Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business Personal Development

My 16 Answers

In my post You’re an Indie. Now What?, I linked to Seth Godin’s 16 Questions for Free Agents. Below are my answers.

1.Who are you trying to please?

The short answer: my customers. But I think this question is really about identifying who your customers are. After all, you can’t please everyone, and if you try, you’re probably making something watered-down that pleases no one.

So who do I want to please? One, I’ve always wanted to make sure that I make games that I can also play, so cross-platform compatibility is very important to me. I use GNU/Linux at home, and I am frustrated when a game is released that is Windows-only. It’s even more frustrating for a game to be ported to the Mac but to hear that the developer refuses to support GNU/Linux. That’s like finding out that an old high school buddy traveled across the country to visit a mutual friend but refused to visit you because “it’s too far” even though you live just two blocks away. Web games are usually better at cross-platform support, but when they rely on Windows and Mac-only plugins, again, it shuts out people like me.

Two, even though I’ve quit my day job and no longer have to be there for 40-60 hours a week, I remember not having a lot of time to play games, at least not as I used to when I was younger. Years ago, playing 4+ hours per day after school was easy. Today, I don’t think I even WANT to dedicate that much time when I have so many other things I want to do. But I don’t want to play Bejeweled for 10 minutes. I want to play bigger, more complex games. Thinking games. Involved games. I just don’t want to need to dedicate hours upon hours to playing them in order to get satisfaction. So if I make a game, I would like to appeal to the gamers who wish they could game more often but find it difficult to do so. There are casual games, but sometimes they’re too simple for our tastes.

A perfect example of a game that allows you to get involved without needing to spend inordinate amounts of time to do so is Neptune’s Pride by Iron Helmet. It’s a real-time strategy that doesn’t require quick reflexes or quick thinking to do well. In fact, the faster you are, the less you’ll have to do since most of the time you’re waiting to see how your strategies play out. While it has a fun social element, allowing you to trade and backstab and do all sorts of diplomacy-related things, I like that you can log in only once a day or every 5 minutes and not gain or lose much over your opponents, and yet it is deep.

So the customer I’m trying to please right now is someone who wants to play deeper, more intricate games but have the same time commitment as he/she would with more casual games, and he/she wants to do so on the platform of his/her choice without absurd arbitrary limits.

2.Are you trying to make a living, make a difference, or leave a legacy?

I don’t believe these are mutually-exclusive. In fact, I have a hard time seeing how you can make a sustainable living without trying to make a difference or make your mark on the world. That said, the question of “what are you trying to do” is an important one to answer.

I won’t be satisfied with merely getting by. Granted, my income is nearly nonexistent at the moment, and there is definitely a desire to change that, but I don’t want to make bad long-term decisions just to make a quick buck now. I want to be creative and encourage others to be creative. I want to pursue curiosity and support others in their own pursuits. I want to make something that gives people a reason to think and talk about it.

3.How will the world be different when you’ve succeeded?

Earlier this year, I thought long and hard about how I wanted my life to turn out. I knew I was in charge of making decisions that would impact my quality of life, and if I didn’t become more self-aware and more conscious, then life would impact me instead.

In an earlier post, I mentioned going through some exercises in the book Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life. If you want some great advice for getting some guidance in your life, I’d highly recommend reading that book and actually running through the exercises yourself.

My current identified life on purpose is a joyful life of freedom, continuous learning, encouraged and supported creativity, insatiable curiosity, and prolific creation, all driven by passion and a desire for excellence, powered by a healthy body and soul.

The thing about a life on purpose is that it isn’t just about me. It’s about everyone else, too. I want my life to be a joyful life of freedom, and I want others to experience that, too. I hope I’m always learning in my life, and as important as it is, I hope the same is true for you.

While I anticipate my life on purpose will change as I grow, currently the above statement indicates how I hope the world would be changed when I’m through.

4.Is it more important to add new customers or to increase your interactions with existing ones?

It’s a question I’m wrestling with. There are only three ways to increase your business, according to Jay Abraham’s book Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition: increase the number of clients, increase the average size of the sale from a client, and increase the number of times a client returns to buy again.

So clearly adding new customers is important, but increasing interactions with customers is also important. Of course, just starting out, I have no customers. Having one customer is more important than giving great service to no customers, at least if I want to see revenue.

But there are two speeds when it comes to adding new customers to your business: fast and slow. Amazon.com needed to get big fast and gave very little thought to company culture. Ben & Jerry’s wanted a certain culture and built up slowly.

