The Glittering Truth about Stellaris
Jul. 25th, 2019 08:00 amThe Glittering Truth about Stellaris
Stellaris has recently come into my life to the detriment of my productivity. It's a "conquer the galaxy" game in the spirit of Civilization, only in spaaaaace. This kind of game is typically called "4ex," for Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate, and they involve a lot of micromanagement as you build up planets, colonies, imperial sectors; manage borders and choke points along the hyperspace corridors; manage your economy and diplomatic prospects; and wage war with the various ravager species that are out to make a mess of your lovely little federation or whatever.
I've written a bit about "flow" recently, and one thing that I've codified in my day-to-day experiences of flow, especially in programming but also in writing, is a moment in the middle of flow that, for lack of a better term, I've named the glitter. There's a famous cartoon that explains glitter much better than I can, and you should go look at it. See that third panel in the right column? That's the glitter moment: the moment when absolutely every last brain cell is firing and the mental model of how the world is working is complete enough for you to move ahead and change it. In the ancient tensions of "I'd like to change the world but they won't give me the source code," that's the moment when you have enough of the world in your head to change at least a small but significant part of it, at least professionally.
Glitter is pretty fucking addictive. Developers like me chase after it. Which is ironic because, on the other hand, much of my career has been around developing programming and documentation techniques designed to limit the amount of headaround in any given project: cognitive complexity should be tiered so as to not create more headaround than the average developer can handle.
As that cartoon says, though, flow can be destroyed, the context and headaround of the project disrupted, by a single interruption, and can take forever to recover.
Except in Stellaris. Stellaris lets you get into the glitter fast and keep you there throughout the entire game, not just in flow but at the actual state of keeping every neuron happily engaged. It's a remarkable acheivement, but it's seriously hitting the developer's version of a runner's high on a regular basis, and distacting me from my own work. Right now I'm studying some foundational stuff in programming languages, stuff I need before I can advance futher in my project, and it's not fun at all. In fact, it's a bit of a grind. I'm managing to do about an hour a day of it, but it's still a struggle to engage as much as I'd like. Practice just isn't fun, and there's only so much energy anyone can throw at it.
Stellaris has recently come into my life to the detriment of my productivity. It's a "conquer the galaxy" game in the spirit of Civilization, only in spaaaaace. This kind of game is typically called "4ex," for Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate, and they involve a lot of micromanagement as you build up planets, colonies, imperial sectors; manage borders and choke points along the hyperspace corridors; manage your economy and diplomatic prospects; and wage war with the various ravager species that are out to make a mess of your lovely little federation or whatever.
I've written a bit about "flow" recently, and one thing that I've codified in my day-to-day experiences of flow, especially in programming but also in writing, is a moment in the middle of flow that, for lack of a better term, I've named the glitter. There's a famous cartoon that explains glitter much better than I can, and you should go look at it. See that third panel in the right column? That's the glitter moment: the moment when absolutely every last brain cell is firing and the mental model of how the world is working is complete enough for you to move ahead and change it. In the ancient tensions of "I'd like to change the world but they won't give me the source code," that's the moment when you have enough of the world in your head to change at least a small but significant part of it, at least professionally.
Glitter is pretty fucking addictive. Developers like me chase after it. Which is ironic because, on the other hand, much of my career has been around developing programming and documentation techniques designed to limit the amount of headaround in any given project: cognitive complexity should be tiered so as to not create more headaround than the average developer can handle.
As that cartoon says, though, flow can be destroyed, the context and headaround of the project disrupted, by a single interruption, and can take forever to recover.
Except in Stellaris. Stellaris lets you get into the glitter fast and keep you there throughout the entire game, not just in flow but at the actual state of keeping every neuron happily engaged. It's a remarkable acheivement, but it's seriously hitting the developer's version of a runner's high on a regular basis, and distacting me from my own work. Right now I'm studying some foundational stuff in programming languages, stuff I need before I can advance futher in my project, and it's not fun at all. In fact, it's a bit of a grind. I'm managing to do about an hour a day of it, but it's still a struggle to engage as much as I'd like. Practice just isn't fun, and there's only so much energy anyone can throw at it.
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