October 2002
What can I say about the great month of October 2002? Well, it was
a month. It had 31 days. The last one was Halloween, and actually
there's some news from here in Madison on Halloween because there was a big
riot and a bunch of stores had their windows smashed. I'm guessing
there might have been a little bit of alcohol involved in the whole incident
but I'm not sure. What else? Let's see... I totally messed up
on my math test. I didn't know anything and they wanted me to prove
all these vector spaces and redefine the very concepts of addition and multiplication
to suit their nefarious ends and I just froze up and shut down and before
I knew it, it was time to say hello to oblivion. Really, this test
was the worst test ever and I'm really not looking forward to the next one.
I hate proofs so much I just want to die! Okay calm down... but I can't
calm down because it seems like my Japanese class just keeps getting harder
and harder and I can never keep up. We're watching this video, and
it's a love story about this man and this woman and he's deaf and she's childish
and jealous and they've fallen in love but there's just so much stuff that
happens to them, like his mother shows up and meddles in their lives and then
his ex-girlfriend comes back and the heroine of the story thinks they've gotten
back together and are having an affair, but they're not, and a bunch of misunderstandings
ensue but really it's always I love you I hate you I love you I hate you,
let's play the theme song again! We're supposed to be following the
story but everyone talks so fast and I'm like huh? Then the teacher
asks me something like, what did they mean by you can't draw people, and
I'm like I dunno... uh... he hides his emotions behind a mask of stoicism,
I guess, and the teacher's like, no that's not a very good answer, anyone
else? Then someone else gives this really fluent answer and my head
starts to hurt and I just want to sleep. Can't you just let me sleep?
Zzzzzz...
Over time, our minds change, and we think of new ideas. However, we
also abandon old ideas as well. I remember I used to think about creating
a game called Ethereal Light, which was about people from Earth being teleported
to another world, and I even wrote some of the story elements, but now I'm
not so sure I want to make that particular game. I really don't know
much about how civilizations would be formed, or how the teleportation would
be explained, or even the very nature of this other world that would make
it so different from and so much more interesting than our world. That's
another thing: when you're creating a fantasy world from scratch, how different
can it be from Earth? How much of the world do you have to describe?
The world of Drakan, for example, isn't really explained beyond the bounds
of the game and a few references to other lands, but the Elder Scrolls series
has much more literature and explanation of the various history and mythology
of the world. Of course, they're two completely different kinds of
games, and I have a suspicion that the Drakan world was only conceived as
something to mirror Middle Earth's atmosphere for familiarity and provide
a good setting for plenty of battles, but it's still something to think about.