Thought of the Day: Birthdays are made for introspection

As of today I am 28. I suppose I'm two years early for the typical "what have I done with my life" questions, but then I started shaving my head when I was twelve to get used to being bald. I'm a forward thinker so thats the question on my mind today.

What have I done with my life?

The answer is not much. Mostly keep myself alive, entertained, and with enough money coming in to support both. Is this enough? Not really. Not unless I don't think about it. I want to get back to school, I want to really study philosophy, and most of all I really want to be a scholar, but the barrier to entry is time, money, and an understanding of how to do it. The last one there is the hard one. Knowing nothing about scholarships and schools, I find myself paralyzed by indecision. Without a clear path to go forward, I idle on the path I know.

I need a life machete, I need to get myself moving on this. It is officially my goal to be back in school and learning by the time I hit 30. I figure two years is a sufficient time to get the ball rolling. Of course it's also a sufficient time to give up and fail so I suppose there's a danger as well.

My greatest failing is my inability to rouse myself to action when I'm not helping someone other than myself. I find accomplishing anything that directly benefits me and only me, is an uphill battle of titanic per portions. WHY? What makes my own wellbeing so worth skipping over? I want good things for myself but I don't get to have them, or they aren't worth striving for. The only reason I'm pushing myself to go back to school is for my old professor. She wants it for me, and I want to make it happen for her, but if that push wasn't there I wouldn't even consider the effort.

Sloth is my name.

I want to fight this part of me. I want to be accomplished. I WANT GOOD THINGS FOR MYSELF. To that end I'm going to write once a day this week. Sunday to Sunday. No matter how small or frivolous. I often worry to much about what I have to say, but once I sit down the words pour out. I can do this. It comes easily to me, but only once I start.The week begins now.

I am 28 today.

What am I worth: Part 2

I'm still stuck in a bit of an existential doldrum so I find the need for further review of the earlier post. The big question I'm faced with is, if I'm in capable of follow through, if I'm good for nothing other than salted ideas, if nothing I think up will ever see fruition, then should I spend any time thinking them up at all?

Let's be honest, the ideas I come up with are exciting. They're marketable with some extra spin, engaging with some actual development, and strong because as I learned in the biz you steal the best bits from everyone else and then mash them together. I genuinely want to play, read and watch the concepts I come up with, but when the end of the day arrives, I can't be bothered to exert myself enough to make any of them. I've built a life around myself that encourages and rewards apathy. I get up. I go to work. I eat a lunch. I think about all the awesome ideas I have while I work more. I drive home thinking about those ideas. I get home. I ready myself in front of the computer. And then fail to do any of the things I want to and instead I play games, or read a book, or more likely, surf for porn.

I am a parasite!

I feed off the hard work and passion of others!

I live vicariously in the mists of my own head, accomplishing little, and holding myself up to almost no standard!

Sometimes on a good day, like today, I'll write, but not about any of the things I want to. I don't assemble any of the epics that have gnawed at me from within for decades. No, I just jot down mind vomit, which frankly is little better then the masturbation I usually engage in. Even as I do it I'm chastising myself for not writing in the voice of Tom (what little he has) as he tries to salvage the shambles of his life without losing it in the process, or record the discoveries ofReconnoiter as she runs through seas of green grass under an achingly cerulean sky. These visions I have are as strong as anything I see, but I lack something fundamental necessary in making that next step from day dreamer to dream maker.

Is it drive? Maybe. I've always been a fire once and forget it type of game developer. I never want to go back an examine the things I've created because, and this is a sneaking suspicion I have about myself, I don't think I actually know what I'm doing. Whenever it did come time in the dev cycle to make improvements I would always look at what I had put together... And that's pretty much it. I would push some things around, shift them from left to right, but I never really felt it was any greater or lesser improvement on what had already been done. More polished maybe, but what was already there, was it fun? I couldn't ever tell. I don't know what fun is, and that is the heart of game design, the ability to convey an engaging experience. Nothing of what was in the actual game was fun for me. What was fun was the blue sky, highly abstract, early design process. That part I'm REALLY good at. That part I REALLY enjoy. The heady feeling of assembling a game one fundamental piece by piece and then playing those off one another in concept alone was euphoric. The actual slog of building out each of those things was in it's own way, torture for me, especially when it became clear that I lacked the ability to guide both myself and the team around me toward the fruition of my dream. That was anguish.

Of course now that I look at it under this light I'm beginning to understand that I don't really play games for the game. Often times not even the story. I play them for the concept, their most base potentia. When I first hear about a title it exists as little more then a brief description, high concept only, ready to be fleshes out by a broad range of what-ifs and wouldn't-it-be-cools. The next step is getting my hands on it and seeing if it lived up to the pillar I've built, and you better believe I know from pillar building. Often times it doesn't. Oh well it happens, but all of that is secondary to the fact that I engage my media in the same way I produce my own ideas: for the concept's sake alone.

Bringing it back around to the beginning, with this knowledge exposed, should I be coming up with ideas? Should I be wasting my time putting sperm to egg if it will simply sit in the womb, never to be born? Is there some way I could use this talent for ideas to benefit myself and the world as something more then mental wank material? Considering I just came up with an idea for an action/stealth title featuring a character with the ability to alter his personal gravity as a movement mechanic, I don't know. Maybe not.