A New Beginning (and Other Clichés)
It’s been a year and a half since I stopped blogging at Tumblr.
According to many folks there, I was driven off by a group of fans from Tumblr’s rather rabid social justice crowd — which is not to say everyone from Tumblr is rabid, or that everyone interested in social justice is rabid, but some of them certainly are and that does indeed make it rather unpleasant to have a conversation in their vicinity about anything which potentially intersects with their interests. And so be it? They have a lot to be angry about, and it was pretty clear my clumsy attempts to engage with their constant questions were only making them angrier. Stepping back from that was better for them and certainly better for me.
More than that, however, it had been four months since I’d left the Dragon Age team to work on a new IP for BioWare — a fact which hadn’t yet been announced at that point, but which made continuing my blog less rewarding than before. I’d worked on Dragon Age for ten years, after all, right from the setting’s creation up to the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014, and that’s all anyone really knew about or asked questions about. Yet Dragon Age was behind me. I couldn’t talk about my new project, but I was also far less invested in talking about Dragon Age — especially with people who would continue to hold me responsible for a project I no longer had any influence over.
I suppose the first question would be “why didn’t you just turn off the ‘Ask a Question’ function?” I had written articles about game writing, after all, so why not focus solely on that? That’s true, but the blog had become a purely Q&A thing, and I can safely say my interest in talking about the craft with folks had reached a low point. So I felt it was better to just walk away.
As it turned out, my feeling of dissatisfaction was more fundamental than that. I’d left Dragon Age because I wanted to try something new, but after a year on the new project I realized that wasn’t doing it for me either. I was considering something radical (for me): leaving a place I’d worked at for more than 17 years.
Leaving Bioware
There was a narrative after I left with which some journalists became rather enamored, and that was the notion of BioWare as some sinking ship with creative folks abandoning it left and right. The list of said creatives was always rather small compared to the total, but hey — it made for an interesting story, right?
Let me be clear: it wasn’t them, it was me. BioWare is a fantastic place to work, and I still consider the people there a kind of extended family. All the negative things I hear about other game development companies never really seemed to apply there. Yet that was part of it: I’d only heard about those other companies. Perhaps the grass is always greener and so on, but I was starting to feel that working at one company for my entire career just wasn’t cutting it. I wanted to try something new, I wanted more control over what I was doing and, even more than that, I wanted to work on something different.
As it turned out, different — not necessarily something new — was the key. I began my game writing career working on Baldur’s Gate II, and thus it amuses me to no end that I ended up going to a company which (so far) is known for updating and expanding Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II and other Infinity Engine games. I ran into Trent Oster at my gym, and he planted an idea in my head from which I just wasn’t able to escape. Considering there wasn’t really any place for me to go at BioWare, I had no choice but to take the plunge. If people want to read that as some kind of indictment of my former employer, go right ahead. They still have plenty of creatives who will do just fine without me, even if I’m missed.
Well, I hope I’m missed. A little. After 17 years, one’s ass leaves a considerable imprint on the chair, you know? And my ass is not small.
Onwards and…Upwards?
I wish I could talk about what I’m doing at Beamdog. I really, really do. My eagerness to shout it at the world kind of crawls under my skin and makes me crazy. “What are you working on now, Dave?” someone will ask me. “Shut up!” I reply and run away, arms flailing in the air.
Then they smile smugly and say, “Oh, I know what you’re working on.” And I have to let them walk away being all knowing-like even though they’re completely wrong. They can’t know. Biting my tongue has never been my strong suit.
So I suppose that’s why I’m here. As Creative Director at Beamdog, I’m busy building up a new narrative team and forming a narrative design pipeline at a place which hasn’t really had that before, so I’m thinking a lot these days about the craft of writing games and the entire process. Thus, since I can’t talk about my project, I can talk about that. Maybe I’ll opine on other things related to the gaming industry along the way, but it’ll mostly be that. Maybe nobody will be interested, but after spending a year in Pre-Production on the BioWare project only to move onto Pre-Production here…I need to actually write something or I will go goddamn crazy. It was either a novel or this, and I chose this. For now. We’ll see how things proceed.