As an indie, I’m not interested in producing five or 10 games a quarter in the hopes that one of them becomes a hit and makes up for the investment in all of them. I’ll leave that business model to the major publishers. I’d rather have customers that are willing to talk to me about what they like and what bothers them.

So while it is more important to add customers, I don’t want to try to “get customers” at the expense of the longer-term relationship I could have. I don’t want people feeling ripped-off. I want to know that the people playing my games are satisfied, that they have no problem telling their friends and family about my games, and that they look forward to my games.

5.Do you want a team? How big? (I know, that’s two questions)

No. Ideally my team would be just me.

I’ve realized over the years that I can’t do everything myself, though. While I’ll take advantage of contractors and freelancers, I’d still prefer to keep my “team” small. I am not interested in turning GBGames into a massive company.

6.Would you rather have an open-ended project that’s never done, or one where you hit natural end points? (How high is high enough?)

Open-ended project that’s never done? I’m pretty sure Duke Nukem Forever covers that. B-)

Joking aside, I’m making games, and I’d rather have projects I can say are finished. While I could see making social MMOs requiring updates throughout the life of the game, there will still be a 1.0 version released.

7.Are you prepared to actively sell your stuff, or are you expecting that buyers will walk in the door and ask for it?

“If you build it, they will come” is widely regarded as a lie, and so if I expect to sell anything, I need to be prepared to actively do so. I won’t last long if I am sitting back and waiting for the customer to do the hard work of discovering my game, determining whether or not he/she wants to play it, and paying for it.

8.Which: to invent a category or to be just like Bob/Sue, but better?

While creating innovative and unique games sounds more creatively satisfying, I don’t want to make them so foreign that people don’t know what they’re playing and therefore won’t. At the same time, I don’t want to merely clone other successful games. Even if they could be financially successful, I wouldn’t be happy with it.

9.If you take someone else’s investment, are you prepared to sell out to pay it back?

Yes? By taking someone else’s investment, don’t I have an obligation to do things with the expectation that I will pay it back? If someone gives me $10,000, I’m going to want to do something that makes back at least $10,000, and I suppose that could be seen as “selling out.”

As of now, the only person’s investment I need to worry about is my own. Of course, I’d still like to be able to pay myself back (and then some!), so my behavior will still be geared toward getting my business profitable. It is a business, after all.

10.Are you done personally growing, or is this project going to force you to change and develop yourself?

Is anyone ever done personally growing? My business will definitely force me to change and grow much more quickly than I ever had to before.

11.Choose: teach and lead and challenge your customers, or do what they ask…

While I’ve been writing about having customers who are willing to tell me what they want, I am not going to be bending over backwards to make games that appeal to all customer requests. I’m the game designer, after all.

Also, part of my life on purpose includes continuous learning, and again it applies to everyone, not just me. And so I choose to teach, lead, and challenge my customers. What I choose to teach, however, is a different question.

12.How long can you wait before it feels as though you’re succeeding?

Before I quit my day job, I determined how much my burn rate was based on my current savings. I figured that the worst-case was that I had only a year before my savings ran out, but if I had to, I had even more time if I didn’t mind dipping into retirement savings.

And even if my savings did run out, I would find a way. I’m indie now, and I don’t see myself going back. At the moment, I feel that, if I had to, I could wait indefinitely.

13.Is perfect important? (Do you feel the need to fail privately, not in public?)

Heck, no! I’m planning on blogging about my failings. B-)

14.Do you want your customers to know each other (a tribe) or is it better they be anonymous and separate?

I’d love for my customers to interact with each other if they choose to. Going along with my answer to #4, I want these people to enjoy being customers. I don’t want them to be one-off cash register chimes.

15.How close to failure, wipe out and humiliation are you willing to fly? (And while we’re on the topic, how open to criticism are you willing to be?)

I’m all in as far as quitting my day job and relying on myself to earn a living goes, but per project? I don’t think I would try to spend everything I have on my first project. While it might result in higher quality art and sound as well better quality work (I’m not so arrogant as to think that I couldn’t hire someone to do a better job of programming than I), that’s it. If the game doesn’t earn me a living, it’s over for me.

So realistically, I’m going to be more cautious and less willing to spend money when I don’t need to. I need to be careful that I’m being too cautious. After all, if I can pay someone to do something in 30 minutes that would take me weeks to do a poorer job of, I should pay the money. But if I wipe out, I’m not going to do it in one big expensive effort in the first month of being indie.

