B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

There's a familiar pause before answering the question "What do you do?" - it's about the shape and size of the amount of time it takes to gather my thoughts when not I don't plan on responding entirely truthfully. It's not that I'm going to lie - "Games Designer" is how I'm introduced at parties and meetings, so that has to count for something - so much as I don't quite believe it myself. This job, this life, and all that goes along with both of them manage to be both wanted and completely unnatural feeling at the same time. It's a sort of fracture running along my personality, breaking the surface in the way I talk (stumbling over using "us" and "we" in place of "you" or "they" in meetings) and the way I walk (almost constantly self-aware, afraid that messing up will show me out as the fake and impostor with no right to be doing what I'm doing that I'm still a bit convinced I am). I think the trouble has less to do with my job now and much, much more to do with the years and years of shitty, worthless, dead end go no where work that put me here. Maybe that's the real terror here: for once, for maybe the first time, I'm genuinely enjoying what I do.

posted by chris  # 9:39 AM 0 comments

I guess at some point I should talk about making video games, as that's what I spend all day doing.

Hm.

It's not playing games all day. To be honest, I rarely play anything at work until a project reaches the testing phase, and then I play the same game over and over again, eight hours a day for up to a week or more to find new and exciting ways of breaking it. It's not playing God, either, at least not at the level I'm at where all our games involve other people's properties and we're forced to work around their approval, their time frame, their budget and their storage space. It's hard and frustrating and a long, long process involving months spent carrying an ever-changing idea through all the steps of production in the hopes of ending up with something that holds together and does what its told when buttons get pushed. And that something had better be fun and worth it, or you have to start all over again.

At the same time, it's also one of the most engaging and addictive creative styles I've ever worked in. Game design - and by default, games - aren't just the up-and-coming tenth art form, it's where the rest of them meet and spin off in to something new that, at its height, can't be touched by any other medium. There's such potential in games to effect the audience in a genuine and real way that we're barely scraping the surface of, and yet even our first stumbling steps toward emotionally complicated games are something to behold. We're moving to a new sort of gameplay experience, one where the beautiful visuals of slaying the monster aren't as impressive or important as the regret you feel after sticking the sword in.

Making games, even relatively small scale we work on, is less creation and more conducting, pulling all the elements you can find into a massive Spectorian wall of sound and firing them back at the player. You bring in what you know - art, poetry, song, storytelling - and stick one on top of the other, ending up with something new that is not observed but experienced. If games aren't respected I think it has as much to do with that as it does Laura Croft's cup size of or Doom's shotgunning of alien demons: games are an equalizer, inviting the player to participate in the story and in many ways make the work their own. Sharing responsibility for the effect a work of art has isn't an idea that's very popular or taken very seriously. Neither is asking an adult to come and play, for that matter. But that's something for another ramble, I think.

Game design, this fascinating, frustrating thing that found me and burned its name across my brain, isn't like playing God. When done right, when done well, it's stealing the controls and doing him one better.

posted by chris  # 4:09 PM 0 comments

Sitting in front of this blank screen at just past a little too early in the morning and wondering what to write. And then immediately after that wondering how that is even a question, how some part of my brain can keep reigning in my hands by cautioning "But we don't even know where we're going yet!" at the start of every day. I came to the conclusion the other day that writing about writing might be a way of keeping me in safe waters, but now I wonder if it is more of a hinderance to not allow myself to write about whatever the first impulse may be. That brings up another question: am I drawn to writing as a (ha ha) subject matter because it is safe, with no danger of stepping on any one's toes or getting into laundry I'd rather not air in public? I maybe I am, at least partly, and I think for now that's okay. I'm very much just starting, and very much still finding my way. To work yet another bit of awkward imagery into this, it's a bit like training wheels: you either take them off immediately or leave them on until the protection they offer becomes restraint. And really, honestly, I am getting tired of only coughing up reminders of what I'm doing every morning.

posted by chris  # 9:51 AM 0 comments

New layout, similar to how it was when the murder hurricane prettified it. What's the verdict? Soooo grood or nooooo grood?

posted by chris  # 3:18 PM 0 comments

Four days off in a row for the holiday is the longest bit of time off I've had since... I'm not really sure. Sometime in the early Summer, definitely, but I'm pretty sure the last time I went this long without working was when I wasn't working at all. This sort of sudden stop, particularly after the long slog that began in August and never really ended, can't help but provide time to reflect on everything that's happened. It feels like several year's worth of work have been crammed into the space of this one, like I've stolen a few extra off the end of my life. Five jobs in the last eleven months, and two of them realizing life-long goals - that's not a good year, that's a pretty decent life.

