The next game I’m making is all about animal locomotion so I figured a good first step would be to improve my eye for motion. To do that I’ve spent the past year taking classes to become a better animator, creating shots like this:

I’ve reached a point now where I’m starting to forget some of the things I’ve learned as they become habits that have been drilled into me, instead of conscious knowledge. I thought it might help reinforce and clarify what I’ve learned if I summarized the highlights here.

Animation theory

• Animation isn’t about motion, it’s about poses. Bringing a character to life comes from creating poses that express how they’re feeling. Motion is important but early on it’s a distraction from the real goal of evoking your character. Richard Lico, a former Lead Animator at Bungie, says he spends 70% of his time refining his core poses and 30% on everything else. He compares it to the classic Disney workflow where senior animators would draw the critical frames that told the story while an army of junior draftsmen drew the frames in between. Nowadays we’ve replaced the draftsmen with a computer. 
• Animation is about art directing motion, not just making it believable. As an animator you’re not only making things move, you’re framing and adjusting motion to make it clearer and more expressive. For example, if a character drops his sword, shield and helmet when he dies then physics might say each of those objects should land at the same time but it’s easier for the audience to read and more visually appealing if each object lands on a different frame like they do here:

• Animation is a constant struggle not to get lost in the details. There’s so much to think about when animating that it’s easy for all your attention to get sucked into fixing whatever looks broken. You start seeing your character as a collection of problems or a mechanical puzzle to solve, rather than a living thing. For example, when animating a character running and then veering to the right I treated it like they were running straight ahead and then I gradually rotated their whole body like a ship. I forgot that living things tend to turn their head and look in the direction they’re going to turn before they start rotating the rest of their body. I was seeing the world from camera’s perspective, rather than seeing it through the character’s eyes and then trying to convey that experience. The hard part is that in order to ignore the technical aspects you have to immerse yourself so fully in the technical minutia that they become automatic and you can focus on what’s actually important. As an example, here’s what my animation curves looked like for the first shot I posted above:

The first two dimensions are the hardest

• Even when you’re animating in 3D most of what makes an animation look and feel good has to do with what happens in 2D.
• The first thing people notice about your poses — and maybe the only thing — is the overall line of action. That’s a 2D phenomenon. To make a motion feel clear and powerful it helps to speak loudly and in visual terms we do that using fundamental shapes like a character going from a “Reverse C” to a “C” shape:

• Everything in a living organism should move in arcs and what those arcs look like are profoundly influenced by where the camera happens to be
• Clear silhouettes make motions easier to read and are created by reducing visual overlap between body parts and emphasizing negative space, very much 2D issues. In games this gets tricky because the player often controls where the camera is, though Richard Lico says that if you make your poses look good from the front and the side, most of the time it’ll hold up from any angle.
• Animation feels better when there’s MORE of it. Specifically, increasing the NUMBER of moving parts on a character makes them feel livelier and more appealing. The motions themselves can be pretty basic, just having enough details like ears flapping and bracelets bouncing somehow tricks us into believing this character is real. It reminds me of Walter Murch’s observation that we can distinguish two sets of footsteps but with three sets all we hear is a crowd. I think if a character’s motions are too simple then our brains can easily track everything, which is part of what makes it feel fake, but there’s a tipping point where suddenly too much is happening in the body for us to take it all in so we stop trying and just relate to it as a holistic organism.

Timing

• Avoid having things start or stop moving on the same key because it tends to look boring and unnatural. For example, when jumping it usually feels better if each foot leaves the ground on a different frame or for a jumping attack you wouldn’t want the character to land and have the weapon impact on the same frame. Spreading things out helps create rhythm and adds visual interest. Similarly when parts of the body settle, it’s more interesting to see the hips, chest and head all come to rest at slightly different times.
• Rhythm is important for individual actions AND for entire scenes. For our sanity, when working on longer scenes animators usually break them up into smaller beats and polish those one at a time. So if the scene is about a character pulling their pants on, grabbing breakfast out of a toaster and then running out the door, you’ll generally start by polishing the rhythm of each of the three actions so there’s a satisfying contrast of high and low intensity movement. But it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you want each of those actions to have a different duration and intensity FROM EACH OTHER, otherwise the scene as a whole will feel monotonous, like tapping out “Shave and a Haircut” three times in a row.
• You need moments of stillness to give definition to the motion and make the whole feel readable and crisp. It’s tempting to keep the character moving but our brains and eyes need to rest sometimes so that what we’ve seen has a chance to sink in. It’s like having spaces between words.
  

Anticipation and showing impact

• Anticipation makes any motion feel better, especially large movements. I think it’s a combination of realism (bodies take awhile to get moving), the chance to draw the eye, and having a moment to rest which helps create contrast.
• To make a motion feel fast and powerful, delay the start and hold the ending. For really fast actions the motion and even the moment of impact aren’t that important. It’s counter-intuitive but makes sense if you think about the alternative of trying to get an axe to feel weightier by swinging it faster, which would just make it seem lighter and also harder to see. Adding time before and after the action calls attention to how fast the movement is, even if we can barely see it. 
• For fast motion like a melee attack the clarity of the reaction is more important than the attack. The reaction tells us what happened even if the earlier movements were too fast to follow, answering questions like: “did the hit connect and how hard was it?”
• Changing where a character is looking is an easy way to create anticipation and also suggest their thought process.
• Although games usually avoid having anticipation for player actions (because they make controls feel sluggish), a few frames of anticipation feel OK as long as you immediately start moving the player in the direction of their action, eg an attack. It’ll feel responsive even if the action itself takes a few frames to connect with its target.
• In games, attacks often include a “hit frame” that pauses the moment of impact for a few frames. For example, in God of War when you swing your axe into an enemy it stops there for several frames, then starts moving again with the same momentum it had before. It makes absolutely no physical sense but it feels fine because the effect is almost imperceptible. At a subconscious level that pause gives players a chance to register they’ve made contact, makes the impact feel weightier, and also gives the player and enemy animations a few frames to sync up before they start playing their reaction animations, which are often tied together. 