Humiliation and criticism? I’m open to the possibility that people will laugh at my efforts, but I’m not going to let them discourage me. Cynics do not create.

16.What does busy look like?

I’m going to assume the use of the word busy here does not imply that you’re spinning wheels as opposed to moving forward.

I think there won’t be any one activity that I can point to and say, “If I’m working, this is what I’m doing.” I can’t expect to do well if I focus exclusively on product development because there won’t be any marketing or sales efforts. People won’t know what I’m offering or why they should pay for it. If I only do market research, then nothing is ever going to be produced. And if I only sell, then I’m not going to be creating anything, either.

But, if I can identify goals I want to accomplish, and if I make sure to do those activities that will help me accomplish those goals, then I can know whether I’m being busy or wasting time.

What are your 16 answers?

Some answers were harder to answer than I anticipated, while others were questions I’ve never thought about before.

If you’re an indie, have you taken the time to answer those 16 questions? Care to share them?

Categories
Marketing/Business

Shareware is Dead

ASP

In case you haven’t heard, the Association of Shareware Professionals has changed its name to the Association of Software Professionals.

For more information on the name change, read Shareware is dead – long live shareware!

Shareware, essentially try-before-you-buy, is alive and well today. Almost any software in distribution offers a demo these days. Decades ago, shareware was revolutionary as a concept, but it was a great way to get your software in front of potential customers. In a time when the most people could expect was a brochure or ad, being able to actually USE the software before you paid for it helped spread software to a wider audience.

Unfortunately, as time went on, there was a negative association between “shareware” and “amateur”, or “freeware”, or “crippleware”.

That isn’t to say that the ASP isn’t still a useful organization. Shareware was always about marketing, and marketing changes. Getting assistance, information, and business advice from a professional organization? That’s a constant.

Categories
Marketing/Business

Are You Going to ProductCamp Chicago?

ProductCamp Chicago

This Saturday, I’ll be at ProductCamp Chicago, an un-conference about product management.

What is product management? Don’t ask me. I just learned about the role!

But to get an idea, think about it like this:

Project managers focus on the day-to-day activities that will get a single project done on time and within budget. They concern themselves with how to best handle the resources they have to move a single project forward efficiently.

Product managers, on the other hand, concern themselves with the long-term activities of the company as a whole. They act as ambassadors for the customer and determine what products and services a company should create, both now and in the future, and how to inform customers about those products and services.

So product management is closely tied to development, marketing, and sales.

To learn more about it, I’d suggest checking out The Strategic Role of Product Management as well as PragmaticMarketing.com and The Accidental Product Manager.

Clearly if my business is going to be a success, I’m going to need to put on another hat: product manager.

And so I’m going to a conference to connect with others and learn more about it.

Are you going to the conference? How have you, as an indie, internalized the product management role?

Categories
Games Politics/Government

Depictions of Violent Death in Games

Fight Club

Opinion: The “Virgin Mary” of Video Games? is a piece at GameDev.net by Lew Pulsipher, a board game designer and game design educator, which analyzes the predominance of games that depict violent death.

He links to a short post by John Sharp in 2009 which asks the following question:

If representations of Mary are used as evidence of the centrality of Christianity in the culture of the Italian Renaissance, what does the preponderance of guns say about our culture, and more specifically, the cultural form of games?

Pulsipher argues that guns are too specific, especially when you consider the vast majority of games set in a fantasy environment in which there are no modern weapons, and posits that a large number of games depict violent death.

He doesn’t question why it is so. He doesn’t demand the game industry account for itself. He and Sharp both simply question what it says about our culture that our entertainment is so violent.

And they’re not the first ones to ask this question, and it isn’t just games. Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment is a book from 1998 that explicitly analyzed not how violence in our entertainment affects us but why we specifically look for it.

There’s an article on video games by Jeffrey Goldstein in this book that mentions Mortal Kombat. If you recall, there were two versions released for home consoles at the time. The Sega Genesis version had all of the blood and gore included, but the Super Nintendo version was toned down.

Although there were more Nintendo than Sega game systems present in U.S. households, the bloody Sega version of Mortal Kombat outsold the less violent version by about 7 to 1.

