I met Rachel four or five years ago. I’m not good with dates or the years in which things happen. I think it must have been five years ago, because it was during crunch, which means I was still working on Horizon Zero Dawn, which means it was five years ago. That’s the only way it could line up, I think.

Every night I was getting out of work incredibly late, going to a bar, striking out with every woman I talked to, and then heading home to sleep four or five hours before going back into the office. Sometimes I just slept under my desk.

This is essentially the same way I live now, the only difference being I drink less and I always sleep at home. I justify it to myself because I make a decent chunk of money, but when I was working on Horizon Zero Dawn, it really, really did not feel like it was worth it. The game sucked. I was only making enough extra money to go to a bar every night and buy all my meals at delis. I wasn’t doing anything but running on a treadmill.

Everyone seemed like they were okay with it. They would complain, but everyone complains. I had been through crunch many, many times, and so had everyone else. It didn’t seem like anything serious. I didn’t find out that we all cared about how bad our lives had become in a serious way until very close to the end, when there was nothing to complain about anymore.

I was always tired, I was always strung out, I was always stressed, and I was always kind of drunk. I had been always all these things for long enough that I couldn’t see anything but work— I saw the streets as lines with defined lengths and textures, the buildings as chunks of collision. 

I couldn’t escape the map, even in my sleep. I dreamt the desert from above. I descended the slopes as I graded them, waiting for the objects team to set down yurts and trees. I walked through the shrubs that the creature artists were supposed to place rodents in, and through the unbuilt towns—denoted only by names hanging in the air— that the character artists were supposed to stick people in. Nothing ever populated the map in my dreams. It was all empty and silent.

The texture of the ground went fuzzier and fuzzier after a few hours, like I was viewing it at a distance. Entire days of my work were becoming illegible, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything about it. I walked while the rocks faded into lines, and then kept walking— on the vertices, the angles, the wires, the death planes underneath them, the minuscule numbers I tweaked in the positive and negative— untilI fell forever into the void of lighting underneath.

I met her out drinking. It wasn’t a night where I was trying to hook up with anyone, it was just a night where I wanted to get fucked up. I had the next day off and I felt like shit. I went to a bar alone, but I happened to see a woman I knew from Ubisoft, who introduced me to Rachel, her friend from college. We all sat together. I didn’t want to at first, but I didn’t want to leave, either. 

It took about an hour for me to think something of Rachel. She told me about her work as a dental assistant, saying she had previously worked as a hotel concierge. I had also previously worked as a hotel concierge when I was nineteen. We talked about how it seemed like a job reserved for dapper old men but, in reality, was stocked almost exclusively by tired twenty-somethings. It wasn’t exciting conversation, but it was nice anyways.

Luckily, she asked me to see a movie with her the following week. Even though I wanted to, I wouldn’t have asked her out the way I was that night, stained by sweat and delirious from the things I always was.

◆

My condition during crunch is always partially my own fault. When you’re in crunch, one of the only benefits is every few hours they’ll let you take about twenty minutes to walk around. They don’t make you clock out. You can get about an extra hour a day by taking a walk or sitting on the toilet. But I never really do that. I always just stay at my desk working. That’s how I’ve always done it. The office is so big, and if I focus on the work, I feel like I’m not there. I’m not at work, I’m just working.

My coworkers think I’m crazy for it, and I totally understand that. Maybe I’m a masochist, but I just want it to be done. My philosophy used to be that this isn’t a job where after we do the work there’s always more work; it’s a job where once we’re done, we’re done. When our team finishes, crunch is over. They won’t make us make new areas that they don’t have content for.

Then, on Red Dead 2, we got done very early. As punishment, we had to map out the rest of the continental United States, even though it was complete wilderness with no gameplay or story planned for it whatsoever, and the other teams had to work double-time to fill it. This experience changed my philosophy, and made me leave Rockstar for Ubisoft. Which was a mistake. Now I’m back at Rockstar.

The thing is, even though it turned out my idea about there not being work after the work is done was wrong, it’s still ingrained in me. I bite off more than I can chew, that’s just how I am. And because I work for so long without breaks, I tend to leave gaps in the ground or place invisible vertical planes that stretch into the sky infinitely. It’s all minor, but it makes me feel totally incompetent when my coworkers double-check my work. They act like I don’t care just because I can be a bit sloppy, but they’re double-checking for a reason— and we have QA for a reason, too. We’re all working off no sleep, but there’s no sympathy for me. I probably just have an off-putting personality.

