We regret to interrupt your regularly scheduled essay.
Friday’s essay will be posted Sunday morning, instead of Saturday morning as has apparently become customary. Keep reading to find out about plans for the future of Problem Machine, the new article schedule, and the reasoning behind these changes.
At the Machine’s inception, my intent was to write entirely about game design and the problems it produces. As time went on, and the conditions of my own life became more chaotic, I had to deviate from the 1000+ word format I started with and do shorter essays. A natural consequence of both the shorter format and the surrounding chaos of my life is that the essays became more intimate, and tied my personal daily experiences into my observations on game design.
More recently, there’s been a lot of controversy in the gaming world, with latent issues such as sexism, studio exploitation, ‘entitled’ fans, class and race and gender privilege along with other issues which had been simmering under the surface and have been exploding in quick succession. I’ve held my own opinions on many of these and, for the greater part, been sitting on them since I didn’t think that’s what Problem Machine was about. However, it’s getting really frustrating, and these opinions just pile up higher and higher and until I get them out of my system I may have trouble writing about much else.
So I’m going to be considering these each a separate style of essay, and building a schedule on this basis. It’s going to be a bi-weekly schedule, and here’s what it’s going to look like:
Week 1:
Tuesday: Life in the Machine (personal essay, 300-800 words)
Thursday: Devblog update (project to be announced next week, 9/13)
Saturday: Human Interface Device (controversy and discussion, 300-800 words)
Week 2:
Thursday: Devblog update
Saturday: Diagnosticism (game design essay, 1000-2000 words)
All updates will go up at 10am pst. The titles of these segments were made up on the spot at a hair after 4am in the morning, so they’re all subject to change depending upon whether I decide over the course of the next week or two that any of them are dumb.
For clarification, right now we’re at the end of week 1, so at 10am Saturday the first Human Interface Device essay should go up. it should, but it won’t, since this is going up in its place: The first Human Interface Device essay will actually go up on Sunday. I was originally planning on making this post a short preface to the first HID essay but it’s 400 words and counting now so that’s not an option. Not a good one, anyway.
Also, this lets me get some sleep and put off writing for another 12-20 hours. So I got that going too.
