Stuff that I have written.
Doing something a little bit different again. I have posted this poem before, but I wanted to talk a little bit about taking things away, since I was so recently on the topic of adding things in. And for those of you who don’t usually read the Sunday Poems, this one actually has game design relevance!
I was in a mythological mood, at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. Hence the title. And yeah, it’s a poem about sex. Sorry. At least it’s sex in the cosmic, way-the-world-turns sense, the ocean-and-earth sense.
Now that it’s on Amazon, I suppose that I need to actually write it.
This is the follow-on to A Theory of Fun for Game Design, of course, and it’s called A Grammar of Gameplay: How Games Work. It’s intended as a companion, of course, but also as an amalgam of all the thoughts on game atoms, game design notation, mechannics vs dressing, and so on. It’s also intended to spend a fair amount of time on only the dressing — not so much as to replace indispensable books like Lee Sheldon’s, but just to provide a bit of an overview of how non-mechanical elements influence a player’s perception of a game.
The overview sell sheet that I provided to the publisher:
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I don’t really have any poems specifically for or about mothers, which is rather odd, come to think of it. But I do have this one, which is about parenting and marriage and of course, a puppy.
The Puppy Poem
She’s just teething now, the first
Puppy of our marriage — a black
Hound, glossy and bewildered.
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Today is my surviving grandmother’s 94th birthday. She’s in hospice now, near the end of her life. I’ve written various things about my grandparents before, and even my great-grandmother, but today I wanted to share one that wasn’t written as a poem, but as a song, at a time when her husband, my grandfather, was failing. It’s on After the Flood, and it’s called “December.” You can follow along the lyrics with the song:
