Maybe the people with the best luck… were those who didn’t have to evacuate at all -but among those who evacuated early 2025, we were lucky, our house is still standing, and we had insurance that covered the 10 weeks that we couldn’t go home. This is a series looking back on what I managed to learn during that time, and how it relates to the video games that are my life’s work.

To keep a D&D group together, I used FBI hostage negotiator techniques - not during the evacuation - back in 2018.

“Seems like you’ve got a reason for saying that.”

That’s one of the techniques that Chris Voss of the FBI would use to keep a hostage-taker talking. The negotiator wants them to feel heard, so he thoughtfully prompts them to explain their worldview to him. The more he seems to “get” them, to validate that he understands how they feel and why they were motivated to do this, the more they are willing to hear him out.

You shouldn’t need hostage negotiation tactics to keep D&D chums from quarreling.

We ought to live in a world where emotional literacy is as ubiquitous as literacy.

Instead, since we don’t get to pick the world we live in, it can be helpful to know how to back out of a tough and sharp-edged conflict.

(A side note: that D&D group eventually erupted because hostage negotiation is only good for a single problem - if I’d known the divorce research of the Gottman Institute, the D&D members could have all talked and repaired our quarrels and used D&D as a launching pad to get to know one another. I learned of the Gottmans’ work in 2024. I ran out of steam and threw a tantrum and erupted the D&D group in 2022. Oops. Part of the reason I am adamant about getting Gottman principles into games is because I was actively seeking ways to help keep my relationships in working order, but the training I needed was too buried in a sea of noisy noise that is our modern media landscape. -Hopefully if marriage counseling research comes wrapped in the clothes of video games, more people will catch onto the ideas in time to save their own friend groups.)

A year ago today, I wrote in my game design journal that if I wanted to, I could use, “Seems like you’ve got a reason for saying that,” on myself, when I’m raging against my own mistakes.

I’d packed wrong when we evacuated.

And I was not being kind to myself about it.

In the year since, there have been articles and testimonials from people who evacuated who have shared the sentiment, “If I’d known we weren’t coming back right away, I would have packed differently.” -So it wasn’t just me who was lamenting the choices I’d made about what to flee with.

But two days after the evacuation, I was trying to use hostage-negotiation techniques on myself, to keep myself calm, to stop my tirade against myself, to change my momentum and reflect on how I got there, instead of chastising myself for my situation.

Hopefully, the games I’m making will help spread the word, of all the tools and techniques we have, as a planet, for hating-ourselves less.

She practically barked at me in agreement, a bit too readily for my tastes - I had been talking to my oldest friend, and it had been an offhand comment of mine, that, “I should give up on making big impressive games, and just go make fan levels in Neverwinter Nights,“ (a computer roleplaying game based on Dungeons and Dragons, which let users make their own levels and stories within the program). When I was in high school, I had used the Neverwinter Nights D&D toolset to make a few of my own levels, ‘so why wasn’t I applying all I’d learned since to this proven (if unambitious) tool??’ was the vibe I got off of my friend when I casually brought it up to her.

We lost her last year, and she’s been on my mind this season, like Marley’s ghost.

She cornered me once, years ago, interrogated me about my chasing fame. Would I be satisfied with the level of fame of the guy who wrote In The Hall Of The Mountain King (Edvard Grieg) - someone who se most famous piece of music, many people would recognize, but whose name you’d have to look up. It was a startling question, but she was startling like that.

I’d told her no, that so long as I was alive, I was competing for the best in the world.

It’s a new year. My plan, this year, is to honor what it seems like she was trying to steer me toward in life: making games that might disappoint my ‘grand visions,’ but games that are easier to make.

Games that are easier to make are more likely to get completed. I have a graveyard of projects I threw my heart into, but were overly ambitious for one man.

I won’t be a household name, but if I were to pick simpler projects, and complete those projects, I’d at least have something to share with those of you who have found my work.

And those of you who are here to watch the process - if I’m not beaten down by the crushing force of overambitious work, I’ll have more energy to share the process along the way. You’ll have something to read from me, instead of months-at-a-time of silence, while I work on whatever the plural of a Magnum Opus is.

Happy 2026. May your year, similarly, be one that won’t haunt you. Good luck! 🥳

Don’t do it recklessly.

Don’t do it when the penalty for being wrong will result in harm.

But when the penalty for being wrong is bruise to the ego, or blemish on our perfect records?

Go out on a limb.

Someone needs you to.

The world needs people to go out on a limb, or there won’t be anyone offering help.

People only ask for help when they think there is a chance someone will show up to help them, OR once everything is lost and we are turning to help in a desperation.

We need more people asking for help.

Imagine the world if more people asked for help.

In fact you don’t have to imagine it because worlds where people ask for help already exist: They’re called video games…

The biggest fantasy I’ve seen overlooked in games, is the Quest Giver.

Imagine you had to invent the quest giver today.

This is a person who:

1. Knows what they want

2. Is willing to ask for help

3. Is willing to ask a stranger for help

4. Has a finite number of ways that will satisfy them and you’ll know definitively once you have gotten them what they need

5. Only ever asks for something that is within the skillset of the person they’re talking to

6. Will repeat the directions of the task as many times as you need

7. Compensates people for their help

Imagine walking down the street in real life, and people had manageable tasks they needed performed, and they were happy you were there, and the thing they need is something you’re good at, and they’re offering to thank you for your time by giving you something that is useful to you…

But that’s not how real life works.

In real life, when we are in distress, it’s rare that we can articulate what’s wrong, and it’s not uncommon for us to be an unreliable narrator who misdiagnoses what our real problem is.

In real life, most people will not have the skills that would solve our problem, so that nearly anyone we ask will be bogged down by the task, not uplifted by it.

In real life, few of us have anything good we can offer in return, and rarer still that it’d actually match what is missing from the life of the helper.

Which means asking for help rarely matches us up with a satisfying experience of being helped.

So, most of us, most of the time, do not openly ask people for help because we’re imagining that we might regret asking.

Which is why the world is now full of people in pain, no one asking for help, and if we’re going to help, it often has to come in the form of going out on a limb.

“Hey this might not be useful, but it sounds like what you were talking about might be helped by x.”

And in many cases, it annoys the person we’re trying to help, because they didn’t ask for help.

But the people who do need help and who wish someone would come help them, do not often ask for help, so you will never know which person needs you to get over the risk of annoying someone who rebuffs your help.

Imagine if the people we could help, actually did ask, and asked clearly, and had clear end-goals, and asked us for something we’re prepared for, and helped us out in return.

Now remember that the satisfaction we’d feel completing such a clear-cut quest, is actually still available, if we’re willing to go out on a limb and offer help to the person who is only half-asking, speaks clumsily, is murky and torn about what they even want, needs something that’s a bit beyond us, and will forget us the minute we are done helping.

The satisfaction comes not from being a do-good-er, or patting ourselves on the back.

The satisfaction comes from participating.

We need houses of brick.

The things that matter in life take more time to build than a house of stick or straw.

We wish we were useful.

Somewhere, someone has use for you… but it’s going to require you guessing and being wrong, a bunch of times, before you find the person who needs you,

My parents didn’t want me playing video games, because they didn’t want video games taking over my life.

My father was born in the 50’s, my mother was born in the 60’s. It’s more obvious now how foreign video games felt to them.

They didn’t just restrict me to no video games, but a lot of the shows my peers were watching, were forbidden as well.

