rant mode on

Up front I'm going to apologize because I simply dont like to rant much at all. However, if there is one thing that I can rant ad infinitum about, it's the degree and sheer amount of ego and arrogance in amateur independent game development.

I have been into game development now for over 12 years. About 2.5 of which in the professional arena. In those two little years I never experienced vitriol, anger, jealousy, and sheer arrogance that I have in the amateur and independent game development arena. Granted, I certainly recognize that there is an abundance of talented, respectable, and very helpful figures out there...they tend to remain in the woodwork for the most part. What happened to the community, though? Am I just completely out of touch with what it is now? Perhaps in the past 7 years the rabid success of the console market has driven an increasingly large amount of people into indy game development. So is it linear with the rise in population in the game development community? The answer is not something we can really investigate, though I have my suspicions.

But why? For the life of me I cant imagine why the arrogance. Maybe it's just the way I was learned or my experience...my early experience of being around very talented figures. Regardless, it's quite simple that there's nothing someone knows that another can't know. So knowledge is not something possesed, rather it's built on from those before you and reflected from those things you've gathered. It's an expression of the way things are, and that's innate. So then arrogance of knowledge is really just complete insecurity. Really though, this field is so incredibly vast that there is room for everyone to contribute and do so in a constructive way. To simply do what they do and put it out there. If anything for nothing more than to have another fun game to play or another fancy demo to drool over.

So please, with sugar on top, if you can not be constructive. If you just add fuel to the flames, then you're simply part of the problem. In this field the proof is in the pudding. IF you have something to prove, put your money where your mouth is. However, nobody should owe it to anyone to prove anything to anyone. Prove it to yourselves. Prove that you're more capable than you ever imagined you were and then you'll become part of the solution towards propelling games into the next generation.