• Tracked whether I was using my PC or not automatically, without needing to remember to press a button.
• Let me configure the maximum time I’m allowed to work, and how long I have to take a break before it counts as a break.
• When I overwork, nag me in (customisable) ways that are gentle enough I won’t just close the app, but persistent enough I won’t just ignore it.
• Met or exceeded the high standards of alliteration established by Tom’s Timer.

And so!

Tom’s Tstretch Timer
(Windows, 17MB, v1.6)

“Every moment of my life it haunts me. I work. I eat. I rest. I sleep. Still it persists. Tom’s Tstretch Timer 1.4.”
Victoria Tran, referring to a previous version.

“Repeatedly” means once a minute, and it stops nagging if you’ve been AFK 30 secs already. You don’t have to click Reset to resume working, that’s just for the GIF. You can force Work or Break mode with those buttons, but generally just leaving it in Auto mode is best.

TomsTimer5.exe
(v5, Windows, installer)

Here’s what it already did:

• Click Work or Break to start tracking time
• App’s name in the taskbar shows how long you’ve been at it

These days I mainly use it to track how long I worked each day, partly to keep an eye on productivity but mostly cos logging that work in my spreadsheet triggers a little dopamine hit of accomplishment I don’t get otherwise.

But I hit two issues I wanted to fix: firstly, I’d sometimes need to rush off while the work timer is going. I don’t have time to note down how long I’ve worked, so I don’t click the break button cos that’ll wipe the data. But if I’m away a while, now the data is wrong.

Secondly, sometimes I just forget to officially stop a work session, and the timer is ticking away while I’m not at my desk. Obviously I realise this has happened, but how long was I away?

Just generally, the timer wasn’t great if you ever failed to use it perfectly, and I saw a few ways it could be more helpful with that. So I added:

• Keeps a running total of all work sessions: means you can end a session without losing any data, and you can just log total time at the end of the day.
• Detects when you’re idle: if the mouse and keyboard haven’t done anything in more than 5 minutes, when they next move, the log notes how long you were idle. It doesn’t subtract this time or do anything with it, since it could be wrong, but it’s just useful info for you to have if you know you were away.
• Keeps a timestamped log of each time you start a session: useful for back-solving if you lose track of something, and generally good for clarity / not losing info.
• Optional stretch reminder pings every hour: I ought to be doing this, I don’t. There are other apps for this, but since I already have one that now has a sense of whether I’m at my computer, fits nicely here. It won’t ping if you’ve been idle for 30+ minutes, assumes you’re out of the room.

Last year I was diagnosed with ADHD, and it’s made a certain sense of my timer, my spreadsheet, and various other coping mechanisms I’ve developed. It puts in a bracket with folks who have much more serious struggles than I do, and many symptoms I have no trace of. I tend to think diagnosis buckets like this aren’t worth bickering about, they’re just a means to finding treatment and strategies that work. I was having some memory and attention lapses, and I got some meds that help with that.

The timer helps too, as does the spreadsheet, and researching ADHD has helped me understand how to lean into that with other tools. It’s a wide family of symptoms, but a lot of it stems from the brain failing to provide enough of a reward for just doing the shit you need to do. A year ago I would have told you these tools were just about tracking my time and keeping an eye on productivity. Now I realise they’re also about helping to turn ‘I did what I was supposed to’ into ‘I feel good’.

I’ve since made myself a Trello-based to-do list that is obsessively focused on the aesthetics of hiding any daunting backlogs, making what’s on my plate look manageable, and keeping my accomplished tasks everpresent and cumulative. The aforementioned spreadsheet now turns daily chores into satifying box-checks, keeps running tallies of how I’m doing on many different metrics, and has a two-tiered system of weekly achievements to aim for. Nothing more I can share yet, but I’ll keep tinkering and report back if anything postable serves me as well as this timer has.

Here’s the original Timer post.

And I just noticed my tweets about each version aaalmost work as a version history, except the very first one isn’t in the thread. So for posterity: version 1, then versions 2 onwards.

When Heat Signature did well in, 2017, I thought: “It’s doing great so far! But how fast will it trail off? This has to cover the budget of the next game. What if Steam’s algorithm changes and all our revenue stops? Maybe after the third game I’ll know more about-”

I see what my brain is doing. There’ll always be enough uncertainty in my life that I can delay a donation in the name of caution. But I don’t think that loop ends on iteration 3 or 4, so I’m cutting it short now. I’m giving $25,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation and another $25,000 to GiveDirectly.

Malaria prevention is a cause that is not at all close to my heart. To my knowledge it hasn’t affected anyone I know. But only giving to causes close to you contributes to a global injustice with charity. The people with the most money to give are geographically and culturally distant from the people who most desperately need it. Of the $410 billion donated by Americans in 2017, only 6% went to international charities.

Everything else I do with my money is about me, my family, or people I individually care about. For charity, I just want to know “Where is this most needed?”

From the Atlantic, quoting the Against Malaria Foundation:

Every day, more than 500 people die from malaria in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the majority of these deaths are children under the age of five. AMF offers a shattering metaphor: Imagine a fully booked 747 airplane and infants strapped into seats A through K of every row of the economy section; their feet cannot reach the floor. Every day, this plane disappears into the Congo River, killing every soul on board. That is malaria — in one country.

There are known, proven ways to help prevent infection, they’re incredibly cheap. Long-lasting insecticide-treated nets have been proven effective in over 20 randomized controlled trials, and they cost less than $5 each – and yet their distribution is still constrained by funding. In other words, malaria prevention charities really do need money, and they can make incredibly impactful use of everything they get.

GiveDirectly are a charity that just gives your money directly to the extreme poor in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, no strings attached, so they can spend it on whatever they need.

There’s sometimes scepticism about what this kind of donation ends up being spent on, but it’s not supported by the evidence. Charity assessor GiveWell say:

Cash transfers also happen to be the most extensively studied non-health intervention we know of. In a large number of high-quality studies, researchers have looked to see whether cash transfers have indeed increased consumption, what sorts of consumption they’ve increased, and whether common concerns about them are supported by evidence. The consistent picture that emerges from these studies is that cash transfers generally do increase consumption, particularly on food, and that evidence to support common concerns has not emerged despite being looked for.
…
There is a smaller set of studies implying that people get significant return on investment from cash transfers, even over the long run; the case for longer-term impacts of cash transfers is broadly comparable to the case for longer-term life improvement impacts of our other top charities’ health interventions, and the cost-effectiveness according to our best estimates is in the same ballpark as well.

An example that surprised GiveWell was that the money is often spent on buying a metal roof. Mud and thatch rooves leak and have an ongoing cost in repair and maintenance – a metal one doesn’t. But GiveWell don’t know of any charity that provides people with metal rooves. Sometimes the most pressing problems in people’s lives can’t be foreseen and solved at scale by external bodies.

Giving directly also partly avoids the paternalism of dictating to poor people what’s best for them, when we have only the most abstract notion of what their lives and problems are like.

Given those causes, why these specific charities?

I mentioned GiveWell – they’re an independent charity that takes a scientific approach to evaluating the effectiveness of other charities. Against Malaria Foundation and GiveDirectly are both consistently in their top picks for the most demonstrably effective charities in the world. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best or that the others are bad – when GiveWell can’t recommend a charity they’re not saying it’s not effective, they’re just saying the information they’d need to say it’s effective is not available. There are many types of charities whose effectiveness is hard to measure because it’s hard to measure, not because it isn’t there – research is especially hard to predict and rate.

But I still think it’s really valuable to have that little island of knowledge in a sea of uncertainty. To say, “we don’t know if another charity might be more effective, but we do know for sure that these ones have an extraordinary positive effect on people who desperately need it.”

Aren’t you doing that paternalism thing with the malaria thing?

Yeah, a bit. But there are some good arguments why the distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets is a problem that needs to be fought at scale. For one, there are multiplicative benefits if everyone in a community is protected. And the main recipients are children under 5, where the ‘decide for themselves’ argument doesn’t really apply. There’s a very fair-minded comparison of these two kinds of charity on GiveWell’s blog, that concedes the virtues and downsides of both approaches.

Why don’t you give your time instead of your money?

I only have a normal amount of time to give, but a larger-than-normal amount of money. I could give both, of course, but I’m not that good a person. I would also stop making money if I did that, so the cause would lose out on a future donation like this and only get the services of a nervous game designer in exchange – not a great trade.

That’s a convenient rationalisation for what you would do anyway.

It is! Thanks.

It’s not really altruistic if you tell people you’re doing it.

True, I could potentially benefit from posting about this! But I don’t care whether this is altruism or not. I’m more interested in potentially helping to normalise it, and keeping it secret to be more virtuous doesn’t help with that. If you have two hits on Steam, it should be normal to give something significnat to some kind of charity. It should be normal to give more, but I haven’t entirely overcome my cautious instincts.

Shouldn’t you show us a giant cheque or a receipt or something?

I have the smaller of those things!

Some technical details:

• Ironically I couldn’t give this amount to GiveDirectly directly, because their UK arm only take credit card transfers, that’s why it’s through GiveWell.
• Suspicious Developments is my company. I sometimes use that name to refer to the whole teams behind Gunpoint and Heat Signature, because a company name correctly implies it’s a group effort, but as a legal entity it’s just me.
• Tax-wise, this will count like a business expense. So if SD was gonna make more than $50k profit this year, it’s now gonna make $50k less and you pay less tax if you make less profit.

Programming is about 40% of my job. Another 40% is design, and the other 20% is every other job on a game that isn’t art or music. The design part is hard to track though: I find most productive design thinking comes from a big engine in the back while you’re doing other things, as it randomly matches disparate ideas and sprinkles them with what you’re currently experiencing and asks: “Is that anything?”

Programming, though, I can measure: I start a timer and then focus on work for anywhere from 8 minutes to 80. If I get the urge to check Twitter, I can but I have to stop the timer to do it, and only log the work time. I only get to log the time if it really was focused work – all breaks and interruptions and meals and everything else is excluded. Back when I notionally worked an 8 hour-a-day job, I had an hour for lunch, lots of Twitter breaks and interruptions. I’d be surprised if I averaged as many as 6 productive hours a day.

Anyway, here’s my first full week’s programming time tracked:

The faint numbers below the days are individual work sessions, that’s where I log them. I know there are apps to automate this but my actual focus doesn’t always correlate to which app I’m switched to, I prefer to do it manually so the data is meaningful. It’s also a satisfying moment to type the number in and see the bar go up.

This comes to about 30 hours, which struck me as alarmingly low at first. It felt like a very full week! But I was forgetting a few factors:

• I do other work on Mondays, which I didn’t track at all – more on that below.
• Programming is only 40% of my job. Design’s 40% mostly overlaps with other stuff, so I’d expect programming to be more than 40% of my work time, but less than 80%.
• This is productive time only, which is very different to ‘office time’ – per above, I estimate worked less than 30 productive hours at a 40 office-hour job.

So, actually, pretty good! The graph we’ll never see is how much more I started working because I knew it was being tracked – that’s one of the reasons I started. Since I’m hovering around 4-5 hours on a normal work day, I’ll aim to get that to a solid 5.

I did not log the time I spent tweaking the layout and colours of this graph.

Some features of my week:

Business Mondays

I set aside Mondays for dealing with all the company, tax, phonecalls, organisational bullshit I hate, and e-mails which I don’t hate but did not respond to at the time. When this piles up during the week, unless it’s urgent, this system lets me shelve it guilt-free, knowing exactly when I’ll get to it. I also do a lot better with tasks I dislike when I know they’re coming – I kinda dread Mondays (I picked Monday so I’d dread the same day as folks with office jobs), but that makes dealing with them easier. I wake up knowing the day will be all bullshit, no hope of doing any interesting work. And if I can plow through the bullshit quickly, I get the rest of the day off. I also relax any diet/booze restrictions on Business Mondays, a policy offices should adopt also.

I’ve been doing Business Mondays for about 5 years now and it’s one of the most successful habits I’ve made for myself since going independent – it stops the bullshit getting you down or derailing the productive stuff. As you can see I actually did end up doing a couple of hours of real work last Monday – this was on a side-project, as a reward for getting all my boring stuff done.

Side-Project Saturdays

This is new, not sure if I’ll stick to it, but I was remembering Google’s 20% time and wondering if that could work for my back-burner projects. My main project is Tactical Breach Wizards, and it’s progressing in ways I’m optimistic about, but it hasn’t been fast. I sometimes get anxious about it because our artist John Roberts made it look so good so fast, and people reacted so well to it, that it basically has to be made. That’s two massive lucky things I’m grateful for, but I’m used to having literally a year to fuck around with ugly prototypes of random shit I make up before having to decide which one is my real project. Feeling ‘locked-in’ so early makes me anxious, and having side-projects relieves some of that.

So, I thought, maybe Saturdays are for side-projects? No hour quota, work as much or as little as I fancy. And you will see from the hour count that I fancied quite a lot. The two games I play most these days are Slay the Spire and Race for the Galaxy, and my fascination with digital, single-player card games has got to the point that I wanted to try making one. I’m also interested in trying something mechanics-heavy but completely non-violent, which means it’ll probably end up being about destroying suns. I’m making it in Unity to make sure I’m learning new things about the tools that’ll help the main project.