They weren’t as strict as fundamentalists, so it’s admirable at least, that they weren’t outsourcing their judgement to someone else.

But what judgement they did, they did at arm’s length.

Video games were not a medium that they cared to engross themselves in, and let’s be fair: Video games were doing nothing to court them. A financial decision had been made that boys my age were the group to mass market games to, because all those games needed to be were competition-inducing, colorful time-sinks, in order to be profitable.

It’s my life’s mission to reverse and heal some of the fallout that resulted from the choice to make video games take the form of an automated pissing contest. -But not just because I wish my parents and more like them would play video games…

But because:

I can’t play most video games.

And it pisses me off.

Wall-Jumping Growth Mindset

When I was in my 30’s, I learned to wall jump.

More than learning to wall jump, I learned that wall jumping could be learned.

Wall jumping is a platforming technique in a bunch of games; you jump and cling onto a wall, and then jump off the wall, into the air, and land on another wall behind you, or sometimes back onto the same wall, but higher up.

It’s a way to get to new areas in the game.

And for most of my life, not only couldn’t I do it, but I ‘was sure’ that I had 100% missed the window to learn how to do it…

I did eventually get a few video game consoles in the house. Garage sale stuff that let me catch up on the games my peers had been playing for years.

But something had happened.

It’s not that I’d never played video games; I was allowed to play them when I went to my friends’ or cousins’ houses. But I found very quickly that I was bad at video games.

And it burned itself into my identity, that I was bad at video games.

We know now, that my friends simply had the gaming consoles at home, and plenty of free time, and the mono-focus of competitive little boys in the 90’s with nothing to distract from playing and failing and playing and failing and playing and learning and completing these video games.

Anyone who had a home gaming console was allowed to play and fail in private. When I’d go over to someone’s house and try their video games, I was always going to be at the playing and failing stage, for the entire visit.

And because our parents were older than the medium of video games as a whole, they didn’t have video games literacy.

They couldn’t sit us down and explain that, “Noah just needs some time to play this game and learn through mistakes and failure, and then he’ll catch up with you-all, but please be kind to him in the meantime, his parents (well-intentionedly) deprived him of the chance (that you-all had) to fail in private.”

So.

Instead of having someone who could diagnose my problem, I was left as a kid, to diagnose myself.

Prognosis: “Noah is bad at video games. Noah cannot play video games.”

Eventually, I’d graduate this to, “Noah missed the crucial window to develop his twitch reflexes, and thus cannot now play video games. (Though he probably could have had a promising aptitude for them if he had been given the opportunity.)”

So I knew eventually that it wasn’t that I was inherently bad at video games, it was just that I’d missed the window to become good at video games.

It was my identity that I was bad at video games.

That identity was, incorrect.

I carried around the identity that I had been unfairly forced to sit on the sidelines and watch others play video games, for two decades, before I accidentally ran into evidence, that my twitch reflexes could still be learned, and that I had not actually missed the window I’d needed to become good at video games.

In the olden days of video games, there were fairly strict genres.

A game was a shooter, or it was a platformer (jumping obstacle-course game), or it was a roleplaying game.

Roleplaying games (RPGs) saved my [gaming] life.

RPGs had a feature that other games did not:

RPGs would let you manually lower the difficulty of the game if you played them long enough.

Can’t beat this fight? Well go fight the easier fights, until you gain enough experience and are a higher level, and then come back and beat this fight with ease.

RPGs took the skill out of gaming for me; so long as I was willing to trade my time to grind these mindless level-ups, I could finish any RPG, by becoming max-level, and being stronger than anything the game had to throw at me.

Finally I was able to play games, so long as they were RPGs.

But decades on, the genres started borrowing elements from one another.

It wasn’t unusual to find a shooter game (which I was bad at the aiming and almost could not play) which added RPG level-up elements that let me manually lower the difficulty so that my bad aiming was no longer a factor. Mass Effect, the game that made me take game design seriously as a career, was a shooter game where I was bad at aiming, but I was able to play because I could level myself up.

But the game that cracked off my identity of, “Noah Wizard stinks at video games because he missed the critical window to become good at them,” was an obstacle course platforming game called Salt and Sanctuary, which had a very high difficulty of combat, but, if you traded your time in for level-ups, you could manually lower the difficulty of the game, and the combat became much more forgiving.

I was there for the atmosphere, and the fun of leveling my character up. It’s one of the few games I’ve beaten, but I still replay it for the satisfaction of leveling up a new character.

In fact leveling up characters is such a soothing balm to me (because it represented the relief of finally being able to play video games by lowering their difficulty) that I am about to pay money to World of Warcraft to let me spend a month of my life mindlessly leveling up characters for no other reason than that I can. I will listen to audiobooks, and rewatch TV shows, and level up characters, all because it helps soothe this ‘Enduring Vulnerability1’ that I have over video games being too hard for me to play.

One day, likely after I’d beaten the game, I was replaying an optional area of Salt and Sanctuary, that required this Wall Jump maneuver to get to a secret area.

Secret areas, are by their definition optional, and I’d had decades of skipping optional content, “because I’m just too reflexively impoverished to have any reason to hope that I should even bother…”

But (much like I do with my occasional vacations into World of Warcraft) I had an audiobook on.

So something happened which I did not expect.

Because I had the audiobook on, and because I cared so much more about learning from the content of the audiobook, I didn’t have enough attention to give to how bad I was at the wall jumping attempts.

The audiobook distracted me from my decades-long litany of, “Don’t bother; I can’t do it; I missed the window…”

And I tried, and failed… but listened to the book.

And tried some more, but mostly listened to the book, as I once again failed.

And trying and failing, were allowed to become ‘background tasks’ that ‘happened to be happening’ while I attended to my main focus, which was learning from this audiobook.

I’d try and fail, but not really think much of it, because I needed to focus on the book.

And this was an optional area, so it didn’t really matter that, “I had no real chance of getting up there but let’s just see how far I can get…”

‘How far I could get,’ it turned out, was the entire way to the top.

I got to the secret area…

And while the secret area had nothing that was worth the effort it would have taken me to get up there, if I’d felt the pains the entire way, instead of having the ‘anesthetic’ of being distracted by the audiobook, the real benefit of reaching this secret area, was that I actually managed to disprove this limiting thing I’d shouted about myself for years.

I hadn’t missed the window to learn how to reflex jump in a video game.

I just missed the window to do it without being self-conscious about it.

I could try and fail and try and fail and learn and complete the task, I just had to submit to the indignity and ego-pains of watching myself fail and fail and fail along the way.

If you’re familiar with Carol Dweck’s Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset, I’d been living my entire life with a relationship to video games (video games: my life’s work…) with my mindset that my skill level was ‘Fixed’ in place, and was an inherent quality about me now, and that, like anyone with a Fixed Mindset on a topic, if someone suggested to me that I could Grow and change and learn, I’d become wounded and offended because of the immutable quality about myself that I was sure I had.

“Noah Wizard can’t wall jump. He can’t even do a normal difficulty platform jumping puzzle! How’s he going to do the multi-twitch-reflex maneuver of multiple wall jumps in quick succession???”

But then, by accident, I disproved this screed I’d written about myself over and over for years.

I was not someone who was barred from becoming good at video games, I’d just have to deal with the hurt to my ego, and let myself fail a bunch, but then, I could acquire the missing skills that I needed, and I’d be able to play more video games than before.

Possible But NOT Probable…

This led me to an era in my life, both of testing my limits in which video games I could try and fail and learn, and in other arenas of my life where I could now see I might have a Fixed Mindset in need of a shift to a Growth Mindset.

