Seth's Blog : Video games, movies and books

Video games, movies and books

What’s the structure of your project? Here are three paradigms to consider:

Video game development is expensive and risky because you’re on two frontiers at once. The tech frontier, trying to do something with hardware that hasn’t been done before, and the game mechanics frontier, perfecting and polishing new forms of interaction that last. So Myst and Tetris and Doom… classics we talk about decades later. A teenager could build a knockoff of any of these in a few weeks now, but back then, they represented risky leaps.

Movies use a technology that’s over a hundred years old, with incremental improvements added all the time. But being the first with the new tech doesn’t win many prizes. Instead, successful movies are a combination of one creator’s vision and the coordinated work of hundreds or thousands of professionals using proven tools and techniques.

And books, five hundred years into the genre, still remain the work of one voice. The partnership with a largely unseen editor and publisher matters, but sooner or later, the author puts the words on paper.

[There are analogies here that go far beyond the strict adherence to the three final products of course. Slack is a videogame, developing real estate, making a record or performing surgery is a movie, and the work of a freelancer is closest to writing a book…]

I’ve done all three, and each is thrilling in its own way. As the available tech advances, each type of project is more accessible than ever. But each still comes with its own rules, risks and upsides.

We get to choose.