My Reasons for Everything
In the states, spring break has officially started! No more schools for an entire week. Time to rejuvenate yourself and get a vacation to get away from all the stress of everyday life! The blissful days of sleeping through the afternoon, enjoying a nice day on a beach, and getting on roller coasters are just getting starting!
Blah. Not for me, except maybe sleeping. No break. Time to get serious and crank up development hours. 4 hours everyday completed in whatever proportion of the day I wanted. This meant 28 hours for the whole week. With no school to drain my energy, this is doable. It isn’t like I never did that much work before.
In fact, I once did 30 days of development with 28 hours per week, all the way to the last month of summer vacation. It was really awesome! Although I didn’t do much in term of major milestone, but I coded everyday. Sometime I would be stuck in a problem, so I switched to another project. Once I am done with that hour of the project, I would return to debug and understand the code. Even with the slow progress I am seeing during the 30 days, I got things done, relatively speaking, that would took me a whole year to do.
The sad part is that after my summer ended, it became very difficult to code during schooldays. Schools like to keep you there for eight hours for no good reason at all. By the time you get home, you’re exhausted and don’t want to do any more busywork. This is the major limiting force in my life. I have to worry about projects and homework all the time.
Not to mention teachers watch me like a hawk, much more than other students. I can’t get away with less work than other students do. My homeroom teacher literally have the power to drive to my house and take away my computer, not to mention changing my next year’s classes. I take regular classes like everybody else in high school, but I was still in the special education program for Asperger Syndrome. Some time, I just felt like the teacher would threaten me for not doing whatever or started lecturing me on the importance of whatever to my future at any given moment. Though, the role of my special education teacher is now limited to seeing me 30 minutes every day.
Now that the break started, I don’t have to worry anything like that.
I wish I can just program for a living, right now. Never have to worry about pointless crap like presenting the Cuban Missile Crisis projects to elementary schoolkids.
However, all dreams come with a price. That price is loss of comfortable living standard, and hours not spent on fun thing like playing video games, and going out with friends. In exchange for insanity at the end of every coding project, I hope to get something really valuable to me. A job, a company, that let me just write games for a living, the way I feel morally and ethically just. Something that doesn’t make me a parasite to society. I freeloaded on my parents for close to 18 years now.
I looked back on my life now. I was pretty stupid back then. I didn’t have the slightest interest in becoming an entrepeneur or programmer. I should have done this and this. Why didn’t I started just program and why didn’t I just pursue these subjects? All the missed opportunity right in front of me, I didn’t take it.
On the flip side, chances are, the opportunities that were available to me wasn’t available to me back then. If you’re lucky, you might have a computer , let alone have the proper tool that allows you to program. This wasn’t the primitive era where computers have basics installed and when you have magazines that have code that you can just copy and type. There were nothing on the computer that even remotely resemble a programming facility. This was the world of window and ancient computers.
As a consequences, I started late. 15 years old, I was writing my first game. Sure, my interest in computers began in the early part of the decade, long before my switch to Linux. It was still a very long road to get where I am today.
Today, you have options and opportunities that weren’t even availiable until a year ago. You got a very low barrier to entry and the ability to recover all of that cost at a click of a button. This blog and this site for example was paid for out of the saving that I earned in the two years as a website operator and a programmer.
In two week, I’ll be turning 18. I felt old. I didn’t accomplish much, but I also knew lot of kids didn’t accomplish much either. Maybe some accomplished much more than me in other way. However, unlike most kids, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Pretty much at age 15, I decided game development is what I wanted to do. On the flip side, though small my accomplishment, I am pretty proud of them. I mean, how many kids actually got on digg, stumbleupon, and other social news site with their first real website, with a domain and everything?
In the end, the past is all sunk cost. You can’t go back to recover the cost. All you can do is move forward.
I move forwarded not only in term of writing games, but also with this blog too. I am moving forward with every substantial essay I write. Every little subscription I gained from readers help me propel beyond the current situation now.
That situation is the reality I lived in. The reality where schools are essentially federal babysitting programs that infantize and brainwash the population with all sort of craps, all the while teaching nothing of use. The reality is that I am freeloading at my parents’ place in high school when I should be in the work force long before 8th grade. The situation is the very harsh world where not only nature conspires against you, but also the government with their taxes and threats, among rumors of wars and wars. This world which is continuously getting fucked up in every fucking possible way, is where I live in.
So yeah. This goal of mine is a way to preserve my sanity. My dream is this gaming enterprise where I just get to write games. Fun games, action-packed games, epic games, artistic games, and games of all kind.
Not only that, this dream of mine reach beyond the enterprise. It is also a post-copyright world. A world where pirates, hackers, and designers are indistinguishable. Where we compete to just make great games and make those games known to every possible audience that we can reach! Imagine the great possibilities and the great games that would have been produced if people share the source code, the artistic piece, and everything else? Imagine all the great smashup, of ingenuity, of sheer imagination! All the ideas and games of the world are spread to every corner of the globe for people to enjoy because information are all free.
This is what I hope to achieve. Together with thousand of crazy free market anarchist game developers, blessed by Discordia, I shall accomplish it!
Yeah, I am really going to do this 28 hours work week this spring break. You can badger and annoy me each day about how many hours I worked all the way to the end of spring break. I don’t mind, because unlike what my teachers and my parents want me to do, programming games is something that I wanted to do.
Happy hacking
~Kiba
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