What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand

30 November 2009

Dave Eggers on “keeping shit real”:

Because, in the end, no one will ever give a shit who has kept shit ‘real’ except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things. The keeping real of shit matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It’s fashion, and I don’t like fashion, because fashion does not matter.

What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

The whole article is great.

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Happy memories

30 November 2009

salamis-pier.jpg

I swam here. Right here, just off the pier. So buoyant, so warm; bobbed around, drifted out to sea with the tide, fought the tide to swim in, drifted in again. Behind me, behind the shore, and likely deep, deep underneath me, under the sea, was Salamis. Forty-five minutes later, the rain gushed down.

But for half an hour, I bobbed around, warm, calm, happy.

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  • "As Hecker suggested, though, that crucial consideration of the "why" of game development — along with related questions like "What are you trying to say to people?" or "What influenced this?" or "Are you trying to say anything at all?" — seems to be less important in this medium than it is elsewhere. That's understandable, since "fun" can be pursued for its own benefit, and to great and impressive effect. Surely we've got that covered by this point, though, and there's bandwidth for more." Chris Remo thinks out loud for a bit.
    (tags: games intent design fun meaning chrisremo )
  • "On the last day of tutoring, I asked my 15-year-old student if he knew that he had a chance to woo and win Bastila. “Really?” He thought he’d known everything about the game, but the dialogue option never registered as flirtation. His face, usually so focused with youthful liveliness, grew wary. He frowned and blinked. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the fact that his beloved game would contain something so foreign. So adult. " Marie Mutsuki Mockett – what a name! – writes about KOTOR, Carth Onassi, and a little bit of magic.
    (tags: games kotor romance bioware writing )
  • "The alien tripods are decimating the city with ion cannons. Wild one-eyed dog-pigs with irritatingly high voices are roaming the streets, mutilating the populace with their fire breath, doing their best to keep their pet radioactive zombies in check. Meanwhile, you – the only one who can do anything to stop this genocide – are in stuck in a medical pod, being instructed by some asshole lab assistant on how to move your head up and down." Hardcasual don't like tutorials.
    (tags: games tutorials instructions hardcasual )
  • "It boils Digital Britain down to three Ms – media, music and movies – myopically ignoring the pioneers of new technology, and ?
    showing a blind spot for all creativity outside the so-called creative industries… Instead of empowering digital Britons, the bill follows the lead of music and movie corporations, who already apply a presumption of guilt to their customers. Instead of treating the web as a platform of possibilities, it recasts it as a tool for mass theft." Excellent, excellent leader from the Guardian on the frankly scandalous digital economy bill.
    (tags: uk politics government threestrikes digitaleconomy economy copyright )
  • "…maybe this is the best of both worlds. An audience that, having crossed the barriers to entry, is by its nature more invested in our work; a public profile by which we have the means to occasionally reach into the mass consciousness, but which affords us the freedom to continue experimenting with subject, form, and style; an industry which is truly international; which is capable of producing both multi-million dollar blockbusters and single-creator labors of love (and releasing both on the same platform); which manages to be neither too big nor too small, and is the more vital, unique and exhilarating for it. We are a medium for us, and while there are more and more of us every day, we'll never be for everyone. In a way, that's beautiful." I think Steve's about right.
    (tags: games criticism comics culture stevegaynor )
  • "In the Dark Carnival campaign of Left 4 Dead 2, you can win a garden gnome at the fairground near the start – and there’s an achievement for carrying it all the way to the end. It is, in fact, the same goddamn gnome I carried through Episode goddamn Two, for the same goddamn reason: there was an achievement for it. By the end of that ordeal, I prayed I’d never set eyes on his (”stupid fucking”) face again – but here he is, and here I am, and here we go." Tom Francis gets the gnome achievement in L4D2, and lives to tell the tale.
    (tags: games achievements writing tomfrancis l4d2 )
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