VAPORWARE
Friday, the fine folks at JournalStone will release my novel VAPORWARE. It has been described as a "video game ghost story", a sort of Fatal Attraction for the digital age where being "married to the job" means something a little different and a lot more dangerous. You can find it at the JournalStone site, or at amazon, or any number of other fine purveyors of reading material.
So why write a book about making video games? It's not just a case of "write what you know". I know a lot of things, entirely too many of them relating to who's playing shortstop for various minor league baseball teams. It's a question of "write the stories that you can tell because you know them well."
And I know making video games well. I've been doing it for fourteen years, working on big games and small ones, smooth projects and rocky ones, best-selling titles that won Game of the Year awards and projects that got canceled and dropped by the wayside. I've got stories, and I've heard stories - from friends, from professional peers, from long-term industry veterans and people who left the industry after one product cycle. And I've heard the stories people outside the industry try to tell - yet another "video game monster escapes!" or "get zapped into a video game and fight monsters!" story that leaves behind the most interesting thing about video games.
No, not interactivity. That's the most interesting thing about the games themselves. But the really interesting thing about games is the people who make them, and what they do to make something go from notes on a whiteboard to fully realized experience. It is not, contrary to the commercials you might see, as simple as "tightening up the graphics on level three". It's long work and it's hard work and it asks as much of you as you are willing to give it. Sometimes that's a late night. Sometimes that's a weekend. Sometimes that's 80 hours a week for months on end. And why we do it, and why we keep on doing it - that's the interesting thing, and sometimes it's the scary thing.
At least to me.
And that's a little of why I wrote VAPORWARE.
So why write a book about making video games? It's not just a case of "write what you know". I know a lot of things, entirely too many of them relating to who's playing shortstop for various minor league baseball teams. It's a question of "write the stories that you can tell because you know them well."
And I know making video games well. I've been doing it for fourteen years, working on big games and small ones, smooth projects and rocky ones, best-selling titles that won Game of the Year awards and projects that got canceled and dropped by the wayside. I've got stories, and I've heard stories - from friends, from professional peers, from long-term industry veterans and people who left the industry after one product cycle. And I've heard the stories people outside the industry try to tell - yet another "video game monster escapes!" or "get zapped into a video game and fight monsters!" story that leaves behind the most interesting thing about video games.
No, not interactivity. That's the most interesting thing about the games themselves. But the really interesting thing about games is the people who make them, and what they do to make something go from notes on a whiteboard to fully realized experience. It is not, contrary to the commercials you might see, as simple as "tightening up the graphics on level three". It's long work and it's hard work and it asks as much of you as you are willing to give it. Sometimes that's a late night. Sometimes that's a weekend. Sometimes that's 80 hours a week for months on end. And why we do it, and why we keep on doing it - that's the interesting thing, and sometimes it's the scary thing.
At least to me.
And that's a little of why I wrote VAPORWARE.
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