd completely understand until high school, but this started me down the path of understanding that stories help others understand they're not alone. Telling these dirtier, raunchier stories connected with my own darker thoughts and helped pull me through.

Cowboy Bebop OST – Yoko Kanno
We now enter my phase of music guiding some important upcoming decisions in my life (mostly college-related). For reference, Cowboy Bebop is an anime about space bounty hunters just trying to make a living. The anime tells little stories over the course of the series to develop the four major characters in the show. The soundtrack is almost entirely jazz. Beyond that, it was my first realization that music and storytelling are one of the best combinations in this universe.

Almost every episode of Cowboy Bebop is named for a genre or sub-genre of music or dance. In that episode, the music that plays also matches what it is named for. And Yoko Kanno does a simply amazing job of putting a scene to music. Gateway Shuffle, Ballad of Fallen Angels, Waltz for Venus, Ganymede Elegy, Jupiter Jazz, The Real Folk Blues...all of these use the sounds and idiosyncrasies of those genres to help tell the story. And, somehow, the marriage of music and storytelling makes me go back to watch this series at least once a year.

When I hear one of the songs from this soundtrack, I'm immediately placed in the action that was going on during that part of the show, even if it's been months since I watched it last. I'm typically really bad at remembering the names of episodes, but Cowboy Bebop is an odd exception. That I can tie the melody, the instrumentation, and the style to one or two episodes, it's really easy to make the connection and relive a memory by hearing that music. From the point I first picked up this soundtrack, and even today, I learn more that music is a fantastic catalyst for creating and keeping memories. When coupled with a story that means something to you, that carries an important message, this can be a powerful tool. At this point in my life, I knew I wanted to play and write music.

The Planets – Gustav Holst
And here's the second phase of realizing how powerful music can be. I would imagine that I fall in with the majority of people in how I discovered The Planets: its first movement, Mars: Bringer of War. Being in high school now, and being inspired by the music so far in my life, I made sure to be involved with the band programs available to me. As a result, I was introduced to orchestral music formally for the first time. The Planets really stood out to me, and you can probably guess why. It tells a story.

Each movement of the suite is intended to convey an astrological influence that each planet has on the human psyche. As such, each movement has an effect of personifying the planet that they are representing. Mars is aggressive (Bringer of War), Mercury has very airy, flighty themes (Winged Messenger), and Jupiter is full of triumph and celebration (Bringer of Jollity). Even if these words were not present in the movement, Holst puts together themes that paint a picture to help humans visualize an aspect of themselves.

This stop on my journey of learning music's effects on personality (particularly my own) details just how powerful music can be standing on its own. With Cowboy Bebop, the music helps accentuate and recall actions that have happened. Things that become ingrained in memory as they were perceived. The Planets doesn't provide the image, but still provides the soundtrack, only this time to the human imagination. Music can tell stories and rely on humans to draw their own mental pictures. And the amazing thing is the picture can change over time. Whatever Jupiter's celebration is changes with you as you grow, but still tells the same story. Even further, there are no lyrics. This is simply sound converting to feeling and images. This absolutely blew my mind as a teenager. Music is truly powerful.

Baten Kaitos OST – Matoi Sakuraba
The final musical trip that guided me to wanting to learn to write music was the video game Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. The game play itself (card-based, turn-based RPG) wasn't particularly outstanding, but the story, music, and visuals were captivating. The game follows a young boy trying to find his place in the world, while at the same time exacting revenge on the man who killed his brother and father. He meets a cast of other characters that unveil a plot that puts the whole world in danger, and they join forces to take it down together.

This game was one of the first where I started paying more attention to the music that accompanies the game play. One of the aspects of the soundtrack that stood out to me when I was playing was how integral music in areas of safety and downtime were to the atmosphere of the game. The GameCube era (sixth console generation) was getting sophisticated enough that orchestral soundtracks were starting to become a viability in video games, which greatly expanded the sounds available to set the right atmosphere.

To this day, I'll listen to the soundtrack and recall the towns and people of the Baten Kaitos universe just by hearing the more ambient or atmospheric sounds that characterized them. It was this music that showed me that music has another storytelling possibility: it can define a scene and set expectations. Similar to Cowboy Bebop and The Planets, Baten Kaitos tells stories through music, but instead of emphasizing the action or being the primary storytelling device, it paints a setting. Music can take people to a place where they may not see a story, but they see an environment. Video games, especially, take advantage of this to help paint memorable portraits or set an expectation for the player at various points in the game.

Different Trains & City Life – Steve Reich
In college, I studied percussion and music composition. I absolutely loved being in the various percussion ensembles in school and often looked to composers who wrote music for these types of ensembles for inspiration in my own writing. While studying up on percussion composers, I stumbled across Steve Reich. I brought this up in my percussion lessons one day, and my professor let me borrow a full set of his Reich's works written from 1965-1995.

In this set set of CDs, there were some pieces that I'd read about that Reich was especially known for: Piano Phase, Nagoya Marimbas, and Drumming. Not that these next works were not known, they just weren't dealing with one of Reich's signature techniques, which was rhythmic phasing. The pieces that resonate the most from that set of works were Different Trains (a three-movement piece using the recordings of trains and human voice from the times of World War II) and City Life (a five-movement piece using recordings from sounds in and around New York City). As is a theme in these albums, they tell stories, albeit with instruments as supporting material to sounds from the living world around us.

These pieces, in particular, made me realize something fascinating. Even in my earliest music studies, I was taught that music is the organization of sound and silence. People often extend that definition to be something like the intentional combination of sound and silence by some entity. What Reich did in these pieces is recognize that music exists all around us. He took recordings of real world sounds and created melodies from them. He had the ability to recognize the world is generating its own music. Ever since, I love listening to the world around me. I hear way more than I used to by understanding that the organization of sound and silence is a part of this living world. Music isn't just something we can create, it's something that accompanies us in life.

