Looking back at 2015

I haven’t written one of these posts since 2012. Of course at the time it was meant to become a yearly thing. I’m having another go at it now I’m regularly writing here. It’s a post to wrap up the year. There might be a bit of overlap with what I wrote in a recent Sundae newsletter, I’m expanding on some of those ideas here.

It has been an interesting year. A good year on many fronts.

I started the year in the Pyrénées mountains with a lovely walk in snow shoes and a couple days later went to the Mediterranean Sea in Collioure for a walk, to appreciate the beautiful area where most of my family lives.

I had opportunities to do interesting freelance work and do it remotely at least in part, so I thought I’d stay and enjoy the area a little while longer.

I spent a lot of time with my brothers, sister, nieces, nephew and parents throughout the year. I was hesitating on where to live and what to do next. I visited a flat in Perpignan and took it immediately once I’d seen the view of the rooftops and mountains from the roof terrace. That’s where I’m sitting to write this post as well. Two of my oldest friends came to visit from Orléans and Bordeaux. I travelled for work and spent time with some of my best friends in London, and also went on a lovely weekend in Somerset.

A large part of this year was also in the context of a course I’m participating in and completing soon, the Landmark Wisdom Unlimited. The main idea of the course is to explore the qualities of a child at play and applying them to different areas of life with the maturity of adulthood.

The course comprises five weekends throughout the year in different cities in Europe, each weekend has a particular theme. In between weekends, I had weekly calls with a group of other participants in the course who lived in the South of France, we also organised weekend events, social gatherings at each others places. Another important aspect of the course are the various assignments, for example I worked on putting an autobiography together with photos for each year of my life, and displays with all the people I interacted with on a regular basis for each year.

In the course I looked at how I developed and grew as a social being, in the conversations, interactions and circles of people that make up my every day life. It’s a rich course and everything I’ve done this year was supported by the conversations I’ve had with others in the programme. I really enjoyed it and next year I’m participating in another course in the series, Partnership Explorations. If you don’t know much about these kinds of courses I’d be happy to tell you more, or for a good read, a recent article was published in the NY Times about Werner Erhardt who created these types of courses.

I redesigned the Ice Cream for Everyone website, one of my best friends redesigned the logo. I got back into tabletop roleplaying games and started contributing to a friend’s audio podcast about roleplaying games. I really enjoyed it and given I had occasionally toyed with the idea of creating some kind of audio or video show, I started thinking about what I could do. It took me several months between the first episode meant to be research back in August to nail down a format I could produce myself. It started complicated, then I brought it back to something relatively simple I personally enjoy enough that I trust I’ll keep up with it. I interview creators and thinkers in a variety of fields I’m interested in, like advertising, game design, media and strategy.

I spent time working out the kind of writing I want to do more of, as a result I’m writing at least one blog post every week, the weekly Ice Cream Sundae email newsletter, and I’m working on other kinds of articles and posts for other platforms.

I made efforts to meet new people here in Perpignan, and volunteered with the local tabletop roleplaying game club to help with the yearly convention event. I made new friends there which is excellent. I helped my sister with her wine domain, Les Arabesques. I learned a lot of how her business works. I also helped my brother Morgan with his new restaurant.

On other hand there are several things I wanted to get complete this year and failed to, chiefly my driving license. It became an ongoing drama this year. I took many lessons, took the driving test twice and failed it twice. I’m really close and if it didn’t take so long to reschedule another slot I’d probably already have it. I never thought it would be so difficult but there you go.

I intended to have a complete draft of the novel I’m writing by the end of this year and I don’t. I still have the same draft I had a year ago after NaNoWriMo. I spent a little bit more time writing towards the novel but nowhere near enough. I spent more time worrying about developing and promoting my services as a freelance strategist and consultant.

The work side has proven to be tougher than I thought it would be. It’s not working as well as I’d like it to. Spending time going back and forth between London (or other large cities) and the South of France sounded like a fantastic idea but it’s pretty difficult and tiring. Fortunately there has been positive points too: the work I’ve been doing with Framestore was and still is really interesting, I’ve done some work with a few other clients, caught up with many professional contacts and was invited to speak at the European Planning Conference in Prague.

