I Am a Terrible Salesman

Back in my college days, I needed to get a summer job. So, between my freshman and sophomore year I became a Cutco knife salesman. The sales strategy for Cutco was exclusively door-to-door. The salesman (or woman) would cold call potential clients and set up a time to do a demonstration. Once the demo was over, and the knives bought (or not in my case), the salesperson would then ask for names and numbers of anyone the client knew so that the salesperson could start the process all over again.

I was terrible at this job. I knew I would be. I am not a charismatic or energetic sort of person and I am definitely not the kind of person who would try and push a sale on someone who wasn’t interested. But I felt this job might help me with my social anxiety and would help me gain confidence in the big, bad adult world. I wanted to get better in social settings by purposefully putting myself in very uncomfortable positions.

Needless to say, I did a terrible job. While I believe my main goal of training to become less socially awkward was a success in general, I sold very few knives and got even less appointments (the first time someone hung up on me, I burst into tears and felt an overwhelming surge of guilt for days). The only ones who bought my knives were my family. My grandmother was the top buyer, buying the $800 set so that I could get a $90 commission.

This is all to say, my family is my best supporter. When I self-published my books, they were the ones who bought 30 copies. When I published Gramatic!, they bought 10 boxes. I am truly grateful for this support, as I don’t think I would have the confidence to try these new things out if it wasn’t for them. Even if I never sell another book or English-based game, it all would have been a success.

There’s really no other point to this post other to say thank you to all the family members who have blindly supported me and my creative/entrepreneurial endeavors for the last 30 years. Your investment may not be particularly fruitful for you, but it means the absolute world to me.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I love you all.

I Hate Instagram

The funny thing is I thought I would enjoy making videos. Alas, I do not. I feel goofy. It takes too much time. I am getting less and less creative in my old age. And despite all of this, if I want to get Gramatic! in front of more eyes, I feel that I will need to embrace as least one of the Social Medias in order to advertise.

I am very proud of the graphic design and aesthetic of Gramatic! I’m not sure where the 50s vibe comes from and why I associated it with Grammar, but I believe the newsreel style and mid-Atlantic way of speaking lends itself to a grammar-based card game where mechanics are key. And so, I created two mascots for my game: Chuck and Elvira, I made the voices, I shot my first reel…and I feel I’ve made some kind of error. I believe the advertising is sound, these two 50s era cartoons talking about how to play the game, but I feel so uncomfortable voicing the videos that I wonder how sustainable the template can be.

So, I made another reel where I had the card of the day appear and be placed of so artfully with the rest of cards to make a full sentence. I like that vibe, but it doesn’t really support the game and how to play. Therefore, I think I will have to stick with Chuck and Elvira for a while. Maybe as I make more reels, I’ll feel more comfortable in the roles. Maybe I’ll be able to make them faster. At this point, I am hoping for the very conservative goal of one Cand E reel per week, with two to three of the Card of the Day. I think my eyes are too big for my stomach on that one. My real goal with Instagram is to have at least one post of any kind per week. I have even procured a Samsung phone specifically for Sheep Chase purposes, its main job to house the Social Media accounts because I refuse to have that distraction on my regular phone.

I am saying this all out loud in an attempt to hold myself accountable. If you have any suggestions on how best to use Instagram as a tool for marketing, please comment! I would love to hear suggestions and strategies. Oh, and of course, like and subscribe to my Instagram! The link is below.

Eyes on the Prize, Or How to Get Gramatic! for Free

Back in the simpler times of 2013 I heard of a spunky little indie card game that came to dominate the party game scene: Cards Against Humanity. The gameplay was simple, the cards were just raunchy enough to be entertaining, and the best part of all was you didn’t have to purchase the game to get a copy.

When my friend came to visit me in CT from New York that year, we knew we wanted to play the game, but it wasn’t popular enough yet to be available in retail stores. We would have needed to buy it online, but it would have shipped too late and he would have gone home before experiencing the sweet sweet NSFW gameplay. But then, a seed of hope: the developers had all the cards available in a .pdf for free. All you had to do was print it out and cut them yourself. Oh Joyous Day!! We played well into the night, the house filled with raucous laughter where otherwise there would have been sullen silence.