I can’t work smarter instead of working harder— I’m not very smart. I’m always going to think it’s better to have an awkward piece of cliff jutting out on the first draft than no cliff at all. Otherwise, I’m not going to do anything. I’m not going to measure anything out carefully, I’m gonna put the ground down and trim it. I have a complex about this, and the complex is that I take my work seriously as work. They want me to think of it as art, but I don’t. Maybe I should, but I don’t. I don’t have any illusions about escaping to make an indie game like a lot of the other guys. I’m pretty certain I’m stuck doing what I’m doing.

External environments have never been my passion, I just turned out to be good at them. Now, no one wants to hire me to do anything else. When I’ve applied for interior designing, they tell me I’m overqualified to be a foot soldier and underqualified to be a team lead.

I’d really love it if they let me make a building or a compound, even if it was just one. Even if it was just a room, though preferably something bigger. Something with hallways, doors, elevators, anything a building has. I’d like to make a puzzle. In the games I’ve worked on, there are hardly any puzzles that take place in open areas, and if there are, someone else made them, not me. But there are so many environmental puzzles you could set up indoors: walls, roofs, doors, windows, vents, piping, valves, electric wiring, furniture, sinks, swimming pools. I have an idea for one with a transom.

I was first inspired to do all of this by Half Life, when I was ten. As far as I’m concerned, that game should end right before you exit the tunnel out into the desert. Half Life was good, but System Shock 2 was what solidified it. I didn’t actually like playing System Shock, but I loved seeing how the hallways of each floor hooked into one another, how the vents and broken windows let you move your slow, clunky, piece of shit player character around without ever opening a door. I wanted to make something like that.

I eventually modded it so none of the enemies would ever spawn in. I walked the rooms alone, looking at signs and screens, ascending and descending the awful ladders. I still like games like that the best. Ones that take place on spaceships.

◆

Recently, me and Mathilda got to talking about our prior relationships, which I hadn’t done with a woman since me and Rachel broke up. It was nerve-wracking. We both shut down. I was relieved it wasn’t just me shutting down, and maybe she was glad it wasn’t just her. I got brave. “A few years ago, I was dating a woman who I thought was perfect for me. But she moved to Myanmar.”

“Permanently? Is she Myan… Burmese?”

“Yes. And no.” I sank deeper into the couch and looked at the ceiling. “I don’t really know why she did it. I guess she cares more about Myanmar than me— that’s fine. It’s her life. And she’s not coming back I don’t think. But I don’t know.”

“How long has it been?”

“Two and a half years? Three, maybe. For a while I wasn’t dating, thinking that…” I trailed off. I didn’t want to say anything more. She made a funny facial expression: a smile with the bottom half of her face, and a frown with the top. She’s very beautiful.

Her apartment is strangely large for someone with her income, especially in the neighborhood she lives in. The story is that it’s rent-controlled. The ceilings are vaulted. There are doors between the kitchen, the common-space, and the bedroom. The outside hallway, too. The windows are surprisingly tall as well. I think the place is a converted warehouse.

I have to confess that I don’t really like the apartment. I can’t justify the amount of doors it has. What need is there for privacy in your own kitchen? The doors needlessly complicate the rooms and force you to interact with the surfaces of the doorknobs. Not only that. They insist the walls are necessary.

The lack of an open floor plan keeps me from taking things seriously with Mathilda. If we were to ever move in together, her apartment is clearly the nicer and cheaper of the two. My apartment is small and under-furnished and expensive. A writer I was seeing before Mathilda told me it looks like Travis Bickle’s. I think it’s agreeable. There aren’t bugs or anything.

“I was married for two years. Or, a little under that. He was a normal guy, I guess. Worked as an accountant for a car lot when I met him, and then later on for a property management company.”

“What happened?”

“Just didn’t work out. We started arguing all of the time. I think we were a bad fit. We weren’t really dating that long before we got married, I just said yes because I was put on the spot. I know that sounds stupid, but, you know— and I didn’t feel like I could back out on the wedding, because I had already promised. It wasn’t a big ceremony, at least. On a superficial level, it should have been everything I wanted, but, practically, it didn’t work at all.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“You do? I don’t know if I know what I mean.”

“It sounds like you’re saying that by not saying no, you said yes.”

“Right.”

“And then even though you didn’t want to, you had to change the way you were living to accommodate it. Right?” 

“I guess so. Yeah. Well… no, actually, not really. Neither of us changed, and that was the problem. We weren’t acting like members of a married couple— a spouse, I mean. We were acting, you know, completely separate from each other. Different friends, different everything. He got insecure about that, and then it got hard to go back to the same place every night. ” She hesitated and leaned into me so I couldn’t see anything but her hair. “He’s not in Myanmar, but I know he’s not coming back. Like, eight months ago he fell off the train trying to go between the cars.”

