Innovate and Consolidate

Went dark there for a bit, didn’t we? I have a post all written about how I keep thinking about retiring this blog because I don’t know what we do here anymore. We don’t do critique, we don’t do philosophy, and I want to do something of value. Happily I had a long talk with Dan and he straightened me out. This is a place where we think aloud about stuff. That’s pretty much it. Win some, lose some. But this isn’t about that. This is about strategy.

See, the other thing that kept me away was a newfound fixation on Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes. I have a familiar problem with strategy games, in that they tend to consume large portions of my life. A shooter I can pick up and put down, but just starting a strategy game means hours of commitment. There’s usually so much depth to the gameplay that if I walk away from a map for a few days I forget everything that I was doing, so I start over which involves even more hours and eventually my house burns down and the groceries are gone. You know how it is. But they do get me thinking about things, so here’s what I took away from 100+ hours in Fallen Enchantress.

In a good strategy game you do lots of things. You manage resources, move units, build infrastructure, sign treaties, and fight enemies. Sometimes you establish laws or cast magic spells, fulfill quests or endure plagues. They’re games with a lot of depth. But I find that I’m really only ever doing two things: expanding or consolidating. I’m either increasing the breadth of my domain by either peaceful exploration or lightning fast warfare, or I’m securing what I have by developing my infrastructure, building up my ability to produce resources, making sure travel is quick and safe, that sort of thing. In a turn-based game like Fallen Enchantress I can take my time and go through deliberate phases, but in a faster-paced game like Starcraft 2, I want to be doing both simultaneously, protecting my workers while attacking the enemy’s economy. But no matter the speed, that’s what I’m doing.

And it works. Really well. My enemies quake with fear at the might of my armies, and my allies stand secure knowing that I’ll leap to their defense. My people are joyful, and everything is good. The theory is pretty solid (I lose at Starcraft because it breaks down in the execution. I’m not fast enough to watch and move all the things. Yet). It falls under the category of “Things that are so effective that I can’t stop doing them.” I spent a lot of time thinking about my actions in the game and how each one of them fell into one of those two categories, and wondered if I could do the same with my own work.

Sometimes I find it hard to put things into perspective, or lose track of what does what and why I do it. I want to do all the things, but it can be hard to keep it straight. Obviously I don’t really expand per se. I’m certainly not out aggressively taking over other blogs or Youtube channels, after all. I don’t even know how to do that. But it does seem to divide easily into making stuff and maintaining stuff, or because I like rhyming, innovating and consolidating. I love making stuff, but there’s a lot of things that go along with making things that involve getting them out there, the day to day things that seems tedious but make all the difference when thinking about having people actually see and use the things that I make. So I made some lists. I love lists.

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Innovate

• Write a blog post.
• Write a song.
• Make a new video.
• Start a new book.
• Read/watch content by other people.
• Start a new project.
• Brainstorm.

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Consolidate

• Promote some of my work.
• Do website maintenance.
• Comment on other people’s work.
• Set up meetings for things like Headshots.
• Work on my D&D campaigns.
• Strengthen infrastructure for a new project.
• Do research.
• Update my calendar.
• Clean my desk.

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There are lots more things in that Consolidate column, but the Innovate ones tend to be tougher and take a lot more time (says the guy who knows he’s going to spend hours updating pages or designing encounters). The best part about this so far is that I can check things off in each column so that, on a day when I haven’t made anything at all, I don’t feel like I did nothing. I can look at all the consolidation I’ve done and recognize that doing those things is as essential to being able to do what I love as just making new stuff. I don’t think it’s going to change how much work I get done, or whether I’m playing games when I should be writing, or make me more productive in any way. That’s not what it’s for. It’s to help me feel better about the work that I’ve been doing and to recognize its value. Really it’s a chart that keeps me from being the moody bum I’ve been for the past few weeks.

But now I’m back.