After all, if there were things I was bad at, that I could improve at, those unlocked new skills that I’d been avoiding training, might actually open up my life a bit!

The biggest success of that era, was that I sought out a drawing group that was made up of a bunch of people who felt that though we could draw (technically speaking) we were not yet, “Good enough to call ourselves artists.”

Art collectives are tricky things to find. I’ve only ever found two in all my years of searching that were actually just about sharing in the joy of trying to draw (all other groups were basically galleries to show off how amazing your latest gallery-worthy finished piece was).

I started off with some ability to draw:

And gained enough strategy, and had enough practice, that I was able to shift my identity from, “Noah Wizard ‘can’ draw, but he shouldn’t really call himself ‘an artist.’” to, “Yeah, I know what I’m doing; I can draw; it takes me forever, but I’m no longer confused about how to improve a drawing, should I so choose.”

That being said, my identity never shifted into, “Wow I love to draw, I am a ‘drawing person’ now.”

Similarly, I’m still pissed at Mario…

EXPLAIN WHY YOU LIKE THIS

Sometimes, I am a very bad friend.

Sometimes, I am hurt, and I use that as an excuse to suspend decorum, and put other people’s likes on trial, simply because I cannot understand them and I am tired of trying.

It’s a real shit character trait, and I don’t recommend it. (Putting my friends’ likes on trial, is something I will need to adopt more of a Growth Mindset on, going forward.)

One day, I was grilling a game designer friend of mine, who, like most nerd guys my age, likes platformer games, and doesn’t think about them as taunting exclusionary games that prevent someone like me from being able to enjoy them.

“Why are they good? Why is this fun??” I demanded.

He had no explanation other than that because the actual act of platforming didn’t cost him anything, he enjoyed getting to see the next level and the next.

For me, the cost is so high that almost no level in any game I’ve played would be worth it to go through the pains of trying to platform well enough to be able to access that area.

This is especially true for me, when there’s nothing to gain by going to the hard-to-reach area of a game, not even more story, just more game.

I hate it.

I hate it a lot.

And this guy is very wise, and he knew me well enough, that he was able to provide me this point of view:

“It makes sense that you don’t like platformer games. The way you’ve described it, the way these platforming games made you feel, in public, with your friends watching you fail: Mario was essentially your childhood bully.”

That helped.

That helped me to see that I’m not examining platforming games with the lens of someone neutral, trying to discern their benefits and value to the people who enjoy them; I was putting platformers on trial, as a victim who wanted to hear my perpetrator’s excuses for treating me this way…

So.

I can learn platforming, but the wounds surrounding my early humiliations about platforming, may take a lot of time for me to undo, and there’s a real question as to whether or not doing all of that work will be worth it.

I love my ability to draw. I don’t love the drawing [activity] part so much, but I love my drawings.

Overcoming the Fixed Mindset I had about drawing, had a benefit worth the trouble.

I had many such meltdowns on my way to being able to draw. But at the end of the journey, I gained the ability to illustrate my stories and change hearts and minds with what I can now create with my visuals.

At the end of being able to platform, all I’ll get is more platforming in many cases, and it’s not likely that I’ll ever see it as worth working through that hurt.

Games My Mom And Dad Could Play

I wish my parents had played video games.

I’d have had a nicer childhood if they could have used their adult brains to work through the difficulty of learning a video game, and helped give me the psychological antibodies that would have allowed me to get over my own frustrations back then.

But I also just don’t like living in a world where so many have written this medium off entirely, as not worthy of their time.

For many people, if they haven’t checked in on video games in a decade or so, they might be blithely unaware that many games now are made by independent video game creators, and as such, there are thousands of games not sticking to the easily-marketable-pissing-contest segment of customers.

The way I sometimes pitch video games to someone who hasn’t played them yet, is that it’s understandable if they think the only genre of game is the shooter genre; if the only genre of movies that ever existed were the shoot-em-up genre of movies, there would be plenty of people who would have written off film-as-a-medium too!

In fact I think this has something to do with why opera has a narrow band of appeal; content and subject matter are important to viewers. We have so much choice, we want to select media that speaks to something in us.

“We read to know that we are not alone.” -C.S. Lewis

I think the vast majority of people who have never picked up a video game (or who haven’t tried the variety of games that are out now) assume that there is no video game out there that has any chance of speaking directly to their heart, making them feel seen. If there are books and movies and songs and television shows that are making a person feel seen, why would they bother with a medium that they are sure cannot deliver an experience of shared humanity the way all those other mediums surely will offer them what they need?

I want my games to be easy.

I want my games to have a low barrier to entry, because if you’re someone who is used to playing difficult video games, you can always stuff your pride and play a low-difficulty game, but someone who cannot play high difficulty games can’t just switch on some skill they don’t have and partake in a tough game.

I want games to be something that the majority of humans play.

I want, “I spent most of the weekend gaming,” to be looked at as nefariously as, “I spent most of the weekend reading.”

There are those who are suspicious of reading, but it’s an unchecked number of people who are willing to look down on the same number of hours spent gaming. And there are few people who would look on in admiration and say, “Wow, I really need to game more,” the way you will have people who say, “Wow, I really need to read more,” when confronted with someone who has read a lot recently.

I live a privileged life that I have been able to devote myself to trying to bridge this gap. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without support from friends and family.

I hope you’ll join me, at least in your heart, at least one step more than you had been, in honoring games as a way for humans to help other humans, same as any storytelling medium that we’ve had to lift ourselves up.

It’ll be some time before my games are complete enough that they can speak for themselves; in the meantime, if you are someone who felt a shift while reading all this, I hope you’ll stick around, or even go out and seek out more of an understanding of what games can be, and how games can be a tool for saving us from ourselves, and keeping us from the dark pit of isolation.

“Remember, a blog is a conversation no one wanted to have with you”

-some shit I heard once

A lot of this was preventable.

When you look around the world and see people in turmoil?

A LOT of that was preventable. Smart people and wise people have been telling us what the problems are and what the solutions are.

Most of the solutions require us to take our hearts and minds off of auto-pilot though. We have to break our own momentum, and most of us are more comfortable going some bad place fast, than struggling but in the right direction.

When I was 16, I read my first self-help book. It wasn’t particularly good, but I didn’t need it to be good, because it said, essentially:

“We can change the direction of our thoughts, so that our inner worlds are not so mean, and this shift will improve our results in the real world.”

How does that not change everything for every person who hears it? Do you just have to be a weird outsider who already doesn’t have a place in society, so you’re not giving up anything when you change your own mind and try to navigate your life on purpose?

Four years later, I started my first self-help blog, because I was sure that the only thing stopping people from taking ownership over their own minds, was that no one had let them know they had a right to do that. That blog was not met with the kind of response I expected.

Later that year, I tried it as a video channel, vlogging to the camera; multimedia was the key to getting this message out, I was sure.

Another four years later, I decided to try and combine the message of mindset with video games. I didn’t just need to broadcast the message, and get it out with a visual, I also needed it to be interactive, so that people could experience the steps of someone who felt powerless, as they put the pieces together and built themselves a new way of looking at life that left them in control of their own momentum.

Another four years after that, I had a conceptual prototype of how to make a game that slowly taught you how to take control over your own mind. But the prototype was too conceptual; if you were someone who already understood the mind, you thought it was a great idea, but for someone who hadn’t even gotten started working in their own heads, it sounded like a lot of nothing.

