When George W. Bush became President, evangelical Christians like myself traded stories about his dramatic conversion. He had been an alcoholic but had found Jesus. He had become one of us. We welcomed his Presidency because he would stand for what we stood for. Family values. Marriage between one man and one woman. The curtailment of abortion. He would uphold our moral agenda.

When 9/11 occurred, we knew that God had given America the right man for the job. In an age when "evil" was a dirty word, Bush would have the character and resolve to name evil and confront it.

When Bush initiated the war in Iraq, most of my evangelical friends were for it. The spirit of the day was that it would be un-American not to "support our troops" and our President. After all, Bush understood our situation in history as only a Christian could. Somewhere out there, beyond the borders of America, a vicious evil lurked. All of us Americans—the "good" folk—had to unite together, seek out that evil, and destroy it. Like the ancient Israelites purging the wicked Canaanites from the land, God had appointed our generation to confront fundamentalist Muslims.

Then the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison emerged, shocking us into mute disgust. Not only were the images revolting but they turned our worldview on its head. The evil wasn't "out there" anymore. The good guys, too, carried out the basest forms of evil. The line between "us" and "them" blurred into indistinction.

Later we learned that Bush had flaunted the constitution by authorizing domestic wiretaps. We heard about the CIA's secret prisons and the torture techniques they used there. We learned that Bush himself had authorized the use of torture.

At first, evangelicals were slow to respond. Maybe the "harsh interrogation techniques" Bush had authorized weren't really torture? Maybe Bush had intelligence we didn't have—intelligence that somehow compelled Americans to use torture? There must be a reason that our brother in Christ would authorize the sort of inhumane treatment we watched in the Passion of the Christ.

Three years after the allegations had emerged, the National Evangelical Association released a declaration against torture. The announcement underscored—belatedly—a shift in the way American evangelicals had come to think about their government and the President. We saw this shift again in the 2008 elections where only 54% of churchgoing evangelicals voted for the Republican candidate—down from 61% in 2004.

Throughout the Bush years, most of my evangelical friends remained die-hard Bush supporters. Even after Obama won last November, many of them bemoaned his victory and dreaded his presidency even as they committed to praying for him. Yet others—especially of the younger generations—welcomed Obama with enthusiasm. Some swore never to vote Republican again. The Bush years changed the evangelical mind, but they didn't change all evangelicals equally.

I've been surprised by the diverse reactions from the Christians around me. I'm trying to understand why some have praised Bush through even his most questionable decisions while others consider the Bush Presidency one of the most villainous administrations in American history.

I've decided it all comes down to who you see as the enemy.

Evangelicals have traditionally had a strong sense of "us" and "them." We are the good guys. We have—or try to have—committed marriages. We guard our children against M-rated games and R-rated movies. We put pornography blockers on our computers. We feel uneasy when the lesbian couple moves in next door. We see our homes as bastions, sanctuaries against the evil of "the world." The world is Hollywood, liberals, activists who threaten to woo our kids into lechery, promiscuity, and homosexuality. Although America has declined since the 50s—morally speaking, of course—it still feels like "our" place. But "they" are always knocking at the door, making inroads, threatening to change our country into a sexualized, athiest, amoral wasteland. The enemy is anyone who would take our decent, essentially (if covertly) Christian America away from us.

It's this mindset that supported Bush through thick and thin. Bush could start the first pre-emptive wars in American history, he could sit on his hands while (wicked) New Orleans sank, he could even torture "them." So long as he fought terrorists, gay rights, and abortion, he was one of "us."

Though many evangelicals still carry strains of this mindset in their DNA, the moral blurriness of the Bush Presidency has caused others to think again. The enemy is not so easy to pin down. Evangelicals uphold the sanctity of marriage, yet get divorced as often as non-Christians. Evangelicals distrust Hollywood, yet allow TV and the Internet to babysit our children. National Evangelical Association president Ted Haggard turned out to be a drug user and sometime homosexual. Last month, NEA vice president Richard Cizik—one of the drafters of the declaration against torture—resigned after admitting he supported civil unions. Evangelicals who looked for evil "out there" are increasingly finding it "in here."

So it turns out that the enemy is within. Surprise, surprise. Isn't this what the Bible taught all along? "No one is righteous—no, not one."

