Sometimes when you’re thinking of something to say, you’ll have a single sentence slip past your lips that needs a lot of unpacking to make sense, and even then it won’t:
I – it’s not just me, it never has been just me. I’ve always had help and dealt with people pushing me to try things. Even the things I think I own and the things I made believing they were mine, I’ve been told, repeatedly, aren’t really good enough, aren’t up to the standards, aren’t things I should be proud of because who cares if a game got done fast or a book got finished it’s not that good, it’s not something you did it’s something other people did as well, and none of these games are about me, they’re about trying to express something of my friends, because my friends are worth being the subject of stories
Don’t – always be sure to keep things away from what you do do, deny what you know isn’t true, be careful about positive claims because they can be disproven. If someone says what you do is great you don’t have to back that up, but you can say hey look okay you don’t have to go that far
Make – none of it is making, it’s all just bringing stuff together, it’s all just seeing other games and other ideas and struggling to fit them together, that’s not making anything, I just cobble things together and hope that nobody notices the crack or has the same problem I do of not being able to have fun when I’m in the grip of that miserable anhedonia did I do this right, did I make this fun, is this game good fuck if I know, but everyone else is laughing and enjoying themselves
Art – oh god the complex synthesis and definition of if I’m making art or if a game is a design or what does that mean or is it more in the broader sense of creating things that people around you have to value or is it about the notion that all art is manipulation I don’t know if I can handle the weight of that or is it about the graphics I work with in the creation of my games because if I don’t put that artist forward more I’ll be seen as an arsehole oh god oh god oh god.
There’s a lot to be said and I don’t quite have words for it yet.
More on this later, on the practical and pragmatic mindset shift of how to sell games.