I’ve been feeling a little unenthusiastic about writing these posts recently. By “recently” I mean that I’ve been feeling it gradually over the last few years, and more acutely over the last few weeks. There are a few reasons for this: One reason is that I can’t escape the sensation that I’m repeating myself a lot, reiterating more-or-less the same ideas in more-or-less the same ways. It’s not uncommon for me to start brainstorming an idea only to take a look at the archive and realize I wrote about it, or a very similar idea, several years ago. Another reason is that I feel like overall the quality of this work has been slowly declining – there are still better and worse pieces, and some I’m very proud of, but it often feels like I’m cooking with leftovers. Third, I just have no idea at this point whether anyone is interested in this writing, and if so which writings they’re most interested in – this lack of sensation probably contributes to these other dissatisfactions, since without feedback I can’t readily tell what work is worthwhile and which ideas are worth delving deeper into.
All of the above is made more challenging because I’ve been so excited about my main project, Bound City. Any time and effort I’m not expending on that project feels somewhat wasted – in most cases it is a better expression of the ideas I usually write about. Why bother writing about game design when I can game design about it? Why bother ruminating on art and life when I can simulate life in art?
This might suggest the entire blog/mini-essay/Patreon endeavor has run its course, but I’m loathe to just retire the Problem Machine blog – both because this steady output helps me to emotionally and creatively regulate and because, well, now that I’ve got a Patreon running it seems like it would be a nuisance to shut it down only to most-likely start another one later. However, my commitment to a format, to trying to do one piece of critical writing a week, is beginning to feel like it’s doing a disservice to my abilities and passions – and to whatever audience might want to enjoy or support my work. Now that I’ve managed to articulate these obstacles, it’s become apparent that I will need to change how I approach this writing and creativity in general.
I recently started realizing the pains I’ve gone through to avoid ever having to think about any audience I might have: In my fear of having my work rejected, I avoided ever considering how it is received. It is the curse of the artist to constantly seek attention while constantly avoiding scrutiny, to spend tiny eternities crafting masks for the world to see instead of your face. While making this Patreon several years ago was a step in the right direction. Since that time, I’ve retreated back, as is my habit, to a place where I never need face an audience directly, a place where I can once again hide in my thoughts. The idea of trying to promote myself, of trying to simply tell anyone that they should look at what I’m doing and should find it interesting, has been a very difficult one for me, and one that still causes me anxiety to contemplate. My attempt to compromise has so far has been a sort of shotgun approach, creating a large amount of relatively quick and low-effort work – not that I don’t put energy and thought to making each mini-essay as solid as possible, but I have constrained their scope to the smallest, purest, and most perfectly-expressed angle on an idea I can, such that it’s almost impossible to spend more than a couple thousand words on it. With this small investment, I can cast it to the open sea to fend for itself as it may, and if people like it I can be happy – and if they don’t I can remain contentedly oblivious.
However: Eventually, hopefully, I will finish this game I’m making, that I’m spending years on, and once I do it will be truly devastating to me if no one looks, no one plays, no one cares. As things stand, I have no practice in making people look, making them care. My goal, now, is to create things that I can advocate for, to gain practice in advocating for my work, even if it means I end up creating somewhat less consistently. When I started writing this post weeks ago, I intended to change things up and start doing large monthly projects. I even made some progress doing one of these before I ran up against a huge question with no satisfactory answer: When the hell am I supposed to work on it? I soon realized that I would have a very difficult time following through on that idea, and didn’t feel ready to commit to doing so. Sometimes a commitment is exactly what one needs, and if all that was standing in my way was nervousness and anxiety I’d push through — but, though I have plenty of both, in reality the real challenge is time management.
The question, it turns out, is not whether I have the time and energy to do additional projects on top of the game, but one of what sort of time and energy I have. I’ve created little 2-3 hour niches in the week that are suitable for going to a room and tapping away for a bit on an idea, but that’s a wholly different pursuit than if I wanted to, say, create a full song with lyrics or a video essay or something. The amount and kind of energy required differs, as does the amount and kind of equipment. The more complex and sophisticated the task, the more likely it involves me sitting in front of my computer — which is where I work on the game, naturally, so any time I’m in front of it I feel like if I’m going to be working on anything it should probably be that core project.
I’m not going to do these huge side-projects — or not commit to doing them, anyway, which probably means not doing them. What actually am I going to do, though? My plan at the moment is to pause the Patreon for a month or two, flush a few ideas and half-finished pieces out, and then change over to the per-delivery payment plan. This alternative to the monthly pricing allows one to charge only as new works are completed and delivered. Thus, even if I end up never writing again, people who are subscribed won’t be paying me in perpetuity for nothing — and, at the same time, if I have a piece mostly written that I’m not really sure about, I can feel free to take whatever time is necessary to ensure it meets my standards. I’m also probably going to be shifting the focus of my writing away from criticism and analysis and towards more artistic and expressive writing, since it feels like there’s a lot more exciting work to do there right now (and such pieces usually get a better response anyway).
Some questions emerge: What counts as a finished work, a “deliverable”? First off, monthly DevBlog posts do not and will not count. However, if I make something for the game that I feel stands very well on its own as a piece of writing or music or software, I may deliver that as Patreon content. Second, if I’m charging for individual deliverables, will I continue making these available for free shortly after pushing them to Patreon? This will probably vary to some degree on a case-by-case basis: Completely disconnected works such as critical pieces, personal essays, fiction, music, etc, will probably be made public a couple of weeks after publishing on the Patreon, while those pieces which are part of another project such as Bound City may be kept internal until the project is complete and published.
There’s two goals I’m trying to achieve with this: First, to free myself from my self-imposed bonds of feeling like I have to try to say something even if I don’t have confidence in the thing I’m trying to say; and, second, to ensure that whatever I put up from now on is something I have confidence in and passion for, and something that I’m hopefully willing to advocate for, to tell people that it’s worthwhile and they should support me so I can do this work and more work like it. Actually doing that promotional work… well, that’s still something I’ll have to figure out. For now, I can at least work to ensure that I’m making things I have confidence in, things I genuinely want to promote, and hope that the rest follows naturally from there.