Wasting My Talent On Video Games

He wasn’t my boyfriend at the time.

At the time we met, the day he stabbed me in the back, I didn’t know him at all.

He knew me though, which can help explain the stabbing.

The stabbing happened without my knowledge, as so many stabbings do.

One minute I was collecting treasure, fulfilling my hopes and dreams, the next minute the game notified me my character had died. Another player had snuck up behind me, and killed me.

He didn’t take all my stuff, which decidedly wasn’t the custom at the time. (Usually if you went around killing other players, it was to take their stuff and make yourself more powerful.)

You might think it was because I had stolen his boyfriend, but in reality, this was his twisted love language: messing with the people he cared about. (He once catfished his straight best friend into falling in love with a persona he created, as a prank. The straight best friend seemed genuinely amused by it at the time I heard this story.)

But also I didn’t steal his boyfriend! I occupy a slot in friendships that most people have never seen in real life: I actually check in with people. If there was any unironic animosity in the stabbing, it was because I looked like I was stealing his boyfriend. I was doing the things a suitor would do: I was listening, and caring, and worst of all:

I was counsel.

Being counsel to persons in my life, frequently upset those persons’ partners. “Why does this Noah Wizard guy get so much of a say??”

So he might have been stabbing me in the back, because he’d heard my name one too many times, and he didn’t like how much weight that name carried when it was spoken.

At the time, I didn’t realize I was weird. At the time, I didn’t realize how other people were happy to be oblivious about what was going on in their friends’ lives. I sort-of felt like we were ‘in this together’ and that we were all collectively fucking up what benefits and blessings we’d stumbled upon, and that we’d need all the help we could get to not squander our lives.

For some couples, this could be a meet-cute, the ironic enemies-to-lovers start of something beautiful. I’m overly-friends with his boyfriend, he stabs me in the back, we hate each other, we hate spending time together, we fight every time our mutual acquaintance brings us together, eventually they break up because it’s high school, and my back stabber and I find ourselves trapped in a bank vault over Easter holiday, where we’re forced to realize our latent passion for one another. Just like a movie.

—We weren’t trapped in a bank vault. We did get trapped in a musical together. This was the early 2000’s and the gay dating-apps of our day were the local theatre community. (The next guy I dated came from a different theatre connection, one town over.)

We didn’t fall in love over some weekend trapped together.

But neither did we fall in love, slowly over time, realizing what we had in common.

Because we didn’t fall in love. I didn’t know what that was yet.

(It was the early 2000’s, and guys had to make up our relationships with each other as we went along. There was no road-map. We couldn’t casually fall into the roles that our parents’ had in their marriages, because two guys is a genuinely different power dynamic.)

Our story could have been a meet-cute, if it ended with us loving one another, even if that love came to an end.

This was not a meet-cute. This was not enemies-to-lovers.

This was enemies-to-Challenge-Accepted.

I hated the way this guy made me feel, so I dated him.

At the time, my dumbass goal in life, (as an attempt to shame my parents who had recently gotten a divorce) was to prove, to the world, that I, Noah Wizard, best of all humans, could get along with anyone.

I was proud of myself for a year and a half.

I was insufferably proud.

With no example to compare to, my relationship was allowed to live on in my head as “the ideal.”

I scoffed at others who were dating people they actually liked, but then got into quarrels with, and stopped dating.

“Stopped dating? You fool! Instead, stay with a person, regardless of your feelings and treatment and overall compatibility! Just stick it out! Show the world that we will have peace, no matter what.” -Noah Wizard, aged 16, a menace.

Turns out at the time, even in the early 2000’s, leading divorce scientists John and Julie Gottman had already figured out most of the best-case scenarios and strategies for making relationships work. If they’d worked with the Gilmore Girls to show us examples of the work couples do to stay together, I might have recognized I was in a relationship that made no sense, and could have gotten started really dating, instead of being in a relationship I hated, just to prove a point.

It would have overhauled The Gilmore Girls though.

Actual relationship strategies would have upended any storyteller’s plans.

You can make a story that is just two characters who love one another, with no one coming between them, but it’s a different story from the ‘will they/won’t they’ that plenty of writers had no choice but to rely on.

