Hello, April! The start of a new month and the end of a good run of hunting for all sorts of eggs in Animal Crossing. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups. Here are five fragments that caught my eye last week as I thought about what shapes a sense of place…
The Fun Palace was an anti-building, Price proclaimed, and he was CEDRIC PRICE, ANTI-ARCHITECT NO. 1,” according to the letterhead that he doctored by hand for a 1964 memo about the Fun Palace. If an architect was someone who created solid buildings that were constructed from long-lasting, traditional building supplies, then the anti-architect was someone who sought to understand and justify the social function and role for the architectural project, maybe not designing a building at all.
– Molly Wright Steenson, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape, November 1, 2022. Returning to this book by an old friend as I think about the interplay between physical architecture and software. I also just love the idea of doctoring letterhead. Don’t miss the URL on Molly’s personal site…
So there's a distinction between creating a great place, building a level, and actually making a game. Creating a building or even a whole place (level) isn't that hard (though it may be time consuming!). There are design templates to help out, and you can put items and objects around your map pretty easily. Building a game, however, requires that you create parameters. Rules. Spawn points. Damage. Health systems. All these things are done by scripting, which involves using Lua, which involves using a programming language that is foreign to many and can be scary. So actually building levels is pretty accessible to most people, though actually making games with rules and parameters is where it becomes tricky.
– David Baszucki, founder and CEO of Roblox, in a February 2013 interview in Wired—over 11 years ago now.
A citadel to creative concentration need not be a literal palace. It just needs to be free of laundry baskets.
– Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, 2024. A related passage: “The problem is that the home is filled with the familiar, and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly.” Brings me back too to the meditations on work I published on Vision Pro Eve.
Exploring, being lost for a while, looking around without distraction, or just going for a walk eventually raises questions of words, if only in the telling and retelling of short-term adventure.
– John Stilgoe, What Is Landscape?, 2018. The difference Professor Stilgoe made in my life runs deep.
In Caramoan, I was on the same beach all 39 days, and for the entire time there was this one bird that periodically sang a melody identical to the chorus of "Ease on Down the Road" from The Wiz. I think way more about that bird these days than I do about blindsides or challenge stats, and I wish I'd consciously collected more of those memories.
– John Cochran on his Survivor experience, Entertainment Weekly, February 2, 2021. Jess Chong’s participation on Survivor 46 has pulled me back into watching and thinking about the back catalog. John remains my all-time favorite player, and I dug up this detailed interview he gave a few years back one day before going to a watch party for the current season. I think about it a lot.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com