Slower

As prophecied, some days you feel like a nut, some days you don’t.  Or something like that!

Today was a slow day for writing; the morning was action-dense and I spent the entire afternoon ruminating on copy edits.  Editing is funny because while often there’s a linear relationship between time spent and output, sometimes that relationship breaks.  With writing, I have a pretty solid over-under range on the number of words I can produce during an hour’s work.  Editing, sometimes I stare at a paragraph, or even more often a line, pacing back and forth and wondering what’s wrong, why the words clash or the grammar doesn’t quite seem to line up.  Then I look at the clock and feel a little despair.

Of course, ten minutes later I fix whatever was bothering me and skip through three pages of smooth dialogue, good character development, uninterrupted story—before I hit the next mine.  Wonderful!

I’ve been playing Uncharted 2 to unwind recently.  Really fun game, smooth, exciting, but I can’t help but laugh when I compare Nate Drake’s Murder Per Second ratio to, say, Indiana Jones’s.  I don’t think they fall within an order of magnitude of one another.  At one point a little box popped up on my screen saying: “Congratulations!  You have shot 100 bad guys in the head!” which indicates that, since I have horrible aim, I have killed well over 100 people in this game.

I wonder if it’s possible to make a game that feels as engrossing as the Uncharted series, while retaining the Murder-per-second ratio of the Indiana Jones films (which isn’t, you know, the lowest thing in the world—Indy does for a bunch of Nazis & cultists over the course of his career).