Body mechanics

• Believable body movement boils down to: “where is the character’s weight now and where is it going?” It’s not easy, but it is simple.
• Movement looks better and more natural when things are leading and following. It’s partly physics (eg if you turn your head far enough it’ll start pulling your shoulder) and party because it helps lead the viewer’s eye and makes the motion feel cohesive / organic.
• Overlapping action is inherently beautiful. Even a simple tail settling feels strangely satisfying.
• Everything in the body is connected so forces in one area can often be felt as small motions elsewhere. As Richard Lico put it, “the spine is the echo chamber of the body.” For example, if you slam your hand down hard enough on a table then that force will ripple out and cause your feet to jiggle slightly. The one exception is that you generally don’t want to see pops and wobbles in your center of mass (often the hips) which should be slower to react, like the Titanic of the body.
• When you’re confused about how a body would react it helps to visualize body mechanics using simple spheres. You could imagine the relationship between the hips and chest as one ball balanced on top of another, so as the hips rise up then the chest will tend to roll forward or backward depending on how the chest is balanced over the hips.
• In real life, when the body is in motion the feet are almost always moving. Adding small foot movements like weight shifts, toe rolls, and squashing when the foot plants helps sell the overall physicality. The main thing is to always be doing SOMETHING with the feet.
• The more weight a foot is bearing, the less it’s going to slide around. If it’s rotating, it’ll be rotating around whatever point is bearing the most weight, as if it were pinned to the ground.
• Hands usually aren’t very noticeable in games. Having one or two great poses in an animation can be enough. They should look natural but they don’t have to animate much.
• Blinks need a one frame hold for audiences to notice them. Most of the movement comes from the upper lid though the bottom lid does move a little. Lids take longer to open than they do to close.
• If you’re trying to make unrealistic forces feel plausible, which is often the case in games where characters need to be able to do things like jump 10 feet into the air, it helps to start with real-world reference. If your initial body mechanics are believable it’s possible to push those quite a ways and still feel good. As you increase the forces, you just emphasize elements like the squash and stretch of the spine that are already there.
• In games, sometimes you have to secretly move characters around during gameplay, eg in combat you might want an enemy to be slightly closer so the player’s punch will connect in a more satisfying way. In those cases you’re often better off ignoring body mechanics for a few frames — sliding characters around is actually going to be less noticeable than having them take baby steps to cover the gap. Sometimes preserving the overall rhythm and flow is more important than accurate body mechanics.
• You have to consciously watch out for broken poses, where the body is bent in ways that feel uncomfortable or would actually be impossible. It’s easy to get so focused in one place (eg making the hips feel good) that you don’t notice problems you’re creating elsewhere, like ankles bending at painful angles. It’s especially true animating animals, where there are more legs to worry about and the body parts are less familiar. Your brain can only focus on so much at a time, so it helps to force yourself to do a separate pass to check that nothing’s broken.
• Don’t be afraid of broken poses at extreme moments, since that sort of thing actually happens in real life (eg a boxer’s face rippling under a heavy blow to the head) and can help convey just how powerful the forces are. It’s hard when you’re looking at a still frame of your character and their pose seems impossible, even if technically it’s not unrealistic.

Animating animals

• Most quadrupeds have a very similar pattern of motion for their gaits (walk, trot, gallop, etc). But the overall motion for each species looks quite different because of differences in their flexibility. Horses are very stiff, cats are supple, and dogs are somewhere in between.
• Quadrupeds are like rear-wheel-drive cars — the back legs generate most of the power and the front legs are primarily for steering.
• The biggest difference to keep in mind when animating quadrupeds is that their scapula isn’t attached to their skeleton, the way ours is. So when they walk or run their scapula absorbs a lot of the impact, causing it to move up and down while reducing the motion that would otherwise affect the chest and head.
• Different quadruped species have very distinctive upper silhouettes. Emphasizing that shape helps audiences identify the creature as a wolf, a dog, a fox, etc.

• Animals often keep their heads eerily stable, the way a chicken’s head freezes in space when you move its body around. This can make animations like running look fake, so sometimes it’s better to add a little rotation even if there’s none in the reference.
• Dogs can look at things out of the corner of their eyes but cats and most other animals generally turn their heads to face whatever they’re looking at.
• Hearing tends to be sharper than sight, so animals will react first with an ear flick and THEN look at a disturbance.

Posing

• You generally want to exaggerate all of your poses. It makes the action clearer and motions feel better. So much is happening and so quickly, it’s easy for motion to start feeling muddy. Pushing your poses gives you room to art direct and lead the eye where you want players to look.
• With good posing you should be able to pause at any frame and still have a clear sense of where the character is moving and what’s about to happen. If two characters are interacting, the forces should be readable even if you hide one of the characters; if they’re fighting it should be clear who’s in control / winning. 