Come another four years, and I was 32; twice the years on the planet as I’d had when I first heard someone say you could change the direction of your own thoughts. I’d spent 16 years trying to amplify and clarify and fun-ify this message. But I didn’t understand enough about how audience attention worked, so I had to learn everything I could about internet content marketing and how to break through the noise. But I was having a lot of trouble getting the concepts simple enough that people would be intrigued in the short window of time I had to make an impression.

Last year, when I was 37, I’d combined what I believe to be the final missing pieces. I knew I needed a way to make this message digestible for people who aren’t seeking out this answer; a good teacher knows you can’t answer a question that hasn’t been asked. But a great teacher knows how to bring people in with a description of the questions people do have- I heard this first from Eben Pagan: “if you can explain someone’s problem better than they can explain it to themselves, they’ll sit and listen for a very long time, in hopes that you have the solution to their problem.”

I needed a way to bring people in, and the most effective solution seemed to be, that if I could create characters that audiences resonated with, I could give them the problems that most people have, and offer answers that so few seem to know. But it wasn’t until last year, that I had all of the comedy training I needed, and access to our planet’s top divorce research, that I understood the problem I can model that people will resonate with:

Fights.

Arguments.

Quarrels between cool people who love each other, but zoom in the story on the times when they do not agree, and get a little bit heated.

This month I turned 38. I don’t have full finished projects, but the characters I’m creating now, come easily, and though writing them is still intimidating, it’s been enough of a joy, that I feel like the momentum of this project can after 22 years, really get started.

Which is why I’m much more willing than I used to be, to go online and make an ass out of myself, because even once I get the full text done, and the characters illustrated, and the gameplay programmed, if nobody knows I exist, then all this work will have been for nothing.

38 will be my year of, as Steven Bartlett said:

Embarrassment is the cost of entry for success.

I did a bunch of fucking work, now I’m going to annoy you all into having this conversation with me that nobody wanted to have, because we don’t have to suffer like this. Not all thoughts are easy to change, but we could be devoting ourselves, at least in our heart, to the utility of working together to help us all think thoughts that let us kick ass, instead of thinking thoughts that kick our collective ass.

If you can understand why I NEEDED the Power Rangers’ Megazord, it can help you write more believable characters. (And also may generate some story ideas as a free bonus.)

A character is not a person, insists Aaron Sorkin. Characters look like people, but they are not people. Characters are tools of the storyteller. Characters are there to do a thing that the author wants.

A person has brand loyalty, whether they want to or not.

Even a stalwart person.

A stalwart person might resist brand loyalty on most purchases, but pretty much everybody is caught in some consumer trap, buying exactly what someone wants them to buy.

So Matt Bird suggests:

(And I’m colorfully paraphrasing):

Make that shit happen to your characters.

Brand loyalty seems like it’s a choice we’re making.

Usually, brand loyalty is a result of countless hours of market research on people like us. Brand loyalty happens because someone had the care or at least the resources to figure out what we give a damn about.

Then they made the thing we wanted. And sold it to us for money. (Or for our vote. Or for social capital. Or for our attention.)

Someone wanted to be our choice. So they studied people like us until they stood out above the crowd like Powerline.

There are brands who want everyone to be their customer, like burger joints and soda companies. Most companies have a strategically narrowed view of who they want to do business with.

Have you heard comedians like Iliza Shlesinger talk about how in straight relationships the guy has an uninformed version of the story of how the couple met? Women position themselves to be chosen, but in selecting the guy they have agreed to be chosen by, Iliza says, “We scan you, like Predator….I checked your credit score….I gave you a pre-cancer mole check.”

We’re the oblivious guy, for most brand loyalty decisions. We think, “wow, I found this great thing, I have great taste,” not realizing that a part of the purchase price is covering the extensive research into people like us so that we’ll think this purchase is spontaneous, a little bit magical, and meant to be.

As I insinuated up top, I am terribly susceptible to advertising. I study this stuff, I know when it’s happening to me, and my only recourse is to yell in a mock angry tone, “Advertising works!” As I impulse purchase the thing I’m not sure I really wanted five seconds ago before I saw this ad, and my being was converted into person-desperately-in-NEED-of-this thing.

I’ve shouted “Advertising works!” as recently as this year, but when I was a kid, I obviously had even less impulse control than I have now as a man who is several centuries old.

When Power Rangers landed in the US, it was a big part of my world. I was not allowed video games, I was not allowed friends, and I was not allowed to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Ren & Stimpy.

But my mom thought Power Rangers was great. She loved that it was very obviously part shot on an American sound stage, cut together with obviously dubbed lines from the villain, and combat scenes that were similarly imported.

So I was allowed to watch Power Rangers.

I repaid my mother’s kindness… by making her stand in line, for hours, to get me the Power Rangers’ Megazord toy for Christmas.

“Mother… This toy is all I want for Christmas…” -Noah Wizard, aged 6, a menace.

Now, when I learned drum rhythms, I started with bucket drumming because a drum kit has too many parts, and a bucket has two modes, the big low sound of hitting the top, and the higher sound of tapping the rim of the bucket— So, similarly, it’s going to be easier for you to understand how brand loyalty works when you see it used at the start of life when there are few characteristics that differentiate us yet.

To me, the Power Rangers’ Megazord was the perfect answer to my life. I still have it to this day (though it lives in another part of the country in storage).

But the fuckers who sell these toys, saw me and my mother coming not just from a mile away, but from another country away.

Someone realized they could take the fighting scenes from this Japanese television show, slap some Americans in-between them, and sell plastic for a high markup.

There weren’t a ton of toy options at the time. The toy revolution had begun, but we weren’t at Beanie Babies and Pokémon cards yet. There was still a shred of sanity left in the world.

So Power Rangers had some competition, but they were positioned to be exactly what my life needed in their TV show, which would act as an extended commercial for the products the show was promoting.

The number of Power Rangers merchandise things I made my family buy me was obscene.

We had magnets.

We had coloring books.

We had action figures of the Power Rangers themselves.

We had action figures of the monsters the Power Rangers defeat.

We had the hand-held device that turns you into a Power Ranger.

I went for Halloween as a Power Ranger, if I’m not mistaken. Blue Ranger I think.

We had the magically summoned weapons the Power Rangers use in the show.

These people saw us coming.

What did they know?

They knew the lineup of shows that boys had to choose from that year. (And remember this is before we chose when we watched things, or had home-video. We had to show up at a time and place. So they knew roughly when me and my peers were available to watch TV.)

They knew boys would watch a show about fighting shit.

They knew boys would want action figures, and prop weapons, and costumes of the characters.

They knew that parents were susceptible to caving, and pulling out their wallets to make their kids’ dreams come true. (My mother gets animated when she talks about how she’d pre-emptively sworn that she would not become one of those mothers standing outside in a line to get some toy for her kid. Then this fucker, Noah Wizard came along and busted that principle to smithereens.)

I saw Power Rangers and felt seen.

To me, obtaining Power Rangers merch was my right, because it was so perfect for me.

But it really wasn’t for me specifically, it was for any boy of this era with access to a TV and the will to guilt his parents into buying him stuff he didn’t need because he didn’t understand the connection between the extravagant Power Rangers gifts and “Mom stays late at work more. Where’s Mom? I miss her…”

Brand loyalty happens to a person.

Make brand loyalty happen to your characters.

Know Thyself. Then Know-The-Fuck Out Of Other People.