All dramatics aside, the fact that a developer would purposefully make their game available to anyone who wanted to play without expecting any form of payment for it really stuck with me. This strategy also didn’t seem to affect sales at all as now 10 years later, it is still a pretty popular party game sold at most game and big-box stores.

This gets me thinking: My biggest goal is to get more eyes on Gramatic! At this point, I want more people playing Gramatic! the more people play, the more they will want to get others to engage with the game. Additionally, I fully believe in the accessibility of resources. Students should not be prevented from learning because of a paywall of some kind.

Therefore, one of my goals this year is to make the base game of Gramatic! a fully downloadable .pdf that teachers and students could access from this website and cut themselves. This availability could help expedite awareness, and hopefully boost interest enough for customers to want to purchase the official game. I will be posting the .pdf on this Sheep Chase website in the beginning of December, once I figure out the logistics, such as instructions, legal considerations, and actually creating the .pdf to name a few.

Stay Tuned!

Intrusive Life and the Realities of Creativity

Life has a tendency to get in the way of creativity. Not always in a bad way, but this summer truly did not give me the opportunity to work on this side hustle. In some ways, I was grateful for the break. The best part of creating and publishing Gramatic! was over. What was left was the tedium of trying to sell it. Without the automatic fun of enjoying the labor, it was easy to say I needed to focus on other responsibilities: jobs, consulting, vacations, summer camp, travel, travel, travel...when in reality, I just didn’t want to give any energy to the tedium.

But now that the summer 2024 is in the rearview, it is time to come back to this little passion project of mine. In terms of Gramatic! and Sheep Chase as a whole, the break wasn’t a total loss. I was able to step back to appraise the work I had done up to that point. I showed off my work to family and friends. I played the completed game with some of my students. I was able to reflect on the work I had done and the goals I have for the future.

The best goals are specific, time sensitive, and actionable. Therefore, I have set two main goals for the next year, ending in October of 2025. My first goal is to get Gramatic! seen by more people. Not just in a marketing/purchasing capacity, but in an availability sense. I don’t think there has ever really been a game of this kind before. It is a niche market to say the very least. And so, having Gramatic! be available will be my number one goal for the next year. To do so, I have made a checklist of how to become more available (more to follow). The second goal is to have Sheep Chase Games be presentable to the audience that would gravitate toward it the most: ESL teachers. Therefore, I will be working on a presentation focused on gamification and Sheep Chase created for ConnTESOL, the CT conference for Teachers of English as a Second Language. If I can show the benefits of my game to other teachers in a real way, I believe the game could take off. I have created a checklist for that as well.

Here is to the “new year.” Here’s hoping for a little success…

The Trials. The Tribulations

Making a grammar-tense card game based on rummy-style rules is fun. Do you know what’s not fun? Everything else. Though there were a few times that I had to fight my motivation issues to work on the game whenever I encountered a minor hiccup (like getting frustrated with Gimp), the process of building and designing the game was pretty great. I got to build my creative muscles and experiment with the different aspects of building the game, from creating the rules to developing the graphic design. Overall, I’m very pleased with the simple 50s style aesthetic and the minimalist organization of the cards. It allows the students to focus on the words and sentences without getting overwhelmed with information.

 But beyond creating the game, everything else that goes into making a card game marketable and publishable is where I am really struggling. None of it is fun and all of it conflicts with my executive dysfunction. Choosing a manufacturer, building a business, setting up a website (there will be a website rant in one of these blog posts), using social media for promotion, are all terrible terrible necessary evils that I wish someone else would do for me. Alas, when you are doing this for the love, and not the profits, you have to do it all yourself.

Therefore, any advice would be great. What should I write in my blog? How can I make my website better? Will you do my marketing for free? These are the questions I need answers to.

 Until then, I guess I’ll just keep plugging on and hope people buy my game.