• In a walk / run cycle compressing the toes in a lot on the passing pose helps give you more contrast on the contact and liftoff poses when the feet spread out, creating a more organic feel through squash and stretch. Works for human and animal feet.
• Avoid flat poses (with everything in the same plane) or uniformity in spacing or rotation, eg feet facing in the same direction, or if the hands are spread open during a run, have the fingers splayed in a complex pattern with non-uniform spacing between fingers.

Workflow

• The longer you work on an animation the harder it becomes to make changes because the more keyframes you add, the more pieces have to be adjusted with every change. This creates a strange workflow, where early on it makes sense to work cleanly and focus on having sensible values and curves but there’s a point where the complexity grows so great that it makes sense to STOP caring about your keys and just look at your animation to diagnose what feels wrong. Working on new layers can help, but it’s often faster to blow away sections and redo them than it would be to fix the convoluted mess that’s there.
• Blocking out your poses with stepped keys forces you to focus on what’s actually important. There’s so much to keep track of when animating and almost all of it, before you get to polishing, looks awful. Working in stepped — which hides animation and only shows you the poses — is less distracting and gives you a chance to ONLY be looking at the parts of the animation that actually should look good at this point: your poses. As soon as you get out of stepped mode you’ll be drowning in new problems and after those are under control how good it feels will depend mostly on the quality of your core poses. It’s so tempting to stop posing and start animating, especially as a novice. I suspect it gets easier with experience, since you can look at stepped blocking and better imagine how it’ll feel once it’s animated, playing it out in your head.
• Animation takes EVERYBODY a long time. One of my instructors had been animating for 15 years and it still took him 4 solid days to do 3 seconds of combat. It’s a lot of work. You do get much faster over time, but since your eye for detail gets better too, reaching the point where you’ve made the animation as good as it can be still takes a similar amount of time, you just end up with better results.
• Working in the best coordinate space makes animating much easier. For example, if you want a sword to swing in a smooth arc it’s much easier to animate the tip of the sword moving in an arc and have that drive the hand than it is to try rotating the hand every frame to keep the sword’s tip where you want it to be.
• Switching coordinate spaces is faster than counter-animating and a lot more fun, once you’ve setup your tools and rig to support it. For example, posing arms is easier in IK while polishing is easier in FK, so Richard Lico just bakes all his data when the time comes and uses that to switch spaces. Instead of fixing wobbles indirectly in IK he can see all the offending keys in FK and just delete them.
• Baking locators lets you data-mine your existing motions to drive new ones, which is faster and more accurate than working from scratch. For example, to make a character’s ponytail bob while they run you cold attach a locator to the head and bake out the existing head motion, which you can then use to drive the ponytail. Once you’ve got keys on the ponytail it’s easy to move them around to do things like delay later sections to create more lead-and-follow, or make the rotations larger towards the tip so the ponytail whips around. Richard Lico’s tutorials on how to do all this are maddeningly simple and took me several viewings to understand. All of it boils down to tricks for taking the motion you’ve already created and using it to generate more. As Lico put it, “Or I could animate it [by hand]. That would be a nice way to never see my family again and that sounds like a fun way to spend my free time…”
• You animate very differently when you know exactly where you camera will be. There’s a lot of things you can cheat, like not animating the feet if you know they’re not going to be visible, or worrying less about the hand that’s farther away from camera. It also makes you more conscious of 2D issues like the amount of negative space in a character’s silhouette. In games we often don’t have the luxury of knowing exactly where the camera will be, since players might have moved it, but I think in a lot of cases we can make guesses with 90% accuracy so it probably makes sense to animate with a rough camera in mind.
• Periodically checking your animation from different camera angles helps you spot errors and places that feel lifeless. Issues that feel subtly wrong can jump out at you from other angles, making them much quicker to fix.
• One of the best ways to get better at recognizing what’s wrong in your own work is to look at the reels of other animators. You’ll see common mistakes repeated over and over and learn to spot them easier.

Tools + Tricks

• Motion trails are the single most useful tool for identifying what’s wrong in your animation. They instantly show you where your movements need to be smoother and also give you a nice visualization of the overall rhythm of a motion. Most of the polishing you do is fixing stuff that subjectively feels not-quite-right, so it’s comforting to have a tool like motion trails that show you in very concrete, actionable terms why something feels bad and how to fix it, eg “oh look, that foot is moving forward for 6 frames and then it suddenly moves back 1 frame, then keeps moving forward, let’s fix that.”
• The animBot plugin makes animating in Maya much easier, adding tons of useful features like super fast motion trails, tweening, reseting, copying or mirroring poses, scaling keys, quick selection sets, and lots more. The best part is that it makes all those new tools easy to discover at your own pace with great documentation ready when you want it.
• Keyframe Pro is the video player every animator needs. It’s a joy to use a tool that’s designed so well and so specifically to address your needs. When you’re animating it turns out there’s a lot of things you’d like to be able to do when scrubbing through a video. Like crop a section of the video and play it in a loop, or play it all backwards, or even upside down. Or draw notes on top of certain frames. Keyframe Pro does all that and then even lets you save that cropped video with all your notes to a new video file. It’s a beautiful piece of software that makes working with video a pleasure.
• Hiding body parts helps you focus on polishing one piece at a time. For example, when you’re trying to figure out what your hips should be doing it’s distracting to see the arms or head either not moving or moving strangely. By putting them on separate layers you can make them invisible and ignore them until you’re ready, like this:

• Sometimes brute forcing is easier because a “clever” solution is more trouble than it’s worth. One week I was animating a foot rolling off the ground which required some tedious frame-by-frame counter-animation and our instructor pointed out: “Having to do that is going to suck, but it’s only going to suck for three frames.”
  
