I'm always reading a book as a traveling, or should I say, commuting, companion. The forty odd minutes of my commute allows me to get a good piece of connected reading going. Right now it is The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin, subject of his father's book, Searching for Bobby Fischerhttp://www.amazon.com/Searching-Bobby-Fischer-Prodigy-Observes-ebook/dp/B00C0JCZ20/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1398017252&sr=1-1&keywords=searching+for+bobby+fischer. Waitzkin has had an amazing life, first as a child prodigy chess champion then as a Tai Chi Chuan expert and Push Hands champion. Integrating his experiences from the mental study of chess and the physical and mental study of Tai Chi, he distills his art of learning.
I have been enthusiastically recapping highlights from the book with my wife, Maria, giving us a chance to muse on the practical gems of wisdom that Waitzkin has found. It's easy to think that you can put it all into practice and raise your own level of performance (a constant goal of Waitzkin). One thing it is spurring me on to do is to start things that I want to do -- like writing -- rather than put them off until I feel ready.
He talks about internalizing the basics of whatever you are learning through frequent and repetitive practice. The old adage 'practice makes perfect' comes to mind. As I sit here on my deck in the bright late-afternoon sunshine, I think I could get into this habit quite easily. Just having a place like this to get away from it all, in relative quiet, with the sun and the occasional light breeze, ahh.
Another pursuit that I've been chasing lately is photography. I've got gigabytes of photos, mostly taken in natural surroundings like Forest Park. Every once in a while I get the thought of putting them together into some sort of story, or a game that is the vehicle for the story. A lot of trails, trees, streams, lush mossy trees. Maybe they would serve as good landscape for a game based around searching through the forest. With my introduction to Unity through my OGPC coaching, I might be able to create some nice scenes.
Maybe there's a connection I can make between learning and a forestry or nature-based game. I'm sure other game creators have used psychology to derive interesting game flow. I should also review that other great book, The Art of Game Design, about building games that I have on my Kindle, that would help with the flow.
Waitzkin's lessons about observing your opponent could be used -- the opponent could be some other player but it could also be the computer/AI player who would exhibit certain behavior.
So there are a couple of research topics right here:
- using my photographs to craft scenery that is linked together so that I can show a continuous "natural" world to explore. One interesting thing is whether I need to modify the pictures to be more compatible with the game images. Making them less dense with photographic detail, and maybe having to snap a lot more pictures along a particular path in the woods so that they can be strung together.
- exploring the game player's psychology so that they continue to learn in the game, are penalized for not learning or for making really bad choices.
Although Unity is a cool platform, it is not inexpensive. One thing that would be good for honing my game-making chops is to start with something more basic, like HTML5 and Javascript. Those are free and there are a lot of Javascript libraries to choose from. The side-benefit is that I will be honing my front-end development skills which could come in handy some day.