Start the Journey. Finish the Process

I have a tendency to make my creative endeavors more complicated than it has to be, especially because I have very poor follow-through. As I recently learned, this is a product of my inattentive ADHD. Once I embraced this diagnosis, many key factors of my behavior fell into place: the hyper-focus followed by complete disinterest, the beginning but never ending, the overwhelming urge to quit something because it is not perfect. The executive dysfunction. All barriers to achieving my goals.

 Vicious Rhetoric, my ESL TCG (see previous post), is an intricate game full of complex rules and game elements. It is the nature of a trading-card game to be complex. Much like English itself, the game requires conviction to learn, play, and to make. It is beyond my means, mentally, financially, organizationally, etc. So, I discarded it. I haven’t looked at it or its rules since 2017. I have moved on to more grounded endeavors, like instructor training and curriculum development. The same could be said for my Sight Word game I developed for my kindergartener (who is now in middle school). More on that later.

 But that itch...that creative itch is still there. It writhes in my brain. It lures me, bright and shiny. “Yes, you are good at coaching. You are good at administration. But are you having fun?” 

 Gramatic! could be a solution. When I started making this game, I purposefully did not give myself goals. But, I did give myself one rule: make it simple enough to follow through.

 Gramatic! was born out of the desire to make a game that helped practice grammar tenses. It needed to be simple enough to make that I could work on it in my down time. It had to be simple enough that I could develop it in a short amount of time, with the creative resources I already had. I am racing against my own weaknesses after all, and now that I know the dopamine from a new project only lasts so long in my brain, I had to push to finish the prototype before I inevitably lost interest in the process.

 Gramatic! also needed to be affordable to manufacture. Considering I was working on a budget of basically zero, once Gramatic! was ready to go on sale, I needed a way to sell it without investing too much money I didn’t have. This is where I am very grateful to the Game Crafter for print-on-demand. The mere ability for someone to buy professional cards and have them shipped without me being anywhere in that process is the only reason I have gotten this far.

 Fighting my ADHD has been the biggest hurdle of making Gramatic! a reality. Now that it is officially on sale, I am ready to tackle the next hurdle: getting people to actually buy it!

Vicious Rhetoric: the Game

Let’s go back to Magic: the Gathering (MtG) for a second. When I came back to the States from Japan, I took a job as an ESL teacher for a for-profit Intensive English Program. Instead of low-risk English practice with children at a tutoring school, I was preparing adults (mostly in their very early twenties) for university in the US. They needed high fluency and had very little time to get it. Let’s face it, many of my students also were not the most interested in learning English or getting a degree. Most were there because their parents made them go. So, the engagement was not as self-supportive as they needed in order to learn complex language fast. Many struggled with the fundamentals and internalizing the rules, and thusly, they could not get out of the lower proficiency levels. Many of those who struggled ended up repeating their level in perpetuity until they were forced to go home.

 That was when I began thinking about how best to trigger engagement and internalize grammar/vocabulary rules without the student self-discipline. After high school and into college, I took a minor hiatus from playing MtG. I wasn’t around my old friends as much, and finding new people to play was difficult with busy schedules. But then, my sister came back from Costa Rica with a partner. His English was decent, but he had a very hard time with vocabulary, reading, and more complex language skills. On a whim, and since he was around, I taught him how to play MtG. He latched on to it right away. The same elements that I had found so addictive, he did as well. And as we played, the fun mixed with the requirement that he understand the rules and what the cards did, helped his English to flourish. Obviously, playing MtG wasn’t the only reason his English became as good as it was (he has lived in the U.S. 20 at this point), but he himself has stated that learning the game helped him better internalize the language and vocabulary, and it helped expand his ability to express himself.

 So, I applied that strategy for my classes. Many of my students were the same as my brother-in-law: loved video games, was young and impulsive, and didn’t feel engagement in the classroom. For these students, I developed a trading card game, like MtG called Vicious Rhetoric (VR). VR uses trading-card-game mechanics to build sentences and “argue” with the opponent until their points total goes from 20 to 0. The better your sentences, the more points you can subtract from your opponent’s “resolve.” I played the game with my at-risk students during their free lab time in lieu of standard tutoring (which had not been helpful in the past).

