008: catching time, controlling paper
This week—thoughts on stationery and how we control games in a 3D space. Make sure to click into Time + Paper to get some downloadable stationery templates!
The fullness found in emptiness—the delight of browsing for new pens and pencils at the stationery store, the excitement at opening up a new journal or notebook and plotting out how it will be filled. There’s an optimism to how stationery will be used to jot down thoughts, document knowledge, chart progression, and beyond. Often, the actual scribbles fall short of the initial plans. Yet, instead of dismissing this initial energy as foolish optimism or seeing the results as a short-coming, perhaps it’s worthwhile to understand the initial fullness as something complete in of itself.
Of course, I think this romantic view has to be paired with the reality of our relationship with stationery, especially in the context of a productivity-driven world. Meticulously-crafted planners and aggressively-set habit trackers become devices for confining and limiting how we spend our days instead of liberating them.
Time + Paper isn't a proposal to necessarily answer these tensions. For capitalism reasons, for long-term goal reasons, for personal reasons, for mental health reasons, we create frameworks that necessitate organizing and planning with a certain level of rigidity to set routines and accomplish larger goals.
Time + Paper starts with a set of fairly standard tracking templates, a time card, a daily routine card, and a weekly goal card, ways to set goals, keep track, and establish routine. In later iterations, the hope is to expand and create stationery that better celebrates failure, that has more flexibility to accept the fluidity of our lives. But I think even the simple premise of designing ones own stationery is useful. The same way that people spruce up their planners in a multitude of ways, from strict grids of tasks to free-flowing sketches and schemes, the best system is one that is adaptable different people's needs.
There's something worth exploring with stationery as this precarious balance, one that on its surface has many of the same implications as toxic productivity frameworks or rigid Western time notions (the time card is an easy example of something that succulently summarizes the militaristic way in which a company controls a worker's time), but also how stationery is this tool for organizing for our future. It's a category of items that seem to sit right next to art supplies, a creative set that at its best can be tools in manifesting the goals we seek to accomplish. Along the way, we will just have to investigate the process, how do these tools get used, what is our relationship to them?
Check out and download the custom stationery here (best on desktop)!
This prioritization of controlling the camera is also interesting because it’s putting the focus on moving an element that is not part of the game world. Shifting the camera around is a “god view” of sorts, changing what window of the virtual world the player gets to see without changing or affecting anything in the game itself. What happens when a control scheme prioritizes movements that acknowledge the player? Ironically, it doesn’t take the player out of the game, if anything this overall shift is to keep players immersed.