Week 839

What’s this? I’m blogging about my work on a weekly basis – a simple way to track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week my youngest daughter had the flu (like my oldest the week before) so I had to be at home a lot, which slowed everything down.

Still, I was able to get some hybrid writer things done. For example, on Monday morning, David Nieborg was kind enough to talk me through the scientific process. I’m not going to go full-blown academic on my research, but I do want to have a somewhat structured approach and know where to look for relevant papers. From my limited effort so far, it’s already paying off.

Also hybrid writer related: my lunch with fellow author Dirk Vis on Friday. He’s much more interested in experimental writing than I am (sticking with non-linear for now!), but it was still useful (and inspiring!) to exchange ideas.

Lots of nrc.next last week, too, although nothing was published. I went to Amsterdam for an event about upcoming PlayStation 4 game The Order: 1886 on Tuesday, and interviewed the CTO of responsible studio Ready at Dawn. The gist of the story is that 12 years after its founding, the studio has created its first original IP, its first shooter and its first ‘next-gen’ game. I also finished my article on Mean Girls (the movie and the iOS game) that day.

On Wednesday I finished the first draft of my NFC games article, which I’d been working on (on and off) since November. I’m trying hard to capture the essence of the whole Skylanders / Disney Infinity / Amiibo ’toys to life’ trend. My editor gave me some solid feedback, which I’ll use this week for a second and hopefully final version.

After that, I published my article on the ambulance control room serious game by Flavour, from December, on this site: Het spelletje met de ambulances.

On Thursday morning, I had coffee with Kars Alfrink. He gave me a review copy of Bycatch, the card game about drone warfare he developed with Subalekha Udayasankar and Alper Çugun. I helped playtest it a little bit a while ago, and might write about it in the future.

After that, I watched the first couple of Tour Bueno episodes. Quick recap: two German game development students are touring Europe to do 48 hour game jams. A documentary series is being made about them, and I caught up with them in Antwerp earlier to do an interview. The first episodes made me think of Super Game Jam, so I wrote about both in a quick first draft of an article that I hope to finish this week.

Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…

Average step count per day: 6.092
Average staircase count per day: 9
Average weight: 89,9 kg