When Matt Bird suggests figuring out which brands your characters are loyal to, it’s a paragraph or two away from another of his suggestions that you show your characters’ values through the compliments your characters give.

His example is Katniss in Hunger Games begrudgingly admiring her sister’s cat because the cat is a good mouser and Katniss is a good hunter.

Audiences enjoy characters having consistency in the things they value.

So the reason to know enough about your own brushes with brand loyalty takeovers of your psyche, is to understand WHICH brands can take over the minds of your characters.

Each character would fall into a different brand trap. The brand they love, tells you something about what this character values. If this character gives something up to get a preferred brand, that means the character is more invested in this exchange.

As a general rule of writing, we’re always on the lookout for the heightened times in a character’s life, and for characters worth zooming in on.

• If we write about a normal person’s normal Tuesday, it’s tough to keep an audience engaged.

• If we write about the confectioner whose discovery led to Napoleon Bonaparte’s increased naval capacity -’s normal Tuesday, it’s at least an interesting person to watch.

• But we’re really here to watch shit like the day Nicolas Appert wins the bounty that Napoleon has placed for anyone who can develop a better method of food preservation that will let his armies conquer and pillage more effectively by sea.

And we wouldn’t care about things the confectioner did that everyone did. If everyone has a meal every day, it’s not news worthy. If a confectioner is going to figure out you can preserve food by putting it in wine bottles, corking them, and then boiling the bottle, then it might be intriguing to know what kind of shit that guy had in his fridge that nobody else had.

I don’t have that information about Nicolas Appert. I just have barely a grasp of the broadest strokes of his story and his impact on the Napoleonic wars and the unchecked spread of empires.

But if I were writing a biopic on Nicolas Appert, I’d employ some choices about his character that are based on what I know about him thus far.

Rantazmo calls characters, “A collection of choices an author makes.”

Or perhaps it’s like the old statistician’s adage, that: All statistical models are wrong. —They distort reality to make reality more readable.— But Some statistical models are useful despite that distortion.

If I were writing a biopic about this guy, it would be necessary to make up parts of his life to keep an audience interested, even if it’s just putting words in the character’s mouth.

One of the exercises I would do (even if it didn’t make it into the final draft) is to assign this character version of Nicolas Appert a clear worldview that impacts ALL of the choices he makes for at least the first few scenes.

We can always add depth and contradiction to characters later-on, but for the sake of the audience, in the scenes where we’re seeing characters for the first time, we make the characters consistent in how they respond to the world.

The trick I’m partial to, is assigning a few clear archetypes to my characters, to help differentiate them from one another.

In general, the easiest thing to write is some Odd Couple variant. One character wants order, the other character can’t be bothered.

But to keep things interesting, and to help populate the rest of the cast of characters, I use Gunnar Rohrbacher’s Comedy Code, and Sally Hogshead’s strengths chart. Sometimes some Meyers-Brigs. Sometimes some Love Languages. Sometimes Zodiac. Sometimes it’s cheaper and more “yeah like that one character,” which basically makes some of my work fan fiction that’s been worked until it wasn’t a litigious nightmare. (I’ve heard that 50 Shades of Grey started off as fan fiction of Twilight, but I have not confirmed that.)

So if I were picking an archetype for the guy who is going bottle food to help Napoleon kill people, there are a few ways I could go.

You could make the character a Buffoon, whose overconfidence brings about problems for others.

You could create someone who is contrarian and Rebels against all persons he meets, and does a sort of Challenge Accepted, God Complex thing that sustains him through his confectioning experiments.

You could decide he’s an Eccentric, who lives a rather otherworldly life on his own terms, and in so doing, was unaware that other people needed this technology, but in hearing the contest Napoleon has issued, goes to work and swiftly solves the problems of food preservation which are obvious to him how to solve.

If I wanted this guy to be a heroic character, I’d make him a Dreamer. Someone whose life is a mess because they overreach and fail to meet their targets most of the time. I’d have to make it the tragic story of a man who strove often to leave his mark on the confectionary world, and in a desperate attempt to keep his shop open, figures out how to solve Napoleon’s problem of food spoiling on long sea journeys, only to realize later the extra deaths that will cause in the world, I could show him sitting on an extra lux chair at the end, celebrated in the end of his life because Napoleon’s cash kept his business running, and he became a pillar of the community with that blood money, and now cannot enjoy any of his success.

I’m like one bottle of Southern Comfort away from writing this story…

BUT

It’s GAME JAM SEASON and I have a job to do!

Let’s wrap up this section by explaining how I’d apply brand loyalty to Napoleon’s food-bottle boiler, so that you get the mechanics of this technique, then I’ll stop stalling and actually apply it to my characters for this game jam that is due in 205 hours some of which I have to spend sleeping…

So I’ll say I’d go with the tragic Dreamer who regrets too late his decision.

What brands will trap this man?

There will be two distinct phases to his life.

Idealist.

Regret-ist.

During his Idealist years, the things that grab his attention will be rich deserts full of cream and fluff and wonder. He’ll be partial to candied violets and rose petals, and wax poetic about transforming the wonders of the natural world into something even more delectable for the human palette.

Once the regret sets in: Booze.

Alcohol brewers saw me coming from generations away.

Breweries knew that I’d be dissatisfied with how my life lined up with my dreams, and breweries would be a solid business to assume will exist generation after generation. Not because they’re genuinely good for us, but because they fill a gap we are only barely starting to deal with as a world.

So which alcohol would draw him in? Perhaps something syrupy and sickeningly sweet. Amaretto comes to mind. Or cinnamon’ed whiskey, could be.

If I were writing this story for real, I’d keep my eyes peeled as I went through life, trying to check, “Would my confectioner be trapped by this as I have?”

I’d be trying to learn what my instincts for him are.

This is a habit from Dungeons and Dragons (and other tabletop roleplaying games).

If you play Dungeons and Dragons style games for long enough, you may find that we all understand exactly who our character is during character creation, and we can make all of our decisions for the character’s stats and abilities to align with a greater purpose and theme…

But the minute the DM asks us to speak as our character, or take our first action, we are suddenly in the nightmare where we’re getting ready for a play that we’re in but no one has given us the lines yet and the curtain is going up in 3, 2, 1…

In order to counteract the blank-page mind that accompanies playing a character in an improvisation game like Dungeons and Dragons, it’s helpful to know how that character calculates risk.

In our story, the confectioner needed to keep his dreams alive, and was known to be bad at forethought. He was a dreamer. His task was to build foundations under his ‘castles in the sky.’ He didn’t realize the cost of taking money from an emperor. His focus was on the risk of his dreams dying before his life was through. The risk of having to no longer be a confectioner, and join another trade, —that risk was too high, in this story for him.

So whether it ended up in the published story or not, I’d take him on a shopping trip. I’d make the shopping trip an annual thing. (I want to show him in his idealist years and his regretful-ologist years.)

In the tradition of fan-fictioning shit, and because my mother got a book from the author of Chocolat, so I have that town from that movie in my head. So I would make him take a journey to this town with a chocolate shop that is imaginative like he wants his own confections to be.

There would have to be other stores in town, for this comparison to work. Or at least we’d need an easy way to show him in other locations with other dessert shops.

We want to see him choose the chocolatery, over the other choices. Seeing him go out of his way to obtain chocolate from this chocolatery, is how we understand what he values.

