It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. Issues at work, coupled with a weekend with people who I’ve known forever and really, really care about, have just made me really think about what I want out of life, work, and what makes me happy.

Obviously, the thoughts have ranged the happy-miserable spectrum, but for a change, I’ll focus on the positive.

I love making games. I love the creative process, and I love designing things. The high concept phase is obviously fun – are we going to make a game about eating ice cream, or giant robotic gorillas? Usually, it’s relatively constrained, but really, this is where the really wild ideas come from – can we actually make a compelling game about ice-cream eating robotic gorillas? Wouldn’t it be weird if we could?

Still, that gives way to a more detail-oriented process. Once the concept is found, it’s a matter of trying to figure out what it’d actually be in practice. This is a very, “What if?” sort of process, but not an unfocused one. To me, this is where a designer really shines, because anyone can find the obvious answers – it takes hard work and some measure of creative talent to find the odd solutions, the ones that really truly explore the core of the idea, and turn it into something that’s got the potential to be fun.

After that, another drill-down into the ideas – here’s where the weird little details emerge – the aspects of the game’s personality. In the same way that while writing a novel, the characters almost autonomously act without input from the author, this part of the process is where you find what the game has developed. It’s often surprising – the details simply emerge from the decisions you’ve made before and really fundamentally internalized.

Once the drill-down’s complete, it’s almost as though the scale is reversed, as the design goes out to the rest of the team. Engineers have to worry about implmentation, artists have to figure out the visual style of both the large scale, and the individual items in the world. This is where the design process becomes really large-scale collaborative in a way that encompasses every aspect of game development. Other people in varied disciplines add their input on how a particular aspect of the game might function, or how it might be implmented more efficiently. Obviously, many of these people have been involved in the process at every stage, but this is really the first time parts of the design “go public.”

A designer, in some sense, has to be fearless. Showing the team an idea that you’ve worked on for a week, or a month, or longer, is scary. People tear into it, find the holes, wonder about the implementation, the resources that are available, and begin to cut away at it. Sometimes, the response is good, sometimes it’s not. When you’ve got a good team, the end product is always stronger.

A good designer has no ego. Good ideas come from everywhere, and it’s a good designer’s job to harness that energy and turn it into something positive. Finding someone who’s excited about a concept, and really wants to make it happen is a happy moment. Sometimes, the idea emerges, fully formed and considered, nigh-ready for implementation. Other times, the idea comes out raw, and the person may have little experience taking that idea and shaping it.

Teaching someone to design, rather than simply speculate, is a really satisfying process. What is the core of the idea? How does this work with the rest of the game? How do you think a player will interact with this? What is necessary to create the feeling you’re looking for? Being able to quantify these things, to look at an idea critically, and where appropriate, mock it up or prototype it is so immensely fun and satisfying, I can think of few other things I’d rather spend my time doing.

Then, there’s watching the game come to life. Little bits of art, animation, gameplay… all functioning together – creating weird little moments where what’s on screen matches the vision in your head – or better yet, surprises you. Being surprised by a game you know every little detail of is … well, it’s genuinely surprising. It’s happened a couple times, simply because systems that are in place are complex enough that they’re generally not predictable. So, when Seaman asks “Do you like your job?” at just the right moment, as you’re having a conversation in real life about work… what other medium can do that? Serendipity, sure, but it’s so eerie, so perfect, and something that’s really unique to videogames.

I love it. I can hardly imagine doing anything else but building giant robots and taking over the world.

When a number of people all have the same problem with you, doesn’t it stand to reason that there’s some chance the problem is with you, not with them?

It’s pretty impressive how able I am to be ok with the status quo. By and large, if something isn’t actively irritating me at any particular moment, I’m pretty much fine with it. It’s one of those things that’s come into relatively plain focus in the last few months. Whether it’s dealing with people in my personal life, or issues at work, or what have you, it definitely takes constant agitation for me to enact change.

Sometimes, that agitation comes from within – there are some things that I can’t “put aside” – things like the windows that leak require constant and vigilant attention. As a result, it’s extremely difficult for me to ignore them, and they get changed because they constantly bother me. Still, come the summer, for a few months at that point, they get put aside, until I remember that once it rains again, we’re screwed. The windows, thankfully, look to be mostly fixed. Hard to say without rain, but fortunately, we’ve got the acid test in action right now. We’ll see how it turns out.

Personal life’s good, too. Definitely some stress re: wedding planning, but it looks to be mostly coming together. Still, there are definitely people I end up ignoring for long stretches of time, simply because once they stop being a regular part of my life, I’m not “agitated” by their presence, or lack thereof. Kind of a lame way to put it, but true.