The foundational truth of Christianity—how could we have forgotten it?—is that each of us is filled with evil. Paul portrayed this truth vividly: "When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am!"

Who is the enemy? I am.

Paul knew that Jesus didn't come to guard us from Romans or terrorists or the lesbians down the street—he came to cleanse us from the evil within. Evangelicals know it too. But somewhere along the line, in our terror for our children, our lifestyle, and our souls, we let ourselves forget.

As Barack Obama takes on the leadership of the nation next Tuesday, evangelicals gain—as do so many others—a new opportunity to rediscover our identity and mission. As I struggle to do this for myself and my own family, the image that stands out to me most brilliantly is the scene Jesus painted of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14). The Pharisee lived an upright life and even gave his money to the temple. But the parasitic tax collector, the moral scum of Jewish society,

stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, "God, have mercy on me, a sinner." I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

Labels: faith, politics

I've been wandering the Wastelands for three months now and I've come to a conclusion. There is no God.

Let me tell you what happened today. I was heading south along the river, walled in on the left by decayed office buildings. I remember thinking how beautiful they looked in the falling sunlight.

Suddenly I saw Mutants. They had a captive, and she was bound up, blindfolded, kneeling on one side of their camp. I thought, I've got to get her out of there.

There was no way to avoid a fight. Before I knew it they were on top of me. One of them came at me with a sledgehammer, and I prayed with every blast of my shotgun that he would fall before he reached me.

But then something else happened. Somehow in the chaos somebody threw a grenade. It bounced near my feet, then rolled past me as I leaped aside. I heard it pop behind me, but I didn't have time to look.

After I turned the Mutants' heads into spaghetti I went back for the captive. I found her in pieces. The grenade—she never saw it coming.

That's when I knew. Nobody's looking out for us. Nobody made this world. Nobody's telling this story—it just happens like it happens.

In my heart I've known ever since I stepped out of the Vault and looked out over the polluted carcass of what used to be Washington D.C. There was something lovely about that scene too. A golden light lay over the shoulders of the hills. A rusted water tower reflected the blue sky. A dust devil teased the earth along the path in front of me. Then I walked up between some boulders, and a feral dog nearly ripped my throat out. I had to beat it to death with a police baton—couldn't get the blood off for three days.

Now I've been out here three months and can't see my own skin for the muck and the grime. Still searching for my Dad, I tell myself. But who am I kidding? I'll never find him. If the Mutants haven't got him, the Yao Guai have.

At first I told myself that Fate would guide me. When I looked into the faces of the people around me—the people I knew and loved growing up in the Vault—I saw beauty and mystery and spirit. These faces, these eyes, the light behind these eyes, were not random happenstances of chemistry or science. Someone made these people, directly or indirectly. Someone was telling a story through them and through me. Whoever that Someone was would make it all come out all right. Even if I died, I would die heroically. But I wouldn't die—no one I loved would die. I would prove myself the hero of this story that Someone was telling.

That was then. What a self-righteous, stuck-up little chump I was! And naive, so terribly naive.

Then I met the raiders, watched their brains splatter on the rotting concrete—one by one, day after day. The slavers and their tortured slaves. The rats, the scorpions, the Deathclaws. All the poisoned freaks who haunt this hell hole. They taught me, without words but undeniably: There is no story here. No God. No Designer. This world just happened. It's just happening. It'll just keep on happening, because there's Nobody to put it out of its misery.

A few weeks ago, I met a tough, smart fighter named Sydney in the ruins of the National Archives. She carried a mean SMG and knew more about ammunition than anyone I'd met. We teamed up to find an old, valuable document—"The Declaration of Impediments" or something.

Her dad had left her behind, too. When she was fourteen, he went out and just never came back. "Never even said goodbye," she said. "Do I have to tell you what it's like for a young woman alone in the Wasteland at that age?" Boy, that stuck with me.

Then a few days later I was exploring an old building downtown and came across a skeleton curled up on a cot. Next to the corpse was a recording of Sydney's father that he hoped would somehow reach her. It explained everything. He had gone out to do some business, the deal went bad, bullets were exchanged, he took one in the gut. He had just enough time to tell her that he loved her, that he never meant to leave her, and that he had faith she would make it.

So Sydney grew up hating the father who loved her, fending for herself in a vicious world where the only language anyone understands travels at 896 feet per second.

