Two Weeks Till Friday (?) welcome to ambivalence.

Week flys by.

This just in... the week is flying by.

I can't believe how fast the weeks are going. It feels like it was just the weekend and it is already Thursday. What happened to Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday? It could have something to do with work getting quite busy. My projects are all starting to move into Alpha (one going yesterday) and as the game becomes feature complete, we hit it into high gear. I've never seen the need for so many reports before. Tracking Reports, Weekly Status Reports, Daily Dashboards, Submission Confidence Reports, Sony & Nintendo Pre-Certification Reports, European Quality Control Reports, Head Count Revision Reports, Test Plan Versioning, Executive Summary Reports, Milestone Summaries, Gate Reviews, Gate Readiness Reviews... and it goes on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving it. Then there is the constant, ongoing discussions between Development, QA, the Studio, Production... And all the internal communication within our department. phew. Busy, busy, busy.

Apart from all the hard work , I still sometimes take a step back and look at what we're doing. I'll take part of a very serious discussion on the intricacies of an incredibly complex component of the software and everyone will be so very serious. And I'll be thing to myself "Dude, we're making a game! A GAME!!" There will be a huge discussion on the AI (artificial intelligence, mom) of the soccer players and of the telemetry reports displaying how often a human player can deke around a defenceman executing a certain ball trick and if that is too difficult for the new Wii demographic. Some people take their games very seriously.

Oh, this is amusing. the other day, someone in QA had the thought, "Maybe we should make sure we hire some left handed people to test the Wii controls". So the emails went out around the department looking to see who is left handed. To me, that's funny. Such an obvious... observation but we're all like, scratching our heads going... ah, ya, I guess that would make a difference. As methodical as game development has become and our constant pursuit to make it repetitive, it's still very unstructured and new. Never mind that "Interactive Entertainment" (video game industry) generates more revenue than the entire film industry and by 2010, it will have surpassed the entire music industry. Our company has a market share of about 20%. Not bad.

I attended a 3 hour conference Tuesday to listen to one of the original founding members of the industry (he worked for Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, back in '72) to discuss the entire history of the market we are now in. Who started it, who screwed it up and why, who saved it (thank you Nintendo and your Mario Bros.), how it changed, changed again, changed again, and again, where we came from, why we're successful, why we screw up and why world domination is at our fingertips... if we don't screw it up. It was fascinating.

And I took a step back and thought... We're making games. And I'm getting paid for it.

Sweeeet.