2112 – Rush
Some of you who made it to this point may be wondering how on earth a Rush album didn't pop up earlier in my life. This marks near the end of my college years. The first time I attributed a song to the band was with YYZ in Guitar Hero 2. I'd definitely heard Rush songs on the radio before, but never remembered to look them up afterward. Kind of a shame I didn't because, wow...this band changed how I think. Anyway, I found this album buried in one of my dad's CD collections one time my car broke down at his house. He told me to take it with me and give it a listen.

And give it a listen I did. Since all of what I heard from Rush prior to this was radio-ready songs, I was not prepared for what was on this album. For those who don't know, Rush is known for a good number of radio-ready songs, but their early career focused heavily on longer concept pieces. And 2112 is a veritable rock opera. Split into seven movements, it tells the story of a man who discovers a long-lost artifact (a guitar) and learns how to make his own music. When he brings it to the leaders of his world, they dismiss it entirely, and when our hero asserts the relic is of massive importance, they destroy it before his eyes and cast him out. The hero refuses to live in a world where creativity is stifled, and, either through heartache or suicide, his life is ended.

These lyrics and sound that weave in and out of this masterpiece are the outpouring of feelings that Rush had against their label and producers at the time. They were being told to abandon what they wanted to create because "it couldn't sell on radio" and they didn't want any of that. Instead of following what they were told to create, they wrote 2112 in a last ditch effort to prove this is something the world wanted to hear, and it tells a story parallel to their own about needing creativity in a world dead-set on packaging culture for a profit. This song helped me understand that I can't give up my creativity just because it doesn't fit the norm. I can't just give into what is expected when there's so much that can be accomplished by pushing the boundary.

To The Moon OST – Kan Gao/Laura Shigihara
After studying music in college, I continued my education in various computer arts, such as design, animation, and programming. This was all driven by a desire I had to create video games. During this time, I was being heavily influenced by the newly burgeoning independent (indie) developer scene. One of the games that caught my attention was a little gem called To The Moon, a story-driven experience having the player take on the role of two doctors that traverse a dying man's memories to grant his last wish.

The story itself is beautifully written, touching on topics of living with a mental illness, love, and the importance of different perspectives. One of the things that I found fascinating is that the main character, Johnny, is a pianist and how this was used as a story mechanic. To give some perspective, he's lived a fairly long life effectively alone with his wife, and after she passes away, he has a strong urge to go to the moon. He has no recollection of why he wants to do this, but knows this is what he wants. As the doctors traverse his memories in an attempt to have him remember going to the moon, we hear Johnny play a piece that he wrote a few times throughout the story. Instead of just playing the same recording every time this song is played, the designer/composer for the game, Kan Gao, records himself playing it while fitting the current mindset of Johnny.

This fits so beautifully well with one of the themes throughout the game, which is acknowledging the many perspectives of a situation. As the doctors traverse Johnny's memory, they see some things he sees, but but from an outside perspective they have a better idea of what was actually happening. As they change some things about Johnny's memory, the piano piece evolves with Johnny. Musical expression, as with all expression, changes depending on our perspective and feelings. Being able to recognize the many perspectives to any given moment can greatly inform your own decisions, and potentially the feelings and decisions of others around you.

Calling All Dawns – Christopher Tin
And here we are with relatively modern day me. When I was actively playing a bunch of games to teach myself game design, I would frequent a website called Humble Bundle (I still do, but not as much) which, at the time, would put packages of games on sale for discounted prices and allow the customer to determine who received the money between the developer, the distributor, and charity. It's a site with a good cause and definitely appealed to my lack of money at this time in my life. One of the bundles they ran at the time was a package of soundtracks from composers that gained popularity making music for video games. Of these albums, one of them was Calling All Dawns.

Despite having purchased it a number of years ago, I didn't really get around to listening to it right away. I was aware that one of the tracks was the first video game song to ever win a Grammy, but for some reason, that wasn't enough to sit with it immediately. A couple years ago I did get around to listening to it in full, and it is a wonderful portrait of world culture. The album is a song cycle that personifies the night-day cycle of the earth. Each of the pieces in the cycle is sung in a different language. This wasn't a turn-off at all since I was used to listening to music in Japanese and various European languages from my studies in college. To my delight, a lot of these languages were new to me, many of them hailing from Africa and the Middle East.

The greatest takeaway I have from Calling All Dawns is that a piece of music doesn't have to share a style or language across all its parts to tell a cohesive story effectively. Christopher Tin expertly weaves all of these styles and languages together in a way that transcends the words they are saying to convey the meaning he is trying to represent. A wonderful side effect of this approach is that the listener gets to hear the sounds from various cultures from around the world. This earth is so full of beauty and the differences in our cultures often lend themselves to showing just how amazing diversity can be when its brought together. In the world we live in today, growing ever more global, I think that's a very important lesson to learn. Be aware that our differences can overcome perceived friction when we realize the beauty we capable of as a whole.

Music is Amazing
I think I've written enough for one sitting here. For those who made it this far, I hope my self-indulgent sharing of music, stories, thoughts, and experiences was a fun diversion. Music truly is an amazing thing, and its impact on us, as humans, is amazing in its own right. If you've been moved by music you've heard in your life, let me know your stories as well. They may even help me see the world in an expanded light. And even if we share a vision already, it's more new music to listen to, which is never a bad thing!