“Jesus. Seriously? That’s horrible.”

“I know. All those people late for work?” I laughed, but she immediately groaned and made a face. “No, sorry, that’s not funny. And, but— it was right after when I wanted to reach out to him and didn’t. And if I had, I know he wouldn’t have died, because anything that happens, however small, is going to change everything going forwards. I know that doesn’t make sense. I know I can’t blame myself, and I don’t, because even one of any number of small things could have changed the outcome of what happened. But I do think about it. I had that chance, and I didn’t take it.”

“That doesn’t really make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t. I told you that.” She kissed me on the neck.

“Do you think it could have worked out? If he hadn’t have died?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. Those things never do. But, I don’t know. It won’t work out now, that’s all.”

We listened to the fridge hum.

“She was a dental assistant too,” I said.

“Oh, that’s weird.”

“Yeah.”

◆

There are essential questions that you have to wrestle with if you’re an exterior designer for a video game. At least in the early days, before you know there are no answers. Even if you don’t care, you’re going to have to think about these questions.

The first question is what the difference between interior and exterior spaces even is. The answer varies, but in real life, most people would agree that it has to do with the presence of walls and a roof. For me, a roof makes or breaks what is and isn’t indoors. If you think it has more to do with what is and isn’t a “manmade structure”, like some do, you have to ask yourself if you consider a cave an indoor or outdoor space, and conversely if the presence of a door at the mouth of the cave would change your answer.

People might say walls make or break it, but that doesn’t ever hold up if you press them on it. There are always two sides to walls, and what is “inside” or “outside” the walls is determined not by the walls, but by the roof. Or, in a courtyard— which is tough to categorize, I’ll admit— it’s determined by the fact that there are roofs encircling it in the surrounding rooms. In video games, I don’t think this argument is relevant; there are invisible walls at the ends of all exteriors, unless it’s a drop with a death plane. But it’s important to have the argument with yourself.

When you’re creating a video game, your arguments and ideas about space are put to test on a practical level. In some games— for example, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which I worked on with Eidos Montreal right at the start of my career, before I moved to the states— there’s a blurred line between the indoor and the outdoor. There are sets of disconnected indoor segments— a night-club and a parking garage and a police station; but the vast majority of indoor and outdoor spaces are in the same loaded area— the apartment buildings, the analogues to dungeons, the brothels. You could argue it’s more realistic. When this realism runs wild, on the developer end it effectively means there’s no distinction between the interior and exterior. There are only areas in which you can see the skybox and areas in which it is obscured. In Red Dead or GTA, it’s a nightmare to make these distinctions, because everything is supposed to be seamless. The interior and exterior departments have to work closely together, and we don’t get along. It fucks my entire life up. I hate working on these games. I need to move to Redmond.

The skybox presents a philosophical confusion among people with my job. A flat image of the sky that’s hung up above the world is the only thing  covering up the fact that there’s no atmosphere in the game-world. It and lighting constitute the entirety of the simulation of the outdoors—other than objects, if you subscribe to a kind of teleological argument that the difference between interior and exterior spaces has to do with what kind of things there typically are in interior or exterior spaces. In this worldview, aberrations in this “average interior/exterior space” prove our innate knowledge of what interiors and exteriors are. This is why a washing machine or a sink sitting outside is an indication something has gone wrong. But, I don’t really think about objects, I just worry about the shape of the ground.

You can’t go past a skybox. At the same time, it’s not something you can bump into. In this way the skybox is the same as the real world’s sky. This presents the philosophical question, which exists in real life just as much as it does in a game: is the difference between an indoor and outdoor space— and therefore the point of a roof— the ability for things to collide with its boundaries? I’d hazard a guess that this is certainly the point to a wall, and in some cases the point to a floor if there are rooms below it. But that doesn’t excuse doors. The true, Platonic indoor space would have to be a bunker.

There are two other arguments for virtual spaces: the first is that, regardless of anything in the game being “interior” or “exterior”, video games are a flat image on a screen, and therefore are interior to our real existence. That’s the whole point of the Prey reboot. But this argument dodges the question about space and substitutes it with an argument about reality. It’s fair enough, and it isn’t incompatible with my job, but it’s not in the spirit of the thing.

The second and final argument is that distinctions between interior and exterior design have no relevance to game design and are created only for the division of labor in the development process, which is also fair enough— the blending of our two departments shows that this has merit. 

