Perils of the Overworld

Looking at Midgar from FFVII's overworld. So big!

I'm still getting used to the internet being good again. There are so many cool things happening now! The backdrop is grimmer than ever, of course, which should go without saying but I'll say it anyway.

This morning Kyle tweeted a link to Robin Sloan's latest project, which is a newsletter about a video game he's currently writing and programming, called Perils of the Overworld. Eventually we'll be able to play the game, but that's not what's so fascinating about the endeavor.

Sloan is a fiction writer who's also known for his inventive (and playful!) programming. (He also contributed to the acclaimed Neo Cab, which describes itself as an "emotional survival game.") The last thing he made that I loved was this app called BoopSnoop, which is a social network / video chatting platform he built just for his family — you can't download it or use it, but you can read the argument he made for "home-cooked" software that inspired it. Or preceded it. One or the other.

His new newsletter is fascinating; in his words, its vibe is "you are working in the studio with me," which is to say that the point of the project is to write through the entire process. I love it! The game Sloan's set out to make sounds really cool, too. It's heavily inspired by Final Fantasy's overworlds.

If you're not familiar, here's Sloan's explanation: "Classic role playing games almost always feature a mode in which your character is roaming the regions between towns and dungeons; this zoomed-out macro view is called, by convention, the overworld, and a huge part of the fun of these games is the process by which the overworld opens up to you." Which, in my experience, is true. If you've ever played Final Fantasy VII, you'll remember leaving Midgar, the game's first setting, and stumbling onto a world that feels nearly infinite.

From what I can tell, Sloan's game is animated by a single question: "What does the passage of thirty happy years look like in a video game?" Because, as he correctly reasons, most games are about the urgency of finishing quests. But what if you turned that on its head? What if you got caught up in the world of the game, and decided to skip finishing what you started? It's a question that feels lifelike, because that's what life is: figuring out what you really want by doing something else entirely.

I'm excited for future dispatches, because I know how hard it is to make a game; you have to combine video, audio, prose, code, and gameplay in a way that a) works on all of those levels, but b) also is fun to play. It's a herculean task even when you're good at it, because every game is different enough that you have to create a new process to make the game before you can even start making the game in the first place.

I'm also personally interested because I've made some attempts of my own to make games, both alone and with a team; I've never had so much fun, honestly. I guess there's another lesson here, too: sometimes it takes doing something you're not sure you're right for to show you what you should be doing. Or at least that's what I've learned.