Keep on playing, making, and experiencing music in your life, and let it open your mind to paths you never realized before :)
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Thought Bubble: Goals and Progress

4/14/2018

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Recently, I've realized that I've been chasing a few goals. Not ones that I'm expecting to complete anytime soon. I've been doing a lot of writing and design work lately that I'm hoping will one day be something I can share. In working on these projects, I need to keep an idea of what the end result will look like. And to make things difficult, I change my mind about what that end result looks like a lot! Recognizing progress is one of the key factors I have in keeping on track. In considering this, I thought to reflect on a goal closer to realization.

Some Reflection
When I graduated from college in 2010, I weighed almost 300 pounds. This is something that surprised me greatly toward the end of my senior year. While I did see this as a problem, it never really got in the way of accomplishing any goals I was setting at the time. I kind of dismissed this.

When I returned home, looking for work so I could pay off my student loan debt, I got a job at FedEx as a package handler. In no way was I considering this a way to address my weight issue. But over the course of a few months, I had already dropped about 20 pounds. Not that I was living any better, but I did like how just getting a job that had me moving around could have this effect on me.

Visualize the Goal, See the Progress
It wasn't until I had started my career as a programmer that I had noticed how attached I was to maintaining a moderately healthy weight. Even just a few months on the job, I was back up 10 pounds from when I started. During this time I noticed how uncomfortable I was with my lifestyle. Noticing these few things triggered something in me to a point where I decided to set a goal for myself. I wanted to get back to where I was before college. I wanted to be healthy.

In 2013, I stopped drinking pop altogether and started running everyday after work. Over the course of a year, I had dropped down to about 250 pounds again. Still way higher than my target (in high school I weighed a bit over 180 pounds), but it was progress. Progress.

In 2014, I began walking at least one mile per day. The running that I was doing in 2013 was starting to be something I wasn't enjoying, so I decided to dial it back and use it as a time to think. During this time I noticed not only that I was losing some weight, but that I was starting to feel healthier in general. I wasn't running out of breath as often and my endurance was improving. Progress.

In 2015, I began pushing myself onto a healthier diet. Just eating less was tough. My brain was so conditioned to eating when it was bored and it liked only the worst things for me. Still, making tiny shifts at a time, a sensible diet was forming. Over a couple years (and one really big 6-month push), I got myself down to 200 pounds. Progress.

I maintained that for most of 2017, but during the winter holidays, I started gaining again. Not wanting to fall into a trap of being okay with that, I turned myself to what seemed to be the next sensible step: daily exercise. What started as a couple exercises before bed grew into a 10-exercise regime. Now, not only am I feeling healthy, I'm starting to look the part. This coupled with my existing dietary restrictions, diet in general, and walking, I'm now sitting at 190 pounds. Just 10 pounds shy of my goal from 2013. Progress.

Reality Check
Now, that sounds like a long time to lose about 100 pounds, but it was also an underlying lifestyle shift. This is realistic when devoting your life to a goal isn't possible. For most of us, we have to maintain a lot outside of our goals to simply live, so these long-term goals are what we're capable of setting. This can be difficult to keep up with since our time is limited enough as it is. Not getting where we want to be immediately is something we have to endure. The driving factor over the course of that time, for me, was that I was making progress.

You see, one of the things I learned reflecting on this is that as long as you're aware of your goals, and you still have them in your sights, there's no reason to think they're beyond you. There's almost always something you can do to make that little bit of progress to your goal. Even little ones that only impact you, like my weight loss above.

For the goals that matter in the grand scheme of things, we have to be aware that progress is one of the greatest indicators that we're working toward a goal. You can't be discouraged by not seeing the result in very little time.

Humans and Progress
As an example, let's say you're really upset that the beaches on the planet are getting completely trashed. Asking yourself what difference it makes to go clean it up when it'll just get dirty again is complacency at its finest. If that's a goal that you have, to clean the environments around our oceans, you should make those little steps. A couple things can happen.

Your actions can inspire others. Humans are beings driven to other humans. When they see another human doing something that resonates with them, they are likely to either join the human that is resonating with them or share the story of the human that resonated with them with other humans. In time, your tiny steps have encouraged others to take tiny steps with you. Together, you make a slightly bigger tiny step. But you'll notice that you're making progress. Progress.

So take the tiny steps where you can. Look for those little signs of progress. Take some pride in knowing you helped make that progress. Let that pride evolve into a humble inspiration that drives you to keep going.

We may not be here to see the result for everything we do. The people that will see that result may not even know you. Just know that even your tiny steps can change the world, for you and everyone. Don't let instant gratification stop you from seeing progress. The outcome might not have been realized without you.

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Growing a Team - Scrum Mastery

10/25/2015

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Even in what I still consider to be my infant years of being a web developer, I've been pushed into many roles that demand going beyond what I would consider a developer to do. Where I work, we employ the use of Agile Scrum, which I believe is a pretty awesome tool for getting work done in iterative steps that ultimately delivers a better product in the end. But, I'm not really here to talk up development methodologies at this time. Rather, I'd like to discuss a specific role within Agile Scrum: the Scrum Master. I often feel myself being gravitated to filling this role on my team and would like to share some of what I glean from performing duties of the role while still being primarily a developer.

What's a Scrum Master?
Scrum Masters play a pretty interesting, yet vague (and important!), role on a team that employs Agile Scrum. They're tasked with removing obstacles for the team they work with and promoting the use of other Agile Scrum practices. They're the go-to person when a team member is having trouble with team-centric issues. But while studying how other Scrum Masters [within the company] who actually bear the title use the role, I feel there's a misrepresentation of what this person is supposed to accomplish. I'm going to rattle off some scenarios that outline the items I'd like to discuss to give examples of the problems I'm seeing within my own workplace to help bridge the gap between real cases and (hopefully helpful) takeaways.

