Thinking About Momentum

Momentum is a funny thing. So much of life relies on some element of momentum: sustaining, developing, or being abruptly interrupted.

I'm thinking about this a lot because I do a lot of different kinds of work. They're all unified around systems designed for learning or systems analysis for gaming. But that's a complicated topic to be personally hyper-focused on, especially when I also really struggle with focusing in on a single thing unless I'm certain that I don't have any distractions, or I can give myself permission to put my earbuds in and hyper-focus.

This hit me a little bit yesterday, because most of yesterday was fantastic... but there were also moments of odd momentum shift that were a true struggle for me. I'm starting to think about a lot in terms of how I might maybe adjust my schedule for the fall.

I currently teach chess, photography, and D&D. I don't so much teach the rules of D&D as open-world storytelling, role play, using the fifth edition rules as the core arbiters of fairness. If I was to break down which of those are my absolute core skills, it would definitely be the storytelling through open worlds which enable player choice, even though stories are hard and I never had a lot of success as a novelist.

Yesterday I finished my video, did some errands, and then I settled down with my Alan Wake transcript from the episodes of Narrative Eversion that I recorded over the last couple of weeks. I started going through that transcript and cleaning it up so it becomes an essay or series of articles. The concept is to take the raw ideas and teaching style of Narrative Eversion and turn it into something that is pleasant to read. Still educational, but something that you could sit down and read and be inspired to think not just about Alan Wake, but about how we interact with stories and video games in general.

And it's hard work editing your own writing, perhaps especially when I'm going from an audible, speaking-style transcript into a more formal, cleaner, less repetitive draft.

I worked on that for about two hours, and then I really struggled to shift my attention from that over to chess, and then chess into photography, and then into D&D, because some days I kind of intermingle my classes just to hit market openings.

I love having D&D at the end of the day. Having that anticipation of ending my day with storytelling really pulls me forward. Switching back and forth between thinking about stories, thinking about the hyper-precise logic of chess, and thinking about the kind of fusion of precision engineering and art that is photography... that context switching back and forth between those is both one of my greatest skills and one of my biggest struggles.

I'm currently experimenting with expanding my D&D classes a little bit, and in the background I'm doing a lot of quiet fixing of my world-building. I have got twenty years of lore and events and locations and characters, and I'm trying to pull all of those together. Not into a grand unified theory of The Covenant (that's the name of my setting), but trying to pull my scattered notes together into an interconnected web of ideas, because that's how it exists in my mind.

I don't really do on-demand random access especially well, unless I have time to think and pause and create a linear process. When I'm thinking, I either go linear, in which case I tend to get stuck in a track, or I go broad, in which case it's easy to accidentally spend a long time rambling about Talrythar the Goldsands Emperor who was slain in his southern stronghold, and then I start sounding like a Dark Souls lore video very quickly.

That fusion of interests is a lot of what I like about my brain and I think that if I continue to refine this process of Narrative Eversion to generate a sort of rough outline of my ideas, after of course playing and researching and thinking and taking notes and obsessively looking at all sorts of silly details in a game or a story or a movie. If I think about using that as my sort of rough foundation layer, and then building on top of that my analytical layer, and then building on top of that my resources for other people to think about aspects of stories as deeply as I like to. Maybe not going as deep as I do, or going as broad as I do, but finding those patterns of how to ask a good question while examining entertainment.

As I think about my own kind of inertia of starting a thing and then either getting so distracted by all of the little side aspects of it that I never coalesce my ideas into a final product or being so focused on that singular creative process that I end up mono-focusing, over-focusing, paying way too much attention to this one particular plotline that I want to explain even if that plot is boring to everyone else...

I'm trying to take all of those challenges, all of those flaws that I may have, and instead of worrying about them or feeling guilty about them, use them as data points for reimagining how I teach, or reimagining how I express the ideas that matter to me, and hopefully help other people learn to express their own ideas.

It's a messy process. And my allergy to external control is something that I'm having to work on. I can't always roll my own code. I can't always design my own maps. I can't always write every single sentence that a character will say in response to a player, because I don't know what the players are going to ask. So the question becomes: How do I build the frameworks which allow me to use my momentum at appropriate times to complete tasks which will give me further frameworks to rely upon when a completely unexpected question comes from a student, or a completely unanticipated chess move pops up on the board?

How to specialize in being a generalist?

That's a lot of what it comes down to for me. I used to call myself a generalist, but the world is too big now. Everybody can be a generalist if they want to be. The central question of education in the age of LLMs becomes how to build those critical thinking skills and those attitudes of grace and that hunger to learn more when the obvious answer can be put right in front of us?

How do you instill that in other people? Not just for students, but as you're developing content which is intended to help others grow?

Because that's a lot of what I want to do with a lot of my work: Become a better guide for others and have a stronger internal compass for myself.