I'm working through a sinus headache right now, trying to figure out ways to deliberate responsibilities for my team to create a design document for a video game prototype that will be done by February 14th, 2014.
If you told me that would be happening to me, two years ago, I would say that my future self is an idiot and ask him what bug he caught that made him try to do something so insanely big.
I'd shrug at him. "Why not?" is the easiest cop-out. There are lots of reasons why not, including:
Pain and suffering
Anxiety related to professional, academic, and social commitments now thrust upon you as someone with responsibility
Responsibility
The halting of all other aspects of your life
Caring about something
Mental health
The list could very well go on, but I'll end it there. This blog has had stints of activity and non-activity so much that the only guaranteed aspect of its existence is that nothing is going to happen for a long period of time. Just refer to the side-bar and you can review embarrassingly written prose entries about my high-school self, or conceited movie reviews that are only ever just circle-jerking my favorite genre flicks.
The point is, what I have to say, that I want to share, has become intermittent for really only one reason: I have nothing of significance to say.
Most of what I write is stream-of-consciousness, and from up until I started this thing to about, the end of September, nothing that came out of that stream was of particular importance to anyone. Given that, I was well aware of that fact once 2011 hit, I still kept going because, who's going to judge what you have to say, if you type it in a blog post?
Well, significance hit me in the face at the start of this semester like a ton of bricks and now there's some issues with dealing with the aftermath.
I am making a video game.
I love video games.
I love telling stories and hearing stories and reading/watching/playing stories.
I am making a story that will be told through said video game.
I'll try not to reduce the importance of my existence at this very moment to those four sentences, but I'll be damned if those aren't the four sentences I remind myself of more often than not lately. The idea is still absurd. The process is overwhelming. By February 14th, the reward could be... dare I say...
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Screenplay by Travis Beacham & Guillermo Del Toro
Starring Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi & Idris Elba
Produced by Legendary Pictures
I was twelve years old again for approximately two hours.
Like the Jaegers and Kaiju that compose of this film, Pacific Rim puts its heart on its sleeve right out of the gate, and dares you not to smile, at least a little bit, and think,
"We're shitty people, Joel. It's been that way for a long time."
Developer: Naughty Dog
Creative Director: Neil Druckmann
Game Director: Bruce Straley
Lead Designer: Jacob Minkoff
There's not much to say about this thing that hasn't been said already. I'm only saying those things that everybody's been saying because you don't finish playing a game like this and have nothing to say about it.
That being said, the ending of this game left me pretty speechless.
Rightfully so. The folks that brought us the Uncharted series, with each installment pushing the "games as art" debate into more mixed, ambiguous and dangerously arguable territory with its state-of-the-art cinematic ability at the time.
No question here, that if Uncharted 1 through 3 were a testing grounds of how to push gaming technology towards untapped potential, The Last of Us is a product of that endeavor.
Game mechanics, level design, art, UI, AI, multiplayer, DLC, content distribution, back-end, front-end, and all that other crap - yes, that's the bones of any video game anybody's ever made, from Candy Crush Saga to Heavy Rain.
They're the innate bread and butter. Without one or the other, it's not a game. At least Metacritic won't say it's a good one. So what do players look for in a good game? What's missing from the bread and butter? It's not rocket science.
If there's one thing to say about 2013, it's that nobody and everybody cares about you, often at the same time.
We're halfway through the year, and things are coming to a head. Graduating in less than a year now should give any sane twenty-something bouts of uncontrollable existential dread and chronic anxiety up until you're throwing your convocation hat into the air... but it's strangely quiet on this front.
Call it my persistent, now pseudo-notorious apathetic streak, or call it grim realism, or call it not giving a fuck, but there's no crippling, crumbling feeling regarding my near future, as there probably should be.
Worry about the Little Things
My hard drive broke when I moved back home. All of my pertinent, high-quality video data was stored on it as a back-up, so it's fitting and divinely ironic for my back-up to stop working when I needed it most: when I have nothing to do for four months of my life.
That being said, it was less of a back-up and more of a primary storage device that seemed indestructible but I got it from the Apple Store, so that's my bad. At any rate, these beautiful entries have yet to be followed up on:
It's a shame, because I was starting to have fun talking about things that nobody cared about but me. Moving back from the city to the suburbs, I've concluded, quite literally sucks the soul from your bones.
You find out quickly that having nothing to say (in my case especially) doesn't bode well in any situation. They'll be back though, eventually.
