Over the past half-decade my need to blog has diminished as I’ve been more active on social media. But I still like the idea of checking in on this blog for the big milestones, as a more permanent (as permanent as internet may be) historical document for myself. As 2021 nears its end, this seems like a good time.
First, I’ll drop some facts that I can reference as I go.
The household has managed to avoid Covid
We were forced to move from our home of 12 years, but found a nice place, miraculously, in one of the worst times ever to buy a house. That happened in July.
I continue to work from home 100% of the time, and it seems like this will be an option in perpetuity.
Our household is still composed of me, Heather, our youngest son Shane (22) and my brother John.
My job continues to be amazing and has been getting better and better
Heather’s health continues to decline. The biggest event was a lung surgery to remove a mysterious cavitary lesion in September.
I think it’s fair to say that 2021 has been the best year of my life. 2020 is second place, and they more or less continue in that order. This is a nice trajectory.
It’s with some trepidation that I celebrate or even acknowledge how great things are for me when these past 2 years of pandemic have been so incredibly devastating for so many. But these are the vicissitudes of nature and luck. My posture therefore is to be aware of opportunities to help those I know who are struggling. (Several of whom live in my own house.) (Some of whom will be soon)
A couple weeks before the pandemic I started a new job at Mythical Games. It’s located in Ballard, which is about a 45-minutes-to-an-hour drive, each way. Well, I only needed to do that commute for two or three weeks before we were sent to work from home “maybe for a couple weeks.” Almost two years later, it’s more or less accepted that many of us aren’t coming back. A lot of my friends in the game industry have similar stories, though many are also being pressured to return to the office asap.
The fact that Mythical is on one end of this spectrum of allowing choice to its workers is illustrative of what appears to be characteristic of it. One of the company’s stated values is “People First”, a typically vapid and meaningless phrase, yet apparently, when push comes to shove, in this case it does mean something. This job has been absolutely wonderful for me. In the course of a year I went from ArenaNet where I was flailing and failing to find a niche after the game I was working on got canceled, to Moon, where I had the worst boss of my career who made me feel like a fool and a bad designer constantly, to Mythical where I’m being paid a lot more, made to feel appreciated, and being given more and more important responsibilities that are hugely impactful to the game. On top of that, the game I’m working on -called Blankos Block Party- is actually truly, really fun for me to play. While at ArenaNet I had pitched a game that was remarkably similar where you played as action figures in a miniature world. This game is like that, but with the added benefit of a never-ending supply of levels provided by the players.
What’s really remarkable about this job is that it relies on so many of my strengths, and almost not at all on my weaknesses.
My love of teaching is perfect for my role as “The Foreman” (more on that title later) the person who helps our community to build the levels that our game relies on. My years of experience teaching art on YouTube and decades building levels means I’ve got the experience, confidence and knowledge to lead this community. My skill at articulating art and design principles are particularly useful here.
The design work I do is idea-oriented, not implementation-focused. That means when I’m designing I’m doing one of three things. I’m making design documents, talking through design ideas with others, or evaluating the results of design iterations in the game. Importantly, none of these tasks involve coding or scripting or other highly technical implementation. My year of hell in 2018-19 was an attempt to learn to script (programming-lite) the design ideas I have, and I learned to a certainty that my brain simply does not work as one must in order to do that.
I’m communicating to all the different teams such as design, programing, art, UX, Audio, Communications, Marketing, Analytics, etc. While I can’t DO the programing or most of these other things, I’ve been in the industry long enough to anticipate what they need to know and how to deliver the information. I can articulate ideas well in a variety of modalities and that’s very helpful in this situation.
Despite having grown from a small company to a medium-sized one since I started, the team making Blankos is still relatively small. This means we get to wear a lot of hats and opportunities to expand my skillset abound. I’ve been given huge authority to shape this game in ways I never could during most of the rest of my career. Again, my experience working on many games in many teams means that stretching myself a bit is just the right amount of stretch. I can apply the lessons I’ve learned from experience and observation to an ever wider set of problems, and I’ve been successful at it so far.
All this to say, I fit in really well here. The game is wonderful. The company seems great, and has the potential to become a really big deal. In fact, this thought was reinforced recently when Mythical had its third round of funding and was valued at 1.25 Billion (with a B) dollars. Very unusual for a little start up with one game in beta. But see, that’s not why we were evaluated for such an absurd sum. It’s because of the technology side of the company that started working on something several years ago, which is currently exploding into the public consciousness, and has all the other big game companies scrambling to incorporate into their games. It’s called NFTs, a way for players to have proof of ownership over scarce digital goods. In other words, in our game, players can earn (by playing the game) or buy the characters they play. And they can sell them. This element of Mythical is the engine of our value, while the game I’m working on is supposed to be the proof that the engine works and can work for other games/companies as well.
