Friday, November 19, 2004, 6:27pm
Friday, November 19, 2004, 6:27pm
On the ride home I’ve been listening to sounds from my Thief mission design, an endeavor fast becoming one of those endangered hobbies I drop without finishing. A hobby for me is more than a pastime – it is one of the only things I can do that creates energy, or at least keeps a little bit of enthusiasm going. But individually they do not seem to last and often I only realize how I’ve lost interest because of how I’m deeply into something new – like writing a railroad journal.
This mission design for Thief is the biggest hobby ever – like having a second job. And after four years it’s a struggle to keep it going – motivated mainly by the sense of waste I might feel if I quit after 4,000+ hours with so little left to finish.
This journal started as place to work out ideas for the game, but instead I’ve wandered off to where the journal has taken on a life of its own. If I don’t turn up the jets soon, by spring I might be walking away from the game design for good. Then the thing will languish on some computer disk along with all the other crap I produce but never polish up for publication. That is the usual pattern. But after so much invested and so many fans waiting, I may be able to pull this off, even though it might take every last bit of effort I can muster.
Part of this struggle comes from knowing that ‘polishing’ is a lot more than just polishing. It’s rewriting and reworking and rebuilding and repairing, and typically that is ten times harder than writing a script or roughing out the basic form.
The other reason I might not bother to finish hobbies is how they rarely amount to much in the end. Some people read what I’ve bothered to put online, and in at least one place my theories for story telling in games have found their way into the curriculum of a minor film school program. But I don’t have the follow-through to write the book on the topic of story telling in games that really needs to be written – and for all I know has already been written while I’ve wandered off into other distractions.
For a time I can work maniacally on a project – like Dodge Morgan who built a boat and sailed around the world or Burt Rutan who built an aircraft to over-fly the whole planet. But once the wind abates the hobby no longer serves its energy-producing purpose. And from that point I find myself trying to finish a voyage across an airless moonscape.
In tonight’s voyage west on the Worcester Line I’ll take the conductor’s word that we’ve arrived at Framingham Station. I could likely figure this out through careful observation of streetlights or infer this from how we’re making our second stop since Back Bay. But it’s easier to believe him since he has no reason to invent anything. If I had to directly confirm everything I’m ever told, I’d have no time to live.
Should the course of events tonight play out as expected, Ashland Station will be next and even now the time has arrived to prepare for my walk home – which is little less than an early prelude to the weekend and back to work unplanned on Monday to deal with an unexpected spacecraft design deadline – even though I’d hoped to take the week off.
So it seems – whether a matter of happenstance or design – I always have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, even if those promises are made merely to myself.