Evening Chillwork

Towards the end of Heat Signature, when I really needed to put in the hours, I’d sometimes give up on a bug at 6pm, have dinner, then watch TV with my laptop open and just tinker absently with it as I’m watching. It was amazing how often this solved it. When focus fails, taking the pressure off and putting your brain in the open mode is really effective. I’d also sometimes do it if the next day’s work was a big, daunting new task – just scope it out while relaxing, no pressure to get anywhere with it, and I often made surprising progress.

So now I do this occasionally, if I’m stuck on something or just didn’t find the hours in the daytime. I log this as half-time for the graph – an hour of chillwork is 30 minutes of productive time. No idea how accurate that is.

Actually Take Sunday Off

Well, the graph don’t lie, I didn’t do this. But that was evening chillwork, while watching movies. It was work I was excited to do, and sitting there forcing myself to fritter the time away instead wasn’t appealing. I won’t do this kind of thing when the side-project hits a tough part or just needs grunt work, that’s when it gets draining.

When I was making Gunpoint, towards the end, I was doing 5 days at PC Gamer and 2 days on Gunpoint. The idea here is just: don’t do that.

Daily Routine

I work from home in the morning, work out, have lunch, then go to a cafe for the afternoon’s work. I settled on this order of things because:

• Lazy mornings are the primary perk of working for yourself.
• I used to work out in the morning but if I was having a low-energy day, I’d procrastinate and it’d derail everything.
• Being around people for part of my day levels me out.

Working entirely from home is more efficient, but if I do it for too long my mood starts to suffer. I lose perspective, small problems seem maddening or utterly insurmountable. In a cafe, when a problem is driving me nuts, I feel the initial frustration but then catch myself and get perspective.

Obviously I’m amazingly lucky to have this kind of freedom over my working life. That much freedom can be dangerous: if you don’t consciously get on top of it, create systems and measure the results, you can end up throwing away a huge gift and being miserable despite it.

I opened a tiny drawer. Ah yes, this is where he kept things that were brass, cylindrical, and slightly ridged. I closed the drawer, my task complete.

On his desk, though, I saw something I did recognise. Something I knew it would be my responsibility to adopt, decipher, and operate. I don’t know if he ever gave it a name, so I will now: it’s the Egg Controller.

–

Dad was an inventor. That’s the verdict. When you’re alive, people don’t often summarise you – I suppose it would be rude. I used to tell people he was an electrical engineer, a rather dry job description, but it didn’t sound wrong because I wasn’t trying to summarise him.

Once you die, though, everyone’s required to boil you down to a few words. And I think dad’s come out of that rather well. He was an inventor, and everyone seems to have known it. His creations have been impressing people from the garden shed of his childhood home in Woking, to the mayor of Frome, to a chicken farmer in France, to me, just outside this office, watching him barbecue.

–

To understand the Egg Controller, you must first understand the Egg. The Egg is the Big Green Egg, an enclosed barbecue that’s very good for slow-cooking and smoking things. Dad didn’t invent the Big Green Egg, but he did love to use it. He loved to cook, he loved science, and he loved to be able to provide people with something that was unusually good. Almost anything cooked in the Big Green Egg has a nice smoky flavour to it, and almost anyone who ate something he cooked in the Big Green Egg would remark, “Ooh, it’s got a nice smoky flavour to it!” I think he got a lot of pleasure out of that.

He even cooked our Christmas turkey in the Big Green Egg every year – every year except one. About three years ago, he was ill, and the task fell to me. And this is when I discovered what an enormous pain the arse it is to use.

In theory, it can keep its temperature perfectly stable for hours on end. In practice, you open the vents a bit to get the temperature up, then close them a bit, and it keeps going up. So you close them more, and now it’s going down. So you open them more, and now it’s going up. Leaving it in either state for six hours would result in either cold turkey or festive ash, so you end up having to check on it every fifteen minutes, for six hours.

This bothered me because it was exhausting, it was boring, and it was Christmas. Dad was a lot more devoted to creating good food than me, so I don’t think he minded that. But I think it bothered him for a different reason: it was solvable. This business of making small adjustments, observing their effect, and reacting accordingly was something computers are perfectly capable of. So he set about building one to do it.

–

I’ve inherited this gene, I think. I can’t build gadgets like dad could, so the set of problems I see as solvable is different, but if I feel a solution should exist I will bloody-mindedly create it.

At one point I wanted to get business cards made that would each have a free copy of my game on them. That meant each card needed a different code printed on it. I had 200 codes, and one image with a blank space for the code to be written. The card company would happily take 200 different images, but they couldn’t combine the images and text for me – I had to do that. A solution for this should exist.

It does, actually, there are dozens. But all of them would require me to learn some new scripting language or tool that was far more complex than what I needed. This was a programming problem, and the only programming language I knew was the one I made the game in: it’s called Game Maker.

So, technically, I made a game. It’s a game where the only level is a giant room that looks like my business card, the menu system writes a giant code across it, then it takes a screenshot. Thirty times a second. You win the game by waiting for 7 seconds. Then when you quit, you have a folder full of 200 images, each with a different code on them, which you can send straight to the printers.

This took about three hours to make. How long would it have taken to manually put 200 codes on 200 cards? Look, I’m not on trial here, this is about dad, let’s get back to that.

What dad built, in basic terms, was a tiny computer, programmed with custom software he wrote, hooked up to a thermometer and a fan. The computer gets the temperature from the thermometer, and turns the fan on or off to control the flow of air into the barbecue.

What dad built, in even more basic terms, was two green boxes with buttons and screens on, a black box with a light on it, a metal plate with another black thing in it that could be a fan, two wires that end in crocodile clips, and two wires that end in long metal spikes.

I understood the principles well, but I had a crucial question about the device itself. How do I turn it on?

The crocodile clips are attached to wires which are attached to a briefcase-sized device that I think is called an oscilloscope. I didn’t know much about it, but I was fairly sure you don’t bring an oscilloscope to a barbecue. They must attach to some other power source, but what?

–

As someone with a lot of experience with technology, I usually approach every technical challenge with a healthy acceptance that I may be completely unable to solve it. But the stakes felt higher for this. My last visit before he died, dad had wanted to give me a lesson in this, but we didn’t get to it. Should I have made sure it happened before I left?

He also hadn’t had much time to use this gadget before he died. If I couldn’t figure it out, it would be like all his hard work on this brilliant device was wasted, all because I couldn’t even take that trivial last step of figuring out how to work it. He wouldn’t have been disappointed in me, he never made me feel that was ever a possibility. But I’d be disappointed in myself.

I got excited when I found a likely-looking battery pack nearby, and hooked the clips onto it, but the screens stayed dark. Normal batteries were out – there’s nothing to clip on to. I looked around the room of a thousand unidentified objects, and didn’t like my chances of finding the right one.

Then I remembered – 9 volt batteries do have something to clip onto – those weird little cup things that tingle if you put your tongue on them. Not that I’ve tried that, I’m not on trial here, let’s get back to dad.

I dug one out and hooked it up. The screens… stayed dark.

Then I tried the clips the other way around. Brilliant green letters appeared on the screen. The Egg Controller worked.

I remember a car journey with dad, maybe two years ago, when he was working on the Egg Controller and I was working on my space game, Heat Signature. I was telling him about a programming problem I was having: I was trying to get my spaceships to slow down just in time to stop at a particular point in space, but they kept overshooting or falling short. Something was making the maths trickier than it should have been, so I was telling him how I planned to fix it. I was going to teach my spaceships to pay attention to what affect their brakes were having in practice, and ease off or brake harder based on that.

As it happened, dad had recently solved basically the same problem for the Egg Controller. If you just program it to turn the fan on when the temperature is too low, and off when it’s too high, it will endlessly overcompensate. It takes a while for the effect of its actions to be reflected in the temperature it reads from the thermometer, so it needs an intelligent system to know what kind of change to expect, and when.

He told me this is called a Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller. It’s how cruise control in your car manages to keep a steady speed when the slope of the road changes. I wanted a spaceship to stop exactly at a space station. He wanted a turkey to stop at exactly 72 degrees celsius. The principle is the same.

–

We didn’t have a funeral for dad, we had a memorial lunch instead. Ten meat eaters were coming, and I was tasked with using the Egg Controller to slow-cook a shoulder of pork for them. It was a fitting use for his brilliant gadget, and for all the same reasons it was fitting, it would be an especially crushing, deeply personal disaster if anything went wrong. On the plus side, I had managed to turn the thing on.

I decided I’d need a practice run. Just a couple of chicken breasts, only one guest. I figured out how to fit the Egg Controller’s fan into the bottom of the barbecue, rigged up both the thermometers, lit the barbecue and examined the screen. It has three columns: Time, Oven and Meat – the three certainties in life. You can set a desired value for each of these, and below it the actual value is reported.

My best guess at how it worked was this: it’ll keep heating up the barbecue until its internal temperature hits what you set under ‘Oven’, then keep it there until the thermometer you put in the meat reaches the tempereature you set under ‘Meat’. And you don’t touch the Time dial because you don’t know what it does.

I set Oven to 180 and Meat to 75. The Egg Controller told me the Big Green Egg was currently only 50 odd, so it had a way to go. Sure enough, the fan it was wired to was blowing away quietly to stoke the fires.

80 degrees.
120.
150.
180. Good!
190. Hmm. The fan’s still going.
195. Fan still going.
200. Fan still going. This doesn’t seem right.
210. OK, this is just never going to stop.

Maybe it just keeps going full blast until the meat gets up to temperature? I tried turning that number down to lower than the meat already was. Fan still going.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t set a time? Was zero time the same as saying ‘never stop’? I tried setting a short time, and waited until it expired. It beeped, but the fan kept going.

240 degrees now, and for the chicken’s sake it was time to intervene. I unhooked the Egg Controller’s fan and finished it off the old fashioned way, endlessly adjusting the vents. We ate the admittedly delicious chicken – it had this nice smoky taste – and I despondently accepted I could not decipher dad’s design.

–

I didn’t want to believe the interface was bad, and I didn’t want to believe I wasn’t clever enough to figure out a good one. I especially didn’t want to believe it was just broken. But there didn’t seem to be any other explanations.

Silly as it sounds, not being able to figure this out made dad feel more distant. I had thought of us as like minds, and it made the loss easier to accept. His brain wasn’t entirely gone, I still have a partial version of it in my own head. But either this gadget did nothing intelligent at all, which couldn’t be true, or he and I thought so differently that even with unlimited tries, I couldn’t deduce how his interface was ever supposed to work. It was an upsetting thought.

“I’d just like to see it ever stop, under any conditions.” I remember griping as I fiddled with the now un-Egged Controller after dinner, still vaguely hoping to find a trick to it. Fan still going.

That was when I saw the red light. I’d been looking at the screens, and the fans, and the thermometers, all of which seemed to be doing their jobs. But there’s one other component – just before the fan, there’s a black box. The black box had a bright red light on it. Aren’t red lights usually bad? I flicked a switch on the box. The light went blue. The fan stopped.

The fan stopped!

I tried turning the desired temperature up again. The fan started!

Near as I can tell, the black box is some kind of controller or regulator that cuts power to the fan when the computer tells it to. When it’s off, instead of cutting power to the fan, it never interrupts it. That’s why I’d never looked for another switch to turn on – if anything, it was too on.

The whole thing worked exactly as I’d first assumed, you just have to flick the mysterious switch on the black box first. Dad and I do think alike. Except on the subject of black boxes and what should happen when they’re off.

On the morning of the memorial lunch, I was up in good time and had the barbecue lit, the Egg Controller hooked up, and the pork on by 9am. I had Oven set to 110, Meat set to 87, and I didn’t touch Time because I didn’t want to jinx things, but I was allowing four hours til lunch.

50 degrees.
80.
100. Fan still going.
110. Fan still going. Come on…
111. Fan stopped!
110.
109. Fan starts!
110.
110.
110.

The spaceship has stopped at the station. The car is successfully cruising. The Egg has been Controlled.

It worked perfectly. The little fan would spin up and wind down every now and then, and the temperature was dead on nearly 100% of the time, only dipping or rising 1 degree for a moment now and then. Dad would have been proud. He might have even said it was “Quite neat, actually” – his strongest possible praise for a gadget.

I had half-hoped to do pulled pork, time permitting, but I’m new to the world of slow-cooking and it turns out 4 hours is rushing it. I had to cook it a little faster to make sure it was ready in time, but with the Egg Controller that was a simple turn of a dial, and the computer handled the rest.

The Egg Controller draws a graph of the meat’s internal temperature over time – of course it does, dad made it – and this rose from a gentle slope to the side of a mountain. The meat reached 87 degrees right before 1pm, the Egg Controller gave a satisfied beep, and I hauled the impressive-looking joint out to carve it up.

It needed slicing rather than pulling, but it was devoured in short order, and more than one person said “Ooh it has a nice smoky flavour!”

I think dad would have got a lot of pleasure out of that.

Q: You have 100kg of potatoes, which are 99 percent water by weight. You let them dehydrate until they’re 98 percent water by weight. How much do they weigh now?
A: 50kg

It’s not a riddle or a trick, it’s literally true and the terms mean what they seem to mean. The Wikipedia page has some good explanations and diagrams of why the answer is right, which persuaded me that it was, but that didn’t solve the problem for me. To me the problem is: why am I so wrong about this?