Observation
Case 1:
The first thing I occasionally see someone do is act as a filter. In theory, this sounds like a good idea. The less your team has to think about outside the actual development of a product, the more they can concentrate on...well... developing the product. The dangerous part about this is not observing where the team you're working with is at with communication between other teams and departments. Imposing a filter could hamper the progress more than help if you're interjecting an already working line of communication. I think there is room for filtering, but this can't really be done until observation of the team has been done.

Takeaway 1:
The above is just one example where not observing your team can lead to potentially harmful decisions as a Scrum Master. If you start imposing rules and patterns as soon as you jump into the role (or any role really), you're naturally going to infringe on how the team is already getting work done. This is simply unavoidable. If you've just been placed on a team looking to improve themselves, watching them should be the first item on your checklist.

Before acting on any existing pattern, see how they function without you. Find the existing communication channels, find the existing patterns, find the existing relationships and see how you can improve upon what is already working. Now, no team is doing everything right. Especially teams with nobody actually looking for their flaws. But knowing who you're working with on a micro and macro level will help you make informed decisions rather than hasty ones. After all, no team is the same, and even if the last thing you did with your last team worked perfectly, it is highly likely that it will not work in this team's case. Be patient, be observant, and work to improve, not revolutionize. I guarantee your team will be better for it.

Cross Functionally Dysfunctional
Case 2:
Agile Scrum is a proponent of team cross functionality. In short, all members are, at least to a small degree, able to perform each others' roles. A Scrum Master can take advantage of this to talk to just about anyone to get a better understanding of the current team environment. A downside here is that it can potentially open up broad communication channels with people who aren't necessarily best-suited to answering their question. For example, you may be comfortable talking with one person over another, and glean most of your knowledge from that source. While cross-functionality helps back that act as legitimate, one needs to be both fair in assessing a situation and capable of pulling together the best minds to tackle specific problems with efficiency.

Takeaway 2:
Just a shameless plug for Agile Scrum, this is one of my favorite aspects of it. I love being able to jump into conversations that don't necessarily involve programming all the time. This really helps bring out ideas from people who you normally wouldn't go to for direction. For instance, my team's QA Analyst turns out to be a fantastic UI Designer. I, coming from at least some video game development background, have an eye for User Experience that nobody really has on the team. But, every rose has its thorns as they say.

As a Scrum Master, you shouldn't limit who you talk to just because everybody can know everything. The short truth is that, while there's potential for it, most of the time the person you're comfortable talking with will not have the full understanding that the team's expert in that area has. This kind of channel can lead to miscommunication and essentially just delegates the Scrum Master job of opening effective communication channels, resulting in them doing the legwork to get the answer you're looking for on top of their role obligations. This just isn't right. Just because your team is cross-functional doesn't mean there aren't experts. Know your team and find your experts. Get the right information from the best sources and inform the team afterwards. You've done the legwork no one has time to even consider and kept information flowing as a result. You might even find some team members are very passionate about certain work that no one knew about before, ultimately helping the team better understand each other and opening potential new communication channels along the way.

Leadership vs. Management
Case 3:
At my workplace, it is actually rare for a Scrum Master to have recently come from a development role. This role is usually taken by people who are supervisors or managers. Not to say that these people are ill-suited to being a Scrum Masters. They're already good (or at least experienced if not good) at working with people. The pitfall here is that supervisors and managers are not, by definition, people who facilitate teams. This is an important distinction to make in that Scrum Masters should know how to facilitate individuals (manage) and facilitate work (supervise), but combine the two by facilitating individuals who work as a unit. Too often I see Scrum Masters who come from the aforementioned roles and concentrate too much on what they know without learning what it takes to lead a team rather than a person or a work-flow. They miss the proverbial forest for the trees.

Takeaway 3:
The title for this section might sound a little misleading, but I usually find that a Scrum Master is kind of a figurehead for the team they're on. What's interesting here is that I find the Scrum Masters I enjoy watching tend to lead from the shadows. This actually makes a lot of sense when I think about it. A Scrum Master will observe a team and find its strengths and weaknesses. They introduce small changes over time that get the team working as a more polished unit. All the while, their vague role really has nothing to do with any of the designing, coding, or testing. They never really spearhead a development effort. They only need to allow people to rise to the occasion and spearhead the initiative themselves. Ensure the team knows each other well enough to put the right team members in the right spots at the right times. Since the Scrum Master isn't actively leading these efforts, its hard to see the development they've been doing all along: team development.

When a person tries to establish themselves as the pinnacle on a team, as a manager or supervisor usually should, this gets in the way of letting the team become self-sufficient. There's the illusion that this person is the one everyone reports to, but this is not a Scrum Master's role. While needing to be an exemplary leader in their own right, the greatest Scrum Masters are, to me, the most humble. They assume a heavy responsibility of making a team the best it can be while putting the team in charge of their efforts as much as possible. The brand of leadership that Scrum Masters need to be good at is one of enablement, not one of individual growth or maximized work-flow efficiency. We already have managers and supervisors, respectively, for those parts of an organization. Lead from behind the scenes and watch your team blossom. Even though I'm not a Scrum Master in title, when I see my team succeed, it fills be with great joy to witness that. Knowing the little things I did, while largely unseen, helped them get there... that's what the role is all about.