Work, recently, has been a constant pressure. For a few months, I really felt like the agitation could be used to enact change. I could present the issues I had, in a well-thought out manner, and hope that my experience could help the new management gel better with the team, or understand why certain relatively odd situations kept cropping up.

Anyway – nothing really in particular more to say here – just that I’m surprised by how accepting I am of the status quo when the agitation isn’t a constant pressure.

*shrugs*

seppo

So, a while ago at Home Depot, I ran into a classmate of mine from MIT, who’d married someone I was in a wind symphony with when I was in high school. There are reasons that that isn’t as strange as it might initially seem, but my mind almost blew up when I recognized the guy.

There was also that time when my ex-girlfriend’s friend was my friend’s roommate at a small college in the middle of more-or-less nowhere.

Had a moment like that today, where I got an e-mail from someone I had met a few years ago, in a capacity that I had no idea I could have even begun to expect. Fortuitous coincidence, small world, and even smaller industry.

Quite odd.

The Daily Show had a segment where Ed Helms basically just repeated the above sentence over and over, while discussing the recent event. Rather than making it sound harmless, or trivial, they made it clear that exactly what happened is that Dick Cheney shot a 78 year old man in the face. With a shotgun. A couple things struck me: 1.) It’s a phrase worth repeating, just to push back against the media’s tendency towards Orwellian NewSpeak, and 2.) That’s pretty indicative of how careless and moronic the VP really is.

You know, it’s pretty easy to avoid shooting someone in the face. It may be somewhat more difficult to avoid actually *being* shot in the face, but I think we can all agree that it’s quite trivial to go an entire lifetime without accidentally shooting someone in the face.

I mean, how does a man accidentally shoot his friend, a 78-year old man, in the face? Maybe he’s drunk? High?

This isn’t the kind of thing that happens, you know, on a regular basis. I don’t wake up in the morning, and think, “I might shoot my friend, a 78-year old man, in the face, like the Vice President of the US, Dick Cheney.” Mostly, because I avoid such obviously risky behaviour. I don’t wave a shotgun around near my friends. Or at all, in fact. In large part because I understand the risks of gun use – that I might, like the Vice President, shoot a 78-year old man in the face.

So, you’ve really got to say, that this is quite irresponsible behaviour, on Dick Cheney’s part. He didn’t have to pick up the gun, or go out hunting with it. So he assumes some measure of risk, there. He also could have taken the time to assess the situation – to have spent the resources to make an accurate assessment of whether what he saw was a quail, or his 78 year old friend, who he had not yet shot in the face.

Of course, this isn’t really inconsistent with his previous actions. As the Daily Show segment pointed out, there are obvious and quite hilarious (sad) comparisons between the way Cheney ran us into Iraq, and how he shot his 78 year old fundraising companion in the face. It’s just so strange, that this man is still basically second-in-command of our country, if not first-in-command, really.

Here’s a guy who can’t even take enough precautions, or have sound enough judgement to avoid shooting a 78 year old man in the face. Something I’ve managed to avoid, barely thinking about it, every day of my god damned life.

I dunno – no point, really, other than if you engage in obviously risky and stupid behaviour, your day is likely to end in obviously idiotic tragedy. And, frankly, I hope that the sentence, “Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States of America, shot a 78 year old man in the face,” really becomes widely understood to be an accurate description of what happened. He didn’t “pepper” him with “pellets,” he shot him in the god damned face becuase he was a careless fucking idiot.

I have no idea whether that’s an official psychological term, or not. I’ve been using it for a couple years, to try to describe a sense of persistent, focused negativity I feel towards a particular person. Thing is, the focus of that negativity is quite variable – it’s something I almost always feel in either an explicitly cooperative, *or* competitive setting. The competitive one is pretty straightforward – I’m trying to beat you, therefore, it’s not in my interests to think well of you.

The other one’s a bit stranger, but I have to admit that it’s a pretty consistent factor in most work environments I’ve been in. I’ve almost always found *someone* in my day-to-day work interactions that I can basically focus on as the cause of the majority of the various things that are wrong with the work environment. Thing is, when that “problem has been solved,” it just shifts to the next person – the reason it feels like a “complex,” and not just disgruntlement with a particular coworker.

I think the problem is that I expect a lot out of people I work with. I don’t want this to sound egotistical, but what I *want* out of a coworker is someone who’s on my level. They’ve got to both care about, or be as into the thing as me, and they’ve got to be as smart, or as fast as I am. In some sense, maybe it’s part of the competitive aspect of the feeling – if you’re not an asset, in some sense, you’re an enemy, and must be excised.

