by I’ve been off the Pop Ten grid for awhile, lurking in the comments section. I had a few reasons… a new game project that’s been taking up a lot of my time, a move from one house to another that kept me away from the internetz, and a general feeling that I’m not articulate enough to match politics with Chris. For the duration of the Obamathon I’d thought it would be better to shout amen when appropriate but otherwise stay out of the way.
Now that election season has come to a rare happy ending and the cocktail-crashing, mantis-loving, whatever-the-fuck season has come back around, I thought I’d start leaving a few notes on the blog again, and see if anything strikes a chord.
(Crazy-ass picture after the jump!)
Reynolds’ post on Cormac McCarthy got me thinking about what I find inspiring. As I’ve gotten older and moved between the fields of fiction writing, film and game design the things that inspire me have changed. People who study literature are often bowled over by something that a casual escapist reader would find torturous and pointless (the “King James versions” of the world, to crib Jason again). Film students study avant garde movies that seem, to the outsider, like a monkey teabagging a camera lense (and sometimes, the movies actually are a monkey teabagging a camera lense).
Video games are a young medium, so that same divide isn’t really recognized. But after a few years in a Game Design masters program, I can feel a change in my tastes. Where I used to be looking for the Playstation 5 to come along and show me every eyebrow hair blowing in a volumetric breeze, now I get more caught up in a different sort of detail:
Have I lost it, or is this completely amazing? So much detail… everywhere you look, a different miniature moment to follow, all happening at once. What’s better, if you follow the edges of the picture, everything connects: not a single ball is ever lost. It’s a minature world, not as high-fidelity as a multimillion dollar MMO, but just as rich.
