Also has this banger line:

"You wouldn't really die *of* anything in the traditional sense, you would just stop being biology and start being physics."

Absolutely, great example.

Moreover, the story is better not just because it's shorter, but because you *made* it shorter.

Even if you'd happened to write fewer words in the first draft, you still wouldn't have had the experience of shortening it and working intentionally with that motivation.

P.S. This is one of the things I truly love about game development. It's simply too complex, too synthetic, to be understood a priori. You have no choice but to throw your cap over a wall and then spend the next few years trying desperately to climb after it.

If you want to make something real, use whatever process feels right to you: find amazing collaborators or chart your own path; use that ML auto-masking tool or do it by hand.

But *don't* make it easy. Don't take every shortcut. Don't optimize away all the illuminating complexity.

Be frictional.

The classic refrain is: constraint is the mother of creativity. Similarly, friction is the father of discovery.

It feels paradoxical when we're conditioned to obsess over efficiency. But the only perfect efficiency is doing nothing.

A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what it's built for.

Our industry does have peer-voted awards, the most visible being DICE, Game Developers Choice Awards, BAFTA. There are scores of smaller developer-led awards too. We do have spaces to celebrate and uplift one another, please support and watch these shows! The teams work hard for the devs!