It’s a difficult situation, because I wonder if I’ll ever be satisfied. Of course, I know that’s not the case, because I *have* had work arrangements where I lost the nemesis – where I respected, and enjoyed working with everyone on the team. Those teams are usually ones where I’m a junior member, though, because the people that are more experienced teach me – they have value to me. I wonder what happens when/if I surpass them… what then? Are they then baggage that needs to be cast aside?

I think the problem is that I’ve never been someone who goes to work from 9 to 5, and doesn’t really give a shit about the outcome of my work day. I expect people to be as good or better than me – of course, that introduces the question, what do *they* then think about *me*? I dunno. I dunno if it’s a thing, or something I really need to *deal* with, or whether it’s just a matter of channelling that energy into something productive, or if even the whole thing *is* productive, because it’s really focused strongly on excising what I feel is “dead weight” on a project.

The thing that’s bad about it is that it makes it very hard to work with people I feel are inferior. In a sense, it all becomes personal – by not being an asset to the team, I find them personally offensive.

Yes, this is my current attitude at work, and if you’re reading this, no, it’s not you. 🙂

http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/ultraviolet/

Yatz! I loved me some Equilibrium, and this is the same writer/director. The trailer looks pretty damn cool. Not quite as snappy with the dialog, but that’s just Milla Jovovich, I think. The visual style is this weird over-saturated, brightly colored craziness which I think looks awesome.

Is this going to be a good movie? Hell if I know. Am I going to go see it? You’re damned right.

I’m a facts-based guy. I believe that there are things that are quantifiable as “real,” and that ones understanding of the universe should be based on those facts. Still, there are some times when perception creates reality – or rather, whether my perception is correct or not, it is what matters, not what is actually real.

In some sense, that’s not really contradictory, because the perception is an aggregate of many small details, most of which are insignificant or inconsequential on their own. The perception is the bigger picture, even if I have difficulty quantifying what the actual details are that are making me think in a particular way.

What’s really bringing this home to me is a bit of conflict over my job.

My perception, by and large, is that our process is really, truly hosed. That the management of the team is pretty much lost, or is taking long enough to figure out where they are that they might as well be lost. That marketing is running off into their own little world, and paying little if no attention to what it is we’re actually making. That our production process is so completely alien to the people who are trying to implement it that we might as well be talking different languages.

Is that the reality? I don’t know. I’ve read enough people to know, though, that the perception is that we’re screwed, and getting screwed-er by the day. What to do? Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know if the leadership this team has will drag it out of the chaos into which we’ve descended. I don’t know that the leadership understands the dynamics of the team, the interactions with the other teams involved in the project, or whether they’re even competant enough to deal with it, even if they understood the rest.

It puts me in a difficult position, because my loyalties are then split. We have, I believe, a very interesting, potentially quite compelling design. It’s innovative, it’s coherent, and by and large, has the potential to be *great*. I want to make this game. I want it to be excellent.

My other loyalty, of course, is to me. To my life. To my family, friends, etc., that I don’t let work suck the life out of me yet again, for months on end. And that depends on a reliable, well-oiled production team, and good management. Neither of which have been apparent in the last week and a half, on this project. And in terms of our timeline, that’s an eternity.

So… the question is this: I see a sinking ship. It’s a really nice, well appointed ship. I have a lot of opportunity here, and I feel like I could really be captaining the ship with the right moves, in a relatively short while. But, the ship’s still sinking. WTF? Why am I still on it? And most importantly, why am I even considering remaining on board?

drmcninja.com is the best new webcomic I’ve seen in some time. Great stuff.

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The dirt outside our house is incredibly dense, and tightly packed when it’s wet.

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Work has me very subtly, but constantly stressed, pretty much all the time. Not just when I’m at work.

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I only see friends when I have regularly scheduled events with them.

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I haven’t gotten enough sleep lately.

I would make an absolutely terrible politician. Dealing with a small batch of random work politics is nearly making my head explode, and I just feel terrible all around, even though there’s nothing actually really *bad* happening, no one’s being backstabbed, or anything of that nature. Just weird, because basically, we had some *really* nasty political nonsense earlier in this project, and this, on the surface, feels similar.

There’s a couple other people on the team who, I think, could fill this role quite admirably. One might jointly end up doing this thing with me, which is fine, and the other might not. It would be weird if we all went to these meetings – hell, it might even be strange with two – sort of redundant. Not that I have a problem with it, but I don’t have a problem with all three of us going, either. Gah.

So, it’s strange, trying to juggle the various repercussions of this sort of “office politics,” and trying to mitigate the various disappointments and expectations that people have, versus practicality, efficiency, etc.

Makes my head spin, and I cannot imagine how people deal with this sort of crap on a day-to-day basis.

Gah.