Weekly Wisby 2: Polly is pissed

For game design in practice I want to build a product that helps insecure daters, so this past week I’ve been trying to research daters by following blogs and scouring forums. Hisadenious is the term I’m coining for the new feeling I have discovered, because a combination of hilarious and saddening describes the amount of wisdom people think they have about love. Incredibly dear to my heart is a 2731-word response by Polly, who starts off strong by comparing dating apps to leaping across a giant chasm wearing clown shoes.

That was Monday though. After trying to hone down on an audience I eventually started looking at autistic daters. Wouldn’t you know it, there’s only 1 platform out there for those people. But it kind of sucks, as everyone one there is 100s of miles separated from one another. So I started thinking in terms of who could really use online connection. That made me think of how I lived in a small town all my life and how it was really hard for me to see friends. Hence came the idea to make an online platform for small town teens.

That audience really spoke to me, and I was hoping it would speak to a lot of others as well but a pitch on the group discord proved otherwise. Seems most people want to make games. Selfish pricks, attending a game design course because they want to make games. Whatever happened to integrity?!

Jerry the programming teacher didn’t mention my spotless body in his assessment, so I think he missed it. Probably for the best, lest he got jealous. To reiterate: for our first assignment we had to draw ourselves in a program using rectangles and circles. Well… turns out Jerry is a better joker than I, cause this is what he did with our hand ins:

“My favorite are abs guy and balloon head.”

Nothing new to report here other than the assignment for next week is to make balls bounce on the screen and I finished it during the first lesson.

“Show your work!” was clearly not the book for me. “Start small, stay small” treats me much better. It is a book for developers about beginning a startup from the ground up with nary a penny to their name. The trick is to hone in on a group that’s too small for the big bad bozo companies that steal all your customers once you get successful. That… won’t happen because your group is too small. It also means you also get less customers, but within that group it spreads faster. Less customers btw is a virtue: it means less support mails.

It’s actually how I got to the village-teens audience. I should also mention, after a while my idea ‘did’ gain some traction… with the teacher. Which is great for my confidence, but it’s still some ways removed from forming a team. Guess we’ll have to see where we’re standing next week.

Look… I can sort of get the point Polly was trying to make. Online dating can be terrifying and joyless. Hell, that’s why I wanted to help. But you’ve got to understand where anxious singles are coming from. Polly blundered here when she wrote “Reject the high-capitalist notion of shopping for new friends and upgraded mates” to start her twenty-second paragraph. Luckily, she quickly regained her footing by following up with “Reject the notion that we should all get fresh ass from new people constantly”, as I'm sure is what's on every shy dater's mind.