Then, when he’s old and successful, but remorseful, I’d take him back to this village he frequents. I’d make a big scene out of the light in his eyes as he is on his trip, anticipating the wonder he once felt in this chocolate shop. I’d have him make big speeches to his friends and loved ones.

—And you’d have to get a good actor, because this would be all face-acting, so you’d need someone who didn’t rely on dialog to convey the story.—

The look on his face, the twitch or the confusion— It wouldn’t be immediate disgust.

In fact, I’d have him perhaps mundanely move from one half-eaten chocolate to another, as if to routinely move from ‘a bad one’ to one that is ‘correct.’

I’d maybe swamp him in a conversation with the chocolatery owner, who are by this time old friends, and he wouldn’t notice right away that the chocolate brings no joy as it once did.

Trying to not break down in front of his old friend, the owner of his favorite chocolatery, he’d begin to lose patience, grill the owner that he’s changed the recipe somehow. When that isn’t true, the recipe is the same, he’ll have to resort to a litany about how the quality of milk in the region must have gone down in recent years. And the owner will rebuff this. “No, I know the owner of the dairy personally monsieur, the milk in the chocolate has, if anything, improved!”

Brand loyalty trapped him.

Brand loyalty played on his unmet needs.

And we could end the story there, in the chocolatery, if this were a real biopic, because losing the brand loyalty, helps us see how this man experiences the world.

The chocolate was never the product, in his case. The product he was purchasing was the wonder, the hope, the dream.

And his dream, though not dead, is hollow. And tastes wrong on the tongue.

So now let’s talk about spaceship fridges!

Spaceship Fridges!

Fucking hell. -Do you know I almost did this post as a note. Freakin’ you know they mention Napoleon within the first chapters of Anna Karenina, which I have not finished because it is about a billion chapters long, and I’m just saying, holy heck is that fitting to remember just now because this is an even longer blog post.

BUT WE’LL GET THROUGH IT!

You wanted my process? I’ll give you my process dammit!

This is an impulse-check out (advertising works even if it’s just ‘which book should I get from the library’) from today’s visit to the library. We were there for a book sale, but they give you books for free, so long as you’re willing to bring them back.

This is one such book.

It’s called Know Yourself: A Book of Questions.

This is the kind of book I like for writing. I know the answers to a lot of these questions as they pertain to my own life, but knowing that it was game jam season, this was the perfect book to prompt me to differentiate my characters by what they would bring with them in the fridge, for the space flight, that is the setting for the video game that I am making in the next ten (now eight and change) days.

I know less about the characters for my story than I do about Nicolas Appert, Napoleon’s prizewinner.

But because I don’t feel the crushing weight of depicting real people who actually lived, there is some creative flow and freedom that comes from getting to make shit up as I go along, without fear of my historian cousin eying my work with a probationary squint.

What do I know?

Other than the total sum of what works and doesn’t work in a video game, I know:

They’re dudes in a relationship.

They’re in too-small of a space.

They’ve got time to kill on this journey.

Their names are or at least may be Mugs and Rowdy.

Mugs came from me playing a video game I checked out from the library on a whim (because advertising works, and I’ve wanted to play this game for a while, so when I saw it there, free of charge, I checked the hell out of it).

In this game, one of the characters you choose from to play, has the ability “Mug.”

But because of the unintuitive way they laid out the profile page, I thought the character was named Mug.

I was like, “That’s a great name! I want to play as a character named Mug!”

Then I realized my error.

Then I realized THIS GAME DOESN’T OWN THE NAME THEN!

I wasn’t even really thinking about how I could use that name for the game I’m making this week. It’s just a habit I have to future-proof my life, to jot down things that could be good names, for future use.

And this wasn’t the first time I’d misread or misheard something, felt embarrassed that I’d misunderstood, and then felt elation that I’d mistakenly invented a name for someone that I now could use for my own stories.

When I opened the document that holds all of the unused names, the top one on there (meaning the most recent) was Rowdy.

Mugs and Rowdy, I thought to myself, as I wrote Mug down on the list of names, and then Mugs, as that tweak came to me, then I explained in my notes where I got the name Mug from, so that I could remember that I was in the clear, and noticed I was attached to this idea of Mugs and Rowdy AND that I had two main characters to figure out for this game jam, so I declared them the names of the characters I’m about to make today.

I briefly cycled through archetypes from Comedy Code in my head, figuring that Mugs and Rowdy sounded like bruiser, enforcer types. And as I am making a video game, it felt like they would make sense as characters who can hold their own in a fight.

Mugs, I thought at first, might be a Rebel archetype, as Gunnar calls it, which is the archetype that picks a fight with everyone and everything they say. For both the fun of the fight, and because they believe that constant sparring will get them ahead in life (and it often does get them ahead).

But then Rowdy is literally how you would describe someone in a bar picking fights he doesn’t need to, so I shifted the Rebel over to Rowdy, and looked for another concept for Mugs.

Mugs, due to being monosyllabic, made me think of subservient characters who follow others around, and when they have their own agency, it’s maligned with lack of real understanding of the world they’re in, so their fervor gets them into trouble. This archetype is called the Buffoon.

That’s as much as I had figured out, and then I did what I almost always do, which is put the whole thing out of my mind, and hope to bump into some other stuff later.

But I don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to hit, my life is surrounded by stuff that is designed to ignite an idea if I have one brewing.

So now that I had this start-of-a-character going in the backgrounds of my head, hours later, when I picked up this Know Yourself book off of my shelf, I flipped through it, landed on the page above, which says, “What do you always have in your fridge?” and I realized, that Mugs and Rowdy sound like guys who would probably not fight too much over what they keep in their shared fridge, but when it’s a spaceship fridge, with limited availability for restocking, I could see them muscling one another out, to get more room for their coveted snacks.

But which snacks would those be for each of them?

Scotch and Splenda: Tastes like Splenda, gets you drunk like Scotch

I haven’t watched every episode of the American Office.

It didn’t grab me at the time it was airing.

It didn’t grab me when it came to streaming.

Finally, in ‘23, my sister who also did not like the show, lets me know that I should listen to The Office Ladies podcast, because it’s a wonderful friendship of two of the actors from the show, and it’s in-depth and organized enough that she said she felt satisfied that she could follow along the plot without watching the show.

I loved this podcast, and as someone who is promoting the idea that we need to study friendship more, and see better examples of what real friendship looks like: if I can get you to listen to the Office Ladies podcast (even just the 3 minute trailer) I will.

The American Office is referenced in Gunnar’s book the Comedy Code.

Michael Scott of the titular office, is a Buffoon.

Buffoons aren’t silly characters, so much as they are characters with a non-useful model for how reality works, and they take actions according to their own skewed (but consistent) logic.

Don’t write stupid characters, Gunnar says, write characters who are over-reaching and under-prepared.

So the first thing that pops into my head when I think “What does a Buffoon always have in his fridge?”

Michael Scott, when he quits his job, drinks openly at work.

He declares, “Scotch and Splenda! Tastes like Splenda, gets you drunk like scotch!”

When the hosts of The Office Ladies got to this episode, they fixed up scotches and Splenda for everyone, and they were shocked by how good it is.

Then I tried it. -Not with scotch, but adding sucralose to my booze. It was great!

I decided in an instant, because of this occurrence of a Buffoon being very right about something for once, that my Buffoon character Mugs, for my game, needs to have something amazing in the fridge he shares with his boyfriend Rowdy, on their shared, cramped spaceship.

It’s the old concept of “A broken clock is right twice a day too.” Meaning even useless people can be useful once in a while.

