Overall Challenges - 9th March 2026

“Either fish or cut bait”

As those of you who’ve been following this project will know, it’s taken me a long while to get this far. So it’s time for some updates, and we’ll see where I can take this.

My current non-technical challenges are:

Challenge 1 - Time, and difficult conversations

This is just one of several projects I’m currently interested in making work, even after just “freezing”¹ some ideas I’m being very optimistic here. Do I have time to do this project justice?

The whole area is kind of horrifying. Of course the effects of flooding on people in their actual lives is front and centre, but the effects on both myself, and players, and just going through a grim scenario shouldn’t be under-estimated.

“not about us without us” is a great phrase for thinking about who should be included within a decision or a game, so - again, to do this idea justice - I should contact people who are professionally involved, or victims of, these kind of events. It means difficult conversations around the definitions of “games” and “play”, but if I advocate for that elsewhere I should advocate for that here too? But also it means approaching people and asking for them to recall and describe life-changing events for the benefit of an experiment.

Challenge 2 - expertise

As I was getting ready to finally publish some updates on this, I looked at my general website publishing setup - and realised that I had a pending update waiting on my main website, that meant I’d just emailed some friends about another new I’d had, without updating the website I’d directed them to. On the one hand it’s only a minor issue, on the other I’m sparky and creative, but also this project potentially needs administration skills I just don’t have.

I’m not an expert in this area… but if anyone else raised the same query if they were running this project, I’d argue that you don’t want experts running this - one of the main points of a serious game is to bring out the expertise of the players, you don’t need to be an expert in all or any of the areas your games are about.

I expect to use LLMs during the creation and execution of this game. Partly they can substitute for some of the expertise required, partly I will need to use “LLM assisted development” to make some of the intended technical platforms work, or at least to help me troubleshoot and configure the open source software I have in mind.

“Working in public”

By accident I discovered the phrase “either fish or cut bait” while writing up this log entry. It’s an American English phrase, meaning either get on with the job, or get out of the way and get on with the kind of support work that helps others do it. And that works nicely here, I’m sporadically helping others design or run games, so that phrase is a good reminder that if this doesn’t work then I’ve other options, and also the lessons from this could help others.

This is all part of “working in public”, and putting this log entry up and associated pages remind me how far I’ve come while the actual game isn’t running yet. Also it means that anyone following the project can forewarn me if I’ve made any especially bad decisions already.