Millie(let)

Forever thinking about this tweet thread with game writing exercises from Katie Chironis, currently a Principal Designer at Bungie, previously the Design Director at Riot Games. If you can do these game-writing exercises well, you are a God-tier narrative designer, and I will move Heaven and Earth to work with you.

(Yes, I'm doing narrative today, why do you ask??)

FOUR: This NPC will ask the player to kill 40 forest wolves, 9 times. Write a short blurb that explains why this NPC needs the player to kill 450 forest wolves for some reason. Make it heartwarming, bleak, and memorable, but also keep in mind 98% of players won't read it.

in gonna be real, this one actually makes me really sad because i've watched enough people play games¹ that i know it's probably true, and like, the unwillingness to take an interest or engage with what the game is trying to say or often even entire gameplay mechanics is just... yeah

like a lot of the time you can have five NPCs saying "go to the mine!" and a glowing path leading to the mine with an arrow pointing in the direction of the mine and a glowing red mark on the map where the mine is and a giant billboard with hollywood lighting that reads "GO TO THE MINE" in a font that takes up a quarter of the screen, and people will still get confused and upset that they don't know where to go next

i love this medium and the incuriosity just kills me

i used to want to make games, i taught myself to program to do it! but the state of the industry along with the realization that i just do not understand how other people think about things means i will probably never actually do anything about it²

1. excluding speed and challenge runs because yeah, like, they've got other self-imposed priorities here

2. it's been so long since i've made anything but command line utilities and services that i don't even remember how to do much of this and the last time i made anything was before GPUs were invented so any knowledge i have here is functionally useless anyway

Yeah "i used to want to make games, i taught myself to program to do it! but the state of the industry along with the realization that i just do not understand how other people think about things means i will probably never actually do anything about it" is just about the biggest mood of all time.

I kinda still want to make some game-shaped things but only in my spare time and with no expectation it'll make money.

I can at least thank gamedev for giving teenage-me a hyperfixation that would, 10+ years later and after dropping out of college, lead to me getting lifted out of precariat helljobs and into cushy comfy cursed silicon valley labor aristocracy jobs. that part worked out pretty good

Do you ever fall in love with the means and forget the ends?

Melodramatic way of saying enginedev is fascinating to me but I no longer really give much of a shit about actually making a videogame*. This counts as mixed-up priorities (as far as doing work that actually benefits anyone) probably.

* exceptions given to not-quite-videogame digital social spaces along the lines of Garry's Mod, Second Life, Minecraft Creative Mode, VRChat, etc.

There are things I have in common with techbros. I don't have the same brainworms - the experience of having both of my parents lose their jobs to tech (to automation and what the internet did to newspapers, respectively), and for about 10 years being really fucking poor and on the edge of homelessness at all times with none of the standard trust-fund-kid daddy money to save me, substantially grounds me in the reality of things.
BUT
My god I am a sucker for cheesy bass-heavy dancy EDM.
bottom-of-the-barrel youtube video with an anime girl pointing guns at the camera album art type trash that I love, I live in this trashcan, I am possummode for eating this trash, yesss
Most of you might not have been around actual Silicon Valley guys enough to know this, but hardstyle and dubstep and electro and such are A Thing in those circles. This might have something to do with Burning Man and that culture's relation to Burning Man, I don't know. Writing code while listening to this shit makes it really fun and easy to get into a flow state for me, maybe it's that way for a lot of people?

(The other thing I've got in common with them is reading sci-fi novels and having a maybe-unrealistic intuition about how much they apply to real life, but this is modulated by the grounding of the class shit and so it more takes the shape of "what if anarcho-syndicalist cyberpunks had a pirate gene therapy clinic" and stuff like that)