Experiments

 On a strange note, I would love to write a game.

I know the line, "If you want to write for adults, write a book." It gets repeated enough by those in big tech trying to stick to outdated notions of how communication works. I abhor that thinking, a book is a book, and a game is for all audiences.

We can't ever break out of our roles or preset notions of how things are sold in stores. Apple and Amazon say, "We have book stores! Sell your ideas there!"

And the app stores are strangely curated for all-audience experiences.

They have grown so big they are stuck in the ways of the past. They cannot imagine new ways of communicating ideas other than pieces of paper, sounds in a music file, or moving pixels in a video file. They can't sell anything outside those experiences. Their ideas of communication are limited to the past.

I am not knocking books, I love them. But I love writing so much there are times when I wish I could escape the confines of the page.

There are times I play the games I play and think to myself how strangely shallow they are, how plainly written, how horribly limited, and how terribly uninteresting they are.

And I know people in the world of game development. Their worlds are hell. Their technology to deliver experiences sucks incredibly bad to the point to deliver a rudimentary experience costs hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of staff. Everything is pre-canned. Everything is the same. Art is expensive out of your wildest dreams. Animation even more so. Voice acting. Motion capture. Virtual sets. Sound. The massive headache of music.

Game industry. Your tools are crap.

You will never escape the era of tens-of-millions of dollar budgets and massive staffs to lay off.

And making a game will never get any better. Your tools will never improve.

Compared to my tools as a writer.

It is at this point I typically give up. Screw this. Back to books. Creating interactive entertainment means interacting with a corrupt, technology averse, set in their ways, and pay me for nothing entertainment industry. It means fighting technology companies and their lowest common denominator interfaces and delivery formats. It means fighting payment processors and hosting companies. It means developing a channel to deliver, but also developing a format in which to deliver and supporting that.

You lose the plot after a while and you are doing software development instead of creating a damn thing.

So I return to writing. Less headaches. You are doing more of what you love here.

I am home.

But I know, in a way, I feel the tech priests of this new online religion have strangely failed us. They have grown so big they are stuck in the ways of the past.

They are not interested in creating new ways to communicate ideas.

They are forever chained to improving the delivery of the old formats.