I see that it’s true, but it still doesn’t sound like it should be. What’s my brain doing wrong?

I think it’s because we intuitively read the question something like this:

Q. You have 99kg of water and 1kg of dried potato. You remove 1kg of water. How much does all the remaining stuff weigh?
A. 99kg

That’s what the question sounds like – a casual reading of it seems like it’s saying something along those lines, so we expect the result to be along those lines. We’re not 100% we’ve considered all the details – if we were told the real answer was 99.1kg or 98kg, we wouldn’t be massively surprised or interested enough to find out why it’s not what we guessed. But the answer’s 50. We’re nowhere close, we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the concepts.

So what’s wrong with our reading, and what’s the right one?

“You have 99kg of water and 1kg of dried potato.”
This much is true. Whether you think of it as two separate substances or all mixed up in individual potatoes isn’t relevant.

“You remove 1kg of water.”
This is where we fuck up. The original says “you let them dehydrate until they’re 98 percent water”. Removing 1kg of water leaves it as 98.99% water – barely changed at all. Each time you remove 1kg of water, you’re also removing 1kg of the total weight.

The 1kg of dried potato stays the same, so it’s really asking:

How much water do you have to remove until that 1kg of dried potato is twice as much of the total?

Then, I think, it clicks. That 1kg stays, but it makes up twice as much of the total at the end. So how much of the rest must have been removed? About half of it.

I don’t think ‘Maths problems most of us get wrong if we don’t do the maths’ rises to the level of ‘paradox’ though, which is why I’ve been putting it in derision quotes.

Update: Tom’s Timer 5 is now available, with cumulative tracking and stretch reminders!

Older version:

What I needed was:

• Something general. No use tying it to specific websites, or even my browser, since I waste time all over the place.
• Something non-enforcing: hard rules don’t work for me, because I always hit situations where they don’t make sense, so I override them, and you can guess where that leads.
• Something persistently visible: if I have to switch to it or check it, I won’t.
• But not something eye-catching: if it’s ticking away on-screen at all times, it becomes a distraction of its own.

I found a few things that were close, but their faults always meant I stopped using them. So I made my own, in Game Maker Studio.

TomsTimer.exe
(v4.1, Windows, installer)

It’s a little application that you leave minimised, and its name on the taskbar changes to reflect how many minutes have passed since you set it.

So when I sit down at my PC, I start it, and then only when I actually get down to work do I click the satisfying button to reset the clock. That way I can glance at it to see how much time I’ve wasted, and once that becomes a point of shame and regret, I get on. And I click Reset, so it’s now a tally of how long I’ve been productively working.

It only shows minutes in the taskbar so that there’s no distracting ticking, but it shows seconds in the window if you switch to it, so you can see it’s going.

I only just made it today, so I can’t say whether I’ll stick with it, but I like it so far. It’s very satisfying, and its discouragement is very gentle. Once I’m aware of my bad habits I’m usually pretty good at adjusting them subconsciously without much faff.

v4: After using this thing for years, I found myself wanting a new feature. I’d sometimes forget whether I’d reset the clock when I stopped work, i.e. whether it’s now counting a break or continuing to count a stretch of work. So now it has Work and Break buttons and reports its current state, both in the task bar and the app. I also updated the icon because the old one was black on transparent and that is almost invisible on most Windows 10 setups. This new version is the one linked above now.

v4.1: Changed timing logic to use your system clock rather than counting for itself. Should prevent an issue where performance could make it get inaccurate.

Ahead of me were two cyclists: an old lady in pole position, and a young man between she and I. I was looking for a chance to overtake them both, but even at their glacial pace they would close the gap between us and some still-slower pedestrians before I could safely squeeze past. Instead they weaved slowly and silently between three different walkers in turn, each oblivious until they were passed, and got stuck behind the fourth. This man, of normal build, was somehow consuming the entire width of the path, and neither cyclist seemed willing to do anything to alert him to their presence.

This was a dilemma. At this distance I’d normally ding the inappropriately quaint bell on my otherwise rugged mountain bike, but doing so as the third unit in a barely-moving serpentine platoon of bikes seemed somehow impolite. If neither the leader of our mismatched pack nor her XO had elected to bell, belling without authorisation seemed to break the implied chain of command, to defy the rules of engagement established by our commanding officer: old lady.

Eventually General Old Lady entered Quiet Voice Range of the target and let rip: “Excuse me!”

The man’s reaction was immediate, extreme and entirely common in this predicament. His complete surprise that a bicycle – the single most hazardous, spike-bristled war juggernaut in a pedestrian’s fleshy world – could have crept so close without his knowledge translated into a sort of primal fight-or-flight response, and he leapt out of the way of this 2mph pensioner as if she were a freight train. Immediately embarrassed by his overreaction but determined to find an external blame-receptacle, he returned fire:

“You wanna get a bell!”

I think we all knew this could get ugly. “Excuse me” was already testing the boundaries of the fragile peace treaty privileged Britons tacitly sign by avoiding interacting with each other wherever possible. But this man’s suggestion shattered it utterly, by indirectly suggesting anyone else’s behaviour was less than perfect. It could go anywhere from here: knives, drowning, offish silence.

“Oh, I have a bell.” Holy shit. This was true, actually.

“You wanna use it then!” Oh my God. Direct behaviour critique. Is the fabric of our society even salvageable? Old Lady would have to come back with something extraordinary.

She did.

“I always think it’s rude to use it!” she said, brightly.

One by one we glode wordlessly by the stunned man, and on into the strange new world we had forged.

Dropbox

Dropbox runs in your system tray and keeps everything in your ‘Dropbox’ folder synced, both to their servers and to any other computer you install it on. Since I use a desktop and a laptop regularly, right away that gives me one remote and two local copies of all my most important stuff. I use my Dropbox folder as a ‘My Documents’, generally: it’s all things I’ve created and would hate to lose: docs, photos, and my game.

I pay $100 a year for 1TB of space, plus $40 a year for an add-on that gives unlimited version history: every version of everything I’ve ever put in there is stored forever, even if I delete or over-write it.

Limitations:

• It’s not good for syncing stuff that needs to stay in the folder it’s in, like a savegame folder. There’s a third party hack to trick it into doing that, but ‘third party hack’ and ‘my most precious data’ don’t really feel like good partners.
• If you regularly dump huge amounts of stuff in there, it’s a little irritating that you can’t change the order in which things are backed up. One 2GB file has changed? It’ll keep trying to upload that and not back up any of the new changes to smaller files until it’s done. Hasn’t been a problem for me since I first set it up.
• If you regularly delete thousands of files (I do!), it’s bizarre that it takes as long to upload or download that change as it would if you’d added that many files.
• You can get your iPhone to back up your photos to it, but they’ve recently split that functionality off into a separate app called Carousel, which is fucking horrible. It only syncs if you run it, then access your photos while it’s running.
• It’s not good for backing up Unity games. Unity seems to lock certain files in a way that prevents Dropbox from backing them up, and as mentioned earlier, it’ll keep trying that same file forever, ignoring all other changes in the meantime.
• The version history thing is reassuring, but if I ever lost or over-wrote a folder of thousands of files, I can’t see a way to batch-restore them – you have to click on each file individually and select the version you want to roll it back to. For my game, that’d probably take longer than re-making it.

CrashPlan

CrashPlan runs in your system tray and automatically backs up a number of folders you’ve told it to, encrypted, to any and all locations you select. I use it for absolutely everything I value outside of Dropbox – and Dropbox itself, just to be sure.

The free version will back up to a local or external hard drive, or even to a friend’s computer, so you can do a kind of back-up swap (it’s encrypted).

I pay $60 a year to back up to their servers. There’s no space limit, and I’m using over 300 gigabytes – it took a week to get it all up there when I first installed. Now it just runs silently in the background and I never notice it. It’ll back up all changes right away if you like, or you can tell it to only do it when the computer’s idle.

Limitations:

• As far as I know you can’t use it for passively keeping stuff in sync across multiple computers.
• I thought it didn’t have versioning but it turns out it does. Gosh, unless you really need syncing you should use this instead of Dropbox.

Version Control

Version control is a truly vital concept that has unfortunately been implemented by madmen. It’s basically “keep every version of my project (usually online)” but with the ability to ‘branch’ out from a version and then merge those changes back in later, which is particularly useful for teams.

I use GitHub for my Unity projects, following this guide, but I find Git itself baffling and mad, even after taking real pains to learn it. More than once it’s told me I’m not allowed to save my work, and must over-write it with the outdated online copy, and I have to go crying to Twitter to find someone who can tell me what buttons to press to let me actually save. I’ve never actually lost work to it, so I’ll keep soldiering on, but I have a hard time claiming this is a sane way to back up your stuff if you work alone.

Limitations:

• Fucking mad.

Game Maker Studio has a different version control system built in, Subversion. I tried setting it up once, using a test project, and tested deleting something and rolling back to the old version. I could not, the thing was gone forever. That concludes the past, present and future of my relationship with Subversion for Game Maker.

Limitations:

• Lost the only thing I ever entrusted it with.

It’s been fantastic. GDC has been the highlight of my year in each of the three years I’ve been. This was my first Rezzed, but it was much like the brilliant EGX with better food, more people I knew, and no queues for the bathroom.

For most of the year I like my peaceful, productive life at home, but for these few weeks I love switching into the opposite mode, and getting all the benefits of that in rapid succession. That’s why I’ve been chaining these events together: preparing and organising is the only part I don’t like, so any time I can do two for the price of one is great.

That introvert/extrovert flip is also a big jolt to the system, combined with a massive influx of fresh perspectives from a diverse crowd of smart people, combined with a deluge of raw feedback and reactions to the current state of my game, combined with a big break from my usual working schedule, combined with lots of new sights and sounds and games and experiences and inspiration.

I might do a separate post about what I learned about Heat Signature from the reaction it got, but in this one I’ll just boil down two things this trip clarified about life and people and events like these.

This was in my room at the hostel.

Acceptance is like armour

The way confidence and success feed off each other is deeply unfair. “Have confidence!” “Believe in yourself!” and “Fake it till you make it!” are all bits of advice that can work for some people in some situations. But a lot of the time, you might as well be saying “Have gills!” “Believe you have gills!” “Fake having gills until you have gills!”

People say those things because confidence, unlike gills, can quickly lead to the kind of success or approval that gives you more. That’s the part I became familiar with on this trip: the more people heap disproportionate praise on Gunpoint, the easier it gets to talk to people – even the ones who aren’t praising it and have no idea what it is. That acceptance gives you one point of armour, and you can take that armour into any situation you like.

Once you get one point of acceptance-armour, it’s not that scary to talk to someone who might hit you with rejection. You know it doesn’t mean you’re worthless, because you have this piece of acceptance that says you’re not. And of course, most of the people you were scared of talking to actually have no intention of doing that, so they usually give you another point of acceptance-armour and then you can talk to basically anyone. But when you have zero, that fear is so much harder to shake.

I don’t have One Weird Trick for breaking out of that state, because I stumbled out of it largely by luck, and my brain is so self-defeating that it sometimes tries to crawl back in there if I go too long without even more of that luck. But I can tell you what I did try to maximise my chances of getting off the confidence floor.

Your brain is great at remembering criticism and great and forgetting praise, so I tried to reverse that bias. I wrote down anything nice anyone said about my work in a sort of Praise File, to refer back to when I was losing faith. I didn’t keep a file of criticisms, and as hard as it tries, the brain can’t remember those forever.

So was this.

Praise feels different in real life

Getting ten positive internet comments about your thing is radically different to having ten different people come up to you and say they loved it. The first feels good, but the second is extraordinary – it’s the moment the most childish part of your brain is dreaming of while you’re fretting over all the little dilemmas and struggles you had making it.

“Maybe if I just get through this and do it right, there’ll be… like… some kind of party? And everyone will tell me how great I am? And there’s cake?” That’s dumb, that brain-part is an idiot. But if you’re lucky enough that your thing catches on, and you go to these events, that can actually happen.

I was going to say “except for the cake”, but then I remembered that on the last day of Rezzed someone actually did produce a giant box of cupcakes and gave me one. This is ridiculous.

Bear this in mind if you ever get a nice comment on the internet. Try to imagine someone coming up to you and saying it in real life, how nice that is, and how many more people must be feeling the same thing without explicitly saying it.

That’s it, thanks so much to everyone who made this a fantastic trip. Here are some more pics from it:

From the plane, on approach to SFO.

Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco.

Bananas Foster is/are a hell of a thing.

Old Fashioneds (Olds Fashioned?) at the Hog & Rocks, a discovery of my friends at Asymmetric.

Introversion improvise a way to adjust the projector in our room at Rezzed.

Gunpoint/Heat Signature artist John Roberts supervises our booth while I nip out for lunch.

Melt some dark chocolate!

Mix with almond milk to make ganache – my sister and her partner are vegan, so I make them all vegan for simplicity.

Put nice stuff in the ganache. I did one with maple syrup and pecan chunks, one with cinnamon and orange cranberries, and one with vanilla and dried cherries.

Freeze ganache! It’s too soft to chocolate-coat at room temp, so I chill it overnight and cut it up the next day.

Coated in regular chocolate, so they won’t be sticky at room temp. Wouldn’t it have been great if I’d thought to put pecans on each one when they were molten?

Fuck it, I’m gluing the pecans on.

And cranberries for the cranberry ones.

And… some fruit thingies for the cherry ones. Dried cherries look too similar to dried cranberries.

Dusted with cinnamon.

Need something to put them in. If only we’d taken the precaution of drinking a lot of whisky on the Crate and Crowbar this year. Oh wait!

I can only make one pot out of each case because the lid part is kind of important.

The different one is dried apricots stuffed with things like dried strawberries or blueberries or nuts – for my 2-year-old niece, they’re keeping her off chocolate at first.

I did have one box that was basically perfect for this, so I put all the least misshapen ones in it and gave that one to my gran.

Packed!

Labelled!

Niece review: “Yummy!”

Tactical Breach Wizards

Turn-based game where you control a small team of wizards in tactical gear, breaching into rooms full of armed gangsters and the like.

Role: designer, writer, programmer, level designer, sound designer
Working with: John Roberts (art), John Winder (programming), Robert Arzola (music), Steve Lee (level design)
Made in: Unity
Get it: $20 on Steam

Heat Signature

A space game where you can actually go inside the spaceships and beat up the crew and steal things and get shot.

Role: designer, programmer, writer, sound designer
Working with: John Roberts (art), John Winder (programming), Ivan Semidolin (music)
Made in: Game Maker Studio
Platform: Windows (2017)
More info: dev log videos, development blog
Get it: $15 on Steam

Morphblade

A turn-based game where each hex you move to turns you into a different kind of weapon. Inspired by Michael Brough’s iOS game Imbroglio, but I ended up moving it to a hex grid, letting you build the grid as you play, getting rid of enemy health, and letting you upgrade weapons by crossbreeding them with each other, each pair having a unique result.

It’s out now!

Role: everything
Made in: Game Maker Studio
Platform: Windows (2017)
More info: blog posts
Get it: $5 on Steam

Floating Point

A peaceful game about maintaining speed and grace by swinging yourself around randomly generated spaces with a rope. Built in three weeks from the rope physics I developed for the Grappling Hook Game.

Role: designer, programmer, sound designer
Working with: Form & Shape (music)
Made in: Unity
Out on: Windows, Mac and Linux (2014)
More info: trailer, dev log videos, development breakdown
Get it: free on Steam

SimAntics

Competitive multiplayer game about steering anteater tongues down randomly generated ant tunnels. Made in two days with Liselore Goedhart when we were on the Super Game Jam documentary.

Role: co-designer, programmer, writer, co-sound-designer
Working with: Liselore Goedhart (design, art)
Made in: Game Maker Studio
Out on: Windows (2014)
More info: my post with some thoughts on the episode and stills thereof
Get it: with the documentary series on Steam, which is $20 for 5 episodes and the 5 games made during them

Gunpoint

A noir-themed creative infiltration game that lets you rewire its levels to get the jump on people and punch them endlessly in the face.

Role: designer, programmer, writer, sound designer
Working with: John Roberts (art), Fabian van Dommelen (art), Ryan Ike (music), John Robert Matz (music), Francisco Cerda (music), Abstraction Games (Mac & Linux port, ongoing support)
Made in: Game Maker 8.1
Out on: Windows (2013), Mac and Linux (2014)
More info: trailer, development breakdown, dev log videos, the whole development blog in chronological order, how its launch went, in-game commentary and a making-of feature are included in the Exclusive Edition,
Get it: free demo, full game $10 from us, comes with a Steam key

On Hold

Things I didn’t finish, and probably won’t.

Crushed & Bungled

This was an idea for a choose your own adventure style game where every skill check would have an outlandish outcome if you rolled a critical success or a critical failure. The idea was to make content extremely cheap to make, usually just text, but even so 4 outcomes for every skill check ballooned in workload too fast for it to really ever make sense.

Made in: Unity
Prospects: not gonna finish

Civ-Style Experiment

I thought it was a shame that Civ: Beyond Earth didn’t change the very messy and complicated formula Civ has built up over the years. So I decided to spend all the time I would be playing Civ on making my own Civ-style game, to see if some of my theories about how it could be simplified work out. Taking it off my plate for now, might come back to it the next time I’m annoyed about complexity in 4x games.

Made in: Unity
Prospects: not gonna finish
More info: videos

The Grappling Hook Game

A game about a team of thieves using grappling hooks to help each other break into banks, hotels, casinos. Took a long time to get rope physics right as a Unity novice, ultimately decided Heat Signature was more viable with my skills at the time – and just as exciting.

Made in: Unity
Prospects: might revisit some day, needs a rethink
More info: dev log videos

Game Jam Games

I’ve made three or four smaller games for other game jams, and written up ideas for a bunch more. You can see all that on the Game Jams tag.

Can’t talk about the game till it comes out with our episode in September, but a few people took photos:

.@lizzywanders and @Pentadact 's anteater simulator at the @supergamejam party pic.twitter.com/60QTx8uhSy

— Ed Key (@edclef) May 23, 2014

He did it again!!! Playing @Pentadact's #SimAntics at the @LondonGameSpace… And it's awesome! *_* pic.twitter.com/5Jaqh5uu9o

— Alan Zucconi (@AlanZucconi) May 23, 2014

This means that for a few days I technically had four games in development, but this one is done now, Floating Point just needs a few promotional bits before I put it out, and Grappling Hook Game is shelved until Heat Signature, my main project, is done. Basically I’ve just had three weeks where I let myself dabble in other projects for a bit, but I’ve also made a load of progress on Heat Sig in that time, and I’ll be showing that off before long.

First ep of the documentary features JW Nijman of Vlambeer and Richard Boeser of Ibb and Obb, and like all eps comes with the game they made – a racing game about breakups. You buy the series on Steam once and then you get all five episodes and games as they come out (Windows only for now, though the video part will be tweaked to work on Mac next).

Your faults are not ‘your fault’ if you’re born with them, if they’re forced on you, if you didn’t know about them, or a whole variety of other conditions. Language forms organically and messily, and it only makes sense to talk about it in generalisations. But the most prevalent trend I can see in the types of faults that are not ‘your fault’ is this: they’re the ones you can’t reasonably change.

Back to the coffee: if I knew you had shaky hands, I might go one step further and say “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have given you one so full!” I could have prevented this problem, whereas you can’t really do anything about your shaky hands, at least not right now. If we really care about this coffee getting spilled, I’m the one who should change: I should remind myself to be more mindful of other people’s physical quirks. Or I should put less coffee in cups. Either way, the reason I give myself the blame is that there’s something I can do about it.

So far, the way we naturally behave is pretty logical. It makes sense that we have this urge to assign blame, because our feelings about where it should lie match up with who should take action to prevent the same problem from happening again. Not only is it not nice to yell at someone for being born with shaky hands, it also doesn’t get you anywhere: the problem won’t get solved.

So this is an effective way for social creatures to work: when a problem occurs, figure out who can do something to prevent it in future. Blame is an inbuilt tool to direct our energies towards the most effective course of correcting action.

The Self-Conscious Killer

But the question of who ‘can’ do something about a problem gets tricky, particularly as we start to understand more about the brain. This article starts with the story of a man who murdered 13 people and wounded 32 more, but left a suicide note requesting that his brain be autopsied after his death, because he felt something in him had changed and that was affecting his behaviour. The autopsy showed a tumour compressing his amygdala, which regulates fear and aggression. He’d even seen doctor for help, and while the note is vague, he evidently didn’t get it.

His fault? Could he have done something about it? Now that we know there was a physical cause for his urges, should we say he wasn’t to blame?

Irresistible Urges

You could claim that urges and emotions are just one input into the decision making process, and one always has the choice of whether to give in to them. I experience the hunger urge as the result of a biological cause, but I can choose to resist it. But what if I was at the point of starvation? I don’t know.

My one experience of an urge that feels completely beyond decision-making is vomiting. In mild illnesses sometimes you can repress it for a moment, but when you’re really ill, sometimes vomiting just happens. It’s an action, I’m still conscious, my body still moves as if under conscious control (I don’t collapse, for example), but I wouldn’t call it a choice, I wouldn’t say I could do anything about it, and I don’t really think it’s my fault.

Whether or not something feels like a choice gets us caught up in questions of free will, but my criteria for saying that vomiting was not a choice is that my intention not to do it had no effect on whether I did. I got to study this in great detail when I had 24-hour food poisoning once, and it happened exactly the same way whether I was in the most convenient and hygienic place to vomit, or in the middle of a full aeroplane. If someone had told me, “Throw up one more time and I’ll shoot your family,” I’d still have thrown up one more time. Nothing could affect the ‘choice’ to vomit, because it happened even when my intention not to do it was absolute. That’s my definition of not-a-choice.

A Blameless Society

In the case of the tumor sufferer, I think we have to say we don’t know what it was like to be him, or whether the urges were resistible or not. His note specifically refers to ‘deciding’ to commit these crimes ahead of time, but there’s good reason to believe a medical problem influenced those decisions.

As we start to understand more of the brain, maybe every instance of criminal behaviour will be traceable to physical trait of the brain that causes it. Is everything that we can explain that way ‘not your fault’? Could we get to a point where nothing is anyone’s fault? Would that even be a bad thing?

The reason we get in a tangle here is that we’re still focusing on where to put the blame. But as we’ve hopefully established, blame is just an emotional tool for guiding us towards who can take action to prevent future problems. In the tumor case, we don’t actually need to answer the question “Was he to blame?” because we already know what action should have been taken, and what action can be taken in future. (Also he’s dead.)

Pointless Punishment

So what about someone with a history of violence? Someone who’s repeatedly offended, even when they knew there’d be harsh punishment? Once we understand the brain well enough to point to a medical cause of this, are they still to blame? I don’t know. But the question of what to do about it is easier: it’s purely about preventing them from hurting more people.

‘Punishment’ as retribution no longer makes any sense: our urge for vengeance is an emotion that comes from a blame system too simple to apply coherently to our more nuanced understanding of human behaviour. Both in the justice system at large, and in our personal lives.

When you’re angry with someone for something they did, it’s worth remembering that the anger is just a tool to direct your attention to what needs to change. And it’s a crude one. It’s still worth rationally checking: what’s the best way to prevent this from being a problem again? It might be lashing out, but it usually isn’t.

The only thing that matters is prevention. And our greater understanding of the mind might influence how we do that.

Unsettling Cures

That will be our next ethical tangle. Once we know the medical causes of more types of criminal behaviour, we might also know the medical ‘cures’. Maybe that violent re-offender just has too much of one hormone, and we can give him an operation to produce less of it. Once we see behaviour as having a medical cause, when do our ‘cures’ become brainwashing?

It seems scary to start modifying people’s personalities to fit our norms, yet it would seem natural to cut out that shooter’s tumor if we’d found it before he died. In that case, he actually wanted to be cured. But what if his tumor-induced urges included the urge to stay the way he was? Clearly we can’t let him kill again, but can we still cut out the tumor? Can we modify someone’s desires when they don’t want us to?

The uncomfortable truth, of course, is that we already do this in some cases. But it’s going to get stranger, and stickier, and harder to agree on as more and more undesirable behaviour maps to physical things we can intentionally change.

• How my dreams of a job in finance were dashed by the cruel machine of games journalism.
• How I learned review scores are great and you can trust them.
• Crusader: No Remorse was badass and we will both tell you why.
• Why enemies in The Punisher aren’t allowed to dislike torture.
• My thesis on the ethics of teleportation by replication.
• FEAR’s slide-kick does like 10,000 damage for some reason.
• I made a cave in Blood, Steve made a cave in Duke.
• Blood had voxel graves, excellent weapons.
• Why expressionless Half-Life 2 civilians jump for joy at the end of my mod BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA.
• Human & Sons: Carbon-Based Detective Agency and the game it became (Gunpoint).
• The emergent way to deal with the Intex agent in Gunpoint: embarass him.

What you won’t hear is anything about Heat Signature, because I hadn’t thought it up at the time.

You can subscribe to it there, or grab the MP3 directly, or click play below:

Luck And Guilt

The list of dumb-luck things that had to align for it to go so well is too long to write, so it’s not really a ‘just try hard and you can do anything!’ story. Also, annoyingly, all my friends and family were really supportive and encouraging, so I have no-one to say “Ha!” to. Just a truckload of guilt at all the talented people who made good things that didn’t catch on, or don’t have the luxury of enough free weekends to make something at all.

The only person I don’t feel any guilt towards is the alternate universe Tom who never bothered. I almost didn’t. Someone had to make literally one of my favourite games ever in literally one of the easiest tools ever before I got as far as “Fine, I guess I’ll try it.” Even then, I almost gave up. Not due to any hardship or preventative circumstances, I just sort of forgot about it for two months.

I think even if Gunpoint had failed commercially, I’d still be looking down my nose at the alterno-Tom who had the skills and time to explore all his game design obsessions and never tried. As it is, it’s unlocked a sort of secret game mode in life that I didn’t know existed, where you get to just stay home and tinker around making games.

My leaving/launch party

Weirdness

That part is still very surreal. The really weird moment was during launch week, when the sales passed the point at which I’d told myself I’d quit my job. Since I was already on sabbatical, I could hand in my notice early enough to never even go back. And I was standing in my bedroom when I realised: that’s it. The problem of life requiring me to leave this room is now solved – I could just stay here if I wanted. I didn’t, obviously, but that hook of responsibility that drags you out of bed to school or work each day had just suddenly let go for the first time ever, and I had that dizzying stillness you get when stepping onto a broken escalator.