And I decided to make Mugs very useful when he’s useful in this case, so that while Rowdy will fight for his space in the fridge (because that’s what Rebels/Fighters) do, I can make him acquiesce to Mugs, reluctantly but heartwarmingly, when it becomes clear that Mugs used their fridge for something that they both love and can enjoy, because in this one instance, Mugs really is the best in the world at something.

…….So what is it? What’s in the fridge???

Idk. I just know it’ll be something really good and smart and good for a long spaceflight.

I’m on the lookout for it.

What matters today, is that I opened a question about what these characters want to eat, and I figured out how to align the answer to that question with the unshakeable consistency that the characters need to have at the start of their story. (That’s why it’s the food characters MUST eat. If I bring up food in a story, it better not be pointless fluff, you’d better walk away with an imperceptible but solidly improved understanding of who this guy is and what he’s about. …I just don’t know what he’s about just yet… But I know now what I’m looking for, I can see how it’ll slot in once I find it.)

If you want pieces to come together faster, you gotta go consume completed media. This is real-time updates of behind-the-scenes stuff. I got this far today. Then I stopped to tell you all about it and I wrote like 90,000 words in this blog post. —I gotta sleep soon.

Sry.

EDIT: Congratulations to you the reader who is not checking this out on the day of publication, you get the free upgrade of actually hearing what the thing will be.

A buddy of mine was talking about how cheesecake is one of his favorite foods, and I was like, “oh, that can be the food thing.”

It’s as humble as that, once I’ve got the open question, something comes along and works for that slot, and it’s a quick, easy decision, and I lock it in and move on.

In order to finish the game jam, I made a prototype of the story I was working on, but I’m currently working to expand it into a full game.

Now: the main character will have excellent taste in cheesecake, and everyone will agree so… but then he will be terrible for just about every other choice of food, and his crewmates will loathe anything he makes in the kitchen besides his cheesecake.

SECOND EDIT: Mugs loves a dish he makes that he thinks is tiramisu, but he’s really gotten it mixed up with trifle. He puts everything in his tiramisu, jelly beans, graham crackers, banana slices —whatever was on-hand and sweet, he adds to his ‘tiramisu.’

People hate it.

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Got Myself Stabbed By My Boyfriend

He wasn’t my boyfriend at the time.

At the time we met, the day he stabbed me in the back, I didn’t know him at all.

He knew me though, which can help explain the stabbing.

The stabbing happened without my knowledge, as so many stabbings do.

One minute I was collecting treasure, fulfilling my hopes and dreams, the next minute the game notified me my character had died. Another player had snuck up behind me, and killed me.

He didn’t take all my stuff, which decidedly wasn’t the custom at the time. (Usually if you went around killing other players, it was to take their stuff and make yourself more powerful.)

You might think it was because I had stolen his boyfriend, but in reality, this was his twisted love language: messing with the people he cared about. (He once catfished his straight best friend into falling in love with a persona he created, as a prank. The straight best friend seemed genuinely amused by it at the time I heard this story.)

But also I didn’t steal his boyfriend! I occupy a slot in friendships that most people have never seen in real life: I actually check in with people. If there was any unironic animosity in the stabbing, it was because I looked like I was stealing his boyfriend. I was doing the things a suitor would do: I was listening, and caring, and worst of all:

I was counsel.

Being counsel to persons in my life, frequently upset those persons’ partners. “Why does this Noah Wizard guy get so much of a say??”

So he might have been stabbing me in the back, because he’d heard my name one too many times, and he didn’t like how much weight that name carried when it was spoken.

At the time, I didn’t realize I was weird. At the time, I didn’t realize how other people were happy to be oblivious about what was going on in their friends’ lives. I sort-of felt like we were ‘in this together’ and that we were all collectively fucking up what benefits and blessings we’d stumbled upon, and that we’d need all the help we could get to not squander our lives.

For some couples, this could be a meet-cute, the ironic enemies-to-lovers start of something beautiful. I’m overly-friends with his boyfriend, he stabs me in the back, we hate each other, we hate spending time together, we fight every time our mutual acquaintance brings us together, eventually they break up because it’s high school, and my back stabber and I find ourselves trapped in a bank vault over Easter holiday, where we’re forced to realize our latent passion for one another. Just like a movie.

—We weren’t trapped in a bank vault. We did get trapped in a musical together. This was the early 2000’s and the gay dating-apps of our day were the local theatre community. (The next guy I dated came from a different theatre connection, one town over.)

We didn’t fall in love over some weekend trapped together.

But neither did we fall in love, slowly over time, realizing what we had in common.

Because we didn’t fall in love. I didn’t know what that was yet.

(It was the early 2000’s, and guys had to make up our relationships with each other as we went along. There was no road-map. We couldn’t casually fall into the roles that our parents’ had in their marriages, because two guys is a genuinely different power dynamic.)

Our story could have been a meet-cute, if it ended with us loving one another, even if that love came to an end.

This was not a meet-cute. This was not enemies-to-lovers.

This was enemies-to-Challenge-Accepted.

I hated the way this guy made me feel, so I dated him.

At the time, my dumbass goal in life, (as an attempt to shame my parents who had recently gotten a divorce) was to prove, to the world, that I, Noah Wizard, best of all humans, could get along with anyone.

Don’t Fellate Your Enemies, or: Why Representation Matters

I was proud of myself for a year and a half.

I was insufferably proud.

With no example to compare to, my relationship was allowed to live on in my head as “the ideal.”

I scoffed at others who were dating people they actually liked, but then got into quarrels with, and stopped dating.

“Stopped dating? You fool! Instead, stay with a person, regardless of your feelings and treatment and overall compatibility! Just stick it out! Show the world that we will have peace, no matter what.” -Noah Wizard, aged 16, a menace.

Turns out at the time, even in the early 2000’s, leading divorce scientists John and Julie Gottman had already figured out most of the best-case scenarios and strategies for making relationships work. If they’d worked with the Gilmore Girls to show us examples of the work couples do to stay together, I might have recognized I was in a relationship that made no sense, and could have gotten started really dating, instead of being in a relationship I hated, just to prove a point.

It would have overhauled The Gilmore Girls though.

Actual relationship strategies would have upended any storyteller’s plans.

You can make a story that is just two characters who love one another, with no one coming between them, but it’s a different story from the ‘will they/won’t they’ that plenty of writers had no choice but to rely on.

It probably seems grandiose, or overly personal, to talk about my personal relationships on a Substack ostensibly about game design.

But relationships matter.

Our stories about relationships matter, and it matters how we portray those characters keeping their relationships in good working order.

That’s my life’s work.

No one should be confused about what a healthy relationship looks like.

Doesn’t matter if it’s the people we work with, our family members, or the people we share our bed with, we deserve to have a clear goal to aim for.

But many of us are using fictions that were meant as fantasies, and they don’t translate well to real life.

Working in story writing, you’ll come to realize that, “It’s like we were made for each other,” isn’t just an in-world romantic line, from the meta-lens of story writing, it’s actual fact: These two fictional lovebirds were literally made for each other— in many cases, we’ll start with one protagonist, and use algorithmic thinking to generate the rough idea of what their partner will have to look like.

Characters often really do ‘complete one another.’

But humans: don’t.

Humans don’t complete one another. In fact, those divorce researchers I mentioned, the Gottmans, their work found that even among the world’s best-case scenario couples, over half of their problems will be unsolvable, perpetual conflicts which can reach no satisfying outcome, and must be met with understanding of one another, because there will be no, one, ‘right’ way that can be arrived at.