Harvesting the Knowledge
Now, these three points are only scratch the surface of what paths and pitfalls a Scrum Master may encounter. They are just ones that I see fairly often, and have given some thought to as far as escaping the pitfall or maybe even avoiding it altogether. They're really more like principles than strict actions because every team is different. The things that I do to help my team be the best team they can be may not work for your team. I do think, however, that these guidelines can help new (or even active) Scrum Masters approach their role in new and better ways.

If you find yourself in a similar situation to mine, being the communication guy between a bunch of seasoned developers, hopefully these tips help you get the information flowing. And for any seasoned veterans, maybe there's something in their you can glean from a beginner, an outsider looking in. And for everyone, remember that growing a team takes a lot of time and unseen effort, but the pros of having someone looking out for the health of a team can truly be immeasurable when employed well. While the effort may be hard to track, it is most certainly a boon. There's a great Futurama quote that captures this quite nicely, and I'd like to end on it:

“When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.”

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[Multi]Tasking the Player's Mind

1/31/2015

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I've been diving a bit into the broader reaches of design recently, taking a look at how design is applied outside of games. Being a web developer during the day calls my attention to making a site visitor's experience a good one. I've found myself reading a lot into how humans interact with things and attempting to put my own mental models together of what other peoples' mental models might be. I look forward to actually getting good with this, as it is a skill that would seem to predict what a person expects of something before they even see it, a great boon to any designer. One such user experience topic I've heard pop up a bit is on the not-so-existence of multitasking, which is what I'll be getting into here...

Kinda sorta definition

Multitasking is never really concretely defined in any of my reading, but the definitions all seem to revolve around the idea of a person or thing performing more than one action at a given time. I'll go a step further, saying that there are two categories of actions that people and things can do: mental and physical. I really don't think this is cheating the definition as a person's center of thought, the brain, is generally in control of both mental and physical action in humans. The part of the first definition I have a hard time getting my head around is with regards to the time that passes between two actions taken. I find it really minimizes how much we can discuss as multitask-able actions if a second, millisecond, or frame is the window humans actually have to do two things simultaneously. I also believe that most research around this topic revolves around scenarios where people do more than one thing over a period of time. So...for purposes of keeping pace in this post, we'll define multitasking as follows:

The ability of one person to perform more than one action, mental or physical, over the course of a given period of time.

At the end of the post I'll have a neat twist on this, as well, so bear with me.


Games tend to force people into scenarios requiring multitasking

Be it for better or worse, video games put players in scenarios that fit that definition constantly. To cite a pretty recent example that I was having a lot of fun with:

Picture
The above pictured scene is from a quest I was playing in 2K Games' Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. At first glance, it doesn't look like a lot is going on, but let me discuss something about this game that really redefined movement for the series up until this point. The game takes place on the other games' planet, Pandora's, moon. The gravity here is low, allowing for high jumping. They amplify this experience by giving the player an item called an Oz Kit, which allows for 2 interesting abilities: double jumping and butt slams. This scene utilizes butt slamming, which is performed by crouching while in the air. This quest also utilizes a jump pad, essentially a launcher to gain even more ridiculous heights.

To get to my citation, this quest wants you to set yourself on fire, launch off the jump pad, and butt slam onto the tiny hoop on the opposite side of the basketball court (I won't delve into how one gets to this quest, it's actually quite funny, but irrelevant). This may sound like a sequence of events, and to be fair, the setting yourself on fire portion is achieved before entering the execution of the slam dunk. After being set aflame, you launch off the jump pad for a single attempt at this action. This jump pad is less reliable than others in the game, forcing you to adjust your movement in midair, both by looking with the mouse and adjusting player location with the WASD keys. There are cameras constantly flashing, intentionally distracting the player, all the while the fire effect is disrupting the player's UI. The mind is effectively purposefully ignoring extraneous sensual input, keeping the mouse moving to keep a constant eye on the hoop, slightly tapping four other keys to adjust positioning while judging when the right point to hold down the crouch button is. That is a lot of processing going on!

The first time I did this quest I think I was at it for about fifteen minutes. I was still new to the new aerial controls and I'm not terribly great with first-person shooter controls to begin with. This felt like a nightmare trying to coordinate my mind to do all of the things necessary up until the final push of the crouch button. This screenshot was taken on a second play-through where I was much more comfortable with the controls, and it still took multiple tries, yet far from an autonomous response at a player perspective. Games do this kind of thing all the time, and while seemingly frustrating, they're still quite fun. It's cool to challenge yourself physically and mentally in these scenarios, which I'm certain are well thought out while being designed. They're intentionally expecting players to attempt multitasking to accomplish goals like these.

Apparently this is bad for you 

This kind of activity is supposedly bad for the human brain. Studies have shown that prolonged multitasking can show regression in the mind to the point of displaying up to 15-point drops in IQ. It's something that was always thought to be recoverable, similar to a brain drain after pulling an all-nighter, but MRIs performed on individuals that multitask show lower brain density in regions controlling cognitive and emotional control.

This seems a little scary after accepting that players enjoy being put into physically and mentally challenging situations that encourage attempts at multitasking. These studies are actually a little inconclusive as to if multitasking is the cause of brain damage or if existing brain damage is amplified by it. In either case, there is plenty of research taking place that is doing a pretty decent job at showing that multitasking has negative effects on temporary, and potentially long-term, human cognitive ability.

But wait...gamers are benefiting from this exposure 

If games, some of which employ the need to multitask a lot, do this, why are players so efficient? The U.S. Government went through big phases wondering if virtual training sessions were effective for dealing with real-world scenarios. Turns out their research goes even further than just their virtual training exercises.

Studies show that video game players perform 10-20% higher in areas of perception and cognitive processing than non-game players. It's also proven that players exhibit greater short-term memory, can focus for longer periods of time, and have a larger field of vision. This may not directly contradict the studies that say multitasking is bad for brains, but in an environment where that type of activity is commonplace, the brain actually grows.

