teaching, reading, beetle fights, etc.
the hardest part of writing is the writing. i've been meaning to write a few different things, like how a catholic heresy taught me how to appreciate jazz, and i still should, but i keep procrastinating on writing "A Big Post" and forgetting that i really only meant to use my blog as a public braindump first and foremost.
so, anyway, here's a braindump. it's 2025 and we're blogging, baby—welcome back.
hashtag amreading
i have been teaching where i am for five years this semester—spring 2020 was a bad time to start teaching, but i don't think there's really a good time. teaching is a wonderful thing, and i consider myself deeply lucky to be able to do it for a living, but starting to teach is miserable, and i don't recommend it to anyone for any reason. doing that at the start of a pandemic, perhaps triply so.
around five years ago i tried to assign readings to my students so we could discuss them in class. this was a disaster, and i swore off assigning readings as a result. enough time has passed that i have grown arrogant and stubborn that i can make it happen for sure this time, so this semester i have tied all of my classes to a core textbook:
- the well-played game by bernie de koven
- a game design vocabulary by anna anthropy and naomi clark
- game programming patterns by robert nystrom
the well-played game in particular i found really resonant and charming in talking about the kind of design that happens at the community level. also, sometimes you need to just be wistful about the 60s/70s not as it existed but as it gets remembered, you know?
(i have less to say about the other two books, except that i think they are good at the thing they are each doing. the bob nystrom book i think is going to be a tough one for my second-semester programming students, but my hope is that they get excited about punching above their weight. the anthropy/clark book ties into the jazz thing i mentioned.)
the well-played game is for my experimental analog games class, and my hope is to shift that class to be much more about collaboration this semester. my students will go to places around the city, come up with games to play in those places, and then work on writing them together. a mode of "let's just play and we'll figure out what we want to play as we go and afterwards we'll write down the rules as a form of chronicling."
pinsir fight
it's my partner's fault for getting me back into pokemon. i fell off hard as a kid after the gameboy games, got back into sun/moon, then kind of fell off again. i've been playing the new mobile card game a lot, and genuinely having a nice time with it. which is rare, because i pretty much hate all mobile games. my phone is a device for reading words that give me anxiety, not a device to play games on.
the pokemon card game is kind of weird, as far as card games go. most games revolve around "who can get the biggest motherfucker out on the field first?" which i think is mostly not that interesting. but if you play pokemon pocket online, that's most of the decks you'll face.
so, bug city was a response to this—originally the rules were just about removing the biggest motherfuckers (EX cards) from the card pool and shifting focus away from the fancy rare cards. it changes the game around quite a bit! turns out i like the game a lot more when it's not entirely centered around fielding the rarest cards. not quite a pauper league, though. in magic: the gathering terms i would compare it to banning mythic rares.
a thing that has happened to me a few times is pinsir versus pinsir fights. here's pinsir:
the "this can be over in an instant or it can take eight turns" aspect of this i particularly enjoy. pokemon emphasizes randomness and coin flips more than any card game i've played, and i've come around on enjoying the boom-bust of it.
the newest set of cards added these to the mix:
this adds an extra layer to the pinsir fight for me that i find even more charming.
in bug city this week a friend hopped on a voice chat while playing and invited other folks to join. it is, it turns out, nice to share (digital) space with people and play. who knew?
anyway, at some point we abandoned the established rules of bug city and created new rules for a miniformat called PINSIR FIGHT (you chant "pinsir fight! pinsir fight!" when you do this). you make a deck with 2 pinsirs and then 18 other cards that you think can support your pinsirs in some way. it's extremely dumb, and that's great.
bernie de koven's notion of the well-played game is all about that constant, shifting negotiation we engage in when we play together. there is no single well-played game, it's about what is best and most interesting for the play group in the moment of play. it's also about a kind of communal searching of the possibility space of the rules. we don't want to do this now, but maybe that will be right for us later. this feels bad to play against, so can we agree to avoid it? i think that's special.
the second week of the semester starts tomorrow. here's hoping that even though reading stuff wasn't right for my students five years ago, it's right for them now. and if it's not, well... fuck.