 Anecdotally, the game worked pretty well. Those students who played the game regularly passed their levels consistently where before they would repeat more than once. Had I more time and more students, I could have produced better data. Though they did not show an interest in playing the game outside of study class time, they spent the class engaged in playing even after I stopped overseeing their games, where before it was impossible to keep them focused on self-study.

 This alone gave me optimism that designing English games could be helpful for so many people trying to learn the language. Though Vicious Rhetoric is much more labor intensive, I am hoping that as Gramatic! Takes off and I some profits (and publicity...?) I might be able to start funding the real development of this game so that more people can enjoy “arguing” with their friends on a regular basis. Hooray for goals! 

Gamify Your Language

As an ESL teacher, I always tried to make learning as engaging as possible. When I was an English tutor in a juku in Japan, I had to come up with innovative ways for the students (both kid and adult) to engage with the learning. For the kids, it was a lot of games. Their favorite was slipper slide. I would set up their vocab words on the floor propped against an old white board tray stacked on top of tissue boxes. Then the students would use their indoor slippers (which were vinyl and very slick) to slide across the floor and hit the vocab word I would call out. Whichever student hit the word would make the sentence of the month, and we would reset. Did my game teach the students fluent English? No, of course not. But it did create a positive space where they enjoyed learning the content which would provide a solid basis for keeping it in their long-term memory.

 The goal of these games is to support the learning process. By making language acquisition somewhat competitive, with a dose of instant gratification, the tedious part of committing rules and collocations to memory can become more automatic, allowing the brain to focus more on using that English for critical thinking and better communication.

 Companies have known the benefits of gamification theory for a long time. Apps like Duolingo use leveling to help with practicing language. While the promises of learning the language solely by using the app is a stretch at best, it does help keep the learner engaged in the language during the hard beginner stages where quitting is most likely to occur.

 Games like Gramatic! or my in-development reading game Snapworld offer a chance for learning to be engaging long enough for students to get past the breakers and become self-motivating. Who said learning couldn’t be any fun?

MtG: or How I Learned to Learn

When I was a kid, I got heavily into the trading card game Magic: the Gathering (MtG). The fantasy aesthetic, the competition, the collection aspect, the community you built with your friends, all made the game very addictive. But beyond the fun, MtG also helped me develop my language skills and provided critical thinking and problem solving that was difficult to get from my school courses because those were boring and gave little instant gratification. In other words, I was more interested in playing my games than practicing or studying or even engaging in schoolwork.

 Then, in my freshman year of high school, my Language Arts teacher made a deal with the class. Every week, we would have a spelling/vocabulary test. Usually, I did relatively poorly on those because the words were hard and I didn’t study. But, the teacher agreed that if a student brought in an outside source that had a word from the vocab list, she would give us an extra half a point of credit on the next quiz. I soon realized that most of the words on the vocab list were used in MtG in some form or another, either in the card names, or descriptions, or even the flavor text. For the rest of the year, I received an average of 110% on my spelling quizzes, not only because I found the vocab words in my game, but in so doing, it helped commit those words to my long-term memory (I will always remember the word “cache,” from the MtG card Eleven Cache, as the first vocab word I came across in the wild).

 I have a story-telling box full of these anecdotes: how games have helped my or other’s learning in some form or another. I hope to share those stories here in this blog while at the same time producing and publishing my ESL and literacy games. As an ESL teacher for over 15 years, I have made countless games and activities that do not replace other forms and methods of teaching language, but supports learning by strengthening engagement, community, and interest. I want to share these games with the teaching community and support the growth and learning of students in a way that is safe, fun, and, of course, educational.

 Here’s to the start of my new journey. Thank you for reading this far! If you are an educator, what are some memories you have of games teaching you more than just to have fun? Please sign up in our email list so that you can get notifications whenever I post a new blog entry. Happy. Friday!