Defining Awesome

It will only take you 10 minutes to read this, but it is probably the most important thing I wanted to write this year. It is my message for Mankind for Christmas and New Years Eve. It’ll also be my last post this year. So enjoy.

Did you ever notice how your mind has an amazing ability to adapt? How flexible people are and how many different things they believe? From the most amazing, to the most ridiculous, to the most mundane. There is a pattern here, your mind has a pattern of thinking, do you see it?

If you were born in India and follow the teachings of Hinduism, you will believe reality is created entirely out of sound. If you were born in an Aborigine culture you will believe that reality is a dream. If you were born in the Western culture and sometimes watch the Discovery channel you believe reality consists of objects, like atoms, particles, cells and neuron networks in your brain. If you follow what you were taught in school (well at least outside of Kansas) you will believe in evolution, and that man evolved from ape. If you follow what Christianity tells you, you will believe God created you. If you follow pastafarianism you will believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster rules the world. If you were raised in ancient Greece you believed the history of the world were Gods and Titans fighting each other. If you were born today you think the history of the world is what you can read on Wikipedia. If your interest is science you will believe science has answers. If your interest is spirituality and esoterism you’ll believe the Tarot or I Ching has answers to everything. If you lived a long time ago you thought the world was a giant tortoise. If you lived in medieval ages you thought the world was flat. If you live today you think the world is round. If your interest is economy, you’ll see marketing and money everywhere. If you are an alcoholic it seems impossible to stop drinking. If you are not it is impossible to not refuse a drink. If you listen to metal, you think metal is king. If you listen to cha-cha you think cha-cha is king. You might think Quake is the best shooter, or Unreal, or Crysis, some even think Soldat is. If you were born in a poor family, you see rags everywhere. If you were born in a rich family, you see riches everywhere. If you’re a programmer, you see people and the world as computer programs and machines. If you’re a musician, you see songs everywhere. If you study geometry or math, you see the golden ratio, spirals and fractals everywhere.

Everywhere you look there is a spiral. From the smallest to the unimaginable.

Everything is myth, math and metaphor.

There is no reality other than what you percieve. Everywhere you look at, there are only myths, numbers, metaphors and spirals. The problem arises when you believe that it is real.

There are no spirals.

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I made this blog mainly because there was nothing for me to read on other game developers blogs. I felt people are missing the bigger picture of things. They don’t write about what is important to them. So according to my ongoing philosophy – if you can’t find it, do it yourself – I made my own blog so I can read what I like.

Fortunately I made a new discovery. It is Metanet’s blog (the folks behind N) – http://www.metanetsoftware.com/blog/ 
I can wholeheartedly recommend it. There isn’t much of it (I read the whole thing in one go) but there’s a lot of value in it. Like their view on casual games, I could write that stuff myself.

So that’s all, I’m just sharing the wealth cause I’m happy some people share my reality. It’s not only me that has crazy ideas like: games should be made for fun.

I must admit koans are a terrible teaching tool. They never did anything for me. They can do one thing tough, if you are aware enough, you can notice your thought processes, and more importantly you can notice what is besides them.

When you think about a riddle like the one I wrote here or any other like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” you can notice what you’re doing. You can also notice that there are no answers to these questions in your mind. Yet, you are trying to solve them with it. Thinking logically is just permuting knowledge you have. If you don’t know something you won’t find the solution. You can only find it with a different mind state, by creating it, out of what seems to be nothing.

Einstein once said that you can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it. Good enough but how do you do that? Well this is how.

The other day I was trying to fix a bug in the animation system. Namely the monkeyman bug. Now whenever you are “trying” to do something that is a hint that you’re not anywhere close to getting the thing done. So I noticed that I was trying to hear the sound of one hand clapping and I backed off for a couple minutes.
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The answers provided here are not final and are subject to change. It is just a current state of what we think the game will be like and what we’ve done so far.

When will it be released?

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A failed genetic experiment appears in the world of link-dead.

I always struggle what to write about: Should I write practical advice that works for me or should I write about the underlying theory or philosophy?

And I think it is becoming clear to me that there is no point in giving practical advice if nobody will use it. If you don’t know why it works you won’t make a habit of using it. Also when you understand the underlying process you will find the solution to any problem yourself. Like I could give a lot of programming tips or I could give more general advice, like tell you to meditate. But will you do it? Will you believe that meditation is the single most powerful thing you can ever do?

This is not easily processed by a rational mind, and if you try to reason it, you won’t do it. How can meditation or not-thinking actually solve anything? Impossible!

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We were discussing the possible use of force fields in link-dead. They would be activated anywhere by the soldiers. This would change the gameplay dynamic a lot and add a lot of tactical variety. This is an idea I came up with and decided to draw it:

What do you think?

In other news Sigvatr has completed the military sprites. He posted some snapshots and added some detailed descriptions of classes. So if you haven’t seen that yet check it out on his blog.

If I would have to consciously assess everything I do I would not live one day. I would probably leap off of a building because there would be no reason not to.

Consider the example from my previous post Conscious effort and the myth of will power. Is there any effort in you NOT taking a bottle of poision and drinking it? Probably there isn’t if you’re not suicidal. So why don’t you take it and drink it?

The thing that is holding us from not jumping off a building or drinking poison are reasons, or in other words beliefs. Beliefs are the programming mechanism of the human brain. This is done for efficiency. You do not have free will at every moment of your life, because simply it would lead to innefficiency or even worse to premature death. If you are walking up the stairs you cannot think about every movement of your legs because it would take forever to climb them. The brain is a finite state machine, it operates on simple models. So if you want to change the way you do things, you do not use conscious effort to achieve that because it doesn’t work. You must change how the subconscious mind operates.

You change the models inside your head.

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