Now what kind of God would let that happen?

I'm not looking for my father any more. I'm going where he has gone, following in his footsteps, doing what I'm supposed to do to someday catch up with him. But I know he's gone.

This story can have no happy ending, no resolution. This world is too cruel, too grotesque for me to believe it has any Storyteller but Mr. Luck and Mrs. Chance.

I'll keep wandering the Wastelands, because that's what my body and brain tell me to do. But don't talk to me about Fate or God or Destiny or Designer. If he ever existed, he died when the bombs fell.

Or maybe he just walked out. Like Sydney's father. Like my father.

Labels: faith, fiction, games

A couple of years ago I took a course in journalism from Kindred Spirit editor Sandi Glahn. On the first day of class she established, to the shock and horror of the students, a rule I'll refer to as Glahn's Law. It's simple.


In all our writing for class we were allowed two "be" verbs per page. Any more than that and we lost—oh, I don't remember—a finger or something.

At first I thought she was crazy. After all, "be" verbs are everywhere. Passive sentences are written with them. They are employed in stating facts of all kinds. They are arguably the most common verbs in English. Is, are, am, was, were, will be, would be, should be, could be—are all "be" verbs. Not counting that last sentence, this post has already used seven of them. Did they hurt you? No, me neither. So why did Sandi deplore them?

I thought she was crazy, but she was the boss, and there was nothing to lose by taking up her challenge. So I wrote a Word macro to help me count the number of "be" verbs on each page I wrote. As I worked on each assignment I hunted down "be" verbs with a toothpick, like a mother hunts lice.

By the end of the semester the mere sight of a "be" verb would give me the Clockwork Oranges. But on the last day of class Sandi released us from Glahn's Law, authorizing us to use them again. As I emerged blinking into the glare of unconstrained writing freedom, I realized that my time under Glahn's Law had taught me something crucial about how and how not to write.

Here's the fundamental, practical fact: "Be" verbs clog up your writing. They slow it down and make it harder to understand.

Consider the following two sentences.

General Motors is a manufacturer of cars.

General Motors makes cars.

Why would you say the first when you could say the second? Or this.

She was the victor after ten rounds.

She won after ten rounds.

Don't you prefer the second sentence? The difference here is a "be" verb versus a strong, active verb.

"Be" verbs talk about the state of something—what it is, its nature, its attributes. Consequently, whenever you use a "be" verb you end up talking in abstractions. Any toddler can watch a boy playing soccer and say, "He runs." It takes an older, more sophisticated mind to say, "He is quick."

Active verbs like "make," "win," and "run" talk about what things do. They talk about what we see rather than what we think. "The boat floats"—there it is, we can see it floating. "The boat is buoyant"—of course this means the same thing but it gets at the meaning through an abstract idea. The active verb is better.

"Be" verbs talk about what things are. Active verbs talk about what things do. Whenever possible you want to talk about what things do. Why is this?

As I labored under the tyranny of Glahn's Law, I began to understand why do is better than are. In our hearts, human beings really think in terms of action. When we were babies, and the foundations of our observing and thinking were formed, all we knew were the facts of what we saw in front of us. We saw father's mustache bend downward, his eyes narrow, his eyebrows pull together, and we knew we were headed for a spanking. We didn't think, "He is frowning." We didn't think, "He is angry." We experienced the action we saw in front of us in a direct and primal way. At a fundamental level, human beings deal in terms of action.

The higher level notions of state, attribute, nature, and existence only come together as we get older. They are a separate and, in some sense, artificial layer over the top of those primal, active observations. And it's this higher-level, abstract way of thinking that we convey when we use "be" verbs.

So what I discovered under Glahn's Law is that it's better to talk about doing than to talk about being. You should prefer a "do" verb to a "be" verb whenever possible, because then your writing will tap into the deepest and truest part of your readers' minds. Make your readers see things happening and they will find the abstractions. Tell them the abstractions, though, and they'll skate over the surface of your writing without really making contact. They're likely to skate right off the page.

I don't obey Glahn's Law anymore, but through it I learned a new law, and this I live by.


"Be" verbs aren't evil, just unregenerate. Use them, but make sure you know that you're using them and why you're using them. Make them pay their keep.

Labels: thinking, writing

One rainy Sunday when the kids had too little to do and I didn't have the energy to chase them around the house, we came up with a game that they enjoyed but allowed me to relax. We call it the Gemstone Game, and it has become one of our favorites.