You can't deny some things proven are indeed true 

So, we come to a little bit of an impasse. One of the most multitask-heavy mediums is showing growth in the same cognitive regions of the brain that studies also show being reduced by multitasking. What makes games have a positive outcome out of all of this activity? Perhaps the problem-solving aspects outweigh the multitasking negatives? But these scenarios players are tasked with solving involve both thinking and acting on something very quickly over a given period of time.

The other side of the coin, how research is carried out regarding multitasking outside of games, is kind of interesting and may shed some light on this anomaly. Whenever I'm reading about multitasking research, humans are generally asked to carry out tasks that have absolutely no relation. Things like read this book and speak this poem, write this paragraph and boil this egg, eat this taco and drink this water; but those are the kinds of things people are asked to do.

But guess what...

Games are applying this differently 

Think of just about any wartime first-person shooter. The player is acting as a soldier on a front line of some sort. This is a pretty advanced time setting, so the soldier has their vitals displayed before them. They are receiving mission critical advice from their superior while the map next to their vitals is updated with the location of the next target to reach, all while fending off enemy troops and constantly considering when the opportune time to move and reload is.

Granted, most players don't actually take in all of this at once. But they do take in more than the average person would be taking in doing office work. The mission's success is dependent on being able to survive these scenarios, so as long as game's like these are beaten, players are utilizing a good chunk of this information coming in at them. You might notice that games do this quite often, and after getting used to the style of immersion the game offers, the player is able to comprehend and continue on. What these tasks are doing are working together to aid the player in the execution of said tasks.

Through cooperative cognitive processing 

I just made that phrase up, but it sounds about right. Games give players lots of tasks. A good amount of games, and a great deal of mainstream ones, have a lot of tasks being given very quickly. Each of these tasks that the game is asking the player to perform have tells and helpers to assist the player in ultimately reaching the goal. Left thumb to position and right thumb to look, accomplishes the goal of targeting the enemy. Some games will offer a “soft” targeting lock to assist in getting the player there, rewarding them for getting in the ballpark of the zone necessary to complete the goal.

Reaching the next target area is similar in that the player knows they have to go somewhere. Their communications unit just displayed the objective, the goal: reach the extraction point. The map next to their vitals display pulses the general area of the target point while the radar is picking up nearby enemies. They're coming in fast and blocking the best path to the player's goal and a fight breaks out. Their partner communicates alternate paths that the player can take all the while trying to survive the fire fight.

These scenarios put the player into very difficult positions that will require them to fight, move, listen, and plan nearly simultaneously. The player is immersed in these scenarios and ultimately comes out on top. And these kinds of situations are actually increasing the player's cognitive ability. The secret here seems to lie not necessarily in multitasking itself, but in what these tasks are trying to accomplish. When every action a player takes is toward a common goal, the ability to handle multiple tasks becomes both easier and beneficial to cognitive function.

Conclusion 

I said there would be a twist by the end, so here it is. Multitasking isn't a real thing. Humans have one brain. One processor.  It's not [yet] possible for a human to send off signals to do things in complete simultaneity. Even activities like snapping your fingers together with both hands are just very quick back-to-back electrical signals running across synapses telling your hands to do things simultaneously.  While the action is seemingly in sync, the precursor to that, very likely, is not.  Human brains are just so fast that it's really hard to catch that there are gaps in action, both mental and physical. What people are actually doing and researching is the ability to swap between actions very quickly.

I don't think this is discouraging, though. Really, all of these signs point to games using this ability in ways that nurture player growth in and out of the game world. Game developers put a lot of thought into how many tasks is too many, and how the game can assist the player in achieving the goal these tasks are meant to reach.

And games aren't the only medium doing action-swapping correctly. Mediums such as music also employ doing things in a multitask-able manner. Think of any drummer you've seen perform. I'm a percussionist so I can tell you that every limb is needing to work on its own accord. But each of those actions performed together allow the drummer to reach a goal: the groove.

I'm not reaching for any real statistics for this one, but people who play games and people who play music tend to be very cognitively efficient. I don't think that's a mistake. I think the way both types of people employ their brain has a high impact on this outcome. As long as developers and composers consider the concept of actions that reach a common goal, multitasking seems to be a fine way to challenge and mold a more efficient human.

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Sociology, Game Design, & Multiplayer

5/13/2014

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I was recently pointed to a call to write blogs regarding Local Multiplayer posted by Gamasutra, and I find it to be crazy well-timed as I’ve been in a discovery resurgence of great local multiplayer indie titles. I’ve thought about why these games aren’t online, and being a self-proclaimed game designer myself, I’ve gathered a few thoughts on why there is this accepted resurgence in a world trying to be completely in the cloud…

We Live in a (Dis)Connected World

Let’s face it; we live in a world where it’s completely okay that we don’t necessarily have to talk to each other to talk to each other. We don’t have to be next to each other to see each other. We don’t have to be on the same continent as each other to play games with each other. In a lot of ways, this is an incredible thing. People may say that this kind of “social” evolution through technology is disconnecting us at a relationship level. I can’t believe this for a second, since as a child I only knew the people on my block. I would never have known that you could communicate with people across the world by the time I was an adult. It’s quite literally mind-blowing when you stop to think of just how much ground people have covered as far as communicating with others. I’ve met plenty of humans (and I say this to reaffirm that people you meet online aren’t fake…well most of the time) from all over the United States and even from other countries thanks to online gaming and social settings on the internet.

BUT!

