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Re: failure and determination
Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 10:09:01PM -0800 in <0dc0a675ba227a0231e96fb7a5b75d9b@direcway.com>,
Chris Crawford <christophercrawford@direcway.com> spake:
>At some point in the past I was on the idrama list but then I changed
>my email address and forgot to update it on the idrama list, so I
>didn't see any of this until I saw a mention of it at grandtextauto.
>Rather than respond to any specific comments, I'd like to offer a
>meditation on the issue of "dem ole interactive storytelling blues".
[...]
Hello, Chris.
Like you and so many others, I've tried and so far failed to achieve
the absolute peak of what I want my art to be, or any kind of commercial
success... But I'm not giving up, if only because I can't. I could
more easily give up breathing than making games.
I've been making games, almost entirely in the adventure/RPG/story
genre, for nearly 20 years now. Aside from some ancient relics that I
don't even have systems to run anymore, what I have to show for it is a
few interactive fiction and CRPG authoring systems, a few playable games
(if not always 100% complete, they've still reached some people), and a
bunch of free pencil-and-paper games, which I use to develop systems for
the computer games (and I'm finally moving towards getting some tabletop
games published, so at least there'll be some income from my games
work).
The commercial computer games industry is a plague upon mankind. Like
so many others, I have my own horror stories in my attempts to sneak
game design ninja-style into the industry, and my own perpetual
frustration at the impossibility of getting even a few thousand dollars
of funding to make and publish *games* and not $10-100M CGI movies where
you click a button once every ten minutes. At least I finally stopped
going to CGDC; the one or two good talks per year were no longer worth
paying for.
I can generally afford to spend 6-12 months working at corporations by
day, putting in a few tired hours on evenings and weekends on games, and
then when the contract's done, coast on savings for another 6-12 months
while I work on my games full-time, but I routinely have to explain
these gaps in my employment history to recruiters and employers so I can
get work again, and often this loses me jobs I could do in my sleep to
uncreative (but therefore "safe") monkeys without a tenth of my skill.
The business environment really does not appreciate anyone who isn't
100% committed to their corporation as if it were a messianic religion.
<shrug> There is nothing I can do to change that, so dealing with it
and moving on is my only choice.
At least one person has read <Chris Crawford on Interactive
Storytelling>. I found it interesting and somewhat useful; it's not the
direction I'm going, but it's been good for understanding another
approach for comparison. I haven't picked up <CC on Game Design> yet.
As an unbiased observer--which you surely must be!--what's it like?
I'm glad to see from your site that Erasmatron's moving to Java--the
primary obstacle to using it before was that it was tied to the Mac,
which is a lovely platform but simply not on the desk of most people.
With a good cross-platform version, I do expect that many more people
will use it. If you have any Java dev questions, let me know in email,
and I'll be able to help you.
What I have learned from what I've done so far, is this one
all-important lesson:
Know when to shut up and code or write. Make something that works,
even if it's not perfect, even if it's just the vaguest sketch of what
you want. Something that's concrete and works can be considered and
analyzed and second-guessed later. Games that people can play, good or
bad, are always better than games that people can't play.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/";> Mark Hughes </a>
"I think [Robert Heinlein] would take it kindly if we were all to refrain from
abandoning civilization as a failed experiment that requires too much hard
work." -_Rah, Rah, RAH!_, by Spider Robinson