Number of Players: 1–4, or more if you have a big enough play area
Ages: 4 and up
Time to Play: 5–15 minutes. Really as long as you want.
Materials:

• Twenty or so "gemstones." We use little colored glass beads about 1cm in diameter, but marbles would work too.
• One smallish throw pillow per player
• Hiding Places: sofas, stacked sofa cushions, recliners, upturned tables (nicely padded with pillows and blankets), blankets strung across the room

Object: To place the most gemstones onto your pillow before the gemstone pile is empty.

Setup

Choose a play area, either in a living room or den, or outside in the yard. The area should be reasonably large—we usually play in our living room, which is about 25'x20'—and as clear as possible of hard surfaces and sharp corners.

One player—typically the lazy grownup—is "The Watcher" and sits at one corner of the play area facing outward, away from the play area. Line up each player's throw pillow a few feet behind The Watcher. Put "hiding places" all around the play area. These can be sofas and solid chairs—padded ones that you can't see through. Players will hide behind these hiding places, trying to avoid being seen by The Watcher, so the obstacles need to be reasonably wide and tall. You can string up blankets to make good hiding places. Overturned coffee tables can work well if you pad them with blankets and pillows.

Now, at the far end of the player area, behind one of the hiding places, lay down a pile of 20 or so "gemstones" (marbles or the like).

How to Play

Players start at the pile of gemstones. When The Watcher is ready, he says "Alabama Closed," turns away from the play area and closes his eyes. Now each player picks up one gemstone (only one!) from the pile and attempts to carry it across the play area to place it onto her pillow. You must place the gemstone, not toss it.

At any moment, The Watcher may say, "Mississippi, Mississippi, Mississippi, Mississippi OPEN!," turn toward the play area and open his eyes. If he sees any players, he calls that player's name. That player loses one gemstone from off of his pillow and has to go back to the pile.

When The Watcher is ready, he says, "Alabama Closed," turns away and closes his eyes again. He continues to alternate between "Mississippi... OPEN" and "Alabama Closed" until the players have moved the pile of gemstones onto the pillows near The Watcher.

Scoring

When the game is over, each player counts the number of gemstones sitting on her pillow. Stones that have rolled off onto the floor don't count! The player with the most gemstones wins!

Notes and Tips

• This game can be dangerous! Players run, dive for cover, slide into hiding places, and try to move quickly among obstacles. If there's anything hard or sharp in the area, players can get bumped, scraped, or cut. We only use sofas, soft chairs, and pillows for our games, so we haven't had many injuries. But players can still bump into each other. So be warned: This game is not safe. We're okay with that in our household—we think the chance of a hospital-caliber injury is low—but if you're not, don't play.
  
• It's generally wise for players to agree that they'll always move either clockwise or counterclockwise around the play area. If everyone moves the same direction, it helps avoid head-on collisions.
• For older kids, it's fun to make the game get harder as it goes on. The Watcher can warn, "I'm going down to three Mississippis starting next time!" Then say, "Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi OPEN!" before opening your eyes. We eventually go down to two Mississippis, though I say them pretty slowly.
• This game is a great workout for the kids. They laugh while they play, and get great exercise moving quickly around the play area, getting up to run, getting down to hide. We have to take breathing breaks every few minutes.
• It's also great relaxation for lazy adults. Reclining on a bean bag and turning around every few seconds—anybody can do that. I like this game because it's a great way to spend quality time with my energetic kids without wearing myself out.
• You can vary the length of the game by starting with a bigger or smaller pile of stones.
• You might think of using bowls rather than throw pillows as destinations for the stones. Don't. It's too tempting to toss gemstones into a bowl. Because throw pillows tend to be domed-shaped, players have to be careful of how they place the stones, else they'll roll off.
  
• If your kids are any good at the game, there's an eerie thrill to be had here. When your eyes are closed you hear all this giggling and movement. But every time you open them the room looks empty. The experience is pleasingly horror-film-like.

Trivia

The game was vaguely inspired by the old Atari arcade game, I, Robot.

Labels: family, games

You have a brilliant idea for a video game. It's creative, original, intriguing, and fun. You can picture it vividly—the breathtaking visuals, the jaw-dropping action scenes. You can't wait to play it, and when you tell your friends about it they can't wait to play it either. Your only problem is, you don't own a game development studio. How do you get your game idea made?