The article goes on to discuss the distinction between aggressive behavior and aggressive play, and it says that there are 25 possible reasons for an appeal to the latter ranging from biological to psychological to social reasons. One reason children war play or enjoy violent media is surprisingly out of a need to seek out justice. After all, it is more enjoyable to see a film about a violent criminal who is caught and brought to justice than it is to see one about an unresolved murder.

And again, the book that this article comes from is from 1998, so the questions asked aren’t new. I do think, however, that there aren’t many answers that have been provided since then. There is, of course, the notable exception of Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson. Johnson argues that the content of the video games isn’t as important as the form. That is, the systems of the game provide the appeal and benefit rather than the actual content.

But it doesn’t explain why a bloodier Mortal Kombat sold so much better than a toned-down version, although marketing could have much to do with it. And it also doesn’t explain why video games tend to focus on conflict and violence as themes, especially if they don’t need to do so.

So what does it say that most video games are violent? Pulsipher says he doesn’t know and would like his article to stir up some discussion. Goldstein mentioned a number of possible explanations, but he admitted that there isn’t much research to indicate what may or may not be the case. Hasn’t there been any more thoughts on it? Are depictions of violence in video games indicating a problem or a cultural bias in learning, or is the content unimportant?

To put it another way, what would it say about our culture if violent depictions in video games were incredibly rare? Would it indicate that gamers are more civilized? Would it mean people weren’t gaming anymore?

Does violence in video games stop appealing to gamers as they mature, or is it a certain type of person who specifically doesn’t enjoy games which feature violence heavily in their themes?

Do you know of further research which indicates what violence in our cultural artifacts means? Are games inherently good for exploring themes of violence, struggle, and survival, or is it simply easier for game designers to focus on such games?

(Photo: Fight Club by Polina Sergeeva | CC-BY-2.0)

Categories
General

The World Cup is Here!

Besides not having Internet access at home yet, the other reason why I won’t be able to write many blog posts here is because I’m a big soccer fan and am watching the World Cup!

Yes, it isn’t exactly a stellar start for me in terms of being a full-time indie game developer, but I’ve made this decision, and I’m going with it for now. Part of the reason why I’m an indie is so I can decide what to do with my time, and right now, that means feeling perfectly comfortable sitting in a bar and watching soccer multiple times a day. It’s quite liberating, actually. B-)

If you really want to read what I have to say, I have gotten a few things written down at my other blog: ModernAmericanSoccer.com, where I try to cover all things about American soccer and what makes it unique in the world.

Tomorrow is the big, highly anticipated game: USA vs ENG! What are your predictions? Do you think the Yanks can win the match? Group C? The Cup itself?

Categories
Marketing/Business

You’re an Indie. Now What?

Mediocrity is Sin

If you’re like me and just quit your day job to run your independent video game business full-time, you might be thinking, “What do I do now?”

That isn’t to say you aren’t prepared. You’ve done your homework. You know how to make games. You know business models. You know who you might need to know.

But you still need to know what you are specifically going to do. I don’t necessarily mean what specific game you want to work on or what sales system you’re going to build. I mean what do you want to make of yourself and your time? Who is it that you’re trying to impress? What is your end goal in this endeavor?

Some indies specifically want to hone game development into an art. See Jason Rohrer’s games Passage or Gravitation for excellent examples. John Carmack is an applied mathematician and 3D game engine wizard. Corvus Elrod is a storyteller.

Each of these people focused on excelling in some area, and the result is advancing games in a very specific way. If you want to have discussions about games as art, you’d do well to know about Jason Rohrer’s games as well as his life. If you want to make the best 3D game engine, Carmack was the pioneer for many techniques and methods for doing so. And if you’re interested in how games can tell stories in their own unique way, you would do well to have discussions with Elrod.

Some indies want to create fun for as many people as possible. Others want to focus on using games as a means to inform. Some want to make something to enjoy with their friends and family, while others just want to tinker. There are many paths to take. In their respective circles, they’ve made a name for themselves.

But what are you going to do? What do you want to be known for?

Seth Godin wrote 16 Questions for Free Agents, which can help you make that decision.

In my experience, people skip all of these questions and ask instead: “What can I do that will be sure to work?” The problem, of course, is that there is no sure, and even worse, that you and I have no agreement at all on what it means for something to work.

It’s easy to do what you see others are doing. Make that clone. It sold well, and you might sell well, too. Maybe. More likely, probably not.

Perhaps fame or legacy isn’t what you are looking for.

But if you only have one life to live, why settle for a cloned life of mediocrity?

