Connection

...Is this one of those weird blog posts again?

Why yes! It is one of those!

The kind of blog post that gets interpreted as me having a mental breakdown!

So I'll do this once... I'll clarify: This text is very deliberate. Conversational and vulnerable, sure, but these are conscious choices. I'd like to think I'm a lot more coherent than I would be if I was having an honest to god mental breakdown. Yes, I'm going through some stuff, but show me an adult who says they aren't (an artist no less!) and I'll show you a liar.

This is my way of getting motivated to write more blog posts. If you want corporate slop or generic updates or articles, this isn't the place for it. Deal?

Can we move on now?

You titled this connection...

I've been thinking about my need to make games. It's not about money, that would be ridiculous and gamedev would be a horrible choice. I think... it's about communication, and by extension, connection.

Lost Echo had something it wanted to communicate. It is a personal story wrapped in 20 layers of plot and metaphor and it had something very specific to say to a very specific person. I don't think that person has played the game, therefore Lost Echo was a complete failure. Case closed.

And yet, we are still working on the sequel.

Because even though it didn't reach the person it was intended to reach, it did reach other people, and made an impact. And important things (to me) were conveyed, things that are difficult to convey. Communication was achieved, connections were formed. And that is hard and rare.

In a world drowning in small talk, direct human contact with meaning is difficult. Social media reinforces punchy smart ass posts that are intended to siphon likes and induce a dopamine hit to the writer, while nuance is boring.

That leaks into real life too. People "collect" human connections like tourists collect postcards and photos. Then connections become just a list of checkboxes to get through. Superficial stories to share at a party to "gather likes"...

Why meet only a few people and see how deeply you can know each other, when you can just meet a ton of people briefly and have a bunch of "interesting" things to remember and stories to tell?

Real connection is hard. When people try to do it directly, it takes a lot of time and effort and compatibility and even then, it may never happen.

Art is a cheat, a shortcut. Because an artist can spend silly amounts of time to make something that can attempt to communicate something deeper, something beyond words and images and music. Beyond dopamine hits, postcards, likes, and silly platitudes.

But the art needs to be popular enough, so that enough people experience it (and enjoy it) so there is a higher chance it will reach the right people, where it might actually connect with them.

Which means to achieve its primary goal... art needs to reach a secondary goal of appealing to at least a critical mass of people... which is very counterintuitive and hard to handle as a creator. The overlap on the Venn diagram of mass appeal and sincerity is ...fairly small.

What about Lost Echo: Resonance?

Yes, what about it... After so many years, all secondary goals are gone now. Communication and connection are the whole point. And since that is the only point, it requires more scrutiny.

What am I communicating and why? Is what I'm communicating honest? Honest to what? How I feel? Am I sad? Do I want to communicate that? Do I want to affect other people in a negative way? After spending so much time, that would be a disappointment. The world sucks enough already. But is there a point in communicating something that is not honest? Probably not.

How do I make it honest? I need to ask myself how I really feel and let that inform what I'm making... And how I feel is...

Isolated.

And why do I feel that? Besides existence being a lonely experience by default, when you pour so much of your life into a single project, or more accurately, when you need to care about things deeply, connecting with others becomes difficult.

Even just caring strongly about something is alienating. People would rather care a little about many things--doomscrolling, it's a thing... I guess life's more manageable this way.

But even when I find someone willing to feign interest in what I think, it's tough to talk about it, because my thoughts have become extremely esoteric. And the way to get others to understand them is to either get them to spend the same amount of time on them as I did, years... or have them play a game that isn't finished yet.

So in my day to day, when people ask me what my game is about, I either give them a superficial fortune cookie-esque answer, or I genuinely attempt to explain and then sound like a complete madman for a while.

The funny thing is, video games are typically excellent dopamine providers and that sets expectations. So when I attempt to explain what I'm working on and what I care about, which isn't really dopamine inducing at all, it is interesting to see the expectations betrayed and the attentions quickly turned to something that will more easily acquire more likes or stories to post.

It's more heartbreaking when it happens with people you love, that then try to tell you to care less about things, and that you should be a more rounded person, or care about more mundane stuff, or that this is unhealthy.

...don't dismiss my choices and tell me how to live my life...

And don't dismiss my choice to use games to achieve connection. Yes, games are used more effectively for other things so far, but I think the interactivity makes the player more involved with the world and the themes and there are more opportunities for new things here than in more traditional mediums. There's so much more space to explore... The space where interaction, visuals, music and writing meet is ripe for experimentation... it's what Lost Echo: Resonance is aiming for... and that is genuinely exciting.

Plus I like the idea of using the "wrong" medium.

We're using the wrong medium, the wrong engine, the wrong workflow, during the wrong period of time, and the wrong culture, while the world collapses in the background, and with having lofty goals of achieving "connection" while feeling isolated. I really like something about this, but it's probably because I like stories about underdogs.

All in all... I'd say our odds are pretty good. Despite all my ramblings, all of this feels... right.