Then you meet me. You find out I make games for a living, and before you can stop yourself you're telling me about your idea. Your eyes get as wide as the twin moons over a desert planet, your hands scrub the air, spittle foams on your lip. I understand your game idea, I say it's pretty good. Then you ask me, "What should I do to get a real game development company to make this game?"

How do I know you ask me this? Believe me, I know. I've worked in games for almost fifteen years and this is the number one question I'm asked. But no, that's okay, it doesn't bug me. Ask away—I'm happy to offer some advice.

I'm going to answer your question by asking you two questions. First: Is your idea really a game idea? Second: How are you going to climb the Ladder?

Is Your Idea a Game Idea?

Let's start with the first question. You've got an idea for a "game." My first question is: Is your idea really able to be made into a game?

When a game development team starts building a game, they start with a Game Design Document, or "GDD". Usually this is a literal document but sometimes it's a more informal thing: sketches, whiteboard drawings, memories of fevered conversations. But the best game studios strive to record their design in a written, illustrated document. In order to have even the remotest chance of getting your idea published you need to turn it into a GDD.

A game design is much more than a game idea. It's a detailed specification for how the game should work. What does each button on the controller do? What does the HUD look like and what do each of the pieces do? How does enemy AI work? What pickups can players gather and what do they do? The game design describes every part of the game and tells how all the parts fit together to create a fun game.

This raises another question. What makes a fun game?

There are many possible answers to this question. No one has found a sure-fire formula for fun. Sid Meier says that a game is a series of interesting decisions, and this is a helpful starting point. Players have "fun" when they have to make choices. But not just any choices. Fun choices have to be intriguing, meaningful—interesting. How will your game design produce interesting choices for the player?

This is a hard question. Let me show you two examples that illustrate how hard this is.

The original Half-Life took the gameplay of Quake, then amplified and extended it in many ways. One of the ways they amplified the gameplay was to add a Reload button. Now ten years have gone by since Half-Life was released, and games like Halo have made Reload commonplace. But at the time it was a risky design. In earlier games you never had to reload, so Valve was making weapons harder to use. Players could easily get annoyed—"Why do I have to keep hitting Reload every ten seconds? None of the older games made me do this. Why can't the gun just reload itself?"

Valve took a gamble on reload and the gamble paid off. Players loved Reload even though it made more work for them. Why? Because Reload creates interesting decisions.

When you're fighting enemies and your gun has a little ammo left you don't want to spend the time reloading. If you're sure the area is clear of enemies you will reload. But what about those times when you'd like to reload but you're not sure whether an enemy is about to pop out at you? Then the choice of whether to reload becomes an interesting decision.

Half-Life was more fun as a result of Reload even though Reload made the game harder. Now let's look at another example.

Doom 3's design called for the game to be set in darkness. Many of the rooms had only one light and some were completely black. To counteract this, the game gave the player a flashlight that could be used to light up any environment. Yet the player could not shine his flashlight and wield a weapon at the same time. This created a decision: do you want light or protection?

Many players hated this game feature. It seemed arbitrary and unrealistic. It often put players into impossible situations where they could either see their enemies or fight them but not both. Players would find themselves either staring helplessly at oncoming bad guys or blasting away into blackness.

Half-Life's reload feature and Doom 3's light feature are similar in many ways, but one of them was fun and the other was not. If you can understand exactly why that is, you're one step closer to turning your game idea into a winning game design.

Most game designs also talk about the game's setting, story, and characters. But I want to stress that this part of the game design usually accounts for less than a fourth of the total document. When people tell me their game ideas, usually their idea is 99% setting and story and only 1% gameplay. I have to tell them that they don't have a game idea—they have a story idea. A game design is not a story design. If you want your idea made into a game, you'll have to fill out the details about how the game actually plays—what the player actually does, how he moves his character, how he interacts with the world.

It's hard for most people to think through how a game should actually play. Here's a helpful hint for how to do this. Write a "Five Minutes of Gameplay" document. A lot of studios require this, and it'll help you think through your game.

