This year I embraced my role as a developer. A symbolic element of that transition was my move from TextEdit to Sublime Text. TextEdit has been a staple in my workflow for over 10 years. I use it because it's flexible, free and light weight. At the Apple Store and with Creative Mac Training, that was important. But now that I've limited the scope of my work the general nature of TextEdit puts it at a disadvantage. It offers *some* tools for every type of circumstance, but the best of the dedicated tools in each industry can run circles around it. Sublime Text is a straight forward, no-nonsense development application. It's not a full fledged IDE like Eclipse. It doesn't manage projects or support versioning, but it does check my syntax, compile my LESS styling, and perform code-completion. Diving into it allowed me to abandon both TextEdit and Dreamweaver. Both of which are tools from a less sophisticated era of web programming.

Around my birthday I decided that it was time to allow myself to find a new game to play. For the last 12 years I have almost exclusively been playing just three games: Diablo (along with its clones), Starcraft, and iConquor. I am by no means tired of them. But having just completed school, and transitioning successfully into a schedule of full-time startup work, I decided to reward myself by allowing a new leisure experience. I came across X-Com by sifting through Macworld reviews. It turned out to be one of the most pleasant software discoveries of the year.

X-Com is a turn-based strategy game similar to Myth. It takes place in the year 2015, and places the user as commander of an international combat force created to fight an alien threat. Players are given a small squad of troops, each with unique attributes. As you complete missions, the characters in the squad learn new abilities, provided that they survive. Even with a limited background story, the game's approach kept me invested in the outcome of every battle. From the beginning I felt a responsibility to my troops, and it gave me incentive to explore the depths of what the game has to offer.
I love X-Com for its immersion. In it there is always something to do. Alien attacks happen unexpectedly all over the world, UFO ships can be intercepted and shot down, panic levels must be managed in every country, various request come in for goods and assistance, the gray market is always looking for trades, and the base itself needs to be managed. New technologies can be researched, facilities can be constructed, troops can be upgraded, gear can be swapped, and ships and satellites can be launched. On top of this, the user is judged by a 3rd party council every 30 days, and is given a letter grade and summary of their performance, which affects the funding of their agency. In short, this game can be very overwhelming. The user is put in a position of constant maintenance and future planning while also being responsible for offensive actions. Keeping everything balanced is nearly impossible. The timing of outside activities is entirely out of your hands, and effectively utilizing internal resources is often more challenging than combat. If you listen to your crew they may lead you astray. Each of the department-head who report to you views his or her concerns as being the most pressing, and they communicate their requests to you, urging you as their commander to take care of their team first. They often represent a myopic view of something that really is quite large and complex. So the task becomes learning the subtleties of judgment necessary to prioritize and to determine when a thing needs to happen within the context of the overall goal rather than the narrow view of any one demand. I find it quite comparable to the challenges of running a large company, and I look at it as a type of practice. Someday I may be able to look back and realize that, at least in small part, my time playing X-Com has prepared me for making heavy decisions while still juggling everyone's best interest.

When I play a game it is almost exclusively for my love of the involved strategies. I enjoy planning out my actions multiple steps at a time and I receive a huge gratification as I watch the outcomes unfold. The reason I find these games so enjoyable is that they allow me to practice a simplified, miniaturized version of the skills I most value in real life. I approach life itself as a strategy game. Through my eyes, the world is filled with challenges, each with a measurable range of long and short term benefits. Unproductive moves are to be avoided, and the clearer the vision of the intend outcome, the easier the end goal is to achieve. In Life's strategy game the challenge is to learn to visualize the outcomes of each choice and to develop the judgment necessary to achieve the chosen goals as efficiently as possible. That same analogies are obviously there in the computer games I play. The difference is that these games provide immediate payoffs. That makes them incredibly appealing. They let me practice real-life skills while immediately giving me simulated benefits. In that way it can essentially be seen as strategy pornography. It simulates something desirable. If that's the case then this year X-Com was certainly my favorite porn star.