But this dodges the question in a much more egregious way than the last argument. If we’re working on interiors and exteriors separately, there’s a difference. We’re thinking about them as if there is one. There has to be one. So there is.

This may sound granular, but I think about the different answers to these questions every day. It shapes the way I live my life. That’s not to say that I like thinking about work. I actually hate thinking about work. It takes up too much space in my mind, and it’s totally cut off from the rest of my life. I’m not even allowed to talk about what I’m working on because of NDAs, so when people ask what I do for a living, I just have to say I work at whatever company I’m working at and leave it at that.

There’s one more question, of course. Which is better? Interiors or exteriors? Most people would say it’s a matter of opinion, but I don’t think it’s a question you answer for yourself. I think it’s chosen for you by geography.

Me, my work, and Mathilda are all on the M, right by stations. See? It’s always out of one building, into a tunnel, and back into a building. I have one window in my apartment and it faces an exterior wall made of brownstone. It feels totally natural. It feels like I’m in the office every day of my life. I don’t remember the last time I walked down a full street. We don’t go out or do dates, really. I can’t complain about it. She does, but I can’t.

◆

Sometimes I take to wondering if everyone is depressed. I am, I think. I don’t really care, though. Mathilda is certainly depressed, Rachel certainly was. After Rachel left, there were three prototypically depressed women I was seeing regularly and concurrently. The first was the writer, and the other two couldn’t keep a job. They were probably the only people I kept in contact with outside of work at the time.

One evening, I called all three of them because I was feeling wistful and drunk and horny— and maybe I also wanted to check up on them and make sure they weren’t going to kill themselves. They were all so depressed they could barely speak.  They said nearly identical things about the states of their lives: I’m unmotivated; I’m tired all of the time; work is draining my soul; etc. None of them wanted to see me.

It wasn’t the best idea to call them. I didn’t mention to any of them that I was calling the others, and they didn’t know each other, but it was still risky. My continued emotional distance following this incident turned out to be the end of my relationships with all three of them. I guess all of the subsequent loneliness led to meeting Mathilda, so I can’t be upset.

I did my best to not know anything about these women. The one I knew the most about was the writer, who had absolutely no material worries or commitments. She was my favorite. When she was feeling well, she was willing to see me at basically any time.

She still did like me more than I liked her. I found her obnoxious sometimes. She would say she was like Carrie Bradshaw over and over. She would start sobbing without warning. Not often, but enough. She would say things about the people she knew that made me imagine what she was saying about me to everyone else. Eventually, I read a few pages of one of her books and realized the characters were people she had told me about. I figured if I slowly stopped talking to her I could avoid getting flattened.

But the other two women were the same. They were smart, funny, depressed, and totally uninterested in me as a person. They didn’t know anything about me except that I was depressed and worked a lot. That’s the kind of distance I like. I was trying to keep that distance with Mathilda, but it slipped somehow and I didn’t want to stop seeing her. She knows that’s how I am, still. She says I’m avoidant. It’s the only thing that causes friction between us. I worry she’s mad about how I still haven’t introduced her to my friends, but I just have to trust she knows I don’t have any.

I read a study that said people who play third-person video games see their surroundings in a different way from people who don’t. People who don’t play these games— people like Mathilda— see things in relation to themselves. A car down the street is something that is a certain distance away from them, and if it’s moving, they see it as moving in relation to their  own body.

People like me have no choice but to see the car as moving in relation to other objects— buildings, parked cars, moving cars, other people. I think an initial reaction to hearing this could be to attribute a generic sense of heightened emotional intelligence to gamers, a group of people who are typically considered antisocial, but I don’t think this is a particularly compassionate way of thinking or feeling. I have an awareness of space based on an imagined parallax, using the horizon line as a framework to view the world as a flat, two-dimensional image. It’s hardly healthy.

I try to keep up with studies like this. A while ago I read one that was attempting to prove open-world video games could help teenagers who had agoraphobia. They used Horizon Zero Dawn as the tool. The findings were inconclusive, but it seemed that in most cases the game didn’t help at all.

I don’t exactly expect to be credited in a study like this— or even consulted — but it was strange to not know about it until a few months after it was put out. If they had talked to me, I would have told them their perspective about space wasn’t aligned with their subjects’. If agoraphobes thought exterior spaces were possible within a screen, they would be just as scared of the computer as they were of open spaces. I also would have told them the game sucked and would taint the data by depressing the kids playing it.

◆

Rachel was into old movies that haven’t been thought about in decades. She took me to these experimental movies that had nothing to do with anything close to reality, and when I went with her to those, I always felt cheated.