• Sometimes a chain of sensible values can still produce a very odd-looking result. A character’s nose might move in a very jerky way, for example, because the rotations of her hips, chest, neck and head add up (and are out of step with each other) in such a way that there’s a wobble at the end of the chain. This requires you to “fix” the already perfectly good values so they don’t add up that way, which is counter-intuitive, or you could use Richard Lico’s space switching workflow to animate from the nose directly.
• Broken tangents help things feel snappier. They’re crucial for hard stops like when a foot lands during a run cycle, but they can also be useful any time you need a little extra, slightly theatrical emphasis to a motion.

Reference footage

• Almost every animation starts from video reference, either found footage or recordings you make of yourself acting it out. That’s true for students as well as professionals. It feels like cheating at first, as if every painting had to start from a photograph. But there’s so many subtle nuances in the way bodies move and convey emotion which you’d never think to add but can discover for free by studying reference.

• When studying video reference, focus first on what the hips are doing. Your key poses are likely to be at places where the center of mass (ie the hips) are changing direction.
• Finding reference animations and then editing them together into mood videos is a great way to explore how you want something to feel and also to communicate that to the rest of the team. They’re like the animation equivalent of concept art. Richard Oud gave a talk at GDC this year about his process of creating mood videos for Horizon: Zero Dawn.
• Video reference of actors (ie people pretending to do something) usually needs to be animated faster and with more powerful / painful impacts because even great actors will subconsciously protect themselves, which affects their performance. Real life reference is better but can be hard to find. Fail videos are a good source of how bodies react to intense, unforeseen circumstances.
• Video reference is even more important for animating creatures than humans, since we have a poorer intuition about how their bodies work and it’s harder for us to act out the motion. Unfortunately, finding good creature references is much harder and sometimes impossible. As a fallback you can use comparable animals, like studying chicken feet to see how dinosaurs might walk, which they did on Jurassic Park.
• When shooting video reference, having two perspectives (eg front and side) makes it much easier to figure out what the body is doing since body parts often get occluded at various points. If you can only shoot one take then a 3/4 perspective is good.

Fun facts

• Herbivores have huge digestive systems because their food is difficult to absorb, which gives them barrel chests and rigid spines, making them easy for people to ride. Carnivores, with their shorter digestive tract and much more flexible spines, would be almost impossible to ride.
• When people laugh unexpectedly their head moves forward sharply because their lungs expel a burst of air, causing their torso to bend.

Conclusion

What I hope for most with any new experience is that it will help me see the world in a new way. As I’ve gotten older that’s been harder to find, but spending a year studying and practicing a skill I suck at has turned out to be a great way to rewire my brain. It’s been a year full of painful, useful failures that have forced me to notice all kinds of little details I was oblivious to before.

One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed is that when I see people walking on the street now I can’t help thinking about all the details that go into making a walk animation feel good. I flashback to the hundreds of hours I’ve spent at it and the mediocre results achieved. But these people are all walking around like it’s no big deal. Like it’s effortless.

Here’s the part that blows my mind. It’s not just that walking is an insanely intricate and graceful motion, or that every single person walks in their own distinctive way. It’s that — on top of all that — everyone walks differently depending on how they’re feeling right at that moment.

Surprise! It turns out we live in a world of unimaginable beauty and complexity. I don’t know why I keep forgetting that. At least now I can see it constantly walking around me.

Last month I climbed Mt. Rainier and while I’m glad I did it, it was also one of the most grueling and unpleasant experiences of my life. Strangely, the more time goes by the more fondly I remember it so I wanted to write down these thoughts while they’re still fresh.

I climbed Mt. Rainier because my dad did it back in 1982 when he was 40. I was 4 years old at the time and ever since then I’ve just assumed I’d climb it too, in that distant future (2018) when I’d be 40. I don’t have any special affinity for mountaineering but it seemed like a fun, dramatic way to celebrate that milestone.

What was so unpleasant?

The physical aspects of the climb are the most obvious challenge. Getting up and down Rainier from basecamp takes about 12 hours and for most of that you’re roped together with 3 other climbers and one guide. Everyone has crampons and ice axes and for the most part nobody has done anything like this before except your guide. To give you the best chance of firm snow the climb starts at midnight which means you also (probably) haven’t slept more than an hour or two.

For me, the physical part wasn’t so bad. I’d spent a couple months training for this and while it was strenuous, putting one foot in front of another for 12 hours wasn’t what made this harrowing.

What stands out to me now is that even the rest stops were stressful. Because you’re on a tight schedule and tied to other climbers, the rest stops are the only time you stop moving long enough to take care of personal business like, for example, drinking water (hydration bladders don’t work because they freeze, so you’re stuck with bottles). It turns out there’s a lot of personal business when climbing mountains so the rest stops become a scramble to:

• Pee
• Change your clothing (adding or switching coats, gloves, hats, etc) to adjust to weather and altitude
• Toss on the giant parka you wear only at rest stops so you don’t freeze
• Drink some water
• Force yourself to eat even though you aren’t hungry (altitude kills your appetite)
• Sit down on your pack to rest your legs and not loose heat to the ground

By the time you’ve taken care of all that you’re left with a few minutes to actually rest before your guide yells “two minute warning” and you have to start stuffing everything back into your pack.

