Late night thoughts about game development.
It’s weird growing up watching cop shows, courtroom shows, movies about newspapers or tv networks. They all presented these complex, deeply hierarchical worlds that had been ticking along unchanged for decades.
1/
— Matt Colville? (@mattcolville) August 8, 2021
In these shows and movies, the characters belong, they do work that matters. They are valued. They know what is expected of them and they can expect to continue this for decades.
As a teen, I always assumed whatever I ended up doing, it would be like that. Instead I end up in game dev. First in tabletop, then video games, now tabletop again. And it always feels like we’re making it all up as we go. There’s no template to follow. No sense of a whole-souled industry going back decades. No sense of the future. The opposite.
3/
— Matt Colville? (@mattcolville) August 8, 2021
Always a feeling like “how long can this last?’
The world I have spent my life in bears no resemblance to anything I was being prepared for. Not in the art I consumed or the subjects I was taught or the advice I was given.
Nothing that seemed important…actually was. I’ve had coworkers confide that it’s nice to see someone ‘my age’ still making a living out of it. It reassures them because there are no old, retired game developers out there with gold watches.
We have no one to look up to. No one who has gone before, pointing the way.
5/
— Matt Colville? (@mattcolville) August 8, 2021
It’s amazing we get to do this, I think about how lucky we all our all the time. It’s insane, the shit I’ve gotten to work on. Insane.
But the flip side is; there’s no bedrock. No institutions supporting you. No whole-souled culture going back generations.
6/ It’s a hell of a life. It’s rewarding and creative and some people can make a living at it.
But it’s also scary and isolating.
fin
— Matt Colville? (@mattcolville) August 8, 2021