“Writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all.” – Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

A girl once beat me for a scholarship by making a blog filled with memes about art school. One of the images she posted was about how every writer who gets writers block ends up writing about it. I scoffed and said that I’d never stoop so low.

I lied.

It happened on Wednesday afternoon. I realized that I’d written myself into a corner. My current challenge is something that’s very difficult to write about without being boring. No one wants to read a blog post about a man reading about another guy explaining how games work. It’s like Inception without the Hans Zimmerman score or action or plot. Basically its like reading a novel about a guy reading a manual. If David Foster Wallace was still alive he could have used that last sentence as the premise for another insufferable novel.

I thought about writing a post about growing up near where Gary Gygax lived. I considered writing about an exercise I did where I tried to make a pen and paper prototype of a game. I even contemplated writing about the time that I went to video game camp as a kid, the only memorable thing about it was the fact that I helped make a Crysis mod while all my friends back home got laid. At the time I felt slighted.

I’m not writing a lot about video games because I don’t know enough about them yet to comfortably talk about the subject. If you want to learn everything I know about them you can go pick up a copy of Game Design Workshop . Even better, go check out H.G. Wells classic Little Wars, it’s free and taught me more about strategy games than any other book did. For something written over 100 years ago it’s held up incredibly well.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t written a lot about my challenge, it’s because I didn’t want to bore you. You could go play with some dice, graph paper, and plastic soldiers and learn just as much as I have.

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