So something happened around March 2020 that required me to work from home. So I took a nap for the last 5 months, and just woke up now. Let’s check the news to see what I missed.
… oh God.
Of course that was a bad joke. Staying indoors every day, I rely on the news for updates. 21st century news programs always had a reputation for unnecessarily scaring people, but 2020 is a genuinely horrible year, and it seems like not a single week passes without a horrific decade-defining event taking place. Which is not to say the last 4 years in general haven’t already been full of anxiety and fear…
This is a game-developer’s blog, not a political-opinion one. And if I dared say anything, no matter what view or side it was on, someone, somewhere, would attack back at me and threaten my life or well-being. And that’s exactly why I can’t help but say this:
America in particular has become an indicator for the rest of the world, containing extreme versions of both the best and worst of humanity and its culture, its greatest successes and most disturbing failures. After decades of anxiety (financial, racial, etc.) with no indication of improvement or change, it makes sense that some want to demand it, not backing down until its resolved once and for all (while refusing to offer any absolute solution; after all, a single perfect solution doesn’t exist). However, with such extremes and binary expectations of opinion, society in America (and for the most part, only America) have completely forgotten how to listen.
If one person speaks of their pain, others only think about speaking of their own struggles, neither believing the other to be the true victim, and not thinking for a moment that both are in pain, or that both are responsible. If one person demands or begs for change, others demand and beg to protect what little they have. If one person judges, others fight to prove their innocence or ask for redemption that will never be given. If one person yells, the other yells back. This is true for all political sides of the country, not just one. How much could be solved if everyone put their emotions in check, sat down, and calmly talked to each other about how to fix things, and then committed to moving forward on what they agreed on?
Whenever I watch the news, I feel a thousand different emotions and reactions, not just one or two. Everyone seems to ignore the long-held truth that the majority of Americans are not on the far left or right, but somewhere in the middle. There is no such thing as a single side being consistently right or wrong. If there were, politics would be easy, and the “wrong” side would never have a chance to lead. And when two sides insist they are 100% right, I can’t help but shudder at how both of them are horribly, horribly wrong (and I also wonder how much would be solved in there were simply more than two options, like most other countries have?).
It’s not my place to have any opinion: I’m not American. But what happens in America affects the world, and their views and culture affects mine and those around me. So I hope that Americans (ALL OF THEM, INCLUDING YOU) wake up, shut up, and calmly listen to those they disagree with, and work together to find out a way to balance things and move forward. Protests and screaming are one way to have your opinion heard, but only heard, and not listened to. Violence and chaos is worse: the natural reaction to force is an equal or stronger force to end it. And despite all the violence already on the news, I’m very afraid that things will get far worse before they ever get better.
I’m sorry I had to get that off my chest. Now, games… and more opinions incoming.
It’s understandable that world events forced large conventions and conferences to move to online-only. But I was shocked that E3 was abandoned in favor of a series of events controlled by individual publishers and companies, not just over one week, but over the ENTIRE summer, from May to August. Immediately, I knew this would be a disaster.
And yet, no one I knew agreed with me. Millions of people tune into E3 LIVE as it happens, but everyone I knew hated it: the pompous self-importance, the inevitable disappointment when your favorite franchise doesn’t announce a sequel, and so on. I’ve spoken to developers in the past who make games for a living, who claimed to not know what E3 was!
But I’ve stressed the importance of E3 before. It wasn’t ego-prancing, it was pageantry. It was showmanship. The evolution of press conferences at E3 would go on to inspire other industry conferences from Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and are far better than some industry conferences even today, that still resemble an awkward speaker in front of a Powerpoint on a TV screen. E3 was like Christmas for gamers, a time of year to get excited about. Even if you weren’t completely happy with your presents, you couldn’t deny there were some fun surprises that made it worthwhile (unless you’re single-mindedly waiting for the next “Zelda” announcement… understandable, but broaden your horizons, man).
Instead, 2020 was like having Christmas spread out over 4 months. People I talked to thought this was a great idea: waking up to surprises every day! But no one foresaw what I did: the number of surprises were the same, and were just as disappointing as they’d ever be. The only change now was the social-media effect of needing to be always-connected, checking every day for any announcement for the next “Direct” or “State of” event, instead of knowing exactly what day it’d be on months in advance. And always being disappointed with a smaller group of trailers after weeks of waiting, only to start waiting again, like an addiction.
By July, the constant reaction I’ve heard: “I miss E3.” Not in person, of course: most people I knew tuned out and weren’t paying attention to anything by that point. But everyone I see online seems to agree on that now.
Not that we had much choice, of course. No one would have had their announcements ready by June. Even postponing to August, or any exact date, was too hopeful. We’re less than 3 months away from a once-every-eight-year console launch-season, and we still don’t know the release dates or prices! Never mind that their launch titles have largely been delayed, making for one of the weakest incentives to buy a new console in memory.
The thing is, virtually every individual online press conference and showcase during Summer of Gaming 2020 has been disappointing to varying degrees. But what was announced wasn’t the problem, it was just the lack of volume and empty space in between. If we compiled all the events from the past 4 months into a 3-day stream of announcements, we’d have something exactly like an E3, and a pretty good one too! And then we’d be able to MOVE ON, waiting for Gamescom or whatever, allowing us to have the natural cycle of peaks and valleys, instead of attempting to keep us at peak hype for 4 months straight.
Anyway, I know the trend has been moving towards individual events with publisher-controlled content and dates, but I hope reactions this year are a wake-up call to remind industry players of the importance E3 had. I don’t know about backroom politics or costs, but at least having everything condensed into a single agreed-on week for that season is vital for building hype and excitement. A constant drip of nothings from social media feeds already makes me numb to when the good stuff comes, I don’t want the games industry to fall into that trap too.
Finally, you’d think working from home for the past 5 months would have helped me make progress on my own indie game, right?
… Nah.
There are countless recent articles online about how an in-home work environment makes it difficult to focus, or to separate real-work schedules from hobbies and personal time. That’s all been true for me. Even worse are the social gatherings: there were already too many I was attending before March, and now I have all of those online, plus extra communication with family in a country I can no longer visit. The result is that I am still making progress, slow and steady, as I always have. But it’s still far too slow, arguably slower than before.
It’s frustrating because I feel like I’m close, dang it. The process of making a game of my size (small, but still bigger than anything I’ve done before) is like forming a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, not really making anything recognizable until large chunks of the picture are formed, with a rapid finish at the very end. I almost have all the pieces I need, but not quite. And after that, I still have to form stuff together… I have no idea how close or far away from finishing I really am.
2020 is a nasty year, but also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take advantage of extra time I (theoretically) now have. If I can’t manage to finish the thing by December, I really need to make a decision about whether to scrap it, or to release it unfinished as a free tech demo of some kind. It’s been almost 5 years since I’ve started this iteration of the project, and I can’t spend another 5 years on it… there’s just too many other things in life to do…
