Wholeness

Hunting at night…

Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing | Valve

Hell Ya!

"Manual control is a highly skilled activity, and skills need to be practised continuously in order to maintain them. Yet an automatic control system that fails only rarely denies operators the opportunity for practising these basic control skills. One of the consequences of automation, therefore, is that operators become de-skilled in precisely those activities that justify their marginalised existence. But when manual takeover is necessary something has usually gone wrong"

— People Make Poor Monitors for Computers at Macroeconomic Resilience

"Another strategy is to ignore the fact that you are slowly killing yourself by not sleeping and exercising enough. That frees up several hours a day. The only downside is that you get fat and die."

— Scott Adams on Time Management

Total War: Shogun 2 Historical Sekigahara Battle Gameplay (by Attila16)

Napoleon Total War, by The Creative Assembly.

Napoleon Total War, by The Creative Assembly.

Being small does make a team efficient. Efficiency comes from a production plan that is solid and in which everyone on the team understands the big picture.

A lot of money gets wasted by having large teams working on games that have not had a complete pre-production or are being designed as they go. Another issue developers have is the amount of money they waste jumping through hoops to keep the publisher happy. I would estimate than on our last big publisher financed game we spent at least a third of the budget needlessly on things the publisher forced us to do that didn’t need to be a part of the process.

A publisher signs up a developer because they trust they can make the game, but as soon as he contract is signed they forget about that and they spend the entire development process making the developer prove themselves over and over at every milestone instead of just focusing on what is really needed to finish the game.

You would never manage an in house team in this way, because it doesn’t make any sense. No programmer on a project is going to do better work if you threaten to not pay him if the feature he is working on doesn’t make the marketing girl who has never played a game happy. It’s lunacy.

— Q & A with Brian Fargo, CEO of inXile | Slacker Heroes

Sharon Van Etten + La Blogo = Bliss.

"The frightening and most difficult thing about being what someone calls a ‘creative person’ is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from, and you have no idea where they’re going to come from tomorrow."

— ‘Art and Copy’ documentary via Sarah B Nelson (UX Week 2011)