It probably seems grandiose, or overly personal, to talk about my personal relationships on a Substack ostensibly about game design.

But relationships matter.

Our stories about relationships matter, and it matters how we portray those characters keeping their relationships in good working order.

That’s my life’s work.

No one should be confused about what a healthy relationship looks like.

Doesn’t matter if it’s the people we work with, our family members, or the people we share our bed with, we deserve to have a clear goal to aim for.

But many of us are using fictions that were meant as fantasies, and they don’t translate well to real life.

Working in story writing, you’ll come to realize that, “It’s like we were made for each other,” isn’t just an in-world romantic line, from the meta-lens of story writing, it’s actual fact: These two fictional lovebirds were literally made for each other— in many cases, we’ll start with one protagonist, and use algorithmic thinking to generate the rough idea of what their partner will have to look like.

Characters often really do ‘complete one another.’

But humans: don’t.

Humans don’t complete one another. In fact, those divorce researchers I mentioned, the Gottmans, their work found that even among the world’s best-case scenario couples, over half of their problems will be unsolvable, perpetual conflicts which can reach no satisfying outcome, and must be met with understanding of one another, because there will be no, one, ‘right’ way that can be arrived at.

Whether parking in the back and walking, or circling around again, looking for a space to open up—

Or whether to live near the city for amenities or live away from the city, to gain space, there are a number of incompatibilities that any two persons have with each other, no matter how much they also love one another.

No TV shows at the time, no films, no books, no songs on the radio, that had any model I could use for my male/male relationship that I was in, with a guy who stabbed me in the virtual back. And even those stories that were fairy tale endings for straight people, gave me no clue what it looked like, when one guy creates psychological safety for another guy, so they can love one another in perpetual conflict, ever after.

It takes years of study to sculpt a man’s muscle-studded chest out of polygons.

And that’s if you want to do a basic, no-frills dude, for a game that doesn’t care about how hot its men are.

If you want to make virtual men for a game aimed at people who are attracted to men, then it’ll take more than a few tutorials in anatomy and polygonal retopology.

But it can be done.

There are some hot men in video games now. Not many. Not the majority. But they exist.

I want hot men for my games, and it’ll be a lot of work to get them in there.

But the gayest thing in my games won’t be two men kissing:

It’ll be two men admitting their inner worlds to one another.

There will be portals between different worlds—

There will be spaceships that defy everything we know about the limits of physics—

There will be spells, and animated, intelligent objects—

But the part of my games that will seem ‘unrealistic’ will be the way the characters talk to one another.

It wasn’t okay that he stabbed me, but I got myself stabbed in the back by being the weird-one. It shouldn’t be this way, but I’ve had strange altercations like this my whole life.

I can’t fully change up the way I naturally relate to people, which is to care about them deeply, give them my full attention, listen to what they say and think and fear and hope, and think about what they said when they are not around.

I’m tired of being the weird-one in life; I’m determined that we work toward a higher rate of emotional literacy on the planet, until we know how to talk to one another. We’ve got all this technology that lets us talk to one another, but our “scientists were so focused on if they could give us that power, that they didn’t stop to think whether they should.”

When I can—

That heading should read More games that show healthy relationships… when I can…

The subtitle of this article is “My plan to create a video game empire by the end of 2007. 2008 at the latest.”

That’s when I thought I’d be done. I thought in 2007, “wow, I should make games, and then take the money I made from making games, and then spend that on going to college to learn how to make even better games.”

That’s a real thought I had.

Note: It did not happen.

I tried to start a blog that year.

Then the next year, a video channel.

It wasn’t even until 2012 that I’d played good enough video games that I realized I really wanted to take video game design seriously.

Then in 2013 I decided not to join a big company, but to build my own games.

In 2021I managed to produce my first few prototype games during game jams.

I know a lot. I’ve studied many many subjects, in order to design games that are about people lovingly fighting with one another.

But there is no roadmap to discovery.

Ironman (2008) was in development hell, I heard once, for 17 years. There was an era where Tom Cruise would have been Ironman, but it fell apart. There was an era where Nicholas Cage would have been Ironman, but it fell apart.

When Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Ironman came out, it launched a cinema phenomenon the likes of which the world had not seen. Twenty three movies between his first and last scene I think? (Though he was not in all of those movies himself.)

