Monsters and Other Childish Things - Pocket Edition

Just a brief note - it's been a few years since I got to play Monsters and Other Childish Things, but I noticed at a recent trip to a gaming store (Valhalla's Gate in Columbia, MO) and now on IPR that they have released a pocket-sized version of the game.

If you want to pick it up from IPR, you can check it out here.



Looks pretty cool, eh?  And it is.  Monsters is one of my favorite games, both for it's presentation and for the system itself.  Children team up with hideous monsters from nightmare who protect them and also provide a constant steam of trouble for them to deal with.  The childrens' relationships with others give them the strength to overcome what happens - and guess what?  Their monsters eat relationships.

Anyway, it's a fantastic game, and I recommend it for someone who wants a superb, rules-lite game about children, monsters and relationships.

Plot, Story, Character, Person

This is a post I put in the comment thread over at Devil in my Dreams.  I just thought it was interesting to think about it - I hadn't articulated these things quite this way before.  Anyone else do that - figure things out in the moment?

I think that Plot is one step removed, one step into the abstract, away from Story.  A Plot is a plan, a schematic, something you can diagram on a dry-erase board.

Same with Character, which is one step abstracted from Person.  A Character has attributes you can list - you could fill out a character sheet.

For both Story and Person, though, you can only experience them.  They exist as unabstracted as possible.  You experience a Person.  You experience  Story.

I think it's telling that your example is presenting something on a stage - a performance piece exists only as long as the performance exists.  A play or a musical performance is like a sand mandala - it is only present for a moment before it is gone.  You can record it and replay the recording, but a recording is not the same as a live performance.  A photograph of the sand mandala is not the sand mandala.

The Plot is not the Story.  The Character is not the Person.

10,000 Hours

I've been reading Outliers by Malcom Gladwell - a little bit belatedly, since it's been out for a while now, but I'm a slow reader and there you have it.

One of the things that Gladwell talks about is that things like talent and genius don't really exist - or if they do exist, they don't matter all that much.  We tend to attribute great success to great talent or great virtue, and Outliers does a great job of demonstrating how success has much more to do with a person's situation than a person's sole capacities.  Really, it's a fascinating book, as are all of his books that I've read.

The title of this post mentions 10,000 hours - according to a lot of research in the lives of brilliant, successful people, 10,000 hours is a number that keeps coming up again and again.  In brief, it takes 10,000 hours to become a virtuoso, to become good enough at something to have a huge impact through it.  The Beatles had their 10,000 hours playing strip clubs in Hamburg; Bill Gates had his 10,000 hours programming by the time he got to college.  (Of course, as Gladwell demonstrates, if Gates had been born three years earlier or later, his practice would have mattered much less)

But this idea of 10,000 hours got me thinking - is there anything in my life where there is a chance I'll practice that much?  The only thing I've done that much is writing - and I have to say writing in general, rather than, say, fiction or nonfiction.  Now, this has to be 10,000 hours of concerted effort to get better at something - so obviously I can't count things like writing letters or writing Facebook posts or things like that.  Even most of my blogging probably doesn't count - at most maybe half of it.  Time spent working on actual books, stories and poems for publican counts, I think.  Editing other people's work counts maybe half.  Writing papers for college and graduate school, half at most.

I'm too busy lately to do the math, but I wonder - how close are you to your 10,000 hours?  Have you already crossed the line?

As a point of reference, 10,000 hours is full time practice at your art of craft, 40 hours a week, for 5 years straight.  With no vacations.

That's a lot...but it's also a powerful number in the lives of some of the most famous people in their fields.  It is also measurable, which makes it a nice goal to have in mind.