The other strange thing is being independent. Not just corporately, but starting to think of yourself personally as your job, boss, employee, and identity. I defined myself so much as ‘working for PC Gamer’, it was weird to let that go and have nothing external to cling to anymore. If I die in a car crash now, the company that employs me shuts down. That’s a weird thought.

New Friends

I guess I’m actually more defined by an external thing than ever before, it’s just a smaller and more specific one. And I’m lucky that Gunpoint is actually pretty representative: it tells you what games I like and what I find funny.

Now that I can afford to go to conventions, it’s amazing how people’s games change your social interactions with them. If they’ve made something you like, and you’ve made something they like, you get to skip straight to being friends. I like to think I would have eventually got to know most of the people I made friends with this year, but as a mumbly, socially awkward introvert, I’m massively grateful for that headstart in coming-to-give-a-shit-about-each-other.

That’s probably exceeded my self-indulgence quota for the year, just wanted to share what some of the emotional weirdpoints of this amazing year have been like for me. Profound thanks again to all of you who made it happen. If I had emotions I would probably cry or something dumb like that.

–

Clack. “I love you. Everything’s OK. I’m coming back.” Clack.

I don’t know what this place is. Everyone here looks so lost. They just sit there, in wheelchairs, looking lost. No-one’s helping them, and it’s heartbreaking, but I don’t know what I can do.

I wish I knew where Chris was. The bathroom? I want to ask him what we’re doing here, when we can leave.

It smells of, I don’t know, ointment. I don’t know which ointment, but it feels like it would be an ointment. I feel like the people here need a lot of ointment.

He’s taking a long time. I don’t know how long now. I have this after-image of him in that armchair, like he just got up for a second, but maybe he’s been gone a long time.

I’m worried now. I’m worried about me. I feel like this isn’t normal, not to know these things. I feel like I’m in a dream. I feel lost.

I suddenly realise there’s something in my hand. I don’t recognise it. It’s boxy and smooth and grey. My hands know it but I don’t know why and I’m scared and sick at how lost I am now.

I think Chris has gone. I think he’s just gone, and I’ll never know why or what I did wrong or what this place is.

My thumb is on a button and it wants to push it.

Clack. “I love you. Everything’s OK. I’m coming back to pick you up at six, same as always.”

For my parents’ birthdays, I made a physical version of the excellent iOS word game Letterpress. This makes me a terrible pirate, I hope no-one minds. I made this video to explain it to them.

So on Saturday we had a Gunpoint-themed pizza and bourbon leaving party. And melon. It was thematically confused, but excellent.

This might surprise you, but sitting in an office full of your friends while playing and writing about videogames is a really great job. I’ll miss it. Happily, though, I’m not giving up games writing or leaving town, so I’ll still get to hang out with most of these people.

I generally avoided talking about games writing itself when it was my job, but now seems like a good time to think about it a bit. So I plan to do a few posts on the topic this week, starting with the five most important things I learned in nine years of doing it full time.

It’s also a big part of the gaming world I’ve been missing out on, and my current phone, er, doesn’t work in America. So I felt like I could justify this as my first proper extravagance.

Having never owned an Apple product before, but having heard a lot about their design, I thought it might be interesting to share my first experience attempting to use an iPhone 5. I was wrong, it was really long and boring. But at some point I just had to start writing it down just to get the baffling chain of madness out of my head.

Start

Your phone can track your location, do you want it to?

Yes! I’m particularly excited about knowing where the fuck I am on maps.

It asks for my password.

I painstakingly type my compulsorily multi-case, numbers-and-letters password out on the tiny keyboard, which doesn’t go into full size mode if you turn the phone on its side.

Open up Safari.

Safari wants to track your location!

Yes, to this too.

Let’s look for something on the internet!

The address bar won’t let me use spaces, and there’s no search bar.

I manually type in google.com for the first time since 1996.

I decide the thing I should be searching for is a browser that isn’t this one, so I try Firefox.

Firefox only supports Google’s operating system, Android.

Search for Google’s browser. Theirs does support Apple’s operating system – hurray!

I’m taken to Chrome on the app store.

This is a page with absolutely no link or button or text that says anything to the effect of download, install, get, acquire, have it, yes, accept, put this thing on my phone. It’s just info and shots.

I keep looking. I’m a veteran of Windows software download sites, I’ve spent thousands of man hours looking for Download buttons. Surely I can crack this.

Still looking.

In desperation, I try tapping literally everything on screen – the word ‘Chrome’, the Chrome icon, the word ‘Google’, even the word ‘FREE’. Nothing does anything.

After much more puzzlement, I eventually discover you DO have to touch the word ‘FREE’ in order to make it go away, to reveal an ‘Install’ button that is invisibly hidden behind it. The first time I pressed that it presumably just didn’t register.

It asks for my password.

I painstakingly type my compulsorily multi-case, numbers-and-letters password out on the tiny keyboard, which doesn’t go into full size mode if you turn the phone on its side.

It asks for my credit card details.

Am I buying it now? Was the FREE thing just sort of theoretical? Does Chrome have in-app purchases?

Also, didn’t I just sign in to my Apple account, twice, which I stored all my card details on?

I don’t have time to enter it all on this tiny keyboard right now, so I give up and decide to try maps.

This time Safari has added a Search bar next to the Address bar anyway, so it’s usable for now.

I know I should get the Google Maps app because the Apple one is apparently bad, but I haven’t learnt how you search for new apps yet, so I go to the web version and follow the redirect.

Google wants to track your location!

Yes.

The app page, again, has no download or install link, but I know the trick now: tap FREE to find the secret button!

It asks for my credit card details.

I’m on a bus at this point, so I type them in. Some are already filled in, but it’s forgotten a few.

It asks me to create a security question. I say “Not now”

It takes me back to the App page – nothing’s changed, it’s not installing.

I try again.

It asks for my password.

I painstakingly type my compulsorily multi-case, numbers-and-letters password out on the tiny keyboard, which doesn’t go into full size mode if you turn the phone on its side.

It asks me to create a security question.

OK, I get the passive-aggressive hint, you’re saying I have to. ‘Continue’.

It asks for my password.

Jesus Christ.

I painstakingly type my compulsorily multi-case, numbers-and-letters password out on the tiny keyboard, which doesn’t go into full size mode if you turn the phone on its side.

I choose a security question from the list, and type my answer.

It asks me to pick a security question. I have to pick THREE.

This is actually a problem – you only have about 6 to select from, you can’t enter your own, and I’ve already chosen the only one I can answer. The rest are things like “Who was your favourite movie star when you were a teenager?” I didn’t have one. Every other question either doesn’t apply to me or is asking something I don’t remember now, let alone in a year’s time when I have to answer this to get my password back.

As I’m deciding, the screen shuts off.

I wake it up and unlock it, and I’m back on the app store.

I go through the Settings to see if I can get back to where I was setting up these questions. There’s nothing about Security in the Settings.

I try on my PC, logging into my Apple account and checking Security. There, I’ve already set a security question long ago, different to the one I just chose on my phone, and it only needs one. In fact there’s no way to set more. It seems to be completely separate, despite being for the username, password and account.

Back on the phone, the only way I can think to get back to that screen is to try installing something from the App Store again.

It asks for my password.

I painstakingly type my compulsorily multi-case, numbers-and-letters password out on the tiny keyboard, which doesn’t go into full size mode if you turn the phone on its side.

It asks me to create a security question. Yes, great, that’s what I’m here to do.

It asks for my password.

Fin

I’m not as grouchy about this as it probably sounds – I generally assume all technology will cause me about this much hassle to set up. This was worse than most, but I don’t really mind. I’m just more baffled than ever by the way so many people talk about Apple’s interface design and ‘seamless’, ‘magic’, ‘just works’ user experience. There must just be a set of people who see the word ‘FREE’ and instinctively poke it, and for them, the rest of this presumably makes sense too.

But! Editor David Malki is also Kickstarting a card game based on the same concept, and since it’s blown its funding goal by over 1000%, they’re releasing a few stories from the anthology to say thanks.

One of them is mine! You can read it now! Here it is!

It’s about a supervillain’s henchman tasked with the job of having their enemies killed in a way that doesn’t contradict their predicted deaths. It is called: LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE!

If you can’t read it, go here.

But I spend a lot of time thinking about whether there’s a way to contribute to a discussion without derailing it. Whether there’s some way of knowing, in advance, that what you’re about to say will make you look like an asshole, start a fight, or be outright wrong.

I think there is.

The problem

There’s a common thread in a lot of the unhelpful and offensive things we say. I only started to spot it after I realised a few things:

1. We don’t know anything.

Most of the things we think and talk about are things we have no certain knowledge about. It’s scary and stupid how fiercely I’ll defend claims I have never verified for myself – I just heard them from sources I trust.

I trust my dad. I trust the consensus of the scientific community. I trust my gut, which is filled with 31 years of passively absorbed half-truths from television, the internet, and hearsay.

But all those things have been wrong, and worse, I’m often unaware that I’m even trusting them. I just think I know things. But beyond my own thoughts and immediate, specific experiences, I don’t.

2. People are different.

I don’t know how different yet, but every time I think I know how different, I meet someone even more different.

So almost anything I say about a group of people will be wrong. And even if it’s only about one person, my picture of them is 1% observed behaviour and 99% conjecture from my own experience. Anything based on the latter is liable to be offensively inaccurate.

3. We like to simplify.

I did it right there. We don’t all like to simplify, and we don’t like to simplify all the time. But I cut those qualifiers out because shorter and snappier sounds better in my head. Maybe it does in yours too. I don’t know, because I don’t know anything, people are different, and I shouldn’t simplify.

The instinct to simplify before you speak can convert a specific and true experience into something harmful, wrong, or both.

The process

Too often, we do something like this:

I’ve seen X be false, and people I trust say it’s false.
Becomes:
I don’t believe X, no-one in their right mind does.
Becomes:
If you think X, you’re a moron.

This process of assholification generally isn’t conscious, but too many of us have come out with that third line. We take specific experiences we can be reasonably sure of (1), conclude more than we could possibly know from them (2), extend that to presume things about other people (2), then simplify it into a neatly prickish generalisation (3).

Simple statements deal collateral damage. You insult people you didn’t mean to. You sound more hostile than you intended. And you seem to be claiming things you don’t actually believe. That’s often how an argument turns into a fight, and any chance of progress dies.

The solution

“Don’t do that” seems like a good solution. But it’s hard to just change the way your brain decides how to say something.

Luckily, most of the fights we waste our time and energy on happen in text, which we can check before we send. Do I know this first hand? Am I claiming something about someone else? Am I generalising for the sake of simplicity?

The way I’ve started to think of it is this:

Share your experiences, not your opinions

You’ll always form opinions, but they need to be flexible. They need to reflect the data, and the data available to us is always changing.

Experiences are the data. What you’ve seen, what you’ve felt. By sharing the data itself, rather than your conclusions from it, you give other people more data on which to base their opinions.

It seems meek. But experiences can be incredibly powerful in changing people’s minds. I’ve never had an “Oh shit, I was wrong” revelation from someone calling me an idiot – every one I can remember came from hearing a different perspective.

• I didn’t realise this thing affected you that much.
• I didn’t realise there were people in that situation.
• I’d never imagined how it would feel for someone who’d been through that.

And stating your opinion also makes you less receptive to that data. When I used to do it, I felt a neurotic urge to defend my position when new information seemed to threaten it. Saying it locked it in place. But an opinion you’ve never stated can be changed without damaging your pride.

It’s been like that for two years, and there were a six things I wanted to change:

1. A title

I’ve always struggled with this – I like to be clear and descriptive, but most personal blog titles make me cringe. I also have a bad name for possessive apostrophes, so “Tom Francis’s Blog” is just painful. I used to avoid the issue by naming it something completely irrelevant, like ‘Ugly Fruit’ or at one point ‘Politics’. Then I avoided it by removing the name completely, so the last few iterations have had no title at all.

This time, I was determined to have one even if I immediately regretted it. After trying several I immediately regretted, I gave up and left it as the placeholder: “Tom Francis Regrets This Already”. I still regretted it, but neatly, the more I regretted it the more appropriate it became.

2. An intro

I looked at a lot of people’s personal sites to figure out how to improve mine, and it’s weird how many of them don’t explain who the hell the person is until you rummage around. In the spirit of explaining things to assholes, I really wanted to do a better job of that. The previous site did it in a few terse, reluctant words, so I tried to make it a bit friendlier this time.

I also think a lot of us are still under the impression that the ‘home page’ is where people arrive, and then they delve into the ‘post pages’ from there. In reality, most people discover sites when they’re linked to a particular page, so they’re more likely to see a particular post first. That’s why the new intro’s on every page.

3. Responsive design

Literally more than half of internet users are browsing from a mobile device now. And they vary wildly in resolution. I’ve never liked fixed-width designs, and I’ve never had one here, but previous versions all needed a resolution of at least 1024 pixels wide. They were basically useless on mobile phones.

Rather than make a separate mobile version, which’d scale badly to the huge middle ground between a Retina iMac and a first-gen smartphone, I’ve made the whole design resolution-agnostic. Try resizing the browser window – it should adapt all the way down to about 250 pixels wide, so it should be readable and usable on anything beyond a scientific calculator.

