My Breakable Toy
I've been hesitant to discuss my ambition publicly, but now that it's part of an assignment I guess the time has come to throw my cap over the wall.
First, a bit of background: a Breakable Toy is exactly what it says on the tin. In the Launch Academy paradigm, it falls under the rubric of 'learning through play'. Which is just a fancy way of saying that making mistakes is an important part of the process, so it's a good idea to create for yourself a space where you don't mind making a mess and mucking things up a bit, because that's the whole point. Experimentation is a breakable toy's raison d'être -- it exists to be broken (and, hopefully, rebuilt.)
For my breakable toy, the end goal is a universal LARP character management system. Inspired by the likes of Dave Burbank's Steam & Cinders Condenser and the Witchwood Character Database, the idea is to make a one-stop shop where any LARP staff can configure a character database to handle all of what Dan calls "administrivia".
Many if not most of the games at which I play or staff simply don't have the resources to devote to setting up this sort of things for themselves. And so they use a slapdash mixture of whatever tools they have available-- Excel spreadsheets rife with macros, off-the-shelf message board software and even good old fashioned pen and paper. In short, it's a mess. And it's not very hard to see why; LARP budgets are always stretched thin. I have often described them as a labor of love; staffers burn themselves out giving everything they have to a game and still barely manage to keep the wheels on the wagon.
Where others see a problem, I see an opportunity -- and a perfect breakable toy. I can start small (say, with a new character creator for one game) and build outwards from there, adding features and functionality as my knowledge grows. Very little is required aside from basic arithmetic and the ability to manipulate strings and shuffle data around. And, perhaps most importantly, all of my data will be provided by the users themselves -- no need to go out into the wild to scrape from other sites, or interact with APIs. Just a nice quiet sandbox where I can feel free to wreak havoc.
I'm extremely eager (perhaps too eager) to get started. It's my second week at Launch Academy, and I still have only a rudimentary idea of how I would actually go about making this thing that I can envision so clearly in my mind's eye. And at every step in the process, my teachers have been illuminating for me how it's nowhere near as simple as I think. The knack, it seems, is learning to break the idea down into its component parts. And then break those parts down even further. To go from user stories, to acceptance criteria, to individual gobbets of business logic that will allow me to make my insubstantial notions into reality.
But it's comforting to know that I can make mistakes. That I'm supposed to make mistakes. That when I do finally start putting things together, I don't have to be afraid of tearing them apart again, if I think of something cleaner or more elegant, or if I just feel like I need the practice. I would love to come out the other side of this experience with something real, something I could put out into the world and invite my friends and associates to use. But even if I don't, I suspect I'll have something better: the tools I need to turn this or any other idea from a half-baked, back-of-the-napkin conjecture into a functioning web application.