The irony of most secrets is that they are not, in fact, secret. It is strange to see people fight tooth and nail to hide things which everybody knows. Even more so when their attempts to dodge certainty and protect their secrets result in miscommunication and bad blood between people who should be getting along.
How does this relate to gaming? Well, in the world of game design, there are many developers who post on blogs and on message boards, and all of them to some degree talk in vague notions and hints, hiding their precious secrets. The funny thing is, most times when their games finally do come out they really don’t introduce anything that was worth hiding, at least not hiding to the degree they did it. I realize that many times they are being vague because they might get fired for revealing company secrets, but if that is the problem why are they getting involved in the discussions at all? If you aren’t supposed to talk about your work, then don’t talk about your work. Its almost like that kid back in grade school who’d dance around singing “I know something you don’t know.”
Why the hell am I blogging about this? I’ll tell you…
I do not work in the game industry. I wish I did, but currently I live in Atlanta, and there isn’t much going on around here (at least not that I know of), and I don’t want to move. Also, while I feel that I have a good grasp on programming and design, I don’t have the experience on my resume that would make other people have the same faith in me that I have in myself. I mean, hey, I’ve only done full life-cycle design on a time and attendance software package picked as the best on the market by several independant studies, and a data warehouse application for one of the largest telcos in the US, but clearly that’s not good enough. I also am currently accustomed to a lifestyle that precludes me from starting over at the bottom, so I can’t just pick up and move across the country to take a bottom rung CS or QA job making next to nothing. But, despite not working in the game industry, I love games and I think about them alot. Starting this week, I’m going to start posting every idea I have ever had for games on my weblog. Some of them are raw, some of them are more thought out, and I hope people find them interesting enough to discuss them with me, and maybe, just maybe, someone might give me credit if they decide to steal one or two of them.
No more secrets.