Re: failure and determination

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

Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes wrote:

>  The commercial computer games industry is a plague upon mankind.
Having read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" recently, I think it might be worth 
contemplating the role of 'plague' in mankind's evolution.  The 
societies that came to dominate the world, were the ones that got 
agriculture going earliest.  Consequently populations densified, and 
they developed horrific epidemic diseases.  So much that these were 
largely responsible for wiping out New World populations, for instance.  
Meanwhile, other places like Paupa New Guinea were protected from 
Eurpean encroachment, because they had developed enough indigenous 
agriculture to develop their own nasty diseases that kept white settlers 
out.  So when you say it's a 'plague', unfortunately I'm inclined to see 
it as the long-term engine of societal progress.  It all depends on how 
long a view you want to adopt.  Historically speaking, I think we're in 
a position analogous to the film industry of the 1930's, where major 
studios had consolidated most of the power.  I'm not interested in it, I 
refuse to deal with it; but the historical process is probably both 
necessary and inevitable.  'Necessary' because seemingly, huge piles of 
people have to suffer before the masses will move on.  The individual 
sufferings of you, me, or Chris will never be cared about.

> At least I finally stopped
> going to CGDC; the one or two good talks per year were no longer worth
> paying for.
>  
I did it once in 2002 when I had more dough.  I don't regret having done 
it that 1st time, to get the experience, and I may yet do it again.  But 
I was already deeply cynical about the value proposition of conferences, 
as seen from my SIGGRAPH days, long before ever contemplating the GDC.  
It makes a *huge* difference whether you're an employee getting a sort 
of paid vacation, vs. an indie footing the bill for this drivel 
yourself.  Know what I did?  I spent almost the entire conference 
playing this game called "Leviathan," and dammit our team won.  Yellow 
kicked friggin' ass, man!  So playing that game cost me $1500 out of my 
pocket, and honestly, that's not the thing I regret about the GDC.  The 
other thing I really liked was Brian Moriarty's lecture.  He's like the 
only really amazing lecturer.  He did this whole thing with a darkened 
room, a harpischord playing, and an eclipse happening during the 
presentation.  I forget what it was about; surely something about 
stimulating the creative juices in game development.  Anyways it was 
fantastic and if I got 10 Brian Moriartys every conference, I would not 
hesitate to plunk $1500 on it.

As it is, most guys are computer geeks who can't lecture interestingly.  
Most of their domain knowledge is stuff I'd look up if I really cared.  
There is occasionally a bright gem.  Also, if one is particularly weak 
in some area and has a business reason to want to know more, the GDC can 
be useful.  For instance, I feel that way about business and legal 
stuff.  But that's it.  I don't see that the GDC has anything to tell me 
about programming, or game design, or visual art.  Maybe audio, as 
that's a very weak area for me.

I resolved, if I'm ever rich and famous in the game industry, I'm going 
to run "Brandon's Beach Conference."  My thought is that for $1500, I'd 
rather be on the beach sipping pina coladas watching scantily clad women 
saunter by, or maybe even serving me drinks.  I'm not sexist, we can 
have cabana boys too.  We'd sit on the beach and talk about game design 
and that's all the conference would be.  I think the primary value of 
conferences is schmoozing, so why not schmooze in the most enjoyable 
setting?  Granted not everyone enjoys this setting, but I would, so 
hence my conference! 

>  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.
>  
I feel your pain.  Really.  Currently I keep afloat by signature 
gathering, and I do believe my landlord's got an eviction threat on the 
way for me.  Fortunately I think I'm going to stay one step ahead of 
him.  I don't even know about "my skills" vs. those of other 
programmers.  I think programming is mostly awful.  I think there's 
probably "some kind" of programming I can really excel at, but the 
industry is wrapped up in processes that mostly drive me crazy.  So I 
find myself limited.  I might have excelled in the early ASM era, if I 
had been old enough, as ASM is the only kind of coding I've ever really 
liked.  I think I might become a God in the "Star Trek Computer" era, or 
something proximate.  There's something about all this contemporary low 
level crap that just keeps me from getting much done though.  And the 
corporate culture is, indeed, about swallowing all this low-level crap 
like you're supposed to care about it, and get really excited about it.  
I cannot possibly lie through my teeth to that degree, not to myself, 
nor to employers.  So I gather signatures.  And I keep slogging away 
with "better" tools, which still involve tremendous amounts of crufty 
Unix legacy pain.  But at least the tools I'm trying to use, like Bigloo 
Scheme, are more progressive than the C++ / Java / C# alternatives.  
Slowly I believe I will find a way.

I don't believe I can find a way quickly, because I think you have to 
actually like technical grunge to fit into the technical mainstream.  
The mainstream does not meet my elegance criteria, so I am continuallly 
at odds with it.

>  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.
>  
Yes, that really was the dealbreaker back when I discussed writing an 
exemplar IF piece for the Erasmatron.  There's no way I could make a 
literary committment to such a small platform.  Things have to get 
shipped on Windows.  I don't like that, and if someone offered me an 
open source platform with a large audience, I'd drop Windows in a 
heartbeat.  I'm already down to Windows being the only Windows thing 
that I use as is, having replaced everything else with open source 
stuff.  But shipping on Windows is still the financial reality of the 
indie game developer.

>  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.
>  
I'm not sure what the all-important lesson is.  I don't have the 
hindsight of success to evaluate it.  Also, there is an old Chinese 
story, about not saying what is good or bad.  Just to say what is.  It's 
a long ramble about a boy who works in a field, but gets trampled on by 
a horse, and gets crippled, but then he doesn't have to go off to war, 
and so he survives, but someone else in his family is killed by the war, 
etc.  Life defies what we can analyze as our "best heuristic."  I don't 
feel I've spent enough time writing code; but, I do feel my game design 
skills are stronger for this.  I am habituated to the problem of 
nothingness, of the blank slate.  I can survive in a psychological world 
of uncertainty where most other people would fall apart.  Really, I feel 
like the only thing holding me back are my lousy tools.  Some would say 
that's the whole rub.  Maybe most would.  But most never ship anything 
of consequence, so maybe it's all a matter of how "high road" you want 
to be about anything.

I mean, I could have cloned Half-Life a long time ago.  Why should I 
care about that?  It is beneath my objectives.  I disagree with you even 
as far as literal formulation.  I would sooner throw a frisbee in a park 
with friends, than play Half-Life.  Such a game is not "better" simply 
for being playable.  Now, I don't want to denigrate Half-Life too 
strongly.  I actually liked the demo level I played of it.  I've also 
heard that this demo level was the more polished part of the content, 
that there were large sections of the game that weren't nearly as well 
put together as the demo.  Anyways, Half-Life has certainly inspired 
many people and I don't criticize it from that standpoint.  But it's 
clear to me, that the things it fulfils for most people, aren't remotely 
related to my personal authorial goals.  And so I ignore it.  I take a 
higher road.

Half-Life itself wasn't even perceived as a huge innovator when it was 
first released.  It was perceived as the best recombination of existing 
approaches.  The thing that struck the right "authorial balance" between 
AI, story, gameplay, etc.

I don't deal too much in questions of demographics anymore.  My 
so-called higher road will probably seem dumb to lotsa people.  Maybe 
even workadaisical, when evaluated in hindsight.  "Is that all you had 
to offer?"  We'll see.  People generally don't understand foresight.  
They usually only evaluate once things have been made easy.


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

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