(Photo: Mediocrity | CC BY-SA 2.0)

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business Personal Development

Going Full-Time Indie

Empty Cube

Last Monday, I gave my two weeks’ notice to my day job. I’m going to run GBGames, LLC full-time.

After 5 years of part-time development and not much to show for it, I was frustrated. I had no urgency. I found myself losing focus often, even after I admonished myself for doing so. Week after week, I’d get disappointed in my lack of productivity. I’d identify the problem as a lack of seriousness or a lack of clarity or a lack of efficiency, and I’d claim, “No more! This time, it’s for real!”, but then I’d find myself at the end of another week with little to no forward progress and hardly any change to my work habits.

Well, no more! This time, it’s for real! B-)

I’m cutting myself off from the peace of mind of a regular income from a salaried position, with nice benefits, at a really good company, with great coworkers. I could work in much worse environments. I was able to spend money on food, clothes, utilities, and toys without generally worrying if I had enough money to cover it. The people were great, and the company policies were what you thought of when you thought of best-practices.

So why walk away from that? Because I’m also cutting myself off from an obligation to be anywhere for 40-60 hours a week. Those hours are mine now. I have the freedom to use them however I want. Instead of being a cog in an otherwise pretty great wheel, I’m making my own wheel.

Of course, with that freedom comes great responsibility. I’m solely responsible for the success or failure of my business. My future income depends more on my marketing, sales, creativity, and productive output than the time I spend sitting at a desk. It’s going to be hard work, and I’ll encounter challenges the likes of which I’ve never seen.

But it’s time. I have an opportunity to make a mark on the world. I am done with feeling like the lion’s share of my attention is being given to what I should to be doing to the detriment of what I want to be doing. I’m only going to get older. I turn 29 in a couple of months, and before I know it, I’ll be 30. And then 40. And 50. And so on. If I’m going to run my business full-time, it might as well be now, when I have less responsibilities and obligations. I’ve prepared for years to do it. I’m as ready as I’m going to be.

Let’s go, World. I’m ready to rock.

(Photo: Empty Cube | CC BY 2.0)

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical

Encourage Creativity: Addicube

Encouragement

One of elements I’ve identified for living my life on purpose is encouraged and supported creativity. Even though it is part of my life purpose, it doesn’t mean it is just for me. Part of the point of a life purpose is that it applies to everyone around me, too. I’m not only focused on making sure my own life has encouraged and supported creativity, but I want to make sure that the people around me are encouraged and supported as well.

So when I learned that Corvus Elrod, former writer of Man Byte’s Blog and current writer of Semionaut’s Notebook, was partnering up with Charles Berube of The Wasabi Project to create a game called Addicube, I thought, “That sounds great!”

But then I learned that the project won’t get started until it is fully funded. See, the project is currently waiting for enough funding through Kickstarter.com, which is a funding platform which allows projects to ask for donations from fans and friends. If enough people donate, the project happens, but if there isn’t enough funding, then no one pays any money. Well, back in January, having newly created my life purpose statement, believing in Corvus Elrod, and knowing that I wanted to encourage and support creativity, I pledged my support at the Benefactor level. Sometimes “That sounds great!” is good encouragement, but money helps, too. B-)

As of this writing, Addicube on Kickstarter has 51 backers and 89% of the $3,500 it needs to be completely funded, but there’s a deadline. If Addicube gets enough funding by April 25th, then Elrod and Berube will get started.

Frankly, I want Addicube to happen, and I’d like to ask you to help. The deadline is looming, and they’re so close to having the Kickstarter project fully funded.

Please go to Addicube on Kickstarter, learn more about the game, and pledge $5, $10, $25, or more. If you really want to make an impact, pledge to be one of us Benefactors at $250+. Let’s encourage creativity and get this game made!

(Photo: Encouraging note | CC BY-SA 2.0)

Categories
Personal Development

Three Ways to Achieve Your Goals More Easily

Every year, especially around New Year’s Eve, people notice something about their lives that they don’t like. Maybe someone doesn’t like seeing the extra inches around his waist. Perhaps someone else doesn’t like the size of her savings account. Whether it has to do with health, wealth, or quality of life, these people identify something they don’t like and decide to do something about it.

They set goals such as:

  • I’m going to lose 25 lbs by summer.
  • I want to have half a million dollars before I retire.
  • I want to live in a bigger apartment.

