The Dustbowl
Blogging is a weird sort of experience. It takes a certain kind of person to churn out material every day, and a certain kind of skill to keep that material engaging. Expecting to have no readers, myself, I am somewhat less beholden to that standardof quality, but the fact remains: I've not a whole lot to say, it seems.
Some people (politicians, say) are built for talking. They jabber on endlessly, given the chance. Myself, when I started this thing, it was about sharing my ideas, when I had them with the void. Kind of like those rituals where you write down a prayer and burn it. And after a dozen or so posts, I'm finding that new ideas aren't terribly forthcoming. Or if they're new, they seem like rehashed versions of existing ideas.
I understand industries of this kind have a high burnout rate. Role-playing games, for example, require people who can spill page after page hour after hour, day after day, and rankly, it doesn' surprise me that so much that gets published lacks that spark. The most prolific RPG rules authors (e.g. Monte Cook) can expect to generate and edit over a thousand pages a year, I wager. Even more authors of fiction can't manage that sort of pace. And many who do (*ahem*Robert Jordan*cough*) also lack that spark of creativity, buried under the chore of all that production.
I'm pretty familiar with creative burnout. I undertake about a half-dozen ambitious projects a year, and they usually get shelved because I can't muster the will to do the busywork. I'm sure if I were beholden to someone (a boss, an audience), it would be a different story. My professional work doesn't show this sort of self-defeating loss of spirit. Consequently, I've got all these semi-complete worlds, storylines, and ideas kicking around in my head like ghosts.
The longest-running such ghost is code-named The Game of Death, a youthful indulgence by a bunch of teenagers. At the time, we had all played Master of Orion 2, one of the best galactic conquest games every made. The genre was known as "4X Games," (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate), a phrase that entered the public domain from being some progenitor game's tagline. Unlike more terrestrial games, the sci-fi aspects of such games allow for wildly fanciful species with unusual abilities and exotic technologies. So we designed a bunch of stuff, threw around a lot of ideas, drew a bunch of concept art. It would sit on the shelf for months or years at a time, then re-emerge in some new form. Its last incarnation, a far cry from its origins, was more in the spirit of Star Control 2 or Wing Commander: Privateer, but many of the original ideas were still in there in some form. The irony is that there simply isn't the collective programming skill among my friends to even vaguely consider actually making it. It's like the Rock of Sisyphus, only instead of rolling up a hill, it's just sort of getting rolled around the base of the hill by someone too weak to get any lifting power.
I don't know if getting my hands on a skilled team of minions would really make much of a difference, mind you. Lacking that sort of authority, I've never had the chance to see if delegation of responsability really increases my patience for such projects. I'm at once envious of and pity people who can remain focused on a single idea for years while they develop it - envious because it clearly requires a discipline I lack, bit I feel pity because so many have their ambitions crushed by the weakness of their idea and the cruelty of the marketplace. Even really good ideas helmed by really creative people (viz. Psychonauts) can fail (or "be lackluster") in today's marketplace. In a way, my not being too invested in any of my ideas protects me from that sort of life-wasting obsession.
For now, I am trying to make an effort to write here. My million other waste-of-time projects aren't being graven into the Internets, so at least, here, I can sit back and grin at my words from time to time.
Some people (politicians, say) are built for talking. They jabber on endlessly, given the chance. Myself, when I started this thing, it was about sharing my ideas, when I had them with the void. Kind of like those rituals where you write down a prayer and burn it. And after a dozen or so posts, I'm finding that new ideas aren't terribly forthcoming. Or if they're new, they seem like rehashed versions of existing ideas.
I understand industries of this kind have a high burnout rate. Role-playing games, for example, require people who can spill page after page hour after hour, day after day, and rankly, it doesn' surprise me that so much that gets published lacks that spark. The most prolific RPG rules authors (e.g. Monte Cook) can expect to generate and edit over a thousand pages a year, I wager. Even more authors of fiction can't manage that sort of pace. And many who do (*ahem*Robert Jordan*cough*) also lack that spark of creativity, buried under the chore of all that production.
I'm pretty familiar with creative burnout. I undertake about a half-dozen ambitious projects a year, and they usually get shelved because I can't muster the will to do the busywork. I'm sure if I were beholden to someone (a boss, an audience), it would be a different story. My professional work doesn't show this sort of self-defeating loss of spirit. Consequently, I've got all these semi-complete worlds, storylines, and ideas kicking around in my head like ghosts.
The longest-running such ghost is code-named The Game of Death, a youthful indulgence by a bunch of teenagers. At the time, we had all played Master of Orion 2, one of the best galactic conquest games every made. The genre was known as "4X Games," (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate), a phrase that entered the public domain from being some progenitor game's tagline. Unlike more terrestrial games, the sci-fi aspects of such games allow for wildly fanciful species with unusual abilities and exotic technologies. So we designed a bunch of stuff, threw around a lot of ideas, drew a bunch of concept art. It would sit on the shelf for months or years at a time, then re-emerge in some new form. Its last incarnation, a far cry from its origins, was more in the spirit of Star Control 2 or Wing Commander: Privateer, but many of the original ideas were still in there in some form. The irony is that there simply isn't the collective programming skill among my friends to even vaguely consider actually making it. It's like the Rock of Sisyphus, only instead of rolling up a hill, it's just sort of getting rolled around the base of the hill by someone too weak to get any lifting power.
I don't know if getting my hands on a skilled team of minions would really make much of a difference, mind you. Lacking that sort of authority, I've never had the chance to see if delegation of responsability really increases my patience for such projects. I'm at once envious of and pity people who can remain focused on a single idea for years while they develop it - envious because it clearly requires a discipline I lack, bit I feel pity because so many have their ambitions crushed by the weakness of their idea and the cruelty of the marketplace. Even really good ideas helmed by really creative people (viz. Psychonauts) can fail (or "be lackluster") in today's marketplace. In a way, my not being too invested in any of my ideas protects me from that sort of life-wasting obsession.
For now, I am trying to make an effort to write here. My million other waste-of-time projects aren't being graven into the Internets, so at least, here, I can sit back and grin at my words from time to time.
posted by Belarius at 10:14 AM
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