But on the first date she was trying to be amenable to me, so there was a plot. It was hard to follow, but I could tell it was there. “The Hourglass Sanatorium.” It’s Polish, I guess, with some kind of Yiddish affectation. The way I understood it is that it’s about a crazy guy who walks through doors into places that the doors couldn’t lead to. It was probably good, but I don’t like or understand movies. Mostly, it just made me reflect.

The beauty of movies is that nothing needs to connect. Montage. That’s probably the only thing that makes them tolerable to make. Establishing shots and scenes filmed around the exteriors of buildings don’t need to actually be the buildings in which the interior scenes take place. One second you’re outside, the next you’re inside, then you’re back outside, back and forth and back and forth. This is the dream for my work, even if it’s nebulous: that the outside of a building doesn’t dictate what’s inside. I want boundaries that are impossible for the player to properly observe. I want a seamless non-seamlessness. With no loading screen or discontinuity, the boundary would move you into an environment that both was and wasn’t inside— not an exterior which is interior, a trick that’s been done a bunch of times, but an interior with no limit but its exit. I don’t know what the space would be like, only the division, but figuring that out would be a part of the process.  And a little bit of it is that I would get to work with sixty or seventy percent fewer people. But only a little bit.

The movie ended and we walked around. I wasn’t drunk, but I kept stumbling anyways. The sidewalks weren’t big enough for the amount of people on them. She took me back to her apartment. I didn’t say anything, but I think I knew when I went through the door that I was going to fall in love with her.

On the train the other day, I was reminded of her. Rachel. I saw a woman carrying a trash-bag over her head. I saw the looks people shot at her. They looked away when they realized there wasn’t a smell.

I knew what was happening. She was a college student taking the train to do laundry, and she was carrying her laundry in the trash-bag. It’s a stupid thing to do. It was also what Rachel did. She was convinced that a laundromat she had found two stops away was better than any of the laundromats she could walk to, and refused to get a laundry bag or cart.

I got emotional looking at that girl. Upset, maybe. She didn’t look anything like Rachel, but she must have been similar in personality. There was a shared delusion about laundromats, certainly.

So I kept staring. She saw me staring. An old man saw me staring, too. It was too much. I turned around and walked to the back of the car. I needed to face away from her. The door to the space between the cars opened and a homeless guy walked through. I thought about going to the other car, but I didn’t. When the train stopped, I turned back and stared again. I stopped being able to breathe through my nose. It’s autumn, so that’s somewhat normal, but my heart-rate was fast. I started letting stale air funnel into my throat. She got off the train while I leered at her like a dog. A few stops later I had to get off and meet Mathilda and pretend I wasn’t disturbed by a twenty year-old college student carrying a trash-bag.

Sometimes I remember that, rather than people being identical, I might just have a terrible memory. I don’t remember most of what I did with Rachel. She was the love of my life for three years, and she probably still is. She probably will be until I die. But what did we do? We looked at each other a lot. I remember that. I remember we talked, we had sex, and we went to movies. But what movies were they? Five-hundred hours of disconnected shots of flowers and walls and war monuments with voiceover and birds chirping and intermittent appearances by characters that tore pages out of books and frowned. Not much to latch on to.

I don’t get into my feelings about why she left because I won’t know unless she tells me. Realistically, I don’t think it was about anything other than dharma. She was obsessed with dharma, of course. I remember that.

◆

Something happened to my mouth a few weeks ago. Overnight, it stopped having the distinctive mouth smell that I’ve been familiar with my whole life and started producing a toxic smell which destroyed the lives of the people around me every time my lips parted. I smelled for myself in full effect by breathing into a plastic bag and opening it up while holding my breath. Mathilda said that was silly, but it gave me a better picture of things— think bleach and pneumonia, or 19th century textiles factory.

I gargled salt water and repeatedly pushed bristles into my gums and scraped my tongue with a spoon, but none of it helped. My breath was still just as foul as it was at the start. I had to go to the dentist. That was for sure. The only problem was that I missed the enrollment period when I was re-hired at Rockstar. I didn’t have dental insurance.

Mathilda told me that dentists don’t actually need to collect payment for their services if they don’t want to, so she hooked me up with a cleaning. I only went six and a half days smelling like a corpse. Despite having the same job as Mathilda, I don’t think Rachel would have done this for me. I knew that I should have cared about this, but I didn’t. It probably just had to do with the professional confidence Mathilda had— which must have naturally sprung forth from working at a smaller office than Rachel and maybe from being ten years older than me. 

She looked at my gums and attacked my teeth with machines. This part went on a little too