I’m also using Matt Wilcox’s Adaptive Images code to automatically resize images to your screen width before you download them, so smaller-res devices don’t download unnecessarily big images.

4. Bigger images

At the other end of the scale, it’s ridiculous how many sites look awful at 1920×1080. That’s by far the most common resolution now, and the internet at that res is a sad ocean of wasted space around unreadable text. I wanted to make sure everything expanded at high resolutions, and I particularly wanted big, sharp, colourful images. Most of the games I write about are gorgeous, and it always makes me sad to see them relegated to little thumbnails.

5. More featured posts

Previous designs did have a column for posts I wanted to highlight, but it was a clumsy JavaScript array I had to manually text-edit every time I wanted to add something new. So I never did. This time, I wanted those to be bold, colourful little badges, with clearer titles, and a much easier way to add to them. I can just add a tag to any post to add it to the rotation there, so I’ll be expanding that set as we go. You can also read all 30 with the link at the bottom of the right column.

6. Ways to subscribe

I realise not everyone uses an RSS reader – even Google, who make the best one, are basically abandoning it. I’m still keeping it, but I’ve now set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account that only ever post when I publish something here.

I think that’s it! Big thanks to Westley Knight, Jenn Frank and Graham Smith for testing and help. As ever, let me know in the comments if anything’s broken. If anyone’s interested in the stats, we’ve just passed 26,000 comments, this is roughly the 600th post (I deleted a few), and so far 1.4 million people have been here. Wow.

Oi, aren’t you making a game?

I am, but I haven’t finished it yet. I’ve learnt a lot so far, though, and at Minecon in November, I gave a talk about what I’ve learned so far, and what I’d do differently if I was making my first game today. Here it is!

 
I don’t argue on the internet anymore, but I have some ideas on how to do it without defeating yourself and also human decency.

Update: This post now has a sort of sequel, suggesting ways to contribute to an argument without being an asshole.

Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, First Class

Doing maths and philosophy at the same time made sense to me, but then in a Relativity module I found out that simultaneity depends on your inertial frame, so now I’m not even sure I did.

My dissertation was on the ethics of teleportation by replication: scan, clone, destroy the original. Like in that movie I can’t mention, because it’s a spoiler for that movie.

2004-present: writer and editor at PC Gamer

Games Media Award for Best Specialist Games Writer in Print

I was assembling skateboards in a warehouse when a staff writer job opened up at PC Gamer. I didn’t get it. But later I got a job doing their coverdiscs, and successfully got myself demoted to writer a year or two in.

2012-present: director, Suspicious Developments

Finalist, Independent Games Festival Award for Excellence in Design

I entered Gunpoint into the IGF mainly to get feedback from the judges. Becoming a finalist was an extremely expensive accident: I tragically had to fly to San Francisco to attend the swanky awards ceremony and related parties.

The winner of the Excellence in Design category was Spelunky, the game that spurred me to make games in the first place. Even I would have voted for it.

“No-one could have foreseen this,” said company director Tom Francis, shortly before the result. Francis controls 100% of the company’s shares, beating its second largest stakeholder Sylvester McCoy, who controls 0% and is not aware the company exists.

“I don’t know who you are,” McCoy said.

The break-in is said to have occured when Francis attempted to enter the building, which is also his house, and found one of its two locks unresponsive to key-based opening techniques. No local locksmiths were available, so an emergency meeting of the board of director was held.

By a unanimous vote of one to no-one else was there, the board elected to not be outside anymore. The board then climbed a nearby railing to achieve the necessary height to strike at the non-functioning lock, and extended its foot with force. The lock, which was not available for comment, detached from the internal door frame after six strikes.

“Fuck,” the board announced.

The developer’s headquarters are now secured with the remaining functional lock. The board then poured itself a glass of wine and fell asleep watching Justified.

Gmail’s new look is optional – FOR NOW – in the same way that Twitter’s was – FOR A WHILE THERE. And like Twitter’s, it’s sort of vaguely pretty but twice as awkward to use for all of my most common tasks.

I just found a script that lops off most of the wasted headspace that scrunches all the e-mails down, even in Compact mode, and it’s made a huge difference for me.

Works natively in Chrome, needs Greasemonkey in Firefox.

It’s weird how all the extra spacing made the default view look claustrophobic. To a certain mindset, white space isn’t open air, it’s the walls closing in.

Until it came out.

It’s flattering to be in such wonderful company, of course, but I can’t help wincing at the way EXPLODED painstakingly re-explains the concept, and details the creation of the machine as if you’ve never heard of such a thing.

Explaining yourself clearly is the first thing you learn in games writing, but it totally backfired for me in this context. And I hadn’t thought about how heavy a collection of stories about people who know how they’ll die could be. EXPLODED has jokes, but it dwells on its deaths.

One of my favourites in the collection is TORN APART AND DEVOURED BY LIONS, because it’s such a breath of fresh air. It doesn’t explain the concept, and it doesn’t even really have a plot, but it’s so funny, breezy and fun that you don’t want it to end.

The third demoralising thing I realised reading Machine of Death was that I suddenly had a much, much better idea for a story on this concept.

The crux of so many stories comes down to that Can’t Beat The Machine rule, and I got thinking about what would happen if you started from that. If the characters in your story had all read this whole collection, and were intimately familiar with the weird ways fate would bend itself to make the machine’s predictions come true. And then you tried to write an action film.

That’s when Machine of Death 2 was announced, and it wasn’t a hard decision to enter. Writing EXPLODED was a quick and enormously fun process, a handful of evenings, something I’d do again without any hope of inclusion.

So I wrote out the story idea I’d been kicking around, looked at it, and ditched it.

The problem was that it was about heroes – soldiers, really, but soldiers about whom I could only ever say one of a few things:

• YAY hero soldiers!
• WAIT some soldiers are jerks!
• GUYS war can be bad sometimes.
• OOH maybe what they’re fighting for is CONTROVERSIAL?

These are the four worst story concepts ever. And they don’t exactly lend themselves to the light, breezy tone I wanted to steal from DEVOURED.

The truth is, I don’t give a shit about fictional soldiers. I’ve watched them, been them, killed them more times than makes sense. I just liked the concept of how these guys would work in a Machine of Death world, how they would use that to their advantage, and wanted to write a story where things worked like that.

Really, the only interesting thing I could ask about some Machine of Death-enhanced superheroes was “What would it be like to fight them?” It would fucking suck. It would be like fighting the player in a videogame, or the hero in a movie – the asshole all the bullets miss, for whom every twist of physics seems to land in his favour.

What’s that like? Ask a supervillain. Actually, ask his henchmen.

LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE is about three henchpersons, the supervillain they work for, and the supersoldier superheroes who keep fucking up their shit.

It got accepted into the Machine of Death 2 collection on my birthday, and I danced around the room like an imbecile.

If you try to explain how much stuff you’ve entrusted exclusively to Google, then replace the word ‘Google’ with any other company name, it starts to sound terrifyingly stupid.

Backing up is surprisingly easy, though. You can’t do it via that weird Data Liberation Front thing they keep shouting about – that’s just for, like, status updates and Picasa for some reason. But for mail and docs, the two things I care about, neither method is hard.

The simplest way to have a local copy of all your Gmail is to install a mail client like Thunderbird, which is free and quite pretty these days, and tell Gmail to let you download it with that. Click the cog in the top right, go to Mail settings > Forwarding > Enable POP for all mail.

If you go with Thunderbird, the next bit is weirdly easy. It asks for your e-mail address and password, and then figures out what all the POP and SMTP servers should be automatically. Last time I messed with that stuff, you had to actually make a phone call to find it out. I am old.

Then you just check mail, and you’ll have about 20,000 new messages. Any time you want to update this backup, fire up Thunderbird and check again.

Google now has an in-built way to back up all your documents. Right click any one of them, and sneak past the two battling context menus to find the Download option.

In there you’ll find an ‘all items’ tab at the top – click that and you can pick what formats you prefer for each document type, then click a big download button to receive them all in one big zip. Surprisingly it was only about 300MB for me (1,000 odd docs).

Digging through all this old stuff has reminded me that for a brief golden age, a group of us managed to introduce “Snakes on a Plane” as a general expression of nonchalance – a sort of “Whaddya gonna do?” As if to suggest that in a world where snakes can be encountered on planes, anything less troubling is trivial.

Person 1: I’m not even dressed yet.
Person 2: But you got home before me!
Person 1: Snakes on a Plane.

Or: I’m Completely Misunderstanding Google+

The main part of Google+ is a social updates feed like Facebook or Twitter. With Facebook, you have to confirm someone as your friend before they see your updates. With Twitter, anyone can see your updates without asking permission, unless you make a special ‘locked’ account. With Google+… Christ.

Sometimes when I think about it, it seems like the best of both worlds. But then I try to use it again.

If I’m misunderstanding, please let me know – most of my complaints are of the form “You can’t do X, except by awkward method Y, and even then not really.” I’ve looked, but if there’s a proper way to do X that I’m missing, I’d like to know.

Bad news, guys. Notch said one thing, so now that’s all I can see of my feed without scrolling. On the plus side, I completely agree with him here.

To add someone, you have to put them in at least one Circle – the default ones are stuff like Friends, Family, Work. You don’t need their permission, like Twitter, but just adding them doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll ever see anything they say. That’ll only happen if they also put you in a circle, and then make a post that’s tagged with that circle, or if they make a new post and tag it as Public.

You can sort of see the idea: you might conceivably want to say something to your friends but not your family, so this is a sort of highly customisable privacy. But there are all kinds of baffling, awkward, clumsy things about the system that make it completely counter-intuitive, painful to think about and confusing to use.

1. It assumes you want to read everything everyone in every circle you make ever says. Your homepage is always an aggregate of all posts from everyone in your circles, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to customise that. You can click individual Circles to see what people you’ve put in those are saying, but there’s no easy way of clicking all the ones you care about and seeing an aggregate feed of those. Short of creating and then maintaining a separate circle that you have to update any time you update any one of the circles you want to include in it.
2. It assumes that the people you want to read are the same people you want to broadcast to. So if I make a ‘Team Fortress 2’ circle to post nerdy comments only TF2 players might care about, Google+ assumes I want to a) follow everyone I allow to see those posts in my general feed, and b) populate my Team Fortress 2 circle with everything those people say.
3. I can only categorise posts by who they’re by, not what they’re about. If I have a PC Gamer circle, and everyone at PC Gamer does, and we only post PC Gamer talk to our PC Gamer circles, I’ll still see all that stuff in my general feed, and since these guys are also my friends, I’ll also see all that work talk in my Friends circle. As far as I can see, there’s no way for my work friends and I to ever keep our work talk separate from our social plans, say. That’s less of a problem when you work for PC Gamer, but it seems like an incredibly common distinction to want, and the kind of thing the Circles system was built to address.
4. You can’t see what circles people have put you in, but they’re not exactly private either. For one, if you don’t manually disable resharing on each post, anyone in the circle you post it to can share it to people outside that circle. Which may well include people who are in your circles and wonder why they didn’t see that post from you in the first place. If you do disable resharing each time, because the people you’re sharing to don’t know what circle they’re in and who is or isn’t in it, they have no way of knowing who they can say “Hey, did you hear Dave’s having a party/baby/midlife crisis?” to without causing awkwardness.
5. Every time I have ever gone to post something, the default circle to post it to is one I have never posted to before and never would. It’s different every time.

Ultimately, it assumes the main thing you care about in life is preventing certain people from seeing certain things you say online, but that you don’t much care what you read. That’s the exact opposite of my relationship with the internet.

I would never broadcast anything, even on Facebook, I wasn’t happy for the world to see – the internet is now 60% fueled by screenshots of people doing that. But I’m incredibly fussy about whose thoughts I want to mainline.

The running joke, the universal truth, the most crushingly obvious thing about social networking since the moment it took off is this: there’s a vast gap between the number of people I like and the number of people whose verbal newsletter I want to subscribe to.

The two big social networks are both terrible at acknowledging that. Facebook won’t let me follow anyone unless I claim they’re my friend and they confirm it. Twitter won’t let me filter out people I like but don’t want to hear every thought from except with lists, which still don’t work properly and are getting harder to access with each new design. Now, Google have come out with something that combines the worst of both worlds in a manner so confusing that it’s taken me a week to figure out what it even is.

Or: Google have done something else in a manner so confusing that it’s taken me a week to fail to figure out what it is.

In the comments, Johannes Spielmann said this:

Johannes: Great article!

For a more nuanced (and scientifically proven) view on the topic, have a look at this Google Tech Talk by David Rock.

The video he links, the one I’m about to embed, has changed the way I think. It’s like being given the owner’s manual to your brain after 29 years of muddling along with the default settings. It’s not only spectacularly improved my understanding of how people behave and why we feel what we feel, it’s actually made me more consistently happy.

It’s an hour long, which I know isn’t cool on the internet, but I promise you won’t regret watching it. If you don’t have time, I’ll summarise the most mind-blowing things in it below.
 

Concentrating makes it hard to have ideas

Our brains store a crazy amount of information. If you’ve had that nostalgic flood of memories on seeing a toy you had at 5 years old, you have some idea of just how much is kept in there. But logical thought, the kind we use when we’re focusing on a problem and trying to solve it intelligently, is all handled by the prefrontal cortex.