While I’m not really getting bored of my roof terrace here, I miss the opportunities and friends in the big city. I’ve also made a conscious choice to keep writing and working in English (rather than in French).

With that in mind, and after much consideration, I’m moving back to London.

It’s weird to be moving again after just a year, looking around my flat and having to pack everything up again. It would be been even tougher to be able to take the time I did this year to work out my new website, podcast, writing, newsletter, tabletop gaming and learning to drive if I’d been in London or any other expensive large city this year, so I definitely appreciate that.

I’m looking forward to spending another New Year’s Eve in the Pyrénées mountains with friends! Once I’m back I’ll write another post about what I have in mind for 2016. I’m looking forward to whatever is coming next.

Dragonmeet 2015 Tabletop Gaming Convention

I was at the Dragonmeet tabletop gaming convention in London last weekend. I’ve started mentioning it around my blog, website and podcast that I’ve been interested in tabletop gaming for a long time and I’ve been actively getting into it this year. I’ve also started putting more time into what lessons can be brought from tabletop gaming into other areas, particularly with work in marketing strategy and planning. My talk at the European Planning Conference was about that, I’ve already mentioned I recorded it and I’m going to publish the audio as a podcast episode soon.

I met with several interesting roleplaying game designers, for some reason several of whom were science-fiction themed. I don’t know if it’s my own interest these days leading me towards those, or if there were more science-fiction themed roleplaying games who had stalls.

I attended a few different seminars, including announcements for Pelgrane Press and was particularly interested in finding out about a recently published collection of original story games – that’s a style of games somewhere between a board game and a roleplaying game, where players typically build a story together. It’s called Seven Wonders, an anthology of seven games from different authors. I’m interested because most of the game authors / designers are in large majority women, and because the topics were out of the ordinary fantasy or science-fiction tropes. These games propose questions like what you be ready to sacrifice to protect your family, what happens back at the village when the heroes are gone adventuring, or how dystopian societies come to be. Unfortunately the book was sold out by the afternoon when I thought of buying it, though there will be a new print run soon and I’m looking forward to reading it.

I’ve heard a lot of good feedback and reviews from Sarah Newton’s game called Mindjammer. The game is already published though she is currently running a Kickstarter crowdfunding project to for new adventures to be written within the same science-fiction universe, and there’s also a novel. I just backed the project, for those interested there are several levels of participating where you can save on buying the main book and game at the moment. I talked about the project with Sarah, she has been working on it for several years and hearing the description made me think of Iain M. Banks Culture universe. I’m apparently not the first person to say that, even though Sarah hadn’t read any of those novels when she starting writing Mindjammer. If you enjoy The Culture novels, I’d recommend checking it out.

I also met Carlos of Burning Games who successfully crowdfunded a science-fiction themed roleplaying game called Faith, with the interesting fact that it presents itself like a board game, with a lot of tokens and cards typically not needed in a tabletop roleplaying game. It intends to be a half-way to introduce people to roleplaying games, which is an interesting idea. I also met with Ed of Imagine RPG and talked about his sci-fi game called Era: The Consortium, for which he wrote 500 years of detailed and playable setting history.

There were many people playing and testing all sorts of games. I had the opportunity of trying Microscope, an ‘indie’ game. It’s pretty interesting, though I’d barely call it a game; it is a methodology for narrating periods, events, and scenes in the history of a civilisation (or of whatever you want I guess). There were many interesting ideas I think I can steal for brainstorming sessions and workshops, I bought the pdf and I’m going to study this a little further.

The convention is also an opportunity for game designers to test some game prototypes. I had fun meeting with Henry and trying his wrecking ball game prototype. The principle is simple and a great idea: you have to build a tower with cubes, try to destroy other people’s towers with a wrecking ball or a demolition truck while protecting your own construction. We talked about the best way to balance this kind of game, how much the pieces should weight or what size they should be, etc. I wish Henry luck and success with the next steps, at least it seems like a great idea for a game.

I attended a live recording of the Ken and Robin talk about stuff audio podcast, both of them are quite known and successful writers and game designers, several of the games they worked on were for sale during the event as well.

It was a great day, I was just a little disappointed by the fact that the attendance seemed to be pretty old on and very male skewed. I’m not sure if it’s representative of the event in particular or of hobby gaming in the UK though. Women are typically in minority from what I could see in similar events in France, maybe 25 – 30% women, where in this event there seemed to be like half that many unfortunately. Lastly, it was almost entirely caucasians in attendance. A little too stereotypical, mostly full of aging white dudes…  Even though I believe that hobby games are evolving in a good way, generally growing as a category and becoming mainstream in the past few years, there’s probably still more that can be done to encourage new people to play these kinds of games, including women and other ethnicities.

With my friends at the French tabletop roleplaying podcast Les Voix d’Altaride we are preparing for an episode on the topic of women and roleplaying games (in France / French speaking countries) and have already collected over 300 responses from an online survey to ask people about it, I’m looking forward to analysing the results.

Happy in Vienna

I thought I’d add a theme music to this post, Röyksopp’s Happy up Here so you can listen while reading.

I took the train from Prague to Vienna last weekend, I’d never visited and it seemed like a good opportunity to catch up with old friends who live here. It was also a good excuse to take the train for a few hours, I always love a good train ride. It was a chance to see what that little part of the world between the Czech and Austrian capital cities looks like while editing some podcast recordings.

I walked around Vienna in the morning a few days ago, and was glad to stumble upon a Stefan Sagmeister exhibit at the MAK, the Austrian Applied and contemporary arts museum. Knowing the famous designer is Austrian by birth, and having seen some of his work on happiness in TED Talks, it was a perfect opportunity to check it out.

It is called The Happy Show and collects the designers thoughts, research, experiments, and ideas about happiness. He famously closes his studio every seven years to take a year off as a sabbatical and many of the works in the exhibition were produced during that time off, some of it while he lived in Bali for a year, which seemed to have been in 2008 or around that time. He shows some of this work in his TED talks, I recommend checking them out.

It was a fantastic and happy morning for me, I’m always happy to walk around the streets of a new city and it was sunny so just that put a smile on my face. The Christmas markets were open with friends and families of locals and tourists walking around having fun and gathering around small high tables to drinks warm mugs of the Christmassy spiced, slightly boozy, and variously flavoured local pünsch.

I also love checking out the food of course, and was surprised to see stalls serving warm soup in bread bowls. While I loved the idea, it didn’t occur to me as a practical kind of street food to eat on the go. I stopped to watch some people order and see how they ate it, they turned out to stop at some tables I didn’t see were there at first. More reasons to smile while walking around.

I’d been walking around the centre of town for about two hours when I came across the exhibition, a good time to stop and get warm in the museum. The exhibits also put a smile on my face. One of my favourite pieces was the “How happy are you?” yellow banana flavoured bubble-gum dispensers. Ten of them are lined up in a colorful display, numbered 1 to 10 and asking people to self select how happy they were and take a bubble-gum from that machine. It’s playful, and as Stefan wrote in comments about the piece; it might sound silly to ask though research has shown that people stating they were happy actually made them happier. I enjoyed noticing there were a lot less gum in the 8-9-10 dispensers than in the ones numbered 1-2-3, which were almost full. I stayed around a few minutes and it was fun watching people select it, visitors watched each other and smiled. Happiness, or at least smiles, are pretty infectious.

I mentioned playful already, and to me this was a recurring theme throughout the exhibition, playfulness and happiness are intertwined in their crafting.

I came across a brilliant article, a thanksgiving acknowledgement for the advertising industry by Tom Demetriou, it’s an interesting and fun read I could relate to having lived similar situations in my work too.

He shares this award acceptance speech from Jerry Seinfeld, also a lot of fun. Cynical perhaps, though I mention as relevant in the same post it because he talks about the small moments of happiness advertising can provide.

“In advertising, everything is the way you wish it was. […] In between seeing the commercial and owning the thing, I’m happy”

I’m not sure I see it as happiness when I’m in the thick of working on advertising or marketing a product, though typically a common thread with all great and memorable pieces of advertising is that they put a smile on people’s faces regardless of the product or service being advertised.

Beyond the ironic humour, there is definitely something to be said for appreciating happiness moment by moment, and then to be able to laugh at the irony of the often nonsensical things I do in the world of advertising, which I think also holds true for a lot of people in other lines of work.

The quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off comes to mind as a good way to complete this post:

“Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.”