Look

NOTE: It is advised that you watch this video before, during or after reading this blog post.

Music by Ted Regklis

Look, can you see what I'm seeing? You probably can't. Human communication is flawed, language is inherently limiting. Conveying ideas, or worse, feelings, from one person to another is almost impossible.

Which is why people reach for art, art is more expressive. Unfortunately, it leaves too much room for interpretation. The author is dead after all, and in this case the author is me, which means I am dead. And wanting to convey ideas and feelings posthumously is probably some sort of cardinal sin.

Setting aside the technicalities of being alive or dead, it must be some sort of hubris to want to create and convey things at my age. The drive to create and share things should be dead by now, but that's okay, because I should either be hopelessly trying to recapture the past, or I should be focusing on passing the torch to the children I don't have. At least that is what one of my heroes told me through their latest game^[1].

Which makes sense, since there is no present or future for me, because—as we've established—I'm already dead.

1. Because all game developers whose games I might play should obviously cater to what I personally care and think about during the time I might play them and failure to do so is obviously a personal attack on my person... Ron, I like your games, make more.

You're having a weird day, huh?

Existence has been weird for a while, I've forgotten when it started, maybe it was always like this. I often look at my hands to "center" myself, because when I look around, reality looks a bit like AI art, shifting and changing and making less and less sense the closer I look. Reaching out feels like getting swallowed by noise, and as time passes quicker and quicker I fear I'm moments away before everyone and everything I know is gone and my corporeal form dissolves as we fast forward towards the heat death of the universe— ...I think I'm starting to talk about entropy again.

(yes, my therapist is currently on vacation, why do you ask?)

Art in comparison, is a lot more structured and clear. The intentions are clear, the narrative beats are clear, the emotions are clear, the rules under which it operates (or attempts to break) are clear.

Which is why we need to start treating art as content to be consumed rather than as attempts to convey ideas and feelings, because if we let the latter continue, people might wish for a better reality, and we can't let that happen. So let's have AI do art now, so art can become as confusing and unintentional as everything else, so we humans can focus on more important things—the universe is not going to heat death itself you know.

So, um, we read this blog to learn about your games...

And this is me trying to write another blog post about Lost Echo: Resonance being late and still being worked on, without it being quite the same. To do that I try to dig deeper for more brutal honesty which I then try to hide behind some purple prose (or, possibly not purple, what is the color of prose for trying to sound like a smartass?)

This introspection (and relative ease of expressing it) is partially a result of working on the same game for a ridiculous amount of time. Lost Echo had a lot of influences, I can point to specific pieces of art that it has drawn from. In comparison, I feel a lot more alone when looking for inspiration for Lost Echo: Resonance. Maybe this is me exposing myself as a plebeian, but I can't find art that has answers for the things I care about currently. There is art that deals with them and asks questions, but no answers. In comparison, in younger adult fiction and coming of age stories there are plenty with strong messages and conclusions. I guess when you get older you really are supposed to look after your kids and stop looking for any sort of answers as life gets increasingly less clear.

Not that Lost Echo: Resonance will have answers. In fact, in what I believe was probably a rare moment of clarity, certain parts don't even try to ask questions. Instead, those parts are laser focused in conveying feelings.

There is a section of the game that the average player will probably take around 20 minutes to get through. It has had thousands of man hours (split between 3 people) of work put in it. I believe we are approaching 2 hours of interactive music written just for that section.

The hope is that with less words maybe we can actually communicate more things, things that aren't limited by language, so a group of players with unique and also shared experiences can be created, so Resonance can be achieved.

Or... at least that is the intent. There is a big and real possibility the section will have no impact at all. And after all my lofty talk, that would be real disappointing. You know after thinking about things for a long time, even small things have meaning, but that might be only for me—for the rest of the world it might just be mundane stuff or just plain nonsense.

Or maybe... Maybe it'll work. Wouldn't that be fun?