I remember talking to Patrick back in January and us deciding that this would be the year that made us grow up, at least in the ways that actually matter. If '03 was us and ours owning the world and '04 when it was all taken back as we'd never really earned it, '05 would be when we got down to the business of proper conquest. Nearly there, now, and I'm not sure what's the stranger feeling: to have so much of my blind and dumb stumbling proven right, or to still be around to see it.

posted by chris  # 7:57 AM 0 comments

posted by chris  # 1:10 AM 0 comments

The first lesson on starting the fifth of these is that it's not easy, but I wonder how much of that is my fault. I can't help but thinking I would have an easier time of things if I wasn't posting them here. there's the nothing I can write about while putting off starting a a project, and then there's the nothing I write about when I know people are going to be reading it. So far, these sets have fallen in the latter, and I worry that it might be hurting the exercise.

It's something to get over, and part of the point. In addition to fiction I feel like I've lost my ability to just write, to just put something on paper for the sake of filling the space. Well, maybe not so much lost as misplaced in the last few years of sporadic freelance and thumb spinning. It's another thing I miss, another tool as useful now as when I had everything to figure out, rather than just most of it. The way to get it back, I think, is to stop treating everything as a job, to stop worrying when I sit down for these lines whether any one is going to read them. This isn't for the sake of any imaginary audience, and the "or not" of Stendhalt's quote covers "interesting" as well as "genius." Time to stop writing about writing, at least for a little while.

posted by chris  # 12:10 AM 0 comments

No lines for yesterday, as yesterday was spent incubating. Which is a roundabout way of saying "playing Sly3 for the better part of the day and not eating enough before downing a brandy tumbler full of Jim Beam and Coke and watching Star Trek IV and going out, though not necessarily all in that order." It's all in the phrasing, see. But in between and around the edges of all that, I thought about these twenty lines a day. I've never been one for writing exercises, and while this one is only five days old I'm personally a little amazed that it's still standing. I can't help thinking there has to be more to it than "looked like a good idea at the time."

I like the limited nature of it, though I've yet to stop at twenty lines with any of them so far. Twenty lines is about the borderline between wondering aloud and short essay, roughly the life-span of an idea before it grows into something that needs proper taking care of. Also, committing to twenty lines a day is a lot easier than the amorphous advice to "writing something everyday" or the dead horse of writing "just a page a day." What is a page to you? Where do you stop yourself when just writing something? Without that mark of twenty lines the exercise becomes work, and if I could just do the work I wouldn't be bothering in the first place.

And that's twenty-three lines, right there. I feel like I should try to avoid making the rule "At least twenty lines a day, genius or not," as if there's anything I need to work on it's conserving my words. And besides, ending mid-thought guarantees me something to write about tomorrow, and it's hardly cheating if it's to keep within the rules, right?

posted by chris  # 1:59 AM 0 comments

If Thanksgiving must happen, there is no where I'd rather spend it than in Manhattan and on my own. Where else can a parade the size and scope of Macy's happen without bumping into my day? Where else is there enough room to accommodate such extremes of celebration and indifference without missing a beat in between? Spongebob lumbers along closed and crowded streets into Times Square like a conquering God while I'm sitting down to a burger and fries hardly fifty blocks South - neither of our actions will effect the other. This optional isolation is one of the little tricks New York pulls to remind you why you moved here; other than empty streets, a few closed stores, the day off and the specials the waiter reads me, there's hardly any sign of the holiday to be found.

So this Thanksgiving I woke when I wanted and played video games till hungry, finally stepping out into the cold and neutral day sometime just after noon. I stopped by Alt for bad coffee over Beach Boys records with Jason and Patrick before wandering down past the mental boundary line of Houston to get to Schiller's. Now, full and happy and waiting for change, warm and only a little tipsy from the Manhattan Jo got me, I realize that for maybe the first time I can remember I'm spending Thanksgiving completely content. Maybe, like the grandparents responsible for my general meh-ness towards the day, the date needed only to be ignored and forgotten to be enjoyed.