My writing notebook is literally hanging by threads, but it was a very nice birthday gift from someone I bumped into from high school walking down Bathurst, and it reminded me of "The Little Things" which is all romanticized so perfectly when you're almost twenty and living in the city for the first time, and ~~**anything can be yours if you dream it**~~~.
Now, it's breaking because I'm using it too much, and not because I haven't been treating with proper care, like I was a few months ago. It could be a reflection in my jarring and sudden change in perspectives after physically changing locations into, what I feel, are two extremely dichotomous states of being.
The nearest thing to me is a Starbucks that's always busy, because everyone who is bored goes to a Starbucks. Next to that, a Wal-Mart. Choose your door, your prize awaits. I usually come out of said doors poorer in my pocket and my soul.
Yet, I worry about these things, because it's nice to think those are the only things to worry about. They're not; no, not by a long shot. But they fit the bill of acceptable losses in the face of that dreadful cliff of adulthood. Jump, they say. They never tell you how far down you gotta go.
So you grab at the tangible things. The empty wallet, the shitty internship, the tattered notebook. Yeah, these things I can care about. You can't care about the stability of your future quite like you can care about how much caramel the barista put in your latte. Try, I dare you.
The Little Things? They're the branches you grab as the abyss of darkness rushes at you while you're falling down that cliff. Beautiful analogy, isn't it? It's not? Well, fuck you. Cliffs are great analogies.
Tell me my dreams are near unattainable, and like the sheep I am I'll be calculating how much it costs to commute home today, and say "What was that again?"
Nobody Cares
I check that "Connections" tab on my Twitter homepage frequently. I don't know why, none of my tweets are particularly notable or witty. The subtextual grab of importing the question, "Does somebody care about me today?" so directly into one click on a web page is brilliant on Twitter's part, come to think of it.
Nobody cares, yes. Cold hard truths are usually the easiest to figure out. Climate change is happening. Dinosaurs walked the earth. Gay men do indeed get it in the butt.
And nobody cares (I mean generally; people do care about global warming).
Doesn't mean you shouldn't. I guess, the 2013 distinction is sort of moot, but I feel it inclusive to the context of the 'nobody cares' sentiment. Mind you, this is outside of a connotation of disdain, nihilism, or outright negativity towards myself or others. Think of it as a a buzzword, or a hashtag. #nobodycares.
That's definitely already a hashtag.
Nobody cares in the context that everybody cares at the same time. Everybody is an ephemeral body of water, floating around the internet, inserting itself into the gaps between our online identities and the platforms we use to craft them. Eventually they press up onto our screens like an aquarium octopus and say "Here, this is EVERYBODY. Look at them ALL." There's so many, aren't there?
Each suction cup is an old high school acquaintance.
Everybody cares about that status you posted. Everybody loves that cake you took a picture of. Everybody knows you love the cottage. Everybody cares to the extent that they don't have to care about anything outside of what's dictated of them.
So, nobody cares about the fact that you may be feeling torn between career paths or personal freedoms and what you want to do. Nobody cares about the secrets you're holding that you can't trust anybody with. Nobody cares about your fears, your anxieties, your hopes and dreams. At least, there aren't any likes on Facebook to show that they do. Ain't that a bitch?
Everybody Cares
It is a bitch. Jay-Z got it wrong, that one problem-- hell, all 99 other ones, they're all bitches. They're snippy, you can't win with them, and they usually leave you in a bad mood and take something of yours you probably won't get back for a while.
Bitches, man.
It's the big one, and she's called "life". I like euphemisms - they're like bite-sized ways to take in really hard concepts to grasp, sometimes. Everybody cares about life, cause we all want to keep it, or have it. Or live it.
Yeah, nobody knows that you have all these hidden, suppressed, and often troubling personal problems that only your therapist talks to you about, but everybody is probably experiencing something similar. They all care about those problems of theirs, cause life serves it to them on a silver platter every day.
Everybody cares that reality is filled with tragedy and hurt and pain and suffering. The Little Things keep us occupied though. The other 99 problems, so we don't have to pay attention to the Big One, the one with the Cold Hard Truths and the absence of an answer.
Find those alone, and I'll throw you a party. It means nobody cared enough so that the only person that mattered was you. Great. Keep the victory to yourself, but share the answer with the rest of us: the everybody.
Then, the likes and subscribers and retweets will mean little when the only currency that matters, the currency of human relationships, is cashed in for you. And then you realize everybody cares and nobody cares.
But, in the end, you care.
What is existence but a convenient set of contradictions?
