I have a ton of notebooks filled with texts like this one. The texts are reviews, thoughts, diary notations (and heavens if they’re not embarrassing). One of them even has a note from a guy I was probably in love with, but too scared to say.

All of them have game designs of different kinds, some half baked, some just a thought. In some cases they’re done, but they weren’t quite what I was after, or just done and then forgotten because I am a fickle human being, going wherever my mind takes me. Sometimes to wonderful places, more often straight into the deepest darkness.

I am a reflective and analytical kind of person. I analyse, I consider and I think. I’m not saying this to seem special, indeed I would argue that I’m not. Not very and not really, but my tendency to think ties into my tendency to write.

What I wanted to get to is that design, for me, is just another tool to say something about myself or about the world or just to doodle a bit. Some of my game designs are actually the equivalent of a doodle in a notebook.

I think my point is that I use design as a way to relax. It’s like knitting or crocheting or maybe baking? I design games because it’s a comfy toolset for me. It gets me something. I feel like I’ve accomplished something. I have a pile of rules and it it was something not entirely malformed, I might use it, but most likely I’ll just unravel it like a badly knitted hat and reuse the yarn for something else, later on.

What can I say. It’s been a long weekend and I’m a bit off and I had a weird experience yesterday of picking apart a crafting system using an excel sheet and I felt so calm and comforted while doing it so I had to analyse it.

I can’t help myself. I design stuff out of anything. “Well, aren’t you special?” No, not particularly. I’m just writing about it because that’s how I process things, that’s who I am. And maybe because it’s been a long weekend and because I’m a bit tired and the cats are sleeping after a healthy helping of tuna and some eggs. The pages of this book are empty and they’re calling me to write somethings, so I wrote this.