The congruence of sports fanatics and political/criminal elements is a pretty fascinating one - and one with a long tradition.
In Constantinople in 532 two rival sporting/political factions - the blues and the greens, joined forces and rioted after a chariot race, burning and looting the city for five days. Eventually the blues were persuaded (bribed) to stand down, and the remaining greens were crushed by the imperial guard. 30,000 people were killed.
I don't do sitting meditation, but I try and work it, or similar principles into my exercise regimens. I am on a local rowing team, which means I train on an ERG, which is one of the most boring exercises imaginable. Sometimes I listen to music or audiobooks and sometimes I try and practice a sort of meditative reflection while I row.
"The Soul as a sphere in equilibrium: Not grasping at things beyond it or retreating inward. Not fragmenting outward, not sinking back in on itself, but ablaze with light and looking at the truth, without and within."
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, 16th Emperor of Rome - The Meditations
I like @austin_walker 's Eastern Europe Pikmin idea. With any luck put together by the guys who did Fantastic Planet, which is secretly the best animated movie ever.
That Macbeth movie is also very good. Highly recommended.
For anyone who isn't convinced about WW1 and horse combat, just look at my profile picture.
I think a ww1 game could work pretty well. People have this impression of a war that only involved people sitting in trenches getting blown up by artillery shells, but there was much more than that - there were significant portions of the war dominated by rapid movement and battles of maneuver (also the vast majority of casualties in ww2 were still caused by artillery, things didn't change that much). Add some kind of condemned-style melee combat and you can experience the fun of diving into a gas-filled redoubt and clearing it out with sawed off shotguns, submachine guns, and bashing dudes heads in with shovels and steel clubs.
Limiting yourself is an important part of the art-making process, as it inures you to the reality that your pieces are imperfect reflections of your intention, and trains you through repetition to understand your tools and their own limitations.
However, limitations - financial, temporal, physical, sometimes just result in shit work. Sometimes you have to crunch to meet a deadline and the result isn't a flowering of creativity under pressure, you just end up with bad work with little thought or revision put into it.
I work in animation, which is incredibly time consuming work. When I was in school, for example, one of my teachers who had worked for a bunch of studios over 25 years told us about one time when he had worked on some disney show where Goofy or Donald or someone beat the crap out of another character with a cooking pan. The studio, seeing the result, thought it was too violent and wanted it redone with a tennis racket over a single weekend.
So every person in the studio pulled all nighters redrawing and tracing frames to replace the pan with a racket (which looked like crap) and shoved it out the door.
Constraints didn't create anything other than a bad product and (maybe) some kind of shared feeling of camaraderie.
Constraints are a universal fact and can be instructive, but they can also make you put out sloppy work that you really don't learn much from, and maybe give you bad habits as well.
Have you ever noticed how much of Fantasy, as a genre, is about reinstating a monarchy? Generally speaking, the arc of a fantasy plot is this: change is coming, change is bad, and we must stop all change.
It’s the ubiquity of these fantasy elements that makes, say, A Song of Ice and Fire so thrilling. In George R. R. Martin’s world, the long lost true Queen is potentially a villain (or at least very morally grey), the traditions the culture clings to are presented as absurd, and the monarchy that Westeros depends on is killing it.
“But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were 'embalmers'. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists' – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only 'hallows' were their tombs.”
Excerpt From: J. R. R. Tolkien; Christopher Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter. “The Letters of J. R. R.Tolkien.”
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