I was up late talking to Ralph…
..on the big white phone.
Alternately titled “October Surprise”.
My coffee has the sharp tang of tomato paste, definitely not my preferred blend.
I was up until after 3 am last night thanks to an impressive bout of food poising ala the salmonella lunch special I had yesterday.
What made it so bad was that a few hours after lunch and shortly before I became aware of the evil brewing in my intestines, I added an obscenely large plate of pasta to the mix. In black powder enthusiast terms, this was the “wadding”.
While I was curled up on the tile next to the big white phone lamenting the loss of my tasty pasta dinner, It occurred to me that this was a classic example of bad timing. If my meal had been delayed just twenty minutes, I would have realized I was sick, gotten it out of the way and then been able to enjoy my dinner …just once.
Timing is everything as the saying goes. Since this is more or less and artist and developers blog I’ll keep it in that context.
Being in the right place at the right time, or having the right idea or product at the right time is often as much luck as design. And that is certainly true for the macro and micro view of development and production.
But wait, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” you say? Or maybe you lean toward “if it weren’t for bad luck I’d have not luck at all”.
Either way it’s certainly a factor.
I once had a studio director describe his game development approach to me as “slinging spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks”. While that makes great visual for my perpetually growling stomach, from a business development perspective, it makes about as much sense as Russian roulette. And when you are talking about millions of dollars in operating cost, not to mention the careers trajectories of the developers under your watch, it’s more a road map for disaster than a recipe for success. In my opinion.
I was gonna continue this with a more specific look at how I approach design and development, and how those practices apply to timing and being able to answer the door when opportunity knocks. But all this talk has my belly grumbling, so I’m gonna go eat.
Fell free to post you thoughts on the subject and maybe it will motivate me to finish this post.
I’ll leave you with a little different take on luck.
There was once a boy who came from a poor family in China. One day his horse ran away. The villagers all said “what unfortunate luck”. The boys father shook said, “Maybe good. Maybe bad.”
The next day, the boy went to find the missing horse and found a herd of wild horses and caught a strong steed to bring them back to the village. The villagers exclaimed, “Isn’t this wonderful luck”. The boys father again said, “Maybe good. Maybe bad.”
The next day the boy went to try to break in and tame the horse, but the horse bucked him and crippled his leg. The villagers all proclaimed what terrible luck is was. “Maybe good. Maybe bad.” said the boys father.
That same day the army marched through town taking all the able-bodied young men away to war…
Luck is like the weather here in Eugene, it changes every hour, so don’t bank on it holding.
Obligatory Pic, this is a new treatment on a sketch I did some time ago.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
Hope you’re feeling better. I’m with you on the Luck thing and only time will really tell if you’ve been lucky or not… and even then
I do hold with the “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” as that has been my experience. It’s all down to how one interprets a past event in the end I suppose.
Yup, feeling much better.
I was planning to talk specifically about timing, part of which is luck, but ended up mostly talking about the luck factor I guess.
I’ve worked on games that were really solid, fun games, which had little or no success just due to the timing of when they hit the market, and others that failed because there was no marketing budget, which has nothing to do with luck. So it is more complicated than either luck or timing.
I’ve also seen junior developers (artist and designers) bloom or wilt, due to being saddled with task that built upon their skills or overwhelmed them respectively. And that was a matter of insight and timing, or the lack their of in the case of the latter.
Where I was going with it was that timing is key to so many things, yet often under appreciated and left to chance, which is in my opinion sort of like not pulling a couple of new cards to replace your weak ones in a game poker, just because you are too lazy to assess your odds of getting batter cards, and in turn improving you chance of success.