I see a lot of people saying that NFTs will be the big revolutionary new frontier of gaming. (And the online world in general)
I see a lot of people saying its a dumb fad with no practical use.
I see a lot of people (including many former co-workers and others in my industry that I respect) saying that NFTs are actually evil and anyone who works on games with NFTs are also evil. They think this will lead to a dystopic continuation of tech companies blithely destroying the foundations of civilization as social media has been doing. Preying on those with addictive personalities, and essentially being a giant ponzi scheme.
Once I have a better perspective on the topic I’ll have to write more about it. I didn’t even know what NFTs were when I started just under 2 years ago, and since my focus is on making a great game, I haven’t got super in-depth trying to figure out where NFTs will lead us. My general impression is that it’s simply too early to tell. Most of the NFTs-are-evil arguments I’ve seen are conflating a lot of different issues like fine art, environmental impacts and capitalism into the mix, and none those I’ve seen really apply directly to the work we’re doing at Mythical. But I’m always keeping an open ear and mind to see if there’s something I need to be aware of to keep myself from being culpable in a big negative social trend. I’m doing what I can to combat Upton Sinclair’s maxim:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
I’ve quit a job on ethical grounds before. And I’ll do it again if need be.
Oh, and I wanted to get back to the moniker “The Foreman”. Blankos Block Party has a handful of colorful vinyl toy-inspired characters who help the players in various ways. One of them is a character in charge of Build Mode. (As I alluded to earlier, the part of the game where players can build levels to play with others) As these characters were being concepted someone had the idea of calling this Build Mode guy The Foreman. Because it’s quite fitting that a character who oversees building would be called that. And it’s doubly-so since the real world developer who oversees the design of Build Mode -and the design of the levels that people make in it- literally has the last name Foreman. Then it was decided that it would be cute if the character actually looked like me. I do need to say for the record, that I was not the person to propose these things, as that would be both awkward and weird. But I certainly did not oppose the idea.
And so it is, that I am now instantiated as a vinyl toy in a game. The Foreman.
https://youtu.be/LL86sNznshw
But how do I have a good life while living with family who are suffering so much? There’s a pragmatic answer: that empathetically resonating with them in order to share their suffering simply makes me less happy for no practical good. In other words, me being miserable is not going to make them any less so. But there is perhaps a hidden cost in that answer. To have my mood completely divorced from those around me may be a sign of some degree of sociopathy. If not a sign, possibly still ‘practicing’ the trait. The thought makes me wonder if, living in a counterfactual world where my wife, brother and son were not all suffering so much, WOULD I be happier? Does their suffering rub off on me in ways that are mostly imperceptible to me? My daily felt experience is that they will tell me about their suffering when asked, or when things are particularly severe. I feel a pang of empathetic pain, and by the time I’m done talking to them about it, proposing ways to diminish the suffering, or just giving hugs, my brain has moved onto the larger goals in life and planning on how to tackle them. If the report of their suffering has affected me beyond that point I don’t perceive it. I suppose the sheer amount of ‘bad news’ has to eventually dull the reaction. As it does with doctors and nurses. To stay current with my family’s suffering requires several negative reports a day. And so I’ve learned to digest the emotional impact quickly.
What this says about me, I don’t know. I suppose another way my family’s suffering affects me is by spurning me to action. I take as ‘the bare minimum’ my duty to make whatever sacrifice I can make to minimize their suffering. But from what I can tell, beyond providing the physical necessities of life, some small amount of physical labor, and an always-available ear, there’s not much that I can do. I’ve asked many times. One of my least favorite things to hear is when Heather has done some physical thing that ends up injuring her (this can be as simple as opening a drink, or not asked me for some physical therapy) and she says she didn’t want to bother me because she knows how hard I work and how focused I am on my goals. Despite telling her innumerable times that taking care of her is a higher goal for me, something about me or her keeps her from ‘bothering’ me when she should. It’s tempting to think that this is her picadillo because, on a different issue, she also cannot accept the fact that she’s beautiful despite my daily reminders. But it would be too easy to pin this all on her. Ideally I would be driven just enough to be making consistent progress towards my life goal, but not so much that my loved ones feel like I’m ever inaccessible for the help they need.
Which is a good segue to how I’ve been doing with my attempts to balance my various ambitions. Most people understand that a project without a deadline will expand to fill almost any amount of time. Well my deadline for my biggest life goal is quite literally my DEAD line. As in, I’ll be done when I die. And so naturally, the older I get, the more pressing that deadline feels. It’s not way off in the distant future. It’s a handful of decades if I’m lucky. And I’ve worked on creative projects that took half a decade, which means that even in a perfect scenario where Tales From Talifar becomes an overnight sensation when we start advertising the first completed trilogy, then I’ve only got a couple of TV shows, movies, or games I can realistically oversee before my DEADline.