When people set goals, they have good intentions. They may even write down their goals. For a weight loss goal, perhaps that goal is placed on the fridge as a reminder. Perhaps that first week might be filled with exercise at the gym, and the goal setter might be filled with energy and motivation.

Too often, though, what happens for many people is that they soon forget the goals they set. The person who wants to lose weight might find that he has a hard time waking up one morning, and so he skips going to the gym that day. And he might go to the gym the next day. But soon enough, another tough morning comes. And then another. And he might find the habit of going to the gym daily gets scaled back to only a few days a week. Eventually, without realizing it, he won’t be going to the gym at all, and he’ll be back to living his life the way he did before he set the goal.

And the same goes for any goal. Perhaps the person who wants to save $500,000 gets excited about saving a bit of money each time she gets paid, but it’s possible that there are plenty of bills that need paying and the morning coffee isn’t too much money and someone’s birthday is coming up. She might find that saving money is just too hard, and eventually she falls out of the habit.

A year later, these people might look back and realize that they haven’t made any progress on their goals. And for some people, they might have a lot of goals that they are failing to achieve at once. Insert guilt and frustration here. I’ve been there, and odds are, you’ve been there, too.

So what can you do? I recently realized a few ways to make goal achievement easier:

  1. Focus on only a few goals, not a billion!
  2. Make those goals vivid!
  3. Keep your attention on those goals!

Focus on only a few goals!

This one was tough for me to internalize. I have a billion interests. I have a day job. I have an indie video game development business. I write for this blog. I play soccer. I have friends and family I want to spend time with. I am the Charter Executive for the Association of Software Professionals Games Special Interest Group. I want to weight about 15 lbs less than I do. I want a nicer apartment. I have a ton of papers I want to shred, a set of online business courses to finish taking, books to read, a ukelele to build and learn how to play, a printer to setup…Yeah, I’m busy! B-)

I used to keep all of these projects on a list, which is good in that they won’t fall through the cracks or become forgotten, but I always felt like I wasn’t making progress. One day I’d write a blog post, but I wouldn’t have time to work on my game development projects. I’d go to the gym and run for an hour, but then I’d be too tired to read that business book I’ve been meaning to finish. I’d do some actions related to one project, such as taking the online business course, but then feel like other things weren’t getting done, so I’d switch my focus to something else.

Eventually, I realized that my approach wasn’t working. My attention was spread too thin, rendering me ineffective at everything. I felt frustrated, and life just wasn’t fun. I felt like I needed to constantly be “on”. Watching TV, playing video games, reading for leisure, spending time with friends: they all felt like ways I was procrastinating doing all of the work that I knew had to get done. As the psychologist William James once said, “Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” And I had a lot of those!

If I was going to accomplish anything meaningful, I needed to focus on it until it was done. After all, if it was the most important thing for me to do, why spend time on anything else? Isn’t that just procrastination?

At the start of the new year, I identified a few major goals that I wanted to accomplish this year. Not 50. Not 100. I came up with four goals, and I have since reduced them to three. At any given moment, I know that if I should be doing anything, it is in service to to accomplishing those three goals.

Why so few? Because I need focus if I want to see these goals accomplished. Focusing on a billion goals is the same as having no focus at all.

Make those goals vivid!

There are good ways to define goals, but there are also bad ways to do so. If you search online for tips about setting goals, you’ll inevitably come across the acronym SMART, and you’ll also come across articles suggesting that it is outdated. Whatever you decide to do, write your goal so that it gives you energy to think about it. Boring goals won’t motivate you.

“I want to lose weight” is a lame goal. It has no energy behind it. There’s no vision. It’s just a weak prayer. A better version: “I want to lose 15 lbs in three months.” It’s better partly because of the details, but it could be improved. How about this one?

“I am achieving a healthy, optimal weight that makes me look sexy and feels vibrant. I easily reach a weight of XYZ lbs.”

Achieving! Healthy! Optimal! Sexy! Vibrant! Easily! These words make the goal FEEL awesome! Just think about the way that goal is written in the last example. It’s a lot harder to forget than “I want to lose weight”, isn’t it?

You want your goals to fire up your imagination, and you want to imagine what success looks and feels like. It might sound silly, but this activity is key. I allow myself to enjoy the good feelings that come from immersing myself in these goals as if they are already achieved. This isn’t just fantasy or navel-gazing. Imagining that your success is already accomplished actually helps you accomplish those goals! If you can convincingly feel that your accomplished goal is real, your subconscious can go to work making it happen.

