GBGames

Video game blogs: the next level is a post on Aeropause on the topic of writing a better blog in general and a game blog in particular.

I actually gave Eats, Shoots, and Leaves to my girlfriend, so I might borrow the book from her one day. I’m also interested in reading 31 Days to Building a Better Blog. I never intended to make money from my blog. I don’t blog professionally (although one might think that I spend enough time doing so at the expense of other things I SHOULD be doing professionally) so I don’t think all of the advice will be relevant, but I should be able to gain some insight into better blogging.

Prompts to start you writing provides a link to a site to help you get into the writing mood. The Imagination Prompt Generator actually generates topics for you to write about.

Some examples that came up when I tried it out:

“One thing I want to learn right now is…”
“If you could pass on a piece of advice that meant a lot to you when you received it, what would it be?”
“____ was my favorite cartoon because…”

And you can just keep going until you find one that appeals to you, write for a few minutes, and BOOM, you’re in the writing mood and can start writing whatever it is you wanted to write. It reminds me of the creative writing exercises I did in grade school.

I searched for a similar site for hacking prompts, but I decided that it probably isn’t a good thing to encourage people to code creatively. It’s not like writing. I thought that maybe I can get into the coding mood if I write a simple, 10-line program based on a suggestion. I think it is more accurate to say that if I am having issues getting into the mood to program, I probably don’t have a very clear reason to program. I shouldn’t just sit down to a blank file and start hacking. I should have some specific goal. Why am I coding? I should design it on paper and try to figure out what details I’ll need. I can be creative coming up with solutions in that phase, but I should not be creative with the actual code.

In the latest Escapist, The Contrarian: Roll the Dice mentions ESR’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

I’m reminded of Eric S. Raymond’s essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote about the differences between top-down, monolithic software development and bottom-up, open-source development. But the metaphor applies here too.

People don’t always get what the Cathedral and the Bazaar really represent, and it is weird because it isn’t like Raymond hid the meaning in metaphor and poetry. He says it up front: the cathedral represents software development by project leaders on high while the bazaar represents software development done by everyone. Both ways can be open source, not just the latter. It just depends on if the project moves in a direction on the whim of the few or with the natural developments of the many. That’s all it refers to.

Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvalds’s style of development – release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity – came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here; rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

Even so, people think the cathedral and the bazaar refers to open source vs proprietary software, Microsoft vs Linux, and all sorts of things. And apparently now it refers shallowness in video games vs the depth provided by tabletop gaming? Or the openness of a game as opposed to the rigidity?

I thought it was a good article, but the link to ESR’s work was a big stretch that doesn’t work.