The pace isn’t frenetic, it’s just fast and constant. Like you’re in a mild rush for 12 solid hours. I didn’t end up taking a single photo, for example, so all the ones here come from other folks on the climb. Even though the constant rush can feel dangerous you can’t argue with it because it’s actually done in the interest of safety. The longer you stay on the mountain the softer/slipperier the snow and ice get, and the more risk you have of bad weather moving in.

So it’s hard work done quickly, which is rough, but the experience for me wasn’t just hard. It was overwhelming. That came from something else. 

I spent the last 4 and a half years making a game about what it feels like to be overwhelmed so when I encountered that feeling on the mountain I wouldn’t say it was welcome, but it was interesting.

In our game we found that creating a sense of being overwhelmed came down mostly to two elements: (a) emphasizing the power of the forces players were encountering along with their own weakness and isolation, and (b) making any revelations clear and sudden which greatly magnifies their impact.

My experience of feeling overwhelmed on the mountain was quite different. Yes, the mountain was a powerful force (and symbol!) but its aesthetic and psychological impact actually felt pretty minimal. For me, the sense of being overwhelmed didn’t come from any dramatic moments, it came from the sheer volume of new stuff you had to deal with. 

New challenges (for me) included:

• Using the ice axe. The day before the climb we had a workshop that taught us basic mountaineering skills like how to walk in crampons or hold an ice axe. Like everything else on this list it’s not especially hard, it’s just a constant low-level cognitive tax. In the case of the ice axe, for example, you need to always carry it in the hand closest to the mountain (which changes at switchbacks), with the tip pointed behind you, and ready to dig in with it if someone on your rope team falls.
• Walking and breathing, but differently. The workshop also introduced us to a brand new way we were supposed to walk and breathe while in the mountains (pressure breathing and rest stepping) having to do with efficiency and altitude. Walking with crampons also takes some getting used to, retraining your brain to go up slopes that would normally be far too steep to walk up.
• Monitoring the rope. For safety, you’re roped together in teams so most folks have a rope attaching them to someone 15 feet in front of and behind them. To keep the rope from yanking other people, or from getting too much slack and catching on rocks or ice, you try to match the pace of the climbers ahead of and behind you. Easy enough on the flats but tricky on slopes.
• Crossing crevasses on ladders stretched horizontally across them. I think the longest of these was about 15 feet wide, with a 200 foot drop. They weren’t all that difficult in themselves but there was some rope work required (clipping your carabiner into a special guideline) and the context switch of walking in a slower, more precise way.
• So much new gear. They recommend / require 40+ pieces of equipment, almost all of which got used at some point on the climb. Carrying three different kinds of gloves isn’t hard per se, but switching them out as conditions evolve and finding them in your pack adds some challenge.
  
• Unfamiliar landscapes and materials. I don’t spend a lot of time on snow or ice so judging the best place to put my feet or ice axe took some conscious effort.
• Doing all this in the dark, since the first half of the climb is before sunrise so you’re focusing on the small patch of snow in front of you that’s illuminated by your headlamp.
• Altitude sickness which can creep up on you. I felt totally fine until I didn’t.

On their own, none of these challenges were all that noteworthy but each chips away a bit at the mental energy you have available. The high physical and cognitive load combined for me to create a sense of not just this-is-hard, but oh-my-God-this-is-hard that was overwhelming.

And yet, for all that, it still felt doable. Harder than I’d expected but knowing how many people with no more experience than myself climb up and down the mountain every year I had faith that I could do it too.

In a few milliseconds, that changed.

A Little Bit of Terror Goes a Long Way

About three hours into the climb I experienced a moment of terror.

We were crossing a rocky, snowless section of the route called Disappointment Cleaver, scrambling with our crampons over boulders and loose gravel. There was a small ledge ahead of me, maybe 5 inches square, separated by 2 foot gaps on either side, requiring you to gently hop on and off to progress. On the left was the mountain, on the right was a steep slope that descended several hundred feet below us. Our ropes had been shortened to about 5 feet between climbers to keep the ropes from snagging on rocks, making it even more important to keep pace with your neighbors. And it was still dark so the only light was your headlamp. I jumped onto the ledge and heard / felt the ledge and the gravel under it slide a little.

It’s not that I felt like I was going to die but at that moment I did feel like a tiny miscalculation would have been enough to make me fall and potentially pull the rest of my rope team with me. The whole thing was over in a few milliseconds but the effects lingered.

I’ve been meditating for a few years and one of the nicest benefits has been an improved awareness of the way my mind responds to events (ie metacognition). This was the first time I’d experienced terror where I was able to perceive both the immediate and subsequent changes it had on my thoughts.

After that moment of terror it was like I was watching the same movie but with the volume turned way up. Physically, the biggest changes were that my heart started beating faster and I had an urgent need to relieve myself, which added tension of its own and wouldn’t be practical to take care of for another 3+ hours, when we reached the summit.

I would have expected to feel a sense of paranoia but instead what I felt was more like a surge of jittery energy. It’s not so much that the conditions felt more dangerous but that I never again felt calm. Manageable, but not the best state to be in when climbing a mountain.

Things came to a head for me about an hour later when I was trying to clip the carabiner on my harness into one of two carabiners attached to a guideline running across a crevasse. I got the carabiners tangled up and couldn’t figure out which ones I needed to unclip and which ones I needed to reclip. In the end, I had to ask our guide for help.

