I started working with interactive media in roughly the spring of 2017… It’s been quite the journey.
Most of this journey, until the post-mortem and finalization of Everything I Know, and Everything I’m Ever Gonna Know, was primarily spent figuring out what I could bring to the table in the young medium. In fact, in the spring of 2017 and 2018, I wasn’t even certain that my contribution to society would be in interactive media at all. I knew I was an innovator — exploration is simply where I find joy — but I didn’t know where I was going to innovate. I spent quite a bit of time thinking I’d be a film director of some sort, but learned that I hated being on set. I also felt as though film was less than ripe for innovation, given its age.*
But I kept coming back to interactive media.
During my college years, virtual reality was the big “future of technology” thing, so naturally I felt this might be where I was supposed to be. It wasn’t. I didn’t think it had legs. (It doesn’t, at least not yet.)
At this time, during general exploration with utilization of my university’s library, I became obsessed with the kinds of stories that interactive media could tell that other mediums couldn’t. I hit most of the common pressure points that interactive media developers touch on, such as environmental storytelling, narrative vs. story, etc.
Eventually, however, I had a friend introduce me to VA-11 Hall-A and the rest was history.
Well, actually this was still probably five or so years ago, so there was still lots of work in creating systems and workflows to more naturally bring out the elements I loved about VA-11 Hall-A and other similar works, while not being burdened by unnecessary constrictions. That’s a talk for another time, however.
Anyway, while my workflows and systems will always have room for polish, the completion of Everything I Know, and Everything I Know was really the stamping of “this is what I was put on this planet to do.” Now, instead of figuring out what I wanted to produce, it was time to figure out how to make it lucrative as well as spread the word (fortunately, these two in many ways are tightly correlated). And this is what I’ve worked on for the past several months since EIKEIK’s release.
…And now I know the business model. At least the business model for now. So all that’s left to do is… Survive.
Produce products and content and survive.
If you imagine the business journey as a journey to a destination, most of my adult life has been defining what my destination looks like and figuring out the most likely direction I should go to get there.
If the journey is long (it is), then it makes sense to fully orient yourself before journeying forth. But this takes a notable amount of time, because to get a proper view of whether or not you are going the right direction, you need to make a bit of a journey each time. Sometimes you go the wrong way; sometimes you don’t, but you need to move a bit to gain better understanding. And each one of those micro-journeys takes time…
Anyways, those mini-journeys were structured like an endless pool of small sprints, but now that I have a clear idea of the direction I am going, it has become clear that this phase is a marathon. …Which is just a different mentality.
Especially for me because I naturally love the intensity of a sprint. I’m not entirely sure how to keep my feeling of “living” while in the marathon phase.
I get a feeling of “living” primarily from intensity.
Maybe that’s just me, but I don’t know.
I want that need to wake up at 6AM and begin the sprint and then sprint all day, barely hanging on. It is hard to force oneself to do this when they’re on the right path, so it feels unnecessary. But I want it to feel necessary…
Which means, I suppose, I should start adding to my load in other areas of life. I’ve my career moving forward in a direction I quite like, so this is no longer the area from which my intensity will come. Which is good, but unusual.
And it isn’t that I’m not still going to be quite intense with it — I am — it’s just that I need intensity in other areas to fill my days.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this in another blog, but when I was pretty young, I defined that the only two things I really wanted to do with my life were to… 1. Create interactive media (now I know more specifically that I want to “make video games literature”, but at the time I just knew I wanted to create interactive media.) 2. Get married and raise a family.
Well, I’ve put a lot of time into the #1, and it is beginning to spin in a way that I appreciate. I need to keep applying pressure, etc., but now it is moving correctly. As for #2, I’ve had different periods where I really pushed this, and others where I didn’t.
Last year was probably the time that I was really pushing for it. Asking girls out, going to different events, etc… But one thing I really didn’t do was use the dating apps. I went on a couple of dates earlier this year from an app to try it out, and it seemed to work quite nicely. Neither was a match, but I think this was the right direction. That is, to just go on a bunch of dates via a dating app until I find the right person.
This, I suppose, would be the next area I really need to grind out. So I’ll start pushing here…
*I was wrong about this, by the way.