While all of this is fine and dandy, there’s something that this interconnectivity shouldn’t be affecting…

Good, Solid, Thoughtful Game Design

First and foremost, I think it’s worth pointing out that game development isn’t this magic thing. You don’t just say, “Hey this idea would make a great game!” and *POOF* you’re enjoying the fruits of your magical labor. I’ve failed enough in creating games to know this not the case. People envision a game, and what’s the first thing they want? Everything. No game would be good if it had everything! No person is perfect because they can’t be great at everything either. We do have excellent humans that are good at specific things, though. Games that specialize in a certain aspect of art, performance, music, and importantly design tend to be more successful than those that don’t. Games that have the player character horizontally jumping great distances and dropping them in numerous vertically escalating levels is poor design. Having the player character needing to solve complex puzzles to reload their gun in a fast-paced first-person shooter is poor design. Having a game where the premise involves twitchy, lightning fast, decide-your-fate-at-the-drop-of-a-hat gameplay that includes being played in an environment where dropping frames is an inevitability is…you guessed it…poor design. A game developer’s biggest goal is (or should be) to deliver a fun experience to the player. It takes good design to begin that journey, and sticking to that design to ultimately end that journey. People may want everything in their games, but someone has to draw the line in order to ensure a fun experience in every scenario, in this case that’s the multiplayer environment.

Envisioning the Difference

*You’re playing Samurai Gunn with your friends in your living room. Everyone is on the edge of their seats, spouting all manner of trash talk. It’s getting down to the wire; everyone is reasonably within winning range. Swords are flying in the game while peoples’ arms are flailing in the living room. Your buddy closes for the last kill and fires his last bullet! You expertly swing your sword at the last moment and score the game-winning kill by deflection! But wait…*SHOWDOWN!* and everyone clamors to their controllers as you struggle to get back to yours after some manner of victory dance. 3 people are in on it, and the screen goes dark. All you see is the slashes of your enemies’ swords in the darkness, as all your friends tense up around you. You can feel the concentration exuding everyone in the room. When suddenly…*SLASH* and it’s all over. You sit dethroned from the former victory as your friend relishes in his comeback! Oh the humanity! But you jump right back into another match. No hard feelings, laughing hysterically over everyone’s actions and reactions from the previous battle.*

Aside from the obvious reasons of frame-dropping, varying internet speeds, and connection reliability that define why a fast-paced game like Samurai Gunn is not online, it’s the kind of environment described above that gives it all its glory. You can’t physically interact with everyone like that online. You can’t see the look on your friends’ faces as you strut your best victory pose, and they can’t see you after taking it back. That kind of scenario is exponentially more difficult to replicate in an online environment, and if I’m looking for have the most fun while playing that game, I couldn’t think of any other way except for local multiplayer. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be calling hacks over a headset, sitting there hunched over in a chair, staring at my monitor in dim lighting, just waiting for the next match to start if I wasn’t actively involved in every game. There’s this unseen aura that accompanies a local multiplayer environment that makes playing the game infinitely more fun, especially in this setting. And why would a game designer want to give you the option to not have the most fun you could possibly have while playing their game?

Target Audience & Everything

The other thing that people want besides everything these days is “everywhere.” We might as well throw this into to mix too: “If I can’t have it then it’s not good.” This ideology pops up a lot recently and it’s honestly quite irritating. When developers create a game, they know from the get-go that they are making this game for specific people. There are lots of ways to diversify who your game is intended for. One of the hardest creative decisions is based on genre. This is the idea that a game is intended for people who like certain styles of play. Let’s say Activision is changing it up and comes out with a puzzle game up the alley of PopCap’s Bejewelled franchise. One of the first reviews on a fictional blog site somewhere is from “FPSFreak88” who, after browsing his achievements collection on Xbox Live holds trophies for every Call of Duty game out to date and nothing else, is posting about how the new game is horrible and Activision needs to get its act together and start releasing 3 new CoDs every year instead of 2. This person tried the game likely because he is a fan of Activision, but didn’t like it because it wasn’t a part of the genre we know him to enjoy playing. This is not because Activision “needs to get its act together,” it’s because Activision was targeting an audience that he is not a part of. But because he’s not getting everything everywhere, there is some inherent problem.

This scenario does not only apply to genres in games. One of the other primary audience targeting concepts revolves around platform. This is not on the creative side as much as a game’s genre, but players out there still want everything everywhere. A new Final Fantasy game is exclusively coming out for the PS4 and every Xbox One owner just bought a one-way ticket to forum town to demand everything everywhere (and no worries, Wii U owners will get some crazy spinoff where the main character is a chocobo).

This is all kind of beating around the inevitable bush that I’m standing next to and pointing at vehemently: multiplayer is part of audience targeting too. When a game comes out with “online-only” play the first thing people want is everything everywhere. When a game conversely only offers “offline-only” play the first thing people want is everything everywhere. When a game developer is envisioning their game, they have to think of who will have the most fun playing it, what they’ll be having this fun with, and how they will be doing it. Game design requires a crazy amount of balance, and if the person doing the envisioning believes that their game is best suited to only support local multiplayer then let them express themselves in that way. If you believe that this game would be great online then go try it yourself. Walk in their shoes, and find a way to express yourself through the “magic” creation of games. They put a lot of thought into what their genre and target audiences are, let them express it.

Painting with Everything Everywhere

As silly as it sounds, if the industry’s players and critics were fine art critics walking through a museum and everyone took them seriously, the end result would be a museum full of puke-colored canvases. You can only put so much “everything” into something before it isn’t what it was meant to be. Local multiplayer paints an incredible picture in today’s remote access world. It offers a chance to interact on a level that is impossible with an online experience, and when a game is designed to harness that capability from the beginning, the result is truly remarkable. I fully support this resurgence in local multiplayer and hope that if developers believe their game to be best-suited being played surrounded by people plugged into the same machine then all the power to them.