It dawned on me that my thinking had become seriously impaired and not in a way that I was conscious of. Even though I felt mentally alert I’d just failed a pretty simple cognitive challenge. I’d become like the drunk who can’t see how badly he’s driving. At the next rest stop I told our guide I needed to turn back because it wouldn’t be safe for me or for the other climbers if I continued.

He nodded his head slowly and said “Yeah, you don’t have a choice.” Our guides had always emphasized safety as their number one priority so the situation seemed pretty clear. The mixture of sadness and relief I was feeling took a sharp turn when he added “…the previous rest stop was the final place to turn around. From this point on everyone has to summit.”

And so I did. Our guide told me to breathe more forcefully and that helped with the effects of altitude, as did the simple necessity of having no other options.

It also got easier a few minutes later when the sun came up and the final stretch turned out to be a mind-numbing series of icy switchbacks that didn’t recover a lot of thought, just effort.

A few hours later as we were coming down I was surprised to find that the ledge which had produced my moment of terror was pretty unremarkable by daylight. It was precarious, but not dramatically more so than several ledges before and after. I just saw it at the wrong time, in the wrong light, in the wrong state of mind.

Kind of like bootcamp

Another factor that increased the tension was the bootcamp mentality of the guides, by which I mean they have high expectations and do a lot of yelling. Some of this is purely practical since time is short, issues can be life-threatening, and people are bundled up for the cold so higher volumes help intelligibility.

Still, I’m not used to being yelled at. Especially for skills I only learned yesterday. For example, when other climbers had difficulty understanding how to clip their carabiners to the guidelines at a crevasse the response from one of the younger guides was to scream “guys, this is f***ing simple!” and then help them.

Or when I asked my guide for confirmation if it was OK to take our gloves off if we got hot his response was “No! We talked about all this yesterday in training!” It’s been a long time since I’ve been yelled at for asking questions.

It’s hard for me to tell how much of this militaristic attitude is simply cultural (they could be called “trips” but instead they’re “expeditions”), and how much is actually for our benefit. As my friend Mike put it, “Their job is to get your ass up to the top of the mountain.” And whatever methods they used, they succeeded. Lord knows that getting nine guys, most of whom had never held an ice axe before yesterday, up to the summit and back safely wasn’t easy for any of us.

Why I’m Glad I Still Did It

By nature, I’m an explorer. Curiosity drives me to constantly seek out new food, books, movies, and experiences. But a consequence of having such easy access to new things is that the bulk of these end up being relatively shallow, brief experiences. The kind that are more likely to teach you than to change you.

On the other hand, I think giving yourself a hard shove out of your comfort zone, especially in a direction that requires learning a whole new set of skills, has the potential to open up starkly new perspectives and insights.

This is partly a result of the experiences themselves and partly because of the heightened state you’re in at the time, where your perceptions and memory operate differently. For example, even a one-day workshop on mountaineering skills has a way of coming alive for you when you know your life is going to depend on those skills tomorrow.

In other words, the difficulty of climbing a mountain is a key part of what makes that experience so rewarding because it changes your behavior, your perceptions, and your memories.

Climbing a mountain is also a beautiful aesthetic experience. Here’s a few of my favorite moments:

• Being roped together and learning to move with the rest of your team. It forces you to pay attention to your own movements as well as those of the climber in front and behind you and how all three affect each other. It’s like dancing with a partner. When the climber in front pauses a moment before a 2-foot gap and then leaps across it, you feel that same motion echo when you, then the climber behind you do that same action. It’s beautiful. If there wasn’t such an obvious practical reason (catching someone if they fall), having ropes between you would feel like a very on-the-nose theatrical expression of human interdependence, like something in a Becket play.
• The clinking of ice axes stabbing in and out of rock and snow. The axes have long, hollow metal shafts with lengths that vary based on the height of the climber. The effect is a bit like if each climber carried a single note of a xylophone that they pounded with every other step. It’s a surprisingly delicate background sound for those harsh conditions.
• Getting accustomed to walking up seemingly vertical slopes with your crampons. Having spikes strapped to your feet drastically changes how you’re able to move. It’s bizarre both to find yourself with this new magical power and to realize how quickly you grow accustomed to it.
• Dawn coming up on the slope of the mountain. There’s a grandeur to dawn on Rainier that I have not experienced elsewhere. It’s like a stage curtain rising on an entirely new world of clouds and distant peaks above them and not one human element in the world except your tiny band of climbers.
• Getting to know our guides, who were profoundly good at all this mountaineering stuff. Our primary guide Brent Okita had previously sumitted 547 times and holds the record for Rainier. It’s like getting your first violin lesson from Mozart. Although Brent was the most colorful, all the guides were fascinating characters unlike anyone I’ve crossed paths with before.

The whole experience was also a great reminder of what I value and what I don’t. I love learning and finding new perspectives but external marks of achievement aren’t important to me. In this case, it surprised me to discover how little I cared about actually getting to the top of the mountain.

When it felt like it wouldn’t be safe for me to continue I had no trouble (trying to) turn back. What mattered to me was feeling like I’d tried my best and not letting others down, but beyond that I felt no need to push on to the bitter end just so I could stand on the very tippy top.

The climb reinforced for me the tradeoffs between appreciating and achieving (ie journey vs destination). I like pushing my limits but in my heart-of-hearts I’m a meanderer. My favorite times were standing on the side of the mountain and gaping at the landscape around us. But there’s no time for that when your eyes are always on the summit.

