I think this will be a Good Thing, but I'm not sure what the best implementation of it could be... I'm opening up a sub-set of my blog called Hoza's Game Design Research Journal. For now, until I find a better method, this is really just part of my blog posts, but under a category with this formal name (which is just a sub-cat of my blog.)

Basically, I do a bunch of research about video game design stuff nearly all the time -- well, "design" in general, since I see most of life as a game, not just the "video" part! ;) Since I'm almost constantly thinking about games and design, it leads me down a lot of different paths of research (or "research" as it were, since much of it is so informal as to be considered wandering more than hard research.) I have struggled to find a central location to record my progress and findings... I think this medium might be at least one answer to that. Yay, if so.

Let me introduce why I want to do this in these pages...

Research has been somewhat of a passion of mine for as long as I remember. I've been a "tinkerer" in the physical world -- building stuff and dismantling neat things to find out how they work -- and that seems to have bled over to my game and online endeavors. I like to find out about new technology and such, even though I may only barely understand whatever it is. Just knowing that something exists might be enough to trigger a nifty game design or even a little widget to include in a game. It's a behavior that got me to refer to myself as a "Knowledge Sponge" since I can't seem to satiate this need to explore information. Fun for a geek, it is.

So this year at the GDC, Will Wright (I'll talk about him a LOT, but I'll introduce him to you later if you don't know him yet) gave a wonderful presentation where he talked a lot about how research -- and lots of it -- played a large part in his game design world. I talked about this briefly in a post on MassMOG.com, but I think you're seeing here in my journal a more concrete example of the impact of that talk for me.

I hope this journal will inspire me to formalize my research at least a little bit... well, not "formal" per se, but if I treat the journal as a companion in this journey, it might just enrich the whole experience of research for me. Maybe I'll inspire someone else too, which would serve the point of the site nicely, of course.

Oh yeah... and these ideas will all be searchable and I can browse them much easier than if I wrote them in my books and such... considering my blatant lack of technology use at home. Searching is nice.

Well, I'll let you go now since I'm most definitely babbling at this point. Please let me know if you like this idea and DEFINITELY let me know if you found it useful or inspiring at some point!

Thanks again for visiting! (I've been saying that a lot lately. :)

Hoza