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The Nature of Immersion

9/1/2013

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I have a programmer friend that I work with, both full-time and as game-development greenhorns. We often get into really interesting debates that revolve around the design of video games, and it often turns into a round table discussion between two people very quickly; an open forum for thoughts and observations about the games we play and games we ultimately wish to make. As far as memory serves, they’ve never actually been at a round table, but usually a coffee table. A relaxed setting of back-and-forth conceptualizing and de-serialization of the phenomena that we experience in the field we admire most: video games. I’m bringing the conversations to this community, so please use this blog to share your own thoughts on the topics I set up (Because my thoughts are definitely far from end-all-be-all!).

When You Use a Word Too Much…

This week, I noticed myself being torn by the sheer amount of times I hear the word “immersion” come up when describing video games. It could be that Spring and Summer are wrought with game conventions and conferences, and “immersion” has been a keyword when describing a good game for generations now. Everywhere I turn, I hear people spouting the word, toting it around, as it has become a requirement for your game to have this word associated with it in some way, shape, or form. And why wouldn’t you? Everyone knows the word. We all consider it a baseline for a quality gaming experience. When students are learning about the industry, it’s the first “I” word they learn. To make a good game you have to make your player feel like they’re an integral part of it. And not just pushing buttons and making things happen, but actually believing they are a defining factor in the events that go on within your game world.

What tears me, though, is not the word itself, but rather the lack of definition that the word needs to make its point clear. Yes, the player will be a part of this game; but how? What is your game doing to immerse the player? It’s easy to say the person playing this game will be a part of the game, but what is the mode, what is the type, what is the genre of immersion that you are offering to the player? There is a lot of room to further describe the player’s potential influence on and within the game world. This level of descriptiveness, I believe, is easily overlooked.

But Why Do It to Begin With?

Now, I suppose one of the major questions (before I delve into specific types of immersion) would be, “Well, what’s the point of describing it? The player will be playing the game and they’ll figure it out for themselves, right?” This has a lot of truth to it, but when you advertise and pitch your game to other people and you limit yourself to simply noting the high-level genre while throwing the general term, “immersion,” out there, your game really isn’t being done justice. Unless that’s all you thought about when you conceptualized your game, then I guess that’s all you need; but I’m going to take a leap of faith here and guess that most designers have a hook, something that makes your game different than everything else. Using this hook is a great way of describing the type of immersion your game specializes in. It further defines your game and gives the people listening to your pitch/advertisement something to remember; something to relate the game to. When using it in tandem with the base term “immersion,” you’re not only selling a feature of the game, but letting your players know exactly the feeling you’re trying to have them realize while in the game world.

A Couple Examples…

This may be an oversight in the mobile market, but games that use your finger as a control to slash things have a surprisingly deep type of immersion related to them. The feature is so simple, too. A touch screen requires your finger to come into contact with it in order to manipulate the device’s interface. When you go into a game that utilizes this functionality, you’re not just looking at something to feel a part of it; you, yourself, are actually an extension of the game. Your finger has become the blade that cuts the objects. It’s not just pressing a button to get a reaction, you are doing it yourself in much the same manner you would do that in reality. The simplicity of these types of games gives the player the cut-and-dry of how they’d actually perform the task in reality, no strings attached (unless the game has you slashing strings, I guess!). The control type is the primary feature, but it doesn’t quite tell you why it’s so immersive. This technique is something I call “Extensional Immersion.” So it’s not simply a Mobile game; it’s a Mobile super-genre that utilizes an Extensional Immersion sub-genre.

That type of immersion is very different from the immersion I personally grew up with playing loads of RPGs. The RPG genre is a fairly robust one to start with. You’ll see it pop up alongside other, more specific, genres (Action RPG, Puzzle RPG, MMORPG, etc.). Once you get to the granular super-genre, how else do you describe it to your players? Let’s take the approach we just took with the Mobile genre. You’re making an MMORPG and it takes place in a very large, lush environment. Let’s also say that your world also has some lore behind it, and your target players happen to be familiar with this world. You design the game with that in mind and reflect the environment to line up very well with how the lore portrays it. The feeling, the immersion that you want your players to feel is one of existence in the world they know. When they get into the game world (after the learning curve stage that most games have initially), your players know exactly where they are in the world at almost all times. They hardly need the map you provide after a while because the world is already so familiar to them. You’ve successfully brought the world your players were expecting, as they came into the game, to life. I like to call this sensation “Spatial Immersion.” The feeling you get when you navigate through a game world at the level that you know how to navigate through the city you live in. This delivers the MMORPG super-genre with a Spatial Immersion sub-genre to it.

The How-and-Feel Formula

Now, this solves two issues that I often think about: the overuse of the general term of “immersion,” and (something I haven’t expressed yet) the market saturation of known game genres. By utilizing your hook, your unique design factor, as a type of immersion, you actively tell your audience what the game is and how they will be involved in the game world. It’s a simple formula that you’ve probably caught onto with the examples above, but you just take the high-level game genre as a “how you’ll play the game” and take the immersive hook as the “how you will feel when you play the game.” Granted, this formula can be hard to apply to all games, and it involves really getting into your design and making a point to get your players to not only play a certain way, but feel a certain way. This breaks up the monotony of people saying, “My game is immersive,” forcing them to think of how it is immersing the player. It’s a pretty good test to see if you’re succeeding on delivering to your players the experience you actually set out to deliver to them, as well.



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