In this document, you'll describe, in absolute detail, what a player does in your game for about five minutes of play. When I say detail, I mean detail. Don't say, "The player goes North." Say, "The player pushes forward on the left joystick." Don't talk about what the player thinks or decides: just show what he sees and describe what he does with his hands. If you can describe five minutes of your game's gameplay in that kind of detail, you're well on your way to writing a great GDD. In fact, you can put your "Five Minutes of Gameplay" document into your GDD as a kind of overview of the game.

How Will You Climb the Ladder?

You are not the only person in the world with a brilliant game idea. There are hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of gamers all over the globe who have ideas for games. How are you going to make your idea stand out? How will you get it to be one of the few that actually gets made?

You need to be realistic about this challenge. There are perhaps 8,000 people working in the game industry right now. Most of those people have their own game ideas that they want to make. They're not sitting around wishing someone would give them a great idea. They've already got ideas and are just waiting to get the power and status and respect to form a team to get them made. So these people—game developers like me—are your competition.

And if you're not already working for a game company, you're at a disadvantage. A professional game developer has all the connections. He can walk across the hall and talk to a potential financier for his game—someone who knows and trusts him. A professional game developer also has expertise. He knows how games are made. So if you're not already making games for a living, you have 8,000 other game designers ahead of you in the queue.

In fact, even if you're already a professional game developer you have a huge mountain to climb. Very few people in the industry get to run their own game project. Of the few that do, many of those projects are based on movies, TV shows, and other properties, so even the project leader has little creative control.

So there is a tiny, tiny fraction of people who have game ideas and actually get to make them. Yet even then their job isn't easy. They have to sell their game to publishers, explain and re-explain it to their teams, and ultimately convince gamers that their idea deserves the $50 it costs to play it.

There's a huge ladder above you—a huge pile of people you have to compete with, overcome, work with, and convince. How are you going to climb it?

It is possible to climb it. Some people do. I did. In fact there are two different strategies for how to get to the top of the ladder and make your game.

The first strategy is to work your way up. I studied computer science in college. Along with my studies, I also did extra work teaching myself linear algebra, C++, 3D rendering, and game programming. By the time I graduated from college I had written two game demos. I showed them to game development studios and before I even graduated I had landed my dream job working for Origin Systems—at that time, the biggest game developer in the world. I worked as a programmer for a few years, then moved up to lead programmer and ultimately producer and director. I worked for four different companies on a dozen different projects, many of which were canceled. But a few projects shipped and a few did well, so I was able to keep climbing. It took ten years, but I got to design games and lead large projects. If you have the talent, the dedication, and the people skills, you can climb the ladder this way.

One step you can take that will shorten your ladder-climbing journey is to study at a game development education program like the Guildhall. I teach game programming at the Guildhall, so maybe I'm a little biased. But every one of the programmers we've graduated so far has gotten a good job in a real game development company, so obviously we're doing something right.

No matter how you start, getting to the top of the game industry is a hard, long, difficult climb. If you want to make big, sophisticated, AAA titles, it's the only way to go. But if you're willing to make smaller games there's another strategy that is both easier and faster.

The casual game market is growing rapidly and offers lots of opportunity. Casual games are the sort of simple, quick games you play on websites like Armor Games or Shockwave or on your cell phone. They're usually created in Flash or Java and are relatively easy to make. In the last couple of years I've made a dozen or so Flash games, and they're a lot of fun to make and play. Best of all, you can make a game all by yourself or with just a couple of friends. You don't need millions of dollars, a hard-to-find game job, or even a publisher. You just do it!

There's even money in it. If your games get popular enough they can get sponsored by a website. Websites will usually give you either an up-front license fee or a cut of the money that they receive from advertising. You'd have to make a lot of games every year to make a living this way, but it can be done.

Casual games are a tremendous opportunity. The downside is that they're casual. They're not big, grand, gorgeous experiences like BioShock or Fallout 3. If you can be happy just making modest, simple, fun games, you can be happy in the casual game market.

Whether you decide to climb the big ladder to making big games or the small ladder to making small games, you can get your game idea made if you work hard and stick with it. No matter whether you decide to make big games or small games, you have to start with more than just an idea. You have to turn your game ideas into game designs by thinking through the details of how your game actually plays and by discovering how to make it fun. This skill, too, comes with practice.

Best wishes as you start your journey. Drop me a line when you have questions. Let me know about your successes and I'll celebrate with you.

Good luck!

Labels: games, programming