It’s been more than two years since the first time I got paid to develop video games, and almost two months since I started working in the industry full-time. Sometime between then and now, I appear to have semi-officially transitioned from “hobbyist” to “professional”: a career dream I’ve had ever since I was prepubescent. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what that entails, and how this niggling detail has affected my work now and will continue to affect it in the future.

Initially, I’d thought — and sort of worried, to be frank — that once I started getting paid to develop games, I’d stop wanting to do freeware projects anymore. That has since come to wind up being far from true. Instead, I’m learning to see my job and my personal work as complimentary. The things I learn at my job — techniques of the trade, words of wisdom from those who have been there — helps inspire my personal projects, and in the meantime, what comes out of my own stuff — the willingness to try new things without the pressure of making sure it sells well — improves my craft and therefore makes me more useful to people who pay people like me to do stuff for them.

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This just in: I’ve gone and joined the Blogs of the Round Table. Okay, so the reason I’m doing this now instead of, say, sometime in the last several months I’ve been reading Man Bytes Blog is becaues this month’s topic, broadly speaking, is on character relationships in games, and as most of you know, it’s a topic I just can’t resist. And of course, it never hurts to get more exposure. So, here we go…

There are obviously many kinds of character relationships in games, and this time around, I’m going to focus solely on the relationship between the player and the player character. I’m sure I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I take a slightly unorthodox view on what this relationship must entail, which is that I play games not to be the main character, but rather to be the main character’s conscience. I say “unorthodox” because it seems like a lot of the leading interactive storytelling theory out there seems very concerned with giving the player a lot of freedom to act in whatever manner they choose (i.e. “being oneself”) and being able to respond to said freedom in a dramatically coherent fashion. From a programmer’s perspective — and I work as a programmer, so I should know — the fact that this problem is difficult and complex is a huge part of what makes it so fascinating.

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…has now been released.

Regrettably, I didn’t manage to use everyone’s artwork, but I think I got a good cross-section of styles in. Regardless, I thank you all for the submissions; developing this short game was a fun and interesting exercise for me, and I couldn’t have done it without the excellent audience participation. I’ll probably write more about the game itself later, but in the meantime, why don’t you just play it already?

Last night, I went to watch a talk given by critically-acclaimed sandbox game designer Will Wright, who put forth the opinion that the best stories are those that can be easily deconstructed. Like Legos, you should be able to take parts of a story and put them together in alternate ways, or combine them with different stories. You should be able to answer questions as to whether Darth Vader would win in a fight against Lord Voldemort. In other words, the best stories are those that tend to result in fan fiction.

I found myself unable to disagree more. Whatever happened to “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”? If a story’s parts are easy to separate, then it means that characters must be clear-cut archetypes, often representative of one particular attribute. I don’t enjoy such stories, because I like my main characters to be complex and three-dimensional, like real people are. As many of you no doubt know, my view on concepts such as “good” and “evil” is that they’re relational rather than absolute. Archetypes always tend to act the same all the time, with consistent value judgements applied to such actions. This not only makes for boring storytelling, in my view; it can potentially be harmful as well. Look at some of our world leaders and their polarizing “you’re either with us or against us” rhetoric, for example.

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I’m going to go off on a tangent and write about critically-acclaimed Canadian author Douglas Coupland. I’ve been reading quite a bit of his work lately, and it seems to be rather hit-or-miss where my tastes are concerned.

The ones I really liked:
The Gum Thief
Eleanor Rigby
Microserfs

The ones I found a bit meh:
JPod [1]
Generation X
Life After God
Hey Nostradamus!

I’m currently trying to read Shampoo Planet, but I seem to be getting bored of it, so I probably won’t finish.

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