posted by chris  # 11:19 PM 0 comments

At the beginning of November and caught up in the slow fear that comes with starting a thing like NaNo with a story I'm not actually interested in, I bought a book on writing. It's a bad habit of mine, and about as detrimental (I'd imagine) as casual alcoholism or a mild Prozac habit. I find myself wanting to write and almost managing to do so, and start thinking that if I can just find the right book, the right lesson or bit of advice from the right successful author (they need only be moderately successful, I'm not asking for much), the drought will end and the worlds will come and everything will be fine. This has only happened twice, and only once with a book specifically written to take apart the act of writing and put the pieces on display. Most of the books sold about writing (or at least, most of the ones sold to me) are by people who, while they know what they're talking about, aren't saying anything I need to hear. There is a sense that one must be at a certain point in their career before any one will be interested in hearing what you have to say, and as such most writing advice is given by people past the time when they were excited or challenged to write. This leads to two things, typically: (a), lessons on writing that are at once both insulting to your intelligence and assuming writing comes as naturally to you as it does to the writer, and (b), The Modern Library Writer's Workshop being left out on the stoop for any one who wants it.

posted by chris  # 8:22 AM 0 comments

"Twenty lines, genius or not" - a throat-clearing exercise, so to speak. Harry Mathews deliberately misunderstood the line from Stendhal to create a means of getting the little fears of writing out of the way so that the actual work may come through. Done early enough, it deals with the anxieties of the act - the agoraphobia of an empty page, the numbness that overtakes ideas somewhere between brain and hands, the ghosts of all those previous defeats - while they're still waking up, to quiet and comfortable with sleep still in their eyes to be any real threat. Done later in the day it's a beat to hit, almost a signature. For obvious reasons, I'm trying to do these as early as possible.

Speaking of Mathews, and of fear, there's another idea of his I want to look at lifting: the scheduling of particularly unwanted emotions. If I know that with my writing and my work comes an amount of fear and self-doubt, why not get them out of the way? The only real trouble that I can see comes in turning it off at the end of the allotted time. I trust myself to get over myself before too long, with the feeling that I'm being ridiculous overtaking any fear and pushing me to work. But having lived with me for so long, I'm afraid I only trust myself so much.

posted by chris  # 10:16 AM 0 comments

I was going to post my novel as it happened, really. It's just that I sort of didn't.

The first week of Nano was spent staring at an empty screen, or staring at a wall, or figuring to hell with it and going to a bar instead. The thing that I was going to write - typical blend of truth and not-as-truthfully shot through the wanderlust serendipity of the derivé - just wasn't cutting it. I'm by no means tired of writing about myself, just tired of giving those experiences away to characters. That in itself is a bit misleading, so let's try again:

I found myself reaching a point with fiction where I wasn't making up stories so much as putting down things that had happened to me and making up names to protect the innocent and dreadfully, dreadfully guilty. I still think the best fiction requires just enough truth to pull the reader in, and still write with that in mind. But I was losing the joy of fiction, and in so doing losing the passion that first brought me into writing: I like making shit up.

So I scrapped the Derivé thing, and instead went with a line that stuck in my head while in a bookshop on the Upper West Side: "Theseus and the Missus." I don't normally think in what sounds like od Belle and Sebastian lyrics, but it was enough to send me in a different direction with the novel. So rather than writing something that wanders around New York and talks about girls alot, I'm now writing something that, well, does all that, only with a bit of Greek mythology thrown in. It's about break ups, and revenge, and drinking, and plays with whether or not any one can get away from what they are, particularly when they're a character in a story that's several thousand years old. I don't know why I'm doing it, other than the idea appeals to me and I like the characters so far. My wordcount is sort of ambling along (I'm somewhere in the mid-20,000's, but haven't really checked in a while) and I have no aspirations of reaching 50,000. But I'm writing, and I'm enjoying it, and Ithink that means a little more than putting my pile of words up against a high schooler's Buffy/Hermione slashfiction to see who's is bigger.

(Speaking of - word counts, that is, not unspeakable wrongness - Hannah, how you doing on yours?)

I don't intend to post the regular thing, as my fiction is so far behind everything else I try to write that it wouldn't do for it to grow up in public just yet. In the meantime, though, I'm lifting an idea from writer Harry Mathews (more gushing, I'm sure, later) and starting each writing day with tweny lines about anything. "Twenty lines, genius or not" for the sake of getting your fingers moving and your mind over the start of day hurdles like cripping fear and thoughts of absolute failure. Those I will be posting, and the first one should be posted just above this shortly.

posted by chris  # 10:12 AM 1 comments