Late Nite Waycool

The big news tonight: Smash Bros. delayed again. Was there ever any doubt?

Meanwhile, it's the end of my day, creeping up on two in the morning with no sleep in sight. Bouncing my sleep schedule around these days has been a little wacky on my insides -- 6 AM wakeups for three weeks, up three hours a week after and five a week beyond that. I'm becoming progressively more acquainted with the wee hours of the morning, something I haven't really done since college. But it's nice, you know? Nothing on television, no shenanigans in the apartment, everything asleep and still—computers, roommates, fridge compressor units. When it's just you and a shitload of work, the work tends to crank out a bit easier.

Did you know CBC has turned jPod into a television show? Yep, as of a week or so ago, Douglas Coupland's most recent tech-centric novel, exploring the lives of programmers at a monolithic game studio in Vancouver (which may as well be EA, you know) has been fashioned into a weekly comedic outing with none other than Alan Fucking Thicke himself playing the protagonist's dad. It's weird—accustomed though I may be to the adaptation of books to film (most often) and TV (rarely, but still occurring), the idea of something that I've read making such a debut is a little wacky. It is Douglas Coupland, though. He's the Helvetica-lovin' literary rock star of Canada, edgy but in his own special way—like Chuck Palahniuk except talented. And gay. [Update: Chris Furniss informs me that Chuck is gay, too. Okay, so Douglas Coupland is like Chuck Palahniuk except talented. Period.]

You get acquainted with characters in the theater of your mind and it's hard to separate them from what's presented to you in the transition to another medium. When I read the book, I hated the characters -- having read Microserfs almost a decade prior, my idealized image of geeky shut-in coders finding themselves in a collective effort clashed pretty hard with the consumeristic, meme-spouting Googlemaniacs of jPod. I was so pissed that I wrote a goddamn paper on it in my Canadian literature class during my senior year of college; this wasn't what I pictured game development to be like, goddamnit.

Part of me still hopes that such a place really exists. Even the most broad interest in gaming will net a juicy industry from behind the curtain every now and then—layoffs and corporate bullshit in the worst cases, the kind of stuff featured in jPod, businessmen stunting creative vision with their own attitudes on what the kids want, what will sell. When you think about it, is slapping a hip turtle with attitude into a skateboarding game so different than licensing Vader for use in Soul Calibur IV? Yes, chew on that! It is a nugget of thought.

But then you hear about places like Insomniac, studios where every input is valuable, where games are truly developed as the result of a cooperative effort. Places like these are where dreams of game development are forged, neatly inserted into the minds of wee games journalists in the making and germinated over the course of decades. And yeah, most journalists want to be in development—at least, most of 'em that I know.

What I'm getting at is that this idea of what development might be, even in the worst case scenario, is still vaguely sexy to me. I like the idea of being awash in a company culture and able to observe its effects at its most tragic, its most bizarre. And as I mentioned, not every studio is a soul-sucking, heart-crushing bastard machine—just a lot of them. But had I any gift with numbers, I swear I would have eschewed English in favor of computer science when selecting a course of study. As much as I love my station and appreciate my good fortune (and that is most certainly what it is), I'd trade any skill with words for the ability to code. If you're gunning for development it's definitely a foot in the door, almost all other thoroughfares being "the hard ways".

I ain't complaining, though—just musing on what could have been. Ever sit down and think "Man, I wonder what it would be like to be a totally ripped fireman, saving lives and getting chicks and shit"? It's more or less the same thing, except both sides of my equation—the comfortable reality and the wild, batshit insane fantasy—involve few women and little recognition. But hey, at the very least they incorporate games and a steady paycheck; for a dork like me, that's an absolutely invaluable combination.