I'm not going to point fingers, "Mistakes were made", many of them were mine. I picked goals that were too ambitious for our resources, didn't drop the resulting projects when it became clear they weren't going to work out, and in general was too willing to believe that if I picked goals worth reaching towards that somehow the ability to reach them would materialize. I walked away from deals that would have given me part of what I needed because I believed a better deal would emerge. I hit my limits so hard I left a Dave-shaped impression on the wall, but I definitely bounced.
This, by itself, would only have sent me underground for a few months, while I nursed my wounds and processed the lessons, but....
I have an aphorism I used to trot out when I was explaining why I was so driven to focus on game design: "The secret to greatness is simple: Have nothing in your life that is more important than your own ambition." And at the time, following that advice was easy: I was single and although I had a daughter, through no fault of my own (in fact despite my best efforts) I had no contact with her. By the time I left Orbis, this was no longer true. I had gotten married, my eldest daughter was living with us, I had two stepsons, and we were trying to adopt two other girls.
About the time I pulled myself out of the hole of existential doubt my failure with Orbis put me in, everything went to hell on the family front. My eldest daughter was diagnosed with MS, and the adoption of the youngest (at the time not even a year old) became complicated as the family of the biological father became involved. Very simply, I had to choose between my ambitions and my obligations. My daughters needed me present and focused, not running around with my hair on fire trying to make deals, and not drifting around with my head in the clouds thinking Deep Thoughts about game design.
For what it was worth, it wasn't a dilemma I agonized over once it was clear to me. I stopped trying to scare up other work, stopped trying to keep up with the minutiae of the ongoing soap-opera that is the game business, and focused on my family. Not everything worked out the way I would have liked: We didn't adopt the older of the girls we were trying to, and after lots of drama and screaming, I wound up divorced.
I'm not going to go into the details of how that happened. It wouldn't be hard to make my ex-wife look like a villain, but since I have to work with her for the next 13 years or so, until my youngest daughter is 18, it wouldn't be productive to dwell on it. Anyway, ranting about your terrible ex is a cliche, and I don't do cliches.
The reality of the situation I deal with now is that I have to restart my career, having been out of circulation for 5 years and not having done anything really relevant (as in working on a significant title) in nearly 10. It sucks, in some ways it is harder than breaking in the first time, because the first time I didn't have any history to live down.
I've tried at various times, in various ways, to start blogging again, each one wound up going nowhere. I realized that I was forcing it, reaching into the well of confidence from which I used to pontificate and finding it empty. I'd know I was ready to start again when it actually took an effort of will not to do it. For the last week or so, I've been restraining myself, and I think it's time to start again.
What will this blog be about? Any damn thing I feel like writing about. That will frequently be game design and the games business, because that is again the focus of my day to day life. Sometimes it will be about my RV and how I keep it running and make it more livable. Occasionally, it will be about my daughters, because I happen to feel like it and it's my damned blog, I'll shout any damned thing I want into the void.
