Hi ,Happy new year! I hope you had a fantastic time over the holidays!Inspired by friends' newsletters like James (Five Things on Friday), Faris & Rosie (Strands of Genius) who already got back into the swing of things, it's about time I reprise the Sundae newsletters.I don't really do new year resolutions, though one things I thought is I haven't been reading that many books in the past couple of years, so I'm spending more time reading, less time listening to podcasts. As a result, it's likely more of the links I share here will be book recommendations, we'll see. I've read a lot of interesting stuff in the past couple of weeks, tough to filter & select only a few things but here we go!All the best!Willem

 Weekly Combo Two or three flavours, interesting separately, fascinating together 

A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster (book, 256 pages - half are drawings, it's a quick read)My first book read this year, and an awesome Christmas gift from my sister. I'd come across it as a reference book for game design but hadn't gotten round to buying or reading it. It's pretty widely taught in game design classes and acknowledged as a reference for the games industry. It's not a methodology or how-to book at all, rather more of a thoughtful approach to life and games from an industry veteran.Much of it are fascinating musings about neuroscience, education, and ultimately aiming to challenge the reader and the games industry at large to think about what it is they're up to, and what games are for. Absolutely enjoyable and worthwhile if you're interested in the creative process or anything to do with games, brain science and learning. And what is fun anyways? That's the kinds of question the book aims to reflect about.Choice quote: "The holy grail of game design is to make a game where the challenges are never ending, the skills required are varied, and the difficulty curve is perfect and adjusts itself to exactly your skill level. Someone did this already, though, and it's not always fun. It's called "life". Maybe you've played it."~Raph KosterTo finish on games, I've also played a couple of excellent board games over the holiday period including IceCool with my nieces that won a ton of awards if you have small-ish kids I highly recommend it, Ticket to Ride and Viticulture (awesome worker placement game). As soon as I'm finished writing I'm giving up resisting and gonna buy a Nintendo Switch with Mario Odyssey & Zelda: Breath of the Wild!"Most of us are too busy to be better": the lazy person's guide to self-improvement (The Guardian, 10 min read)

This is mostly just silly and me chuckle. I had a great conversation with colleagues this week about the culture and trend of impatience, that everything has to happen fast or nobody has time for it. Everything seems increasingly frenetic, and this piece pokes some fun at that and the habit of making new year resolutions. I thought I'd share this one as a contrast to the thoughts about life and game design in Raph Koster's book, which is about stopping and thinking about what we're up to rather than race to be a millionnaire in 10 minutes (really?) or reach meditation yoga nirvana in 5. On the topic of busy vs. lazy, I'll refer back to Tim Kreider's fantastic piece about this exact topic and trend from a few years ago: The Busy Trap (if you don't have time to read, here's the audio version on Tim Ferriss' podcast. Starts about 2-3 min in).Lastly, greatness is rarely if ever achieved in a mere few minutes. Check out this guy who's been spending the past 10 years making a Boeing 777 replica out of paper.