invicticide @invicticide@mastodon.gamedev.place

I really miss talking about #gamedev, having creative/design discussions, reading thoughtful media critiques, making cool personal projects...

But current events are so much more important than all of that, and we don't really have any choice but to embrace the exhaustion and soldier on anyway.

Looking for games for Android that actually fit a mobile environment (not console games jammed into a phone screen and touch controls), that are actual games (not dark pattern-driven F2P cash vampires), and that feel somewhat sophisticated/interesting (not trivial arcade games or micro-session puzzle games).

I'd love something RPG-ish or strategy-ish.

I've been having a hard time wrapping my head around the amount of support/outsourcing required to reclaim enough time and energy for people to pursue their actual interests.

This is Facebook's VP of product development: https://link.medium.com/I3RoQAv951

Lastly, both books feel very much like they value long-term lived experiences and attention over short-term achievements and hustle. Both acknowledge the discomfort and struggle in being that kind of person in today's world.

Both make me want to be that person.

The intersection of those two books, for me, is the concept that important work requires BOTH periods of protected solitude AND periods of intense communication. Focusing too much on one or the other greatly limits what you can achieve, in the long run.

I also can't help but draw some connections to Cal Newport's book "Deep Work", which in its own way is also a book about managing attention, and which I recommend with equal enthusiasm.

Temporal and spatial context are crucial for valuable interactions. The book has a chapter on "context collapse" in social media which I've been thinking about a lot. Being with a person, in a place, at a time, feels so much more valuable than any typical Twitter interaction.

I'm already working on replacing my habit of opening Twitter during downtimes to open the Kindle app and reading a book instead.

(I tried replacing Twitter with Medium at first but quickly tired of the amount of vapid clickbait masquerading as profound insight over there.)

I'm feeling a very strong urge to massively reduce my usage of social media, to refocus it away from just reading my feed in every random moment of downtime and toward direct, intentional interactions with individual, specific people.

I'm becoming so much more mindful of where my attention is allocated, and the value of that attention. I'm (slowly) becoming more deliberate about where to place that attention, with more clearly identified reasons for those choices.

I've spent the last month or so reading Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing", very slowly, and I can feel my whole perspective on life shifting, a page at a time.

Having just finished it, here are my most immediately top-of-mind takeaways (short thread)

MH, burnout

Related reading:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work

We've created chronic burnout conditions for an entire generation simply by denying them time to express their humanity, instead sacrificing that time to the altar of "hustle".

I don't have an answer, because there isn't one. At least, not one that's individually actionable. The only way to fix it is to fix the conditions that create it, and those conditions are ~gestures broadly at everything~