Amanda's Weekly Report (for two weeks)

What was planned? Work on Thesis, Sandbox papers, run study participants

What happened? Worked on Thesis, and ran study participants, crunched log and survey data, finished Sandbox paper, worked on figuring out improvements for the game.

Problems? None, now that I have study participants

Next week? Finish thesis up to the point where all I have to do is throw in the numbers to change the tables. Start planning the changes to Elemental.

New stuff learned? I can write papers?

Hours? 32

Creativity Musings - Sorry this is going to be disjointed...

In creative writing, I do best with a slight constraint - a small word count and a one word prompt to get the juices flowing is enough to send me off to the computer. By the same token, however, too large a word count leads to garbage when going off a single prompt. When working on my novel, however, I am only limited by what I can imagine and I am only confined by the setting and characters already established...so one could say that I am always constrained...it's a question of external or internal constraints.

When designing a game (not a G2L game), I go for what I think is fun and entertaining. Some of them have been complete and unabashed rip offs of other games, others have fallen well short of the fun marker, and some are more fun than they should be, considering. More to the point, however, designing a game is supposed to be fun, not work.

When designing a G2L game, half the time I feel stiffled by being crammed into such a small area with so many issues to think about that I cant get anything done at all. The other half, I am super creative. The problem with that is that the super creativity tends to sneak into code and we all know that creative code is no substitute for a good design.

As far as the classroom goes, you want creativity, you take the English courses...and not many of them are creative. The teachers get highhanded with constraints and the students, half of whom are taking it for an easy A, are lifeless, regurgitating the same trite styles that they think is the surest path to an A. The screenwriting course, on the other hand, we were given free rein on everything but the format...that was brilliant. It also emphasized 'show' not 'tell' which, as a game designer, is going to come in super handy someday.

Most of my CS projects outside of the games courses have not had creative content. Some of my games courses have had too much constraint on creativity...I can give you one, maybe two, major constraints but no more than that or you will get garbage for a game. Some of the games are sooooo constrained that there is no possible way for them to be fun, which totally defeats the purpose of making a game in the first place...

Eh, rant.ramble.off