RE: failure and determination

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com>]

Chris Crawford wrote:
>
> You try living for 13 years without any primary source of income.

I've been unfunded for 7 years.  I've been *dirt poor* since 2 years
ago, when the credit cards ran out.  I mean food banks.  I'm lucky I
have a long term relationship with my landlord and they're incredibly
patient.  I'm in debt to them, but recently I've floundered enough with
"day jobs" to keep from falling any farther behind.

> I work and I work and the days roll by, the weeks roll by, the months
roll by, and nothing seems to change. Other people with half my talent
are pulling in big bucks for crappy work, or gaining public recognition,
or in other ways enjoying the benefits of their labors, and I still I
labor on, building more and more technology and still nobody is
interested.

My technological productivity has been rather low, on average, over the
7 years.  For the first 4.5 years I coded hardly a darned thing.  Then
came the 9 month period of panic, where I crunched 60 hour weeks, trying
to write a demo that would save me from dot.com bust career catastrophe.
It did not save me, there were no jobs to be had in Seattle.  After
that, I spent a lot of time looking at what went wrong.  I decided that
maybe I was guilty of shouldering too many burdens, and maybe I should
look to open source to alleviate some of those burdens.  Also C++
completely failed me as a good programming tool, so I started looking at
Higher Level Languages.

In early 2003, I had a realization that has kept me going ever since.  I
am a Game Designer.  The only person who can stop me from being a Game
Designer, is me.  Even if I end up in a homeless shelter, there's still
pencil and paper.  Once I realized that basic principle of what my life
is, everything became easier.  It's my most basic armor against all the
derision and apathy.  I know what I'm here for, and most people don't.

On Halloween 2003, I was filled with tremendous self doubt about my
ability to continue as a programmer.  I remember crying on my friend's
floor.  Was I simply a bad programmer, in the wrong industry?  How was I
going to ever get my game designs turned into real products?  A few days
later I made a list of things I did like about programming, and things I
didn't like.  The former was short, the latter was long.  Nevertheless
the former existed, and I saw the pattern.  I've always been a brilliant
ASM coder.  I hate industrial APIs, because they're crap and they change
all the time.  I like small, closed-form problems that I can devise
elegant solutions for.

Most of the industry is a morass of bad tools.  It is easy to piss away
weeks on trivial problems.  I proceeded to do exactly that as I
researched open source and HLLs.  I have a profound appreciation now for
how bad and unproductive technology really is.  It works in an
industrial setting because a lot of bodies and a lot of money are thrown
at problems.  The output per person is actually complete shit, and when
you become responsible for your own R&D funding, you fully realize that.

I spent a lot of time exhorting people in the Python and OCaml
communities, trying to create marketing plans and business models that
would get me and other people $$$$$.  There's no will among Usenet
techies to deal with such issues.  It took me 1.5 years to realize the
true nature of the beast, that I was rare among coders.  I meet, like, 1
out of 1000 people on Usenet that have an entrepreneurial bent to them.

The spinner has finally landed on Bigloo Scheme.  In my searches, it is
possibly the most appropriate language I've found for bridging between
the HLL and low-level ASM worlds.  I hope to write great game AIs with
it, and also get 3D graphics guys to move beyond C++.  But at this time
I'm still futzing with very basic, painful issues, like quirky compilers
and libraries that don't build.  I certainly don't have a production
environment yet.  But if it does work, and I ship a game with it, I'm
going to write a book, write articles on Gamasutra, and otherwise cash
in on my long years of suffering.

> I take no creative joy in my work, nor any optimism that it will ever
produce the results I hope for. I work now out of towering stubborness,
and out of desperate fear of the thought that my life's work -- and
therefore my life itself -- has been an utter waste of time. I'm like a
shipwrecked sailor in a rubber dinghy thousands of miles from any
possible rescue, stubbornly paddling forward because there's nothing
else to do but die.

To put things in perspective, 13 years is 13% of the 100 years we can
probably squeeze out with good diet, exercise, and modern medical
technology.  More if we make great strides in genetics.  I don't think
you should equate "your huge interactive storytelling project" with
"your whole life."  Most of the industry remembers you as a guy who did
tons of great things before you disappeared down this black hole.
People are divided about the black hole.  For my part, I admire and
share your courage, but I also believe in "write more, automate less."
I don't know what your skills as a writer are, or what point of balance
between manual labor and automation you are seeking.

How to bend in the face of "things bigger than yourself" is a very
difficult and personal question.  So much of self-identity is invested
in what we tried before, even if it was bad for us or failing us.
Letting go is painful, and it takes the distance of time to feel better
about it.

For instance, it's only 2 years later that I'm comfortable with the idea
that my Ocean Mars C++ "crunch code" is probably never going to be used.
9 months, 60 hours a week, that's a large time investment to just blow
off.  Yet inevitably it's going to be better to rewrite it from scratch,
in Scheme.  I take comfort in the fact that 9 months == all the design
permutations I tried.  I tried 4 different planetary models.  Plus a lot
of angsting about OO, a paradigm I'm rather dubious about now, because
in the end it so utterly failed me.  So at least in those 9 months a lot
of lessons were learned.  Some of the design insights *are* genuinely
useful and won't be just roadkill on the way to better things.

I'm currently being forced away from Visual C++.  I don't like this.
I've spent many years learning to use it properly, and it's a resume /
consulting skill.  VC++ is industry standard on Windows, and since
swaying industry is one of my goals, I worry about people blowing off my
game toolchains because VC++ support isn't there and they won't be arsed
with UNIX anything.  I also worry about incompatibility with industry
standard tools, such as Alias Maya.

Nevertheless, the thing "bigger than me" is all the good open source
HLLs come out of a UNIX world.  These UNIX people simply will not
support VC++ in any industrially robust manner, they believe in
Makefiles.  I *personally* could provide the VC++ support, but I need to
get AI code done now.  I am through with taking on support burdens to do
very basic things just to get started.  That's the whole lie of the open
source world, really.  There are so many opportunities to create mundane
work for yourself, pulling you away from your real problems.

I invested 1.5 years trying to get Usenet open source developers to do
business oriented things on Windows.  They won't do it.  Complete waste
of time, 1.5 years of my time.  The problem is bigger than me.  I have
to bend.  I get sneered at on many newsgroups because of the choices
I've made.  But how was I to know the lay of the land, before I surveyed
it?  The more sanctimonous my detractor, the more certain I am that
they've never dealt seriously with my problems, and never will.

> I remain absolutely certain that interactive storytelling can and will
be achieved.

Right.  And like my mantra, "I am a Game Designer," as long as you know
this as your purpose, nobody can take it away from you.

> This is not an easy problem. It will not be solved by a few brilliant
strokes of genius. It demands the solution of a number of gigantic
problems.

Well, again, my $0.02 is less automation, more writing.  Learning to
write well is a difficult problem, not a gigantic one.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                          - anonymous entrepreneur

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.8.1 - Release Date: 3/23/2005