That’s a tiny area of the brain with an even tinier capacity for information – it can only hold a small amount at once. So we load the info about a problem into it, then crunch that information in a logical way.

When we do that, the rest of the brain isn’t doing much. All our activity is focused on logically processing that chunk of data we decided was relevant. Which is good if that really is everything relevant to the problem and the solution. For a problem like 8+12, it probably is.

But for more real-world problems, we can’t cram the vast amount of data that might be tangentially relevant into that tiny prefrontal cortex. We have to pick a small set of information and process just that. And while we do, all that other information goes unexamined, because the rest of the brain is being neglected.

This dog is trying to distract you from the fact that I have no relevant images for this post. Is it working?

When we stop concentrating on the problem, the rest of our brain wakes up, all that information is available to us, and we stop thinking in such a focused, rigorous way. So we’re not being totally logical, but we do suddenly have the capacity to notice weak connections between pieces of information stored in that vast databank in the rest of our brain – a capacity we didn’t have thirty seconds ago.

With what we’ve already figured out logically, often new bits of information light up in the rest of our brain as being relevant. And that, briefly, is why you have your best ideas in the bathroom.

It’s when you stop concentrating that non-obvious ideas can strike, and in complex problems these are often the really game-changing ones.

Even small worries and threats destroy your ability to think clearly or well

The big, powerful, illogical subconscious can’t do much when your prefrontal cortex is busy focusing on something. But both are completely crippled any time there is even the slightest possibility of harm coming to us. We have evolved to be ridiculously skittish, and at the smallest danger our limbic system completely takes over. Instinct, basically.

In modern life, it’s often useless or inappropriate. And while it’s engaged, we lose the ability to think rationally, we lose the ability to have inspired ideas, and we even lose basic functions like short term memory. We instantly and massively suck, and it lasts for ages.

Social threats have the same effect as physical threats

The traditional model of psychology says that survival concerns are ‘primary’ – deeper, stronger and more instinctive – and others, including social concerns, are secondary. Nice if we can get them.

The behaviour of the brain doesn’t correlate to that. Our reaction to social threats, like insults, is not only as strong as our reaction to physical threats, it’s the same.

If you can’t focus on your work because your leg hurts, you can take an asprin, the pain goes away and you can focus again. If you can’t focus on your work because someone called you incompetent yesterday, you can take an asprin, the pain goes away and you can focus again.

Our five main social concerns spell out SCARF

So we’re incredibly affected by social threats, but what’s a social threat? What do we need, socially, that we’re scared of losing?

Status: What other people think of us, and how they treat us. If people will think less of us for something, we are terrified of it.

Certainty: How sure are we that our current status will continue? If we hear some redundancies are coming, we haven’t lost any status yet, but suddenly Certainty takes a huge hit, and we feel a massive, instinctive threat.

Autonomy: Is my fate in my own hands? If you propose putting me in a position where I’m heavily dependent on someone else, I feel threatened.

Relatedness: Do I care about this person or thing? Friends and blood relatives have high ‘relatedness’, and we feel empathy for them and listen to what they say. Everyone else is perceived as an enemy by default: we don’t instinctively feel their pain, and we don’t even picture what they’re saying unless we consciously try to. The only exceptions are attractive people, babies, and everyone – when we’re drunk.

Fairness: Pretty self-explanatory. If you give a raise to the new guy, I get a Fairness threat even though my status hasn’t gone up or down.

Understanding threats makes them cripple your brain less

This panic effect, the way a threat consumes your brain and cripples your ability to think clearly, is partially avoidable.

I’ve often had a feeling of dread, or panic, or anger, without quite being able to articulate what my problem is. So that’s what my brain does, for the next hour. I don’t listen to anyone or get anything done, I just re-run the narrative of what’s going on in my head until I can sort of cobble together a whiny complaint about it that I could conceivable say out loud if I decide to speak up.

In an hour.

I write for a living, and I studied putting words to abstract things for three years at uni. What the hell is wrong with me?

What was wrong with me was I didn’t have names for the kinds of threats I feel when something potentially unpleasant happens socially. I didn’t understand why they occurred or what they wanted from me. That meant not only did they affect me more, the way they affected me also hindered my ability to give them names or start understanding them.

When you do have a quick, rough guide to the basic types, your brain is dramatically better at compartmentalising them and retaining the rest of its normal functions. All you need to think is “Eek – OK, that’s my certainty being threatened,” and you won’t revert to an angry, idiot animal state controlled by your limbic system. You have a sec to think “OK, I know why that is, let’s deal with it.” And that, too, dramatically reduces the brain-shrinking panic of the thing.

That’s why this talk went beyond interesting and all the way to life-improving, for me. Thanks, Johannes!

This 500th post calls for MINIMUM CONTENT and MAXIMUM STATS. They start from when the site moved to Pentadact.com in February 2008, and the graph looks a bit like this (click for readable size):

Special thanks to Chris Livingston for being my biggest human referrer, which will make him vital when the robot referrers rise up against the human referrers and we need some muscle. He’s also writing about film and TV as well as games these days, with his wife – bafflingly also called Kris Livingston. It is awesome to have him back on the blogonets, and some of his amazing old stuff like his Merchants of Brooklyn screenplay is finally back online.

BACK TO STATS.

Apparently- wow, the Left 4 Dead gnome thing is my most visited post ever? Here’s the confusing list:

1. I Played Through Left 4 Dead 2 Holding A Goddamn Gnome
The only thing I know about how StumbleUpon works is that it rewires the internet so that this post is disproportionately popular, forever.

2. I Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome
My SEO seminar is entitled Goddamn Gnomes and How Holding Them Can Grow Your Demographic.

3. Team Fortress 2 Unlockable Ideas
Proof that if you can’t do something well, do it anyway.

4. Ending BioShock
Imagine this post spluttered loudly and indecipherably by a drunk, and you know what I’m like to hang out with.

5. This Is All I Can Think During StarCraft 2’s Cut Scenes
Can’t help noticing the popularity of posts in which I write little or nothing at all.

6. Fallout Girl: Striking Out
Thousands of people saw this! Almost none of them were inspired to read the next or previous entries! Ouch.

7. Far Cry 2: Impersonation Of A Buddy
Thanks to a celebrity cameo in the comments – cheers, Clint!

8. Plants Vs Zombies: Lawns I Have Loved
Wow. OK, no idea.

9. The Best And The Worst Of Mass Effect 2 (Spoiler Safe)
Venting pent up opinion from not getting to review it.

10. A Stab At Meet The Spy
Which, as everyone pointed out, was too long. Then Meet The Spy actually came out, and was more than twice as long as every other video in the series. IN YOUR FACE, people with a reasonable point!

More importantly, we just passed 10,000 comments, and that is tough to comprehend. Even after six years, this place almost never gets a “first!” or a “meh”, so that’s 9,900 worthwhile contributions – more than I’ll ever make myself. Thanks, everyone.

*hic*

The reason we want things isn’t that they’ll make us happy.

Often, getting what you want does give you a little rush of happiness. We can be fooled into thinking this is the sensation of having that thing. In fact, of course, it’s the sensation of getting it. We are feeling the change in our status, not its new level. Which is why it fades.

We expect this relationship:

But we get something more like this:

As a long-term strategy for pursuing happiness, you can see chasing success clearly isn’t going to work. You’d have to be consistently improving your lot to stay happy, and if you ever hit your potential, you’d flatline. This type of happiness – you could call it Gain Happiness – is fleeting.

One consolation is that the reverse is true: if a major loss doesn’t have recurring consequences, you only feel it temporarily. Before long, you’re back to your previous level of happiness even if you’re worse off. A study in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology (PDF) explored the subjective well-being of 118 people over two years, and found that neither positive nor negative events had a lasting effect on their reported happiness beyond three to six months.

So Gain Happiness is hard to gain, but Loss Misery is easy to lose. We’re surprisingly stable. Within that, how do we get happier? Here’s what I have so far:

1. Be ruthless about getting away from sources of misery.

I can’t help you with this, but it’s worth acknowledging its importance. I’ve only talked about what happens in the positive bit of the happiness chart – if you’re actively unhappy and there’s an external cause, obviously getting permanently away from it is your only priority.

For me, the only times I’ve been truly unhappy have been when I was living with people I didn’t like. Once I managed to get away, every type of happiness got a hell of a lot easier.

Disclaimer: try not to kill anyone.
 

2. Do something because you enjoy the process, not the result.

Ideally for a living. There are two particularly great things about my job: writing, and feedback. If feedback was the only one I enjoyed, I’d be miserable.

It’s the result, and if you’re anything like me, getting a great result makes a good one disappointing. It’s Gain Happiness with ever-increasing expectations, which leads to a constant war of neuroses. You can’t let your happiness be dependent on something like that.

Luckily, I love writing. Before we launched the site in June last year, I didn’t get that much feedback on what I wrote – people don’t write to a magazine as readily as they comment on a blog. But I already loved my job, because I love the process.
 

3. Do what you want to be in the mood to do.

Often you’re not angry or sad because of the thing you’re angry or sad about. You’re just in a bad mood. I’ve found if I pay attention to what mood I’m in, it’s amazingly easy to snap out of it.

In my case, I can just watch something funny – I’ve never been angry while Flight of the Conchords is on. And like everyone, I have mood amnesia: the moment I’m out of a bad mood, it’s forgotten.

But it’s even more powerful than this. You can also get stuff done that you don’t feel like doing, just by starting to do it. Your brain only resists up until the point you actually start the job, at which point it starts to focus on doing it. You do what you want to be in the mood to do, and soon you’re in the mood to do it.

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s the single most useful piece of information I’ve discovered about the way my brain works in 29 years of having one.

The stories from the Machine of Death collection are being gradually released as a free podcast, a sort of episodic audiobook. Mine just came out, read rather excellently by Christopher Joseph. Warning! Strong language from the first word.

Not totally sure why I don’t get a mention, I think that might be an oversight. The site makes it clear enough who wrote it so it’s no big deal.

One of many reasons I declined to read my own story was that my narrator is American and I am not, so it’s great to hear it in its pseudo-native tongue. The flipside, of course, is that I’m not perfect at expressing the exact tone of voice characters are using, so inevitably there are parts that aren’t as I’d imagined them. I don’t mind that at all – my narrator is intentionally not me in some important ways, so it’s kind of nice to hear him say things the way I wouldn’t.

It also makes me realise how much clearer I need to be about who’s speaking. Chris always gets it right, but without doing some kind of comedy accent for one of the characters, that’s not enough for the listener to always know. I think I’m meant to write scripts rather than prose, I don’t really care how non-dialogue information is communicated so long as it’s clear.

Here’s the direct MP3 link if you want to download it, or the RSS link to subscribe.

The book is now $12 from Amazon.com or £11 from Amazon.co.uk. You can also get it as an iBook for $5.99 or on the Kindle for £7.29.

The whole thing is also free in PDF form, and the text of my story for it is online here.

I typically only work on it about one weekend a month, and I forgot about it completely for two months last year. The two days I spent on it during the holidays shot it forwards to a really exciting point, and the feedback from testers on that version was amazing. So lately I’ve been spending about a third of my spare time on it – what we in the lazy industry call ‘crunch’.

Things are going so quickly partly because I’m excited, but mostly because I’ve figured out a good way to work. Some of it is obvious stuff that you know but don’t actually do until you learn it the hard way, some of it is specific to making a game, some of it is just generally useful. Here’s what I’d tell the Tom of May 2010 about getting shit done.

• I am from the future. Your local lib dem MP will turn out to be a supervillian, but there isn’t really anything you can do about it.
• Staying excited about a thing is a question of having a really attractive and friendly to-do list. Use bullet-points and shit. Put spaces between clusters of things that it’d be easier to do together, and split them into “This month”, “Next month”, and “Final features”. Five or six things in each, don’t make it scary.

  This thing is the focal point of everything you do on the project, and how it makes you feel is usually the deciding factor in whether you work on it or watch another episode of Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey is fucking superb, but there’s only like seven episodes so you really have to pace yourself.

• Nothing is hard to do. If something seems hard, give up. You’ll come back in two days and solve it with three lines of code.
• Some things are hard to fix, and fixing isn’t fun. If you don’t fix something immediately, give up. Move back to diagnosing the problem better by setting up little bits of debug text and disabling chunks of code. Almost every hard problem is solved by a tiny and easily attainable piece of knowledge.
• Don’t write. Every word of fiction you type before making the game is a poison that will warp and deform it in ways that have nothing to do with fun. Make the game, see what’s fun, zero in on that, then write only what it needs to tie it together.
• Don’t tweak. Get something working, then move on to getting the next thing working. Instead of spending three hours now fine tuning a few values, you’ll be playing a better game three hours later and suddenly know how that thing should look, feel and fit in. Or better yet, testers will complain about it in useful ways.
• Talk about it. It’s worth the risk of boring your friends. I was planning to cut the ‘gunpoint’ mechanic from my game ‘Gunpoint’, until I explained my thought process to Graham. He said I should do the hardest version of the options I’d planned, I looked at it again, and realised it easy. Three lines of code.
• Work towards a build, not the finished thing. Having a working build you wouldn’t dream of releasing is massively more useful than having nonfunctioning tatters of a game you probably would. Making Scanno Domini in a weekend taught me how finishing what you can often shows you that some of the other stuff you had planned isn’t necessary anyway.
• When you’re done with something big, or well ahead, it is time for scotch, rain and smooth jazz. Sometimes it is that time anyway.