Rainier was a pretty stark example of what to me felt like the drawbacks of focusing all your energies and hopes on a goal. The actual summit is a crater about 1500 feet across so you go from stunning panoramas on the way up to, once you’re at the top, being enclosed and seeing nothing but the lip of the crater. Of course you have the satisfaction of being there but for me that turned out to be less important than I’d expected.

And yet the lure of reaching the summit was what made all of this possible. It’s what brought my dad up there 36 years ago and what convinced me and two friends to reserve our spots last summer. Having a clear, concrete goal gave the experience its shape. It’s important and maybe even necessary but it isn’t what I really care about. It’s like the plate in a restaurant vs the food on it. Sometimes it can be hard to separate what’s structural from what’s essential.

Even after sumitting I still felt like a bit of a wuss being so exhausted and shaken up afterwards. It was comforting to hear that all the other members of our group had roughly similar reactions, along the lines of “Oh my gosh, I’m never, ever going to do that again.” The guides didn’t mind. They said a lot of people felt like that right afterwards, but the odds were that some of those same people would be back to climb the mountain again next year.

I don’t expect I’ll be among them but who knows. The way our memories respond to traumatic events is mysterious. Like the way mothers seem to forget (most of) the agony of childbirth. Or how the turmoil surrounding four and a half years of working on a videogame recedes enough after a few months that you start making plans for a new one. 

When I find myself thinking fondly about the days we spent on Rainier I try to remember how my friends described their experiences. My friend Mike, who had bought a bunch of new gear anticipating that this would be the start of many years of mountaineering ahead told me that as he neared the summit he was adding up in his head how much he could get for selling all of his new gear on eBay.

And my friend Dan nicely summed up the bittersweet satisfaction we felt that day when he said: “It’s more than just having done it, it’s never having to do it again.”

I spent 4-and-a-half years working on What Remains of Edith Finch so when the game shipped I was ready for a break. I moved out of my apartment, put all my stuff in storage, and spent the next 6 months traveling overseas. I chose countries to visit based entirely on how much I liked their food. Here’s a few of my strongest memories from that trip (not including the food, which I covered on my food blog).

Walking to the airport in Kathmandu. Google Maps said it would take an hour and a half to walk there from where I was staying so logistically it seemed feasible. If you ask the Internet about trying this the advisability is mixed. The biggest concerns seemed to be the circuitous route, lack of signage, careless drivers, and packs of feral dogs. Of course it would have been easy to take a taxi but since I had an afternoon flight and nothing planned for the day it felt like it’d be more of an adventure to walk. It turned out to be quite pleasant, culminating in a little group of huts on the side of the road just across from the airport where fresh, curry-infused flatbread was coming out of a wood-fired oven.

The waiters everywhere who did their best to talk me out of the things I’d ordered, usually because they thought I’d gotten too much food. And they were right, I HAD ordered way more than I could eat. I felt a little guilty getting whole entrees when I expected to only take a bite or two of each, but I’d traveled around the world to try as many new foods as possible and step #1 of that plan was ORDERING as many new foods as possible. My favorite exchange was with a waiter in Kathmandu who considered the half-dozen entrees I’d requested and paused for a moment, then tactfully asked: “Your friend also come?”

The smell that hits you when you open the doors to the port cellars in Porto. These are long warehouses carved into the hillside, packed with thousands of oak barrells full of port that’s slowly evaporating through them. It’s not just that it smells nice (which it does), what I remember is that it smells ancient and harmonious. You get the sense that the oak and port flavors have been mingling in that air for centuries.

Being in Lisbon for two days. Everywhere else I traveled I tried to stay at least 5 days but visiting Lisbon was a last-minute decision and the timing worked out such that I only had 1 full day there. But I think that was for the best, since the whirlwind nature of the trip added a nice atmosphere of drama. It felt like Before Sunrise if Ethan Hawke had never run into Julie Delpy and instead he spent the day walking all over the city trying pasteis de nata, drinking handmade cherry liqueurs from several bars specializing in it, and watching the sunset from an old castle overlooking the city.

Having egg tarts again in Hong Kong after I’d had them for the first time in Lisbon a few months earlier. The Hong Kong versions were clearly inspired by the pasteis de nata but were also very much their own thing.

The Turkish man I met on the streets of Berlin who asked directions in broken English, then made a joke I couldn’t understand and proceeded to try to dance with me. I felt awkward and a little guilty as I consciously monitored the safety of the wallet and phone in my pockets while at the same time tried to enjoy this strange moment. Nothing happened to my wallet or phone, but a few minutes later my stomach dropped a little when I realized he’d stolen my watch.

The enormous bats in Sri Lanka. These were memorable for two reasons: their 4+ foot wingspans and the fact that I saw them flying around in the middle of downtown in the most densely populated city in the country. After I saw my first giant bat fly overhead in the early afternoon I followed it to a tree by the side of a busy road and found another 40+ bats roosting and a steady stream of bats coming and going.

Waiting for the bathroom in Chengdu. Shortly after leaving a Sichuan restaurant specializing in pork intestines, which was probably my favorite meal of the trip, my digestive system began to protest. I had a 45 minute walk ahead of me through a light-industrial district that had shut down for the night so I resigned myself to a long period of delicate shuffling. Then I saw a public bathroom across the street. Public bathrooms in China are pretty rare and I have no idea why this one had been built here or why it was still open but at the time it felt like semi-magical. My euphoria diminished a bit after waiting several minutes for a convoy of large earth-moving vehicles to pass. I was very tempted to dart out into the modest gaps between them but ultimately it just felt like too embarrassing a circumstance in which to die under.

