April 2010
April 25, 2010
On Epiphany
The brain is a self-organizing mechanism.
It takes in everything we experience and throws it down a giant pin-filled pachinko table. The memories bounce, spin, and come to rest in the deposit-tray of our consciousness.
If we look close enough at this tray, we can detect subtle patterns and order. There will be gaps and flaws at the micro level, but from a distance these bits of data seem to align.
I’m six months into the Game Design program at Vancouver Film School. It took me this long to realize I could be producing games for a living without any other prerequisites.
Here’s some Reggie Watts as he manages to sum up exactly how I feel right now:
April 26, 2010
Why Indie?
A better question is: “Why not indie?”
Who doesn’t yearn for independence, in their heart of hearts? The innocent, perhaps, but that’s what makes them so adorable (and willing to work long hours for a fraction of their actual contribution to their taskmaster’s capital gains).
I’m a builder. I like to create. What more noble an endeavour than building my own real-life empire? And building it one brick at a time, each brick a construct unto itself, in the form interactive multimedia software?
School hasn’t changed much in the last 35 years. It’s still a place that’s a business like any other; the teachers are employees and the administration is management, and public or private they’re all trying to meet their own bottom lines, often at the expense of the student.
Schools are factories designed to produce able-bodied and/or able-minded workers who would graduate and contribute to the general economic prosperity of their country, for the good of all society.
Socialist garbage that falls apart the second a person sits down and tries to analyze that society!
Sadly, a lot of us never take the time to really figure out what it is we want from life, and rather allow ourselves to be led by the nose through countless hoops until failure, retirement, or death claims us.
I’m not saying that’s a bad way to live, not at all. It’s certainly one of the safer ways, or so we’re informed by the myriad authorities that guide us through our formative years and on into our adult lives.
What I’m saying is that there’s always a choice. The choice of independence for social norms and other constructs comes largely from a strong self-awareness and the courage to trust oneself in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
It’s that romantic glory that’s pushing me to go my own way. That and the promise of personal wealth beyond imagining.
April 28, 2010
On Necessities and Essentials
[Lost content: likely a photograph of my development workspace of the time, captioned This is where the magic happens.]
I’m blessed to have amassed such a powerful set of tools. I have everything I need, at my fingertips, to create a high-quality independent video game.
But all the technological wizardry in the world is so much silicone garbage if the ideas behind the game are half-baked, or only partially explored.
A lot of what goes on in my process goes unseen. It happens in my subconscious mind, as I puzzle my way through the design in my sleep. I’ve been using a system that I learned about years and years ago when I was studying natural magic. Aleister Crowley, borrowing heavily from the works of Jung, was a strong proponent of using sleep to overcome challenges in the waking world, by allowing his mind the space and time it needed to sort the different factors of the problems at hand into a recognizable pattern.
This has worked enough times for me to make it part of my creative routine. When I’ve reached a certain point in the data-gathering phase, I’ll sleep on it. I’ll do other things, anything but sit and try to focus down a design. Usually, in the dark hours of morning, I’ll get direction from the aether and be able to make some minor progress.
I suppose I really do make my dreams come true.
2010.04.01 – 2010.04.30