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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Social gaming, they say, is the New Hawt Thang™ these days. Everyone’s into those newfangled MMOs, after all, so that seems to be the way you need to go as a developer in order to strike gold, isn’t it? Yet, there’s a huge problem here. Even though games with social aspects to them are supposed to be ridiculously popular, I just can’t get into them.

Now, there are many reasons why this might be the case; namely, they usually have too much violence and acquisition-based gameplay, they’re huge time sinks I can’t afford to waste my energy on, etcetera etcetera. But one that really stands out is the fact that they don’t appear to suit my personality. I’m a rather strong introvert, you see, which generally means that dealing with people is exhausting for me, and I often need time alone to “recharge my batteries”, so to speak. Hence, having to spend a big chunk of my leisure time trying to socialise with other people is horribly unappealing, particularly since I have to do a lot of it in the real world as it stands. The situation is even further exacerbated when one has to deal with immature teenagers and the like who type in horribly undecipherable netspeak and act extremely racist and/or sexist under the guise of anonymity, who appear to show up even more in online games than they do in real life. Ugh.

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In many circles around which I wander, it seems as though having a blog is completely and utterly not hip. Even more not hip are people who actually update their blogs on a regular basis, particularly those who write about mundane, daily events. What amuses me more is when people belonging to such schools of thought proceed to start their own blogs anyway, all the while trying to assuage their cognitive dissonance by referring to themselves as “lame” for having a blog, continuously pointing out the fact that “it’s not one of those kinds of blogs”, refusing to update on a regular basis, [1] and even going so far as to refuse to use the word “blog” altogether. Because apparently, it’s also unfashionable to actually like the word “blog”.

I think it’s kind of silly, really. Blogs, in and of themselves, aren’t lame; they’re a tool out there for people to use, for good or for ill. Writing about mundane, daily events isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, particularly as there are people out there who can make the most mundane things sound absolutely fascinating, just as others can write about extremely novel concepts and still put people to sleep. And even then, the concept of what’s interesting and what isn’t is all a matter of opinion. [2] Furthermore, “blog” is an awesome word. I fell in love with it back in 2001 when I heard Neil Gaiman saying it on TV. So there.

Oh, and I had a cinnamon bun for breakfast today.

I finally got around to finishing The Longest Journey, a very popular classic adventure game from about eight years ago that people have been exhorting me to play for ages, because, y’know, it’s a storytelling marvel and stuff. Last month or so, I saw it bundled with a special-edition copy of Dreamfall in my local game shop, and thought that was just as good an excuse as any to get around to it. Here’s an amalgam of my thoughts:

At the beginning, I was far from impressed. Graphically, everything that was supposed to impress me back in 1999 has long ago started to show its age; unlike Grim Fandango, which was released a year previously, TLJ opted for making its 3D models look as real as was possible using the technology of the time, rather than designing its characters in an iconic fashion that served the dual purpose of masking current technological limitations. The cutscenes were nice, owing to Ragnar Tørnquist’s cinematography background, but then, I have a bit of a grudge against cinematic cutscenes in general, both because the player can’t interact with them and because they’re hard for little indies like myself to make.

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For those who hadn’t heard me say so elsewhere, I attended PAX in Seattle over the weekend. It brought to mind a smaller, friendlier E3, which is certainly an improvement in my eyes, particularly given the complete lack of booth babes. Much of my time was spent attending every single panel in which the staff of Telltale made an appearance, resulting in such brag-worthy experiences as getting called by name whenever I went up to ask questions and even playing the role of Sybil in an audience-generated Sam & Max scene, in which I got to say such classic lines as my now-favourite “I’m an orthopaedic surgeon, baby!” [1] I also ended up spending quality time chatting with assorted internet buddies in person, as well as running into a couple of people I used to know from high school. (I suppose it was bound to happen, considering that Seattle is about four hours away from my hometown.)

The one thing that bothered me throughout, however, was several game companies’ overwhelming tendency to refer to their games as “products” and to their players as “consumers”. It’s unsurprising that they would do so, really, but it also makes me more than a little uncomfortable. What does it mean to “consume” a game, anyway? Did I miss the memo stating that games are to be officially relegated as food items or somesuch? Maybe that’s the reason why they decrease in value as they get older. Hmm…

I came across a message board post today involving someone from a Greek casual game company looking to start working on their first adventure game. In a seeming attempt at gathering data as to what elements they would include in such a game, this individual decided to poll an audience of adventure game fans as to what they love and hate about the genre. Of course, people started to respond with things like “I love a good story and good puzzles” and “I hate puzzles that don’t make sense”, and while I agree with them for the most part, I have this strange niggling feeling that everyone’s missing the point.

This is how I responded:

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