#30

I'm starting to get a bit edgy now. I've been on a break for too long now. I'm not talking about a break from my day job -- I've been working quite hard at that and not had much time-off at all lately. No... I'm talking about my 'post mid-life crisis' break. The break I allowed myself in which to have a chill-out without having to worry what I was going to do with the second half of my existence, but at the same time with the hope that I might just stumble into something fortuitous that I could both enjoy and profit from, something I could excel at. Last weekend I sat at my computer and tried to restart a video game project I had not touched for about a year: to get back in the saddle, so to speak. I could not believe it -- my heart was pounding like I was having a mild panic attack, and all I managed to do was to compile and run the program before having to stop and shutdown. It must be very difficult for other people to see why this could be. Well I'll try and explain. Should video games be what I spend the rest of my life doing? Writing video games has been one of my greatest loves, probably the greatest one in terms of vocation...but I'm not all that good at the overall gig of writing games yet. I can write bits of video games extremely well, and have some very imaginative ideas, but I have just missed the mark on getting the whole act together and getting a whole project out there and finished. One reason is I'm just too fickle about what kind of scale or type of place I should occupy in the video gaming world.... for starters should I be professional or should I be amateur, should I write tiny fun little games or should I make big ambitious games that might take me 3 years to do as a spare time project ... and it would indeed have to be a spare time project even if I was to do it for profession reasons since I couldn't afford to give-up the day job (again) until I had sold something. What caused me to be so stressed about looking at starting-up video game programming again was that although it's a great love of mine it has cost me dearly, it's cost me big chunks of life and big chunks of money. On just one of my over ambitious game projects I must have spent 2 solid years working 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, with no income -- I was living off savings... which is a double whammy when you think about it because not only are you using money but you're using it, no, losing it, double because you miss out on the earnings you would have had over that time had you been working. Strewth... that could easily be 50 grand down the drain, easily.... uneasily ... gulp. And there is incalculable cost due to it messing-up your CV and making you 'less employable'. So there is real pain there.... that has gotten deep into my subconscious, a bit like a bigger version of when I was young and my Dad dropped his soldering iron on the floor and I picked-it-up for him... by the hot end! And after the weeks of having my hand in bandages was over, it was many further weeks before I could even go near a soldering iron, despite electronics being one of my hobbies, and when I did manage to use one there was some considerable panic accompanying the experience I can tell ye....but... well... I got over it in the end... and even a few years later when a soldering iron exploded in my face I could not be deterred, so probably this is only one such interlude that I'll recover from, but on a bigger scale.

It's the mid life crisis jitters. How ever much you think it's not going to happen to you, don't count on it, especially if you haven't yet quite 'hit the mark' in life like me, because when you hit middle age you can not avoid your brain involuntarily and constantly posing this basic question: "Right, you're half way though Buddy, it's time to decide: is what you've been doing for the first half of your life ever going to amount to anything, or should you cut your losses now and try something new?? If you don't decide now it may be too late to make a success of what ever path you choose... and you'd better make the right decision chum because if you get it wrong you'll have wasted your whole life, your whole entire life." This is very serious, and anyone who tries to trivialize or brush aside someones mid-life crisis does not realise the gravity of the situation and may well be oblivious to their own possible impending crisis, which could make it's arrival all the more of a shock. Even if you have been successful in the first half of your life, perhaps you brain will still demand you to do a complete stock-take and might ask you something like: "Is this really what you want to be doing till you're old and grey?" or: "You're successful, but would anyone really care if you got run over by a bus tomorrow? Would you leave any kind of legacy at all?" It seems to be mainly men you hear about getting mid-life crises, and female trivializers of men's mid life crises will often be a bit Gemaine Grear-ly condescending to men going through it and accuse them of making a fuss about nothing, telling the man to pull themselves together and to stop winging just because women don't fancy them anymore ... but I don't think the 'women not fancying you anymore' bit is the real core of the mid life crisis ....it's certainly not the case with me because women stopped fancying me ages ago.... a time in my life succinctly illustrated by what my Mother said to me when I was about thirty (a decade back) : "What are you going to do now you have lost your youthful good looks?" she said... this was moderately devastating I must say -- not because I had lost my youthful good looks but because up until that very split second I'd not been aware that I had any... imagine someone saying to you: "Oh by the way y'know that lottery ticket I bought for you ages ago... that one that won the jackpot... remember? Oh didn't I tell you? Anyway I'd had it so long it expired yesterday so I chucked it." Although the 'women not fancying you anymore' issue is not the core of the crisis, I suppose if it happens to occur at the same time then that would be a considerable extra bummer which you could well end-up obsessing about (especially if people kept telling you that was what was wrong with you). "I'm not going to have a mid-life crisis because I haven't really had 'a life' to have a crisis about, ha-har"... I used to jokingly say during my thirties, but one still came and kicked my arse all the same....so be prepared, be very prepared, if you're approaching middle age.

Anyway, I've since been able to look at the video game I was doing, in more detail, without panicking too much. But now I've reviewed it I find I have simply gone-off it... because I'm not so sure if it will make a good game after all, despite it being a very interesting ( and possibly even totally new ) concept.... maybe it was even a bit too avaunt guard and up its own arse to be much fun to play. So maybe I'll think of a new game to write. Starting projects are always the most interesting and enjoyable bit, filled with hope and new ideas, so it's not surprising that me or anyone else is tempted to start a new project before finishing their current one (at least when it's a project your doing as a hobby i.e. for enjoyment). So, there's another quarter-finished project to add to my pile...and, as ever, I convince myself I will renew efforts to actually get some projects finished in the next few months. Even Hermit has a good array of part finished projects, but ... he does also have an impressive array of completed ones too, it has to be said. Perhaps I just haven't thought of the 'killer project' yet and when I do I'll become addicted to it and get carried away by it to it's ultimate completion and success...so I'd better get thinking.