Cycles

Something I've gradually realized about how I work is that I work in cycles. The cycles are long and short in duration and encompass the days and the seasons. But the reason why I have them and stick to them is that they make big projects simple to start, stop, and continue. Work that is intentionally complicated, which intellectual work often is, drains me of energy, and structuring it into a more deliberate routine helps.

The way in which I address a big, intellectual problem in cycles is to give myself a prompt to work with. The prompt does not require special effort. It is built by the process of taking notes:

1. Go back to wherever I think I left off.
2. Take out the notebook and start copying by hand what I was doing into the notebook.
3. Mark it up with colored pens and make a little bit of artwork out of it.
4. Proceed with whatever comes to mind next.

For example, to write this blog, I first typed some drafts. Then I reviewed the drafts by taking notes on paper with revisions. Later I added the revisions to make improved drafts. This kind of process is often taught in school, but it's hard to access it naturally as a student because the emphasis of the school system is actually on completing the assignment efficiently at exactly the level that will earn a certain grade. To go beyond being an "A student" you actually have to go slower and be more willing to review and revise.

The note-taking itself is not efficient or to-the-point, it is simply reviewing what I had and preparing myself to continue. I use a variety of pens and pencils, but usually a color multipen, to keep the notes interesting. The slow process of taking it makes me start to think, and once I've started to think, I'm ready to address the problem directly.

The problem I've had with warming up in the past is that the way of warming up involved someone else's direction: that tends to lead down the path of only being able to point myself at trending topics. I also found that if I started without looking at my previous work, I could just repeat myself over and over, instead of developing my idea. Therefore, I use my notebook to refresh myself and face the problems properly.

It's important to warm up with the type of thing that I want to do. If I want to write, a writing warmup is better than a drawing warmup. Both are a kind of "taking notes", both can be artistic, but they engage with material in different ways.

In a broader sense, I believe many of the creative projects we undertake are a form of note-taking. Artists often call works "studies". The study results in an artifact, but the artifact isn't the learning. You can't learn how to make the same picture by just looking at the picture. The work must flow through your hands. Sometimes you repeat the work so that you know it a little bit better. Sometimes you do a fragment of the work so that it's isolated and you can see that part more clearly. If art imitates life, art is perhaps a little "less" than life, but in the "less is more" sense.

Identities and Cycles

Something even more underappreciated than the role of having a cyclical process, I think, is the role of the identity. In our current society, we tend to take identity as an immutable property — a "bag of labels" that we are constituted from. This has always been an incoherent way of doing things because identity is situational: People are actors, they "code switch", they have a workplace persona. When people play games, they easily step into different identities and observe different rules. We accept "default" and "normal" identities as a pragmatic way of doing things, but many societal ills can be seen as a case of "normalizing the temporary" beyond its useful lifespan.

The assumption of the norm as an immutable property is a direct source of "gamer affliction": Games routinely create scenarios where the correct course of action is non-normative — what is challenged is what you believe is true. To maintain normative identity when confronted with these scenarios, the purpose of the game must be reduced to competition. Then all actions taken within the game are justified with "that's how you win". The non-normative components are dismissed as inexplicable or intentionally misremembered, as in the case of "Kirk Drift". The affliction manifests as gamer anger: a game creates an affront to identity if it says that the player's preferred approach to problem-solving or assumed agency within the game world is incorrect. In that case, the game is, rather than illustrating a viewpoint, simply wrong and bad.

Likewise, games that aim to allow all identities equal affordance and agency have difficulty presenting any kind of "judgment of virtue", because the identity can only be aesthetic: nobody gets a sense of great revelation from a game that never pushes back. This mode of gaming promotes easy escapism and denies the opportunity to "know oneself" by examining any boundaries.

When I took an improv acting class, I noticed this tendency playing out among some of my classmates. They couldn't turn off the idea of winning, so they couldn't do "yes and", so their scenes converged into antagonistic showdowns. Their idea of "boundary-pushing" was simply to be more invasive and assert more control. The appeal of improv for this group was "I get an excuse to be an asshole," a tendency that only gradually mediated with experience. Their inverse counterparts who desired no probing of any boundaries quickly dropped the class.

This also explains a common reaction I see when people are confronted with a new game at social events: Sight unseen, they start disparaging the game. Why would they do that? Because they don't want to be bad at games. Moreover, playing the game and embracing a new role might reveal something contradictory about their existing identity. That kind of thing is a threat, so they will say that the game is for children, or that they only play one game(always a competitive game). Credit-seeking is a certain path to losing touch with your ability to create and improvise, since it reduces everything to win and loss.

At the same time, competitive behavior has some value for clarifying limitations. In truth, improv does have games and competition — it's just that it doesn't manifest directly in the characters. Improv that is done well will rapidly circulate through a variety of "improv games" that send the scene in unusual, but managable directions, drawing on a huge amount of preparation to allow their characters to adapt and respond vividly to any development. This all happens in a way that can look seamless to the audience, but is understood by the actors as a kind of oneupsmanship. Deciding intentionally to make something competitive is quite different from being told that it's mandatory, since it lets you engage with it on an intrinsic basis. That is, it lets you think about many different approaches to overcoming a challenge, instead of looking for the "right answer".

My conclusion is that it's very important to develop a fluid identity as a way to stay engaged with different kinds of "anima". That allows you to stay relaxed and not be swept up into these extreme dynamics. For a time I saw myself as a "game designer", but I realized that I'm not excited about filling in spreadsheets with loot tables. Neither did I particularly want to be a "game programmer" and identify as an arch technologist who wants to make the Holodeck. While I enjoy drawing, I'm not predisposed to a highly polished art style, as commercial artists tend to gravitate towards. The "screen cartoonist" role I use is a way of evolving away from those identities. Beyond that, I've taken the extra step of intentionally making fictional identities and trying them out in various spaces.

"Triplefox" is a name I've used for a long time, but I only really took the step of making it a visibly characterized "fursona" when I started on this blog and thought, "I want to have a character in my cartoons". Anthropomorphism makes it convenient to answer "Who am I? How should I behave?" An answer that is a mix of "behave like a fox" and "behave like a human" is easy to portray and motivates play. The modern idea of fursonas originates from improvisational role-playing, as well. People would log into the text-based systems of yesteryear, be confronted with "Who am I?", and, instead of giving a strictly competitive answer, an identity designed to "win the game", they invented something inspired by the fiction they liked and the fantasy they wanted to live. This can be done in a very private, compartmentalized and escapist way, where it never infringes on your public presentation — that's probably the most common way of engaging with fiction — but it also lets you explore yourself.

Fluid identity is the great trick to escape a cycle that is stuck and not progressing. Once you say you're acting as some other kind of being, your sense of virtue changes and motivates different actions. The virtues of a cartoon fox aren't identical to the virtue of the writer typing these words. The writer is, in turn, different from the critic who sits down with the notebook and reviews the writer's work. They are what you might call "different hats", and part of the cycle is being willing to let go of one and use another. This is easier to "win" at than trying to become "more successful" or "more productive" - the types of goals that only make less sense the more you try to cohere yourself with them.