So while my family suffering around me doesn’t seem to stress me out, the implausibility that I’ll be able to create the amount of stuff I’d like to create in the time I have left really does stress me out. In that it hounds me and pushes me to work myself to near-exhaustion all the time. It’s unequivocally unhealthy. I would think that with the absolutely glorious gift of an extra 8 hours a week I’ve been given with the removal of a work commute I’d be feeling some release of the pressure. But if anything, it has increased.
October and November in particular were very hard on me. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I’d been able to get a video out on the first of every month for several years. Even for the handful of months during and after the move we made in July. But the November video was a project that had just the right ingredients to derail my beautiful track record. It lured me into a false sense of security by being MOSTLY procedures and materials I have plenty of experience with, but then with just enough novelty to sidetrack all my experience, requiring many resets to get it right. So I was spending almost all of my free time on this for months. While the giant piles of boxed up stuff sits around our house waiting to be unpacked.
There’s a very obnoxious dependency holding up the unpacking process. The garage required work to get it suitable for a studio. I had to insulate and drywall half of it, which creates a TON of fine dust that covers and clogs everything. So it makes no sense to move all my art and materials into the garage before I finish that process. So all that stuff is filling the downstairs of the new house, which is keeping me from being able to unpack all the bedroom stuff for downstairs which prevents me from being able to unpack a bunch of stuff that’s sitting in boxes upstairs as well.
I’m so close to being done getting the garage done, but near the end of the project I found a line of mold, which will require tearing down some of the old drywall to investigate if there’s a leak somewhere, and that was the point at which I had to shift to the black hole that was the November video. Now the January video. Now that I’ve finally powered through it, I can spend the last couple days of my ‘vacation’ powering through finishing the garage. And then I can power through the rest of the moving process.
All of this is leaving me exhausted. I’ve never felt so late-forties as I do now. I’ve got headaches about 50% of the time, my eyes feel heavy, and I’ve fallen completely off the healthy-diet wagon. I’d love to force myself to exercise for 30 min every day. That’s only 1/3rd of the daily commute I don’t have to do anymore! But because of the immense pressure I feel to keep making progress on My Big Dream, that opportunity cost is just enough to keep me from doing so.
On the other hand, I 100% understand intellectually, that my efficiency is negatively impacted by working this much and being unhealthy. I understand intellectually that without a balance I’m jeopardizing My Big Dream. But one of the cruxes of my problem acting on this is the fact that there’s an external pressure that requires constant care and feeding. The YouTube algorithm. My understanding is that when a creator fails to upload content on a regular basis, this causes the YouTube algorithm to downregulate it’s recommendations. That is: it will show your videos to fewer people who have watched other videos similar to yours. This is where the vast vast majority of views come from. And since YouTube is by far my biggest platform, it is therefore, by far, my best chance at making My Big Dream become a reality. Therefore I’m bound by it’s inscrutable algorithm. And it truly is inscrutable. Purposefully unarticulated and undocumented so as to keep creators from ‘gaming the algorithm’. My understanding of it could be completely wrong. So in a way it’s probably good that this video got delayed two months. I will be able to look at my analytics to see what kind of an impact it has had on my channel.
One of the things I was hoping I’d accomplish this year was to wrap up my backlog of projects. I have a lot of miscellaneous things that feel to me like they are gumming up the pipes. I WANT to be doing 90% Tales From Talifar related videos. But I want MORE to not leave a bunch of these miscellaneous things hanging. Especially the projects that have been many years in the making. The two big ones are the final conclusion to my Shadow Of The Colossus sculpture, and The Cutscene Subversion Project: an essay series about videogames that I started writing and shooting over a decade ago. However, thanks to the move, and my inability to combat the Sunk Cost Fallacy, I have barely been able to touch these backlog items this year. Do I dare say that I will have them done in 2022? Just imagining spending ANOTHER precious year to get these done makes my stomach hurt. But imaging NOT finishing them makes it hurt more.
Also, I don’t have a good place to insert this, but I think it’s another exciting development in 2021. I’ve always known that in order to get My Big Dream to scale up I’d need to collaborate with other people than just my mom. So it’s really cool that one of my co-workers, Charles, who has experience working on Star Wars and Marvel comics, took a liking to me and My Big Dream. So he’s helping me develop a graphic novel set on Talifar. I always want to partner with someone who has expertise in a medium that I hope to put Talifar into, as opposed to just doing my best at it. Because one thing I’m very sure of: the first time I do anything, it’s gonna be average-at-best. And that’s not good enough for My Big Dream.
2. Is there a way to cut back on my ambitions for my Backlog projects so I can clear them and move onto what I’m calling The Josh Foreman Chanel 2.0? (Where I can focus almost exclusively on Tales From Talifar development.)
3. Can I overcome my opportunity cost loss aversion enough to make time to get back into shape and stay that way?
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