Of course, if you do the work to create a goal that inspires you, it would be a shame to forget about it.

Keep your attention on those goals!

I’ve had a problem declaring goals and not following up on them. For example, when it came to making time for regular game development each week, I have historically been pretty bad at it. Tracking it through the Thousander Club, I could see just how bad it was, and at the start of each year, I would say, “This is it! This is the line in the sand! I did badly before, but I will change my ways completely!” The next thing I know, it’s December, and I realize that I am nowhere near 1,000 hours of game development.

If your goals are important to you, you need to dedicate the time to thinking about them. It’s too easy to forget about your goals when you’re drowning under obligations and interests pulling you in multiple directions.

Some people suggest writing down your goals every day. I don’t like the idea of throwing away hundreds of index cards throughout the year, so I wrote them down once, but every morning I make an effort to think about those three goals. I read the statements, and because they are vivid and striking, it is easy to imagine them being real. I’m healthy and look great. I’m living in a comfortable, secure home. My business is successful and profitable.

Every morning, I make the time to quietly think about my three main goals for the year, and it is time well spent. These are goals I really care about, and I don’t want to forget them just because urgent tasks distracted me. And the more I think about them, the easier it is to remember them. It’s a nice feedback loop. And as I make progress on these goals, they just get further reinforced.

So make the time! It can take mere minutes each morning to visualize your goals. Set up reminders. If you don’t need reminders to accomplish your goals, that’s great. If you are like me, get into the habit of setting aside time to think about your goals daily.

Does this visualization really work?

To give an example of how amazing it is to focus on a vivid vision, one time I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to own a Lamborghini. I never really cared about cars before, and this was purely for fun. These cars cost as much as a house, so it would feel pretty wealthy to own one. They turn heads. I could wear shades as I drove down the street. I could show up at parties, and the valet would be excited to get the opportunity to park my car. I didn’t really want such an impractical car, but as far as pretending I was rich enough to own one, why not? It was just for fun.

But you know what I started seeing a lot more of? Corvettes. I saw them everywhere. Sometimes I would see four or five before I’ve traveled a mile! People around me talked about Corvettes. I learned that there were some for sale near my home. I went to a bed and breakfast in the middle of the countryside in Wisconsin, and even there I saw a yellow Corvette outside of the restaurant I went to eat at! It turned out that there was even a Corvette car show in town. It was surreal.

I’m not saying that I manifested Corvettes by thinking about cool cars, although some people will talk about the Law of Attraction at work here. I personally think that I was merely noticing these cars more since I had trained my subconscious to look for awesome cars. They were probably always there, but I hadn’t cared about them enough to notice before.

Regardless of what you believe, making it a habit to vividly imagine your goals will help you recognize opportunities to make those visions a reality. Now, the three points I described above aren’t enough to get you to achieve your goals, but if you’ve ever experienced the frustration of realizing that goals you set a year prior were completely forgotten, they should help you keep your goals at the forefront of your mind, show you how realistic they are, and make it easier to achieve them.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

Starcraft 2 Shelved?!

Zerg Scourge

After spending years developing the game and holding a closed beta for months, Blizzard announced it was canceling development of Starcraft 2. Multiple reasons were given, including poor feedback from fans in the closed beta, but most surprising was a lack of funds.

From Blizzard’s press release:

Blizzard Entertainment announced today that the closed beta test for its highly anticipated real-time strategy game, StarCraft® II: Wings of Liberty™, has ended. Thousands of gamers around the world received invitations from the company to participate in the first phase of the beta test in February. “Gathering concentrated feedback from our players was an important step for us as we headed into the final stretch of development for StarCraft II and the new Battle.net service,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “In polishing the overall experience and preparing for launch, we found that it was not going to be possible to release the game at a sufficiently high quality.”

…

“Even if we believed we would be able to satisfy fans of the original game, we frankly could not afford to continue work on StarCraft II. After years of false starts, to find that the game in its current form would have to be scrapped, it would be irresponsible to start anew.”

It seems that the project isn’t being outright canceled, but if Blizzard is putting it on indefinite hold, it sounds like bad news for players who have been looking forward to revisiting the fight between the Terran, Protoss, and Zerg.

What do you think about Blizzard’s news? Now will you go back to playing the original StarCraft with me, or are you still going to go on and on about how cool you are for getting into the private beta? Whatever.

(Photo: Zerg Scourge| CC BY 2.0)