Regardless, I have some other verbatim to spew before I make an attempt to actually, you know, wake up, and smell the coffee.
Crack.
The game industry, as I've been able to experience somewhat firsthand, is like crack. You'll love it, perhaps to an obsessive, rob your mother for nickels, point, but it will most likely kill you in the end.
Lemme explain. I basically fell into a button monkey, industry job last September, on a project completely unrelated to MMOs. And… September was great. As was October. November was my first month of 'crunch', which apparently is some sort of code for working around three hundred hours a month. Seven months later… I sometimes look away from a small army of monitors, to see whether or not the sun actually isn’t some fabled myth of legend and lore.
Which is what happened to me in short. That said, the experience irrevocably changed me. It changed me on a sort of, fundamental, eye twitching, once a junkie, always a junkie sort of way. I love the industry. I really do. I think I might kill somebody if they say: "crunch" around me, but it would be in a loving, sort of Gollumesque, 'my precious', way.
The reality is, I've sort of been on the other side of the fence now, and I'm not entirely sure how that's changed my perception of thing. Unquestionably, it has changed it considerably, but for the good? The bad?
I'm not sure, I sort of suspect I'll be unable to look at the industry through anything except kaleidoscope colored glasses now. I finally understand how games are put together, how many people are involved, why certain things do and don’t happen. How certain parts of a game can be brilliant, while other parts can totally suck hardcore.
Admittedly, I'm still the cynical bastard I always was; I just have a slightly skewed perspective now. Everything has changed, with only the fact that I love MMOs remaining. It's odd, the one thing I really wish I could do would be to give you a totally in-depth account of everything I've been through in the last nine months. But, as comes as no big surprise, I also finally understand why developers rarely ever talk personally about their own projects/experiences.
The end result? Beats the hell out of me. All I know is my writing is as rusty as hell, and there's at least a ninety-nine percent chance nobody will ever read this site again. Nevertheless, it's time for me to poke my head out of my proverbial hole. The sun is shining, the future looks, well, reasonably bright, and there is so much MMO news, I could literally drown a kitten in it. I love this industry.