A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's the final dollar amount of Zarf's fundraiser. I know, right?

Warmest congratulations and excitements to radiotelescope, who will officially launch his full-time, solo game-development career with the start of 2011! It's been a long time coming.

Or rather, go ahead, but I'll just tell you the same thing I tell everyone else, when they say "Hey, you should make Volity for $SOME_NEW_THING" (most recently, this has been Google Wave). "No," says I, "you should make it. It's an open protocol. Knock yourself out."

My attitude towards Volity today is something like borderline hostility. I consider it an aspect of what William Gibson has called "the great clomping foot of nerdism", the kind that is always more interested in taking things apart and exhaustively cataloguing the components than it is in creating wonderful new stuff. Obsessed with categorization and taxonomies, of finding the common root to all things, and then trying to capture that in code, or at least in sprawling wikis. And then, when it's "done", wondering why nobody except for one's fellow robed adepts show any interest at all in it.

It's the video-game equivalent of spending more time writing and trimming an enormous, detailed "world bible" than in creating any stories set in that world. Or of tabletop-game "systems" like Icehouse or Piecepack, which despite their aspirations never sold to anyone other than hardcore game geeks (hi).

If you want to make a video game, go make it. The tools, community and resources to help you do so are all there for you. And yet, if you're a certain kind of geek, the temptation will exist to instead treat your game idea as the top level of a stack: the real prize, you're sure, lay in generalizing all the lower levels, paring and refactoring them into some sort of Ur-Game technology that will solve gaming, somehow, and lead inevitably to lifelong fortune and glory.

My advice is: don't go there, because I know you have great ideas and you're a ninja and everything, but that is folly. Please just make your game instead. I guarantee that you'll be happier with it, and you'll make more fans that way, too. If you're new to making games, the fans might not come, but you'll be so thrilled at what you made - even though it sucks - that you'll do it again, and again, and it will keep getting better. And eventually you'll really be onto something.

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I started writing this post with the intent that it'd accompany a release of Webgamut source code to Volity's Sourceforge account. I had a burst of energy to do so earlier today, but it didn't take long to peter out. I am loath to put context-free, commented-but-otherwise-undocumented code out there, because that sounds worse that nothing. I'd instead want to spend a day or so writing some nice farewell documentation for it, first. And I just can't muster the energy right now to re-learn how to get this 18-month-old glop of Perl, Mason and Javascript to run on my laptop.

What do you think? Would it be useful to you or anyone you know were I to just paste a couple of my hard disk's directories into Sourceforge and just put a "Here, you figure it out" README next to them? I don't know, I'm asking. Would the fact that the target for this maneuver would intentionally be obsessed game geeks make it OK?

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This post also briefly had a concluding thought along the lines of "I wish someone told me all this six years ago, alas," but that's just dumb, and I apologize for the five minutes of wrong-idea-giving it gave.

I don't regret my work on Volity, nor the work that others have put in, and certainly not any interest that others still have in the project. I think that's great, and I wouldn't even be asking about Sourceforge if y'all didn't exist. I just wanted to put my own current attitude about Volity into words. I'm proud of what we did manage to build, and I am wiser - the real kind, not the cynical kind - for the experience.

Why did I come into the office today? I've had some nicely productive days at home this week. I have a meeting this afternoon, but that's not for hours yet. I guess I just like the walk. News flash: I can take long walks without having to sit in a cube farm for six hours halfway through. Yeah I know.

One result of the contractor-empowerment thing I posted about a couple days ago is resolve to bill a full work-day for every day that I work. Um... wait, so what were you doing before? Eh, I don't even want to talk about it. The point is that ITA agreed to this arrangement because they wanted to take me on part-time, but had no infrastructure set up for that, but on the third hand had been meaning to investigate bringing in some contractors. So they'd been expecting me to bill in day-long chunks, and let us say that they've been enjoying quite a bargain from me instead.

As for the work-at-home thing, even if the intent was to let me be a fakey-fake part-time employee, the true fact is that I am a contractor and I should treat myself like one. And I mean, hell, why not: I get no benefits and my scale kind of blows, compared to other software contractors with my skill and experience. OTOH I don't have many of the responsibilities that my full-time ITA friends must shoulder, such as on-call support periods and having to attend frequent meetings. I think that being in the office by default also falls into this category.

My situation in the ITA office does not present an optimal work environment for me. I sit in an all-male cube farm, and it's probably an experience closely resembling what you imagine. The monogenderedness of it is a real issue for me; Harvard had a swear-to-gord fifty-fifty split among the scientists there, even if all the tech and admin staff (incl. Y.T.) fell along the usual gender lines. I worked with the scientists enough to get workish exposure to both men and women and this was important to me. I do not get that here.

But that said, I kind of don't interact with anyone here. There's rarely any need to. The cube is a three-walled, one-man dealie, I get to use my own computer - my nearly six-year-old iBook - through which I can pump pink noise into my ears at will, drowning out all the ambient conversation. So I'm actually fairly well personalized and isolated here, which is nice. But what's the point when I can just be home, surrounded by my very own environment and comforts, instead? The worst thing I get there is Nicky barking once in a while. Feh.

Going to make some changes.

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Confession: I'm kind of over geeks and geek humor and geek culture and all of that, and I have been for some time now. You may call me a geek if you wish and I suppose I wouldn't be able to deny many of the line-item reasons you'd have for doing so. But I don't identify. Most of the time.

derspatchel and friends have invented a great new mnemonic system for Morse Code. (Background.)

He didn't explicitly say it, but I get the feeling that kynn just messaged me from the middle of his root canal just so I'd note it here.