Driving around Switzerland in an RV with my friend Flavien. Flavien is a French artist who worked on our first game, The Unfinished Swan. He was taking a year off and had bought a mid-size RV to drive around Europe in. After I’d just spent several weeks walking around by myself in unfamiliar cities it was refreshing to be out in the countryside catching up with an old friend while visiting a series of improbable stone bridges in the Alps.

Riding the 3rd class train to Kandy in Sri Lanka. With no air-conditioning and (by the time I arrived) no seats left I spent the 3 hour trip holding on to a handrail, standing next to an open door as the train chugged its way up into the mountains passing villages, jungle, and tea plantations. I never actually used the facilities but the sight of the 3rd class bathroom still haunts me. It was a tiny room with corrugated metal on all surfaces, a small, dark hole in the floor and NOTHING ELSE. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to a Silent Hill hellscape. I’m not even sure if the hole was connected to anything. Maybe it just dropped straight to the tracks? Anything seems possible in that place.

Getting my laptop fixed in Chengdu. It’s strange how much energy we spend avoiding hassles when so many of our strongest, most enjoyable memories are tinged with adversity. When my laptop stopped booting up I was hoping I could take it to the Dell store in Chengdu and have them fix it. Things turned out to be a little more complicated (and more interesting). A salesman at the store told me I had to go to the service center down the street and offered to guide me there. Our 15 minute walk ended at a door with a chain locked around it, then a service entrance down a back alley, then the realization that the center had actually moved to another part of town. My salesman friend turned to me and, using his phone to auto-translate, asked “you ride bike?” Yes. I ride bike. So we rented a pair of bikes and after bouncing around between a couple more service centers finally managed to find one — just as it was closing — that could fix my laptop. By the time I left their office everything else on the floor of their mid-size office building had shut down. But there was a final test: the elevators had inexplicably stopped responding. The solution to the puzzle turned out to be a fire exit on the other side of the building that someone had propped open. Once I found that it was smooth, uneventful sailing.

Taking a taxi to the airport in Sri Lanka at 2 am. Transportation options can be pretty limited early in the morning so I was quite happy to see a number of tuk-tuk-style taxis zooming around. The trip evolved into a bit of an adventure, which was fine since I’d left plenty of time. Our first stop was a bus parked next to the beach. This turned out to be the driver’s brother, who was also a driver, as well as a drunk and was sleeping off whatever he’d had that night. Money was dropped off (or maybe picked up? it was unclear) and then we had a pleasant 30 minute chat on the way to the airport in which the driver talked all about his young family, the crops they were growing, the birthday he was celebrating tomorrow, the time he spent working on container ships in the Middle East and why he ultimately came home. Our route took us through the small town he grew up in so he talked about that for awhile too. When I mentioned how much I liked Sri Lankan watalappam, a cardamom spiced coconut custard, he pulled off at a roadside cafe with what he considered the best watalappan in the area. Judging from the lively crowd there at 3am I believe this opinion was a popular one. And the watalappam was good, up there with the best I’ve ever had, as was the ride to the airport.

The plaque in Hong Kong that described how British sailors reacted to misunderstanding the name of the (already inhabited) island they had arrived at. When they heard “Hong Kong” the sailors mistakenly thought it referred to the island when it was actually the name of the city they were in. Although they soon realized their mistake they chose not to correct it because, according to the plaque, “they found it inconvenient to change the name.” So instead they renamed the city to Aberdeen and the island became Hong Kong. The arrogance and insensitivity this implies is staggering but it’s also a tiny bit impressive that men like this once walked the earth.

Watching hawks circle a junkyard on the outskirts of Kathmandu. I don’t know if the hawks were permanent residents or migrants, but either way it was a majestic event in the middle of a mountain of garbage.

Being back home

I’m really glad I was able to spend so much time traveling because it cured me of the fantasy of perpetual travel. On previous trips I had such a great time that part of me wished I never had to come home. What I’ve realized now is that after about 5 weeks it stops feeling like a vacation and starts feeling like your new, regular life. As if your job had become getting to and from unfamiliar airports, filling out customs declarations, studying the layout of this week’s subway system, etc.

It’s still enjoyable to see and eat new things but the constant, low-level hassles start to wear on you. The first time you have to use Google Translate to figure out which buttons to press on the air conditioner in your room is fun. Doing that every week with a new air conditioner loses its charm pretty quickly. 

For me, the novelty of novelty began to wear off. It takes a lot of energy constantly moving around, which isn’t so bad except that it means there’s less time and energy for doing other things.

I now appreciate how comparatively easy life is at home, where the conventions are familiar and I speak the language fluently. As a local, there’s so many things I can explore in Los Angeles that I’d never, ever get to experience as a traveler passing through. 

For example, a few days ago I went into a cheese shop and had a lengthy conversation in the local language (English), getting suggestions for mild sheep milk cheeses, which I followed up with a question about where to go for goose fat and learned about a European sausage shop nearby that might have it, but that definitely carries specialty meats for South African expats that sound worth checking out. The adventures are a little smaller and less cinematic, but I love how seamlessly one small adventure leads to another when you have time and energy to really explore a place.

I was excited to leave and now I’m even more excited to be back.