Whether parking in the back and walking, or circling around again, looking for a space to open up—

Or whether to live near the city for amenities or live away from the city, to gain space, there are a number of incompatibilities that any two persons have with each other, no matter how much they also love one another.

No TV shows at the time, no films, no books, no songs on the radio, that had any model I could use for my male/male relationship that I was in, with a guy who stabbed me in the virtual back. And even those stories that were fairy tale endings for straight people, gave me no clue what it looked like, when one guy creates psychological safety for another guy, so they can love one another in perpetual conflict, ever after.

Talking About Their Feelings? That’s So Gay!

It takes years of study to sculpt a man’s muscle-studded chest out of polygons.

And that’s if you want to do a basic, no-frills dude, for a game that doesn’t care about how hot its men are.

If you want to make virtual men for a game aimed at people who are attracted to men, then it’ll take more than a few tutorials in anatomy and polygonal retopology.

But it can be done.

There are some hot men in video games now. Not many. Not the majority. But they exist.

I want hot men for my games, and it’ll be a lot of work to get them in there.

But the gayest thing in my games won’t be two men kissing:

It’ll be two men admitting their inner worlds to one another.

There will be portals between different worlds—

There will be spaceships that defy everything we know about the limits of physics—

There will be spells, and animated, intelligent objects—

But the part of my games that will seem ‘unrealistic’ will be the way the characters talk to one another.

It wasn’t okay that he stabbed me, but I got myself stabbed in the back by being the weird-one. It shouldn’t be this way, but I’ve had strange altercations like this my whole life.

I can’t fully change up the way I naturally relate to people, which is to care about them deeply, give them my full attention, listen to what they say and think and fear and hope, and think about what they said when they are not around.

I’m tired of being the weird-one in life; I’m determined that we work toward a higher rate of emotional literacy on the planet, until we know how to talk to one another. We’ve got all this technology that lets us talk to one another, but our “scientists were so focused on if they could give us that power, that they didn’t stop to think whether they should.”

More Games That Show Healthy Relationships.

When I can—

That heading should read More games that show healthy relationships… when I can…

The subtitle of this article is “My plan to create a video game empire by the end of 2007. 2008 at the latest.”

That’s when I thought I’d be done. I thought in 2007, “wow, I should make games, and then take the money I made from making games, and then spend that on going to college to learn how to make even better games.”

That’s a real thought I had.

Note: It did not happen.

I tried to start a blog that year.

Then the next year, a video channel.

It wasn’t even until 2012 that I’d played good enough video games that I realized I really wanted to take video game design seriously.

Then in 2013 I decided not to join a big company, but to build my own games.

In 2021I managed to produce my first few prototype games during game jams.

I know a lot. I’ve studied many many subjects, in order to design games that are about people lovingly fighting with one another.

But there is no roadmap to discovery.

Ironman (2008) was in development hell, I heard once, for 17 years. There was an era where Tom Cruise would have been Ironman, but it fell apart. There was an era where Nicholas Cage would have been Ironman, but it fell apart.

When Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Ironman came out, it launched a cinema phenomenon the likes of which the world had not seen. Twenty three movies between his first and last scene I think? (Though he was not in all of those movies himself.)

“Creativity is the art of curating accidents,” Julia Cameron said.

I wish I could give you a consistent schedule of what you’ll find here on this Substack. The Substack fairies suggest that I should tell you what schedule you can expect from me. And I agree you deserve that schedule and consistency.

But you’ll not get it, because I don’t have that to give. I can’t give you consistency that the process of discovery doesn’t bring.

At least not consistency of schedule.

Naomi from IttyBiz pointed out once that authors didn’t need consistency-of-schedule to be successful. Directors neither. So long as they had consistency of quality.

That’s the best I can offer you.

Though in truth, I can’t even offer you that.

“If you’re going to tell people the truth, make them laugh, or they’ll kill you.”

You deserve consistency of humor, and I’ll give you all I’ve got.

But plenty of days, the humor runs out, and then all I have is this brain full of stuff, and no funny way to get it to you. So our options become you get nothing from me, or you get a less-funny piece from me.

It’ll always be about real big shit though.

That’s my consistency.

Life has been trying to swallow us whole for too long, and I don’t care about video games that make a buck, I care about video games that save our lives. That’s what I’m trying to make, and that’s the mind I can offer you if you want to stick around.

But the next installment might be 55 years from now, so…

How To Build An Effigy Of Me Out Of Household Objects

The best thing you can do is scrap a large portion of your possessions and make a small statue of my likeness, and then bump into it every time you leave the room because you didn’t used to have a statue there.

If your goal is to never forget who I am, that’s the most unhinged thing you could do so that I am burned into your brain and you never forget me.

But it will also cost you floor-space and is way too cult-like so I hope nobody ever takes that seriously, it will haunt me until I die.

So instead, I recommend doing whatever the Substack thing is that lets you get my updates when I have updates. I think you put your email in, but I don’t know! I know that if I had a small looping gif of how to sign up, it would increase conversion rates. They’ve done studies. The effigy thing is a joke, but the gif for how to sign up, that they did studies on, that is not a joke, they really studied that and it really would hope.

But I was born last century. I have signed up for too many websites.

I don’t know how you get my updates on Substack.

So I have to entice you to care enough about me that you’ll figure it out and make damn sure you make it happen if you never want to forget who I am or miss my updates here.

And if we never meet again, let me leave you with this poem from Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919):

So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths, that wind and wind,
When just the art of being kind,
Is all this sad world needs.

Forget me if you have to. It’s a busy life.

Please consider never forgetting that the ‘art of being kind’ is what this sad world needs.

(And if you’re loaded, please also give me tons of cash so I can keep working on this shit. What’s that? You’re taking me seriously but need a guideline? How much is an hour of your time worth? How about you chuck me that amount per month? Or if that number is too high or too low, now you have a starting point for what you’re comfortable with. Boom. Solved.)

What Games Should You Play While You Wait??

Glad you asked!

Can you manage a sad-ish but charming story about helping people cross over to their afterlife while feeding them their favorite dishes that you make yourself on your cute-as-heck boat that you pilot down the river Styx?

Spiritfarer. It’s even available included at no additional charge with Netflix subscriptions in some countries.

Do you have some ability to do jumping puzzles and dodging creatures but not a ton? Do you wish you could hear a story about two women who are about to run out of money for their spaceship as it crash-lands on an uncharted planet? Will they, and their dedicated soup-robot have heartwarming scenes as they uncover the mystery of this abandoned world?

The Gunk.

You want to know the game (trilogy) that made me take game design seriously? It’s dated at this point, but that game was called Mass Effect, and it comes in three parts. Get the Legendary Edition which has better difficulty settings than the original games. It is a shooter game, and I had a hard time aiming and hitting things until I played this game which occasionally lets you use space-magic instead of shooting people, and the space-magic has homing beacons so you don’t need as much skill.

Speaking of space-magic, what’s the best game that no one is playing?

Warframe.

I am so mad at this game, they keep making it hard for me to keep playing, it’s big, it’s confusing, I don’t know how I would have made it through without people holding my hand, and that is still the case for all the new shit they add to it every year, much of which I don’t even get to see, because it’s locked behind skills I don’t have.

But it’s some of the most daring out-there writing I’ve seen. It’s free. And I’d never taken it seriously until I found somebody who knew how to break the game down and make it possible for me to catch up.