“Creativity is the art of curating accidents,” Julia Cameron said.

I wish I could give you a consistent schedule of what you’ll find here on this Substack. The Substack fairies suggest that I should tell you what schedule you can expect from me. And I agree you deserve that schedule and consistency.

But you’ll not get it, because I don’t have that to give. I can’t give you consistency that the process of discovery doesn’t bring.

At least not consistency of schedule.

Naomi from IttyBiz pointed out once that authors didn’t need consistency-of-schedule to be successful. Directors neither. So long as they had consistency of quality.

That’s the best I can offer you.

Though in truth, I can’t even offer you that.

“If you’re going to tell people the truth, make them laugh, or they’ll kill you.”

You deserve consistency of humor, and I’ll give you all I’ve got.

But plenty of days, the humor runs out, and then all I have is this brain full of stuff, and no funny way to get it to you. So our options become you get nothing from me, or you get a less-funny piece from me.

It’ll always be about real big shit though.

That’s my consistency.

Life has been trying to swallow us whole for too long, and I don’t care about video games that make a buck, I care about video games that save our lives. That’s what I’m trying to make, and that’s the mind I can offer you if you want to stick around.

But the next installment might be 55 years from now, so…

The best thing you can do is scrap a large portion of your possessions and make a small statue of my likeness, and then bump into it every time you leave the room because you didn’t used to have a statue there.

If your goal is to never forget who I am, that’s the most unhinged thing you could do so that I am burned into your brain and you never forget me.

But it will also cost you floor-space and is way too cult-like so I hope nobody ever takes that seriously, it will haunt me until I die.

So instead, I recommend doing whatever the Substack thing is that lets you get my updates when I have updates. I think you put your email in, but I don’t know! I know that if I had a small looping gif of how to sign up, it would increase conversion rates. They’ve done studies. The effigy thing is a joke, but the gif for how to sign up, that they did studies on, that is not a joke, they really studied that and it really would hope.

But I was born last century. I have signed up for too many websites.

I don’t know how you get my updates on Substack.

So I have to entice you to care enough about me that you’ll figure it out and make damn sure you make it happen if you never want to forget who I am or miss my updates here.

And if we never meet again, let me leave you with this poem from Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919):

So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths, that wind and wind,
When just the art of being kind,
Is all this sad world needs.

Forget me if you have to. It’s a busy life.

Please consider never forgetting that the ‘art of being kind’ is what this sad world needs.

(And if you’re loaded, please also give me tons of cash so I can keep working on this shit. What’s that? You’re taking me seriously but need a guideline? How much is an hour of your time worth? How about you chuck me that amount per month? Or if that number is too high or too low, now you have a starting point for what you’re comfortable with. Boom. Solved.)

Glad you asked!

Can you manage a sad-ish but charming story about helping people cross over to their afterlife while feeding them their favorite dishes that you make yourself on your cute-as-heck boat that you pilot down the river Styx?

Spiritfarer. It’s even available included at no additional charge with Netflix subscriptions in some countries.

Do you have some ability to do jumping puzzles and dodging creatures but not a ton? Do you wish you could hear a story about two women who are about to run out of money for their spaceship as it crash-lands on an uncharted planet? Will they, and their dedicated soup-robot have heartwarming scenes as they uncover the mystery of this abandoned world?

The Gunk.

You want to know the game (trilogy) that made me take game design seriously? It’s dated at this point, but that game was called Mass Effect, and it comes in three parts. Get the Legendary Edition which has better difficulty settings than the original games. It is a shooter game, and I had a hard time aiming and hitting things until I played this game which occasionally lets you use space-magic instead of shooting people, and the space-magic has homing beacons so you don’t need as much skill.

Speaking of space-magic, what’s the best game that no one is playing?

Warframe.

I am so mad at this game, they keep making it hard for me to keep playing, it’s big, it’s confusing, I don’t know how I would have made it through without people holding my hand, and that is still the case for all the new shit they add to it every year, much of which I don’t even get to see, because it’s locked behind skills I don’t have.

But it’s some of the most daring out-there writing I’ve seen. It’s free. And I’d never taken it seriously until I found somebody who knew how to break the game down and make it possible for me to catch up.