One of the aspects of gaming that’s fun to me is getting to do big things on a small scale. Games let us traverse nations, explore caverns, create railroad empires, fight wars, and conquer the world all in the course of the evening. These are big plans. The kinds of plans which are hard to swallow in one bite or explain in one breath.
Luckily, most games we play provide us with a fairly easy way to break these plans down into smaller steps. This is most commonly expressed by each player getting to take a turn. The action you take in a turn is usually something which can be conceptualized and executed in a relatively short period of time. In fact, I think a lot of modern game design revolves around imagining how long a player's turn will take, how involved other players will be during that turn, and how long it will be from the time a player gets to act and the next time they get to act.
Even in roleplaying games where much of the game takes place outside any specific turn order, parts of the game (notably combat) are broken down into turns to bring order to a chaotic part of the simulation. I certainly run other parts of the game without formal turns, but go around the table to get an understanding of what each character is currently doing. It helps to organize things, keep them understandable and keep them moving.
Everybody has a busy life. Lots to get done. How we perceive the things on our to-do list has a great deal to do with how easily those items are accomplished. Personally, I find the smaller the size into which I carve these tasks, the more easily I seem to be able to get them done.
I think this has a lot to do with how easily I can hold a complicated task in my brain. I might understand the process, but unless I have executed that process many times, I have a very poor understanding of how long it will take. Therefore, I have difficulty allocating the necessary time to get it done. I'm much more prone to putting something off if I think it's going to take a long time to complete.
The example I typically use is last year when I was getting ready to have a bunch of people over to our house for the NC Game Day cookout. I needed to (according to my wife) clean out the screen porch. The screen porch was a wreck. It was going to take me at least a half a day to get it done. I was busy with work. I was prepping my game. We had my wife's birthday the weekend before that. When was I going to be able to find half a day to clean out the screen porch?
I took my own advice and broke it down into smaller tasks. What really needed to happen was: The hot tub chemicals needed to be put away. The extra tools and stuff which had been left out needed to be put in the shed. The outdoor furniture needed to be wiped down. And the floor needed to be swept. It was still going to take me half a day but now I could at least do it in stages. I'd just do them one at a time and do other stuff in between.
I got up from my desk and figured I'd get started by putting away the hot tub chemicals. This took less than two minutes. I would feel silly taking a break after that so I put away the tools that were laying around out there. That part took me about 5 minutes. The rest of the clutter which had made its way out there took maybe another five minutes to put away. So now I had done half the items on my to-do list and it had taken me less than 15 minutes. Things were looking pretty good.
Later, after a call with a client, I got back to work by dragging all the outdoor furniture into the yard, spraying it with a hose and wiping it down. This took a good 30 minutes. Then, while it was drying, I swept out the porch, which was a lot easier with all the furniture out of the way. It still took me another 30 minutes (our screen porch is 500 square feet). Then it was just a matter of moving the furniture back in, which was maybe 5 minutes of work.
So the whole thing took me an hour and a half.
What this taught me (besides how badly I suck at estimating how long things take) is how powerful it is to break things down into smaller chunks. It lets me feel much more in control when I have literally nothing on my to-do list that's going to take me more than an hour. I don't have to hold the whole war in my head. Sometimes I don't even need to hold a battle in my head. I just need to know what I'm going to do next round.
What sort of increments do you break your to-do list into? Do you like games where turns are fast and simple or longer and more complex?
Luckily, most games we play provide us with a fairly easy way to break these plans down into smaller steps. This is most commonly expressed by each player getting to take a turn. The action you take in a turn is usually something which can be conceptualized and executed in a relatively short period of time. In fact, I think a lot of modern game design revolves around imagining how long a player's turn will take, how involved other players will be during that turn, and how long it will be from the time a player gets to act and the next time they get to act.
Even in roleplaying games where much of the game takes place outside any specific turn order, parts of the game (notably combat) are broken down into turns to bring order to a chaotic part of the simulation. I certainly run other parts of the game without formal turns, but go around the table to get an understanding of what each character is currently doing. It helps to organize things, keep them understandable and keep them moving.
Everybody has a busy life. Lots to get done. How we perceive the things on our to-do list has a great deal to do with how easily those items are accomplished. Personally, I find the smaller the size into which I carve these tasks, the more easily I seem to be able to get them done.
I think this has a lot to do with how easily I can hold a complicated task in my brain. I might understand the process, but unless I have executed that process many times, I have a very poor understanding of how long it will take. Therefore, I have difficulty allocating the necessary time to get it done. I'm much more prone to putting something off if I think it's going to take a long time to complete.
The example I typically use is last year when I was getting ready to have a bunch of people over to our house for the NC Game Day cookout. I needed to (according to my wife) clean out the screen porch. The screen porch was a wreck. It was going to take me at least a half a day to get it done. I was busy with work. I was prepping my game. We had my wife's birthday the weekend before that. When was I going to be able to find half a day to clean out the screen porch?
I took my own advice and broke it down into smaller tasks. What really needed to happen was: The hot tub chemicals needed to be put away. The extra tools and stuff which had been left out needed to be put in the shed. The outdoor furniture needed to be wiped down. And the floor needed to be swept. It was still going to take me half a day but now I could at least do it in stages. I'd just do them one at a time and do other stuff in between.
I got up from my desk and figured I'd get started by putting away the hot tub chemicals. This took less than two minutes. I would feel silly taking a break after that so I put away the tools that were laying around out there. That part took me about 5 minutes. The rest of the clutter which had made its way out there took maybe another five minutes to put away. So now I had done half the items on my to-do list and it had taken me less than 15 minutes. Things were looking pretty good.
Later, after a call with a client, I got back to work by dragging all the outdoor furniture into the yard, spraying it with a hose and wiping it down. This took a good 30 minutes. Then, while it was drying, I swept out the porch, which was a lot easier with all the furniture out of the way. It still took me another 30 minutes (our screen porch is 500 square feet). Then it was just a matter of moving the furniture back in, which was maybe 5 minutes of work.
So the whole thing took me an hour and a half.
What this taught me (besides how badly I suck at estimating how long things take) is how powerful it is to break things down into smaller chunks. It lets me feel much more in control when I have literally nothing on my to-do list that's going to take me more than an hour. I don't have to hold the whole war in my head. Sometimes I don't even need to hold a battle in my head. I just need to know what I'm going to do next round.
What sort of increments do you break your to-do list into? Do you like games where turns are fast and simple or longer and more complex?
