So, I was gonna write a book!

So, why do the blog thing? Well, as crazy as it is to do, I was gonna do something even more zany: I was going to write a book. On game design. In fact, I got about 20 pages into it, with over 200 pages of compiled notes. These notes are just dying to be expanded into coherent articles, and this blog will be my outlet.

You see, a book is a helluva lotta work, and I don't have the time as I'm still knee-deep in the industry, involved with business, marketing and primarily design. Blogs are far less formal, less demanding, no deadlines, and I can handle the whole project a small bite at a time and make it last years.

I had several publishers lined up waiting to publish my eventual book, but honestly, I do not need the money and had already decided to donate every penny to some cause within the industry. That won't happen now, but game design books typically don't sell well anyway, so hardly anyone's loss.

Perhaps the one thing that most put the brakes on my desire to write a book was the formation of a new game developers discussion group in 2001, which I will not name here -- publishers are not suppose to know about it. This group, invitation-only, and consisting of several hundred premier game developers worldwide, provided a ripe outlet for my DNA-driven desire to write and share info. Once that dev group got rolling, the book thing skid to a halt. In fact, the dev forum is still a great outlet for new ideas, and it's helped cystalize many of them, and got me to rethink others.

That's where this blog enters the picture. All the stuff I've written about is behind-the-curtain, so to speak. Some of it is dying to peak through. This blog is where many of my thoughts/ideas/criticisms can be expanded, improved, and etched in digital stone, making this blog an excellent personal archive for years to come.

BTW, that book I was going to write would have been titled Game Design Matters. I registered the domain a long time ago. I decided to shorten the name for this blog to allow for topics that weren't necessarily design oriented.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Next up a little meat: The story of how Max Payne was designed as a franchise from the beginning.

Comments

[Charles E. Hardwidge]

Public discussion seems to lack a coherent intellectual and creative framework, and issues that should be settled resurface with tedious regularity. A book could serve as a one-stop-shop to informed discussion rather than the current fragmented affair.

Your reticence over writing a book on game design is understandable given existing commitments. The question that's left in my mind is how great the public good might've been better served if you'd completed the project.