I spend my downtime in life analysing things, trying to identify comprehensible systems and figure out ways to beat them. Then I forget again. So this is a notebook of that stuff.

It’s what got me interested in philosophy, but since uni, my interest has shifted to the more practical consequences of it. It’s not hard to figure out the meaning of life, it’s harder to figure out how to pursue it. Hence, Advice.

The meaning of life is there isn’t one, which is to say there isn’t one other than the obvious one, which is to say be happy.

It gets clearer if you think about what you’d want for your kids: you might want them to have kids themselves, but that really only gets you back to the drawing board a few decades closer to the destruction of the planet. What you probably want, overall, is for them to be happy. Apart from anything, it’d make you happy.

This hedgehog agrees with me.

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that some people have written a bit about how to pursue happiness, but a lot of it trips over a pretty basic hurdle at the starting line. We’ve noticed we are happy when we get things we wanted – love, money, sex, kids, shoes – and concluded this stuff is related. Or we’ve noticed we are unhappy when we can’t get things we want, and concluded we should stop wanting things.

At the heart of it there’s an assumption that we want what’ll make us happy, with a certain margin of error for when things aren’t what we expected. We think we’re almost rational that way, wanting things because of the happiness they’ll bring, or our estimation thereof. We are way, way off.

This won’t sound terribly profound, but we just want shit. It just happens. It’s not a decision, it’s a set of drives built into us by evolution to ensure we survive and reproduce whether it’ll make us happy or not. The desire to have kids has nothing to do with any felicific calculus about the happiness and sadness they’d bring, in the same way that hunger isn’t a judgment about how enjoyable food would be. Other desires that are less primal stem from these, usually via power, safety and status.

The upshot is: your brain, gut, heart, genitalia, and whatever other organs you want to assign desires to, are not trying to make you happy. When they say they want something – whether it’s true love or a breakfast burrito – it doesn’t mean they’ll thank you for it. And the question of how to make yourself happy has really very little to do with getting what you want. These posts will be about what it does relate to, and sometimes how.

You probably don’t want to hear about my year, particularly since it was good. So I’ll do what I did in 2009 and just pick some shots from it, and a track to listen to while you browse.

I invented a board game for my family to capture the basic mechanics of the amazing but single-player only Flash game Dice Wars. It had some kinks.

Rich’s housewarming. He has a trapdoor in his kitchen that leads to an underground well.

I made cookies for my family at easter, each customised to our esoteric tastes.

Ceramic.

My cheese and rosemary bread – best eaten while it’s still this hot.

Exhausted in an especially hectic New York City, I’m happy to find Max Brenner The Chocolate Man still exists, and is still an oasis of warmth and butterfat.

For our pseudo-anniversary, we fed Kim’s fixation with fish at the aquarium, and my fixation with steak at Hawksmoor.

Hawksmoor’s sticky toffee pudding.

I now own a barbecue, the final artefact I needed to complete my triforce of manhood.

Our old friend Al was back from New Zealand for a while, so Rich, he and I got together for a fajitas and margaritas night. We got through about a third of the Cuervo in margaritas before I passed out and Rich violated his vegetarianism. Welcome back Al!

It made us think.

30s party for my Gran’s birthday. Anna, me, and Kim.

Vancouver work trip.

Seafood with Relic. That’s Dan Kading, designer of Dawn of War 2: Retribution.

Halloween.

Christmas. Anna and I are transfixed by our dad connecting a battery and a magnetised screw so that it spins phenomenally fast.

These last few might look familiar.

I seem to redesign this place at the start of every year – boredom with the old design peaks just as the winter break hits with the spare time to fix it. This new design is mostly just a visual jiggle, but I’m counting it as site number six because it’s no longer called James. I’m not good with titles, obviously, so it doesn’t really have one anymore – it’s just my blog, or Pentadact.com if you need something more unique.

I’ve sort of decapitated the old design:

It felt flabby and basic, and those black bars bothered me for no good reason. The new one fits more on the screen, and is a bit smoother. You’ll notice I’ve brought it bang up to date with the hottest web trend of 2003 – very slight gradients. A few other things are new:

• Infinite scroll: it loads the next bunch of posts when you scroll to the bottom. It doesn’t currently tell you it’s doing this.
• Like button: fucking Zuckerberg. That ugly little thing is so goddamn hard to put on any non-white page without making it hideous. I can’t resist them, though – they’ve been awesome on the PC Gamer site for letting us know the difference between pieces that people want to respond to, and piece people just… like. Without something filling that role, you never really know when you’ve done something right.
• Category tabs: browsing by category was a little obfuscated in the last design. I wanted to put them front and center for the sake of people who don’t care about games, since that topic often dominates this place a bit. Of course, which category link do the vast, vast majority of people click on? Games. They look at my site about games and think “Goddamn it, this isn’t enough about games! ONLY GAMES!”

As ever, please let me know what you think and if anything isn’t displaying right for you. I have some tweaking to do and presumably a lot of bug fixing, though it doesn’t look too disastrous so far.

Please excuse the state of this place while I tinker with it a little. I have a visual retartening planned out, and the current design will start to look glitchy as I rip it up and force the new one in. I’ll let you know when it’s supposed to look right, and you can tell me that it really doesn’t.

Work on Gunpoint for two days straight
Making Scanno Domini in 48 hours was exciting and eye opening. The deadline not only sped progress, but forced brutal and useful decisions about the design. I want to do the same for my longer-term game Gunpoint, aiming to get it to the point where you can meaningfully complete a level using the game’s central mechanic by the end of the year.

Every hour of work you put in before that point might be a complete waste of time, so you have to get there as rapidly as possible. I’ll probably work on it on the 29th and 30th.

Redesign Pentadact.com
The intentionally misleading title of this place is starting to cause actual harm in world increasingly reliant on search ranking. I have to call it by my own name. I also want to make the design slightly cleaner and less busy, and implement infinite-scroll rather than those archaic ‘Older posts’ links. Might tweak the colours and add an archive if I have time.

Start ‘Notebook’
A new category or subsite on here for what I used to call philosophy, but which has evolved into increasingly practical advice given by myself to myself. I need to write the shit I figure out down so I don’t forget what little I’ve learned, and doing it publicly helps get it straight in your head.

Post: What Makes Games Good
One I’ve been tinkering with for too long. It’s about giving names to the different metrics on which great games succeed – the ones that really matter. Because they’re not ‘graphics’, ‘gameplay’ and ‘multiplayer’.

Post: What Games Are Bad At
Less of a priority, but I’ve often wanted to do a series on the things I think the industry is repeatedly fucking up. Most of my obsessions about games relate to what they normally get wrong, so explaining why and how might turn that into useful advice for making them better.

Tweak Scanno Domini
So much I could do to this from here, but to avoid letting it distract me from more important stuff, I’ll stick to the quality-of-life essentials. Snow and single-barreled weapons fire both need to be darker – they’re invisibly bright on some people’s screens. Bots still sometimes get stuck camping you, forcing a restart. I really should let you use the keyboard for movement if you want to. And I might either make the game a little easier, add an easy mode, or do something clever with the difficulty so that it ramps up more smoothly. Watching my dad play it was informative.

Some pictures from mine. It’s snowy here in England, and the Dorset hills are a nice place to stomp around in it.

I got a Kindle! If you mail me stuffs – anything like a .txt .doc or .pdf – it’ll pop up on my cyberhyperbook! This is the address: pentadact@free.kindle.com

I was a little dubious about this one, solely because one character refers to the other as ‘kid’ – something I’m not yet sure people do in real life. But it’s one of the most interesting settings for a Machine of Death story – one of the few that has the courage to put the machine itself well into the background of the world, and tell a story that is affected by it, but not about it.

It’s about two soliders, stranded on an island, who both know how they will die. One is STARVATION, the other is HOMICIDE. So the entire scenario is overcast by both men endlessly reconjecturing about how their personal prophecy could come true.

That makes it very tense at times, particularly since my twist-happy brain likes to spend its downtime trying to pre-empt every eventuality. But I can honestly say the ending surprised me, and in a way that made me the story seem smarter than me.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 from Amazon or Topatoco in the US, or in the UK for £11.50 with free shipping from The Book Depository. The whole thing is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

A lab assistant charged with one of the first machines of death refuses to test himself, while everyone around him succumbs.

Pure pleasure to read – or in my case, listen to. It’s the longest story so far, but every time reader Kevin McShane (who sounds excitingly like Peter from Fringe) pauses for more than a second, you’re hoping it’s not going to end.

The whole story is a log, that rapidly devolves into a journal, written in a friendly and clear-headed style. The watch-word of this collection has been ‘refreshing’, and what’s refreshing about Chernega’s protagonist is his almost complete lack of curiosity. He’s curious about other people’s predictions, but he’s one of the few characters in the book so far not even tempted by the prospect.

His diary charts the escalating public reaction to the machines, covering some of the same territory as my own, and I’m honoured they didn’t just scrap mine when they read this. ALMOND plays much more with the machine’s enjoyably sinister ambiguity – when it starts giving more than a few people GOVERNMENT, you know something interesting’s about to go down.

Some predictions are clever enigmas that are unraveled during the story, others are unexplained and seemingly unexplainable, and others seem to be openly fucking with you. That’s important, because the tension the story builds hinges on the narrator inferring a personality to the machine – one that becomes increasingly infuriating to him.

It has a punch, but doesn’t conform to the usual twist-story structure: the set up is almost immediately before the payoff, which prevents it from risking anticlimax. The voice, humour and escalating intrigue don’t need a giant question mark hanging over them to keep the story compelling throughout.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

An insurance salesman’s prediction turns his life around.

Refreshingly unmopey, nonjudgmental and un-non-funny. This is an exploration of the positive impact a prediction could have: not by implying a long and happy life, but by implying a death so exotic you have to assume things are going to get more interesting from here.

That’s really all there is to it, but it’s witty, fun, breezy and explores its concept with an infectious curiosity. The author is clearly a funny guy with a great writing voice, and he lets a little of it seep into every character. In a short story, that doesn’t hurt.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

You’re a doctor, and six unconscious patients come in with a mysterious condition. Their Machine of Death predictions all read: TESTS. What do you do?

A great story, and a great premise. All the stories hinge on the machine in some way, but it’s the sign of a great one when it feels like it’d be worth making up the machine just to tell it.

It’s also cool to have a story that’s serious and urgent, rather than chin-strokey. From 800 submissions that must have been tediously similar at times, you can see why a medical drama would stand out to Malki and co.

If I had to criticise, I’d say the thing with the security guard, which I won’t spoil, felt jammed in for character development. Not enough room in a short story to make it feel natural. And like any story that ends on a question, it’d be better if it didn’t.

Neither bothered me much, and I’m expecting this to remain one of my favourites.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

The second story in the collection to take its title from a confectionary-related death that turns out to be irrelevant to the main characters. And like Flaming Marshmallow, that put me off it for a while.

Fudge is not quite a twist story, but the whole thing does lead up to a prediction, and the nature of the prediction is what gives it its punch. It doesn’t count as a twist because we don’t really find out what it means, only how it affects the protagonist. And then, Fudge ends.

That’s the other thing you can do with a short story – end on a note that is not so much “Oh my God what the fuck barbecue” as “Hmmm.” It’s good, and well-read by author Kit Yona in the podcast version, but personally I quite like to be all “Oh my God what the fuck barbecue.”

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

The book I’m reading just got putdownable, so I’ve finally dug into Machine of Death. I’d also been following the podcast, trying each entry to see if I like the reader’s voice, and saving it to read in the book if I don’t. What? That’s not weird. I’m overly fussy about reading voices.

My plan is to review every story in the book except my own. We’ve had lots of lovely reviews, but in a normal review you don’t analyse every story – most don’t even mention standouts. But short story collections are diverse, if they’re good, and for all I know ours is both. I don’t know any of the other authors personally, except for brief e-mail exchanges about the book, so it’s not hard to be objective. I will be more polite than I am in game reviews, though, since I can’t claim to be well-read or good at analysing literature.

A school girl frets about what social clique her prediction will put her in.

I have to admit I avoided this story at first, because the title made me think “Sigh, comedy death.” It’s not a comedy, and that prediction has almost nothing to do with it.

Instead, it’s an incredibly focused picture of what feels like a very thoroughly imagined version of the Machine of Death world, set long after any initial shock or uncertainty about the use of the machine. Everyone’s so settled into it that schoolkids define their hang-out groups and social status by their predicted deaths; violent ones the coolest.

Something rings very true about the ease with which kids accept the morbidity of death predictions, and get more excited about the possibilities than bogged down by the fatalism. The story’s payload, to me at least, is a situation where a girl is desperately hoping for the stickiest possible end, while her father longs for something dull and distant.

She does get her prediction, but the only failing of Marshmallow is that it isn’t immediately clear what it means. That ambiguity’s a useful tool in other stories, but here I’m just not totally sure if the words are referring to something I’m not familiar with. The characters understand it, and we understand it through them, but the scene could have had more punch if it was something we could immediately grasp the implications of, to both parties.

This feels like one of the most convincing worlds, though, and the voice of the narrator is authentically young and fun.

Machine of Death: a thing that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.