I've Gone Viral! . . . In China?

This blog really doesn't get much traffic at all. I get anywhere from 2-20 pageviews per day, and that number usually spikes up to around 40-60 views on the days following a new post. The "low season" in between posts isn't completely dead, because plenty of people seem to land here from Google Images. For instance, I got an interesting spike in traffic last month when Extra Credits started a T-Shirt design contest and apparently a lot of users were landing in my History of Extra Credits articles looking for images.

However, these mini-spikes in views usually aren't very significant compared to the traffic I get from subscribers every time I post. So imagine my surprise when I noticed a spike that was slightly bigger than the usual new-post spike. This spike happened just a few days before I posted my most recent post, and that should have been part of a really low season since I haven't posted an update in over a month. After looking into it, I found not one, not two, but three websites with articles linking to me.

Long story short, someone seems to have translated my article on How to Think Like a Designer into Han Chinese. And since then, it's been getting passed around and reposted on multiple Chinese websites.

Why I'm no longer Skeptical about SISTA's new Game Design Workshop

[This article explores some of my fears and predictions about the workshop. To find out how it actually went, click here!]

Starting tomorrow, the University of Arizona's School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts (SISTA) will be launching its first Game Design Workshop. It's a one-week program designed for kids between 6th and 12th grade, and it's being run for two consecutive sessions. I volunteered to be one of the two teaching assistants helping to run the workshop, and our latest assignment is to write a reflection on how we think the workshop might go. One purpose of this reflection is to produce a more visible representation of the work I've been doing so far, which makes this assignment a perfect fit for a blog post!

Given how busy I've been all summer, I was starting to think that I wouldn't be able to update this blog again until fall, so I'm glad that I was able to use this assignment as an excuse for a new post. Plus this gives me a good chance to practice writing posts with smaller scopes. Most of my posts tend to start out with a vague plan that I'll just talk about everything I want to say on a single topic, and then I'll figure out how to merge them all into a coherent thesis later. It is an absurdly slow process, and it's about time I stopped doing that.

For instance, this post started out as a list of predictions about how the workshop might go, plus some descriptions of the interesting aspects of the workshop's design woven in. Fortunately, I had enough sense to realize that the workshop would probably be over before I could even finish such a post.