Make it up as you go along | Hacker News Reader

Make it up as you go along

medium.com

30 pointsntlk8 comments

"It unlocked a part of my brain I didn't know I had". I've felt this way about games like D&D since I started playing in 8th grade. Yes they involve a game structure but the most fun I've ever had has been telling ridiculous collaborative stories.

It's imperative that we encourage creativity in kids. They're born with this amazing capacity to imagine incredible things, all we as parents have to do is manage not to kill that off. Telling stories together and playing games together are two of the best things.

The Steve Jackson game "Toon" is the best game to start kids around the age of 9 or 10. The first few chapters put the GM and the player through a very quick "boot camp" that gets a game circle up and running.

"Make it up as you go" may be fine for kids bedtime stories.... but when it's used in software development (which is often the case when "agile" is mis-implemented) it's a recipe for disaster. It ignores all the hard-learned lessons that history has proven about what does and doesn't work.

Indeed, I agree, although I'd argue that I do try to learn as much as possible from the experiences of others. I only very roughly covered what "make it up as you go along" might mean as far as agile is concerned, because so much has been written on the subject and I assumed some familiarity. Perhaps I could have emphasised that more!

Some times back, I stayed telling my kids a series of stories about a little old man. They were all of the cuff and spontaneous and I have the kids opportunities to suggest things in the narrative. The stories were always silly.

I think my kids probably have the best memories from those stories though. Imagination is a powerful thing to encourage in your children.

My mother had "Yellow Jacket" stories which she would make up at bedtime. They always centered around fictional versions of us on a farm with work horses, Yellow Jacket being the name of the horse we would ride. I have tried doing the same for my kids, but I feel like my stories always end up really lame. Maybe I need to try again.

Does anyone else ever have problems with Medium's pages not loading properly? I use Opera on both my phone and my tablet, which both run various versions of Android. I can see the picture splashed across the top of the page, but nothing else. It is very weird.

I saw a message when I went to write this post on Medium that it doesn't yet support mobile/tablets very well yet for writing, so they've disabled writing on those devices. I'm guessing there are similar issues with reading from time to time, then.

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