This has been one of the busiest years of my professional life.<\/p>\n
First, still learning a job that changes as fast as technology allows it to. Evolve had a good year with some great clients, and next year will be especially busy for me as I help with Paradox’s strategy stable. As I stare at the open documents on my desktop and avalanche of paper, I humbly ask for your prayers.<\/p>\n
Second, I won’t comment much on this since I generally only mention my personal life in roundabout ways, but divorce is brutal for the heart and soul. I thank everyone who was patient and helpful this year.<\/p>\n
Third, learning new things takes time and energy. I tried to teach myself new software, video editing, new types of games and also took up the gym more seriously. Clearly I need to work on my balance<\/p>\n
So, I played remarkably few games that we were not representing or that I was not already somewhat familiar with, hence a blog that lay moribund for most of the year. I regret that a lot, since Flash of Steel is my home base – it’s where I launched Three Moves Ahead, it’s where I prefer to write and it still draws a good solid number of hits per day.<\/p>\n
It is very hard to write about strategy games without playing them a lot. I have barely touched Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, Endless Space is laughing at me, there are a dozen wargames from Matrix sitting on my hard drive and eventually I need to finish that stupid science series that I keep putting off because I am not thinking about design in the right way to finish that.<\/p>\n
As someone that loves to write, a year having done very little of it for public consumption is kind of like a cancer. It does ease the pain somewhat that there is a lot of excellent strategy game writing going on in a lot of places (I hope to highlight some this month) so FoS doesn’t have the urgency of the mission it once did. PC gaming is back and strong, there is a greater diversity of voices on all types of games now, and if FoS faded away into irrelevance it would not be missed a lot.<\/p>\n
Except by me, of course. I need this place and will commit to blogging once a week at least in 2013 (not counting all the freaking travel I probably have coming.)<\/p>\n
I ended last year by inviting friends and colleagues to contribute pieces to the blog. It was content and let me get through the holiday rush in piece.<\/p>\n
Not this year. This year I will be inviting everyone that guested on 3MA to contribute a link to something they wrote (preferably on strategy gaming) that they are especially proud of. People get on the podcast in two ways – they make a great game or they write stuff we like. I plan on highlighting the latter stuff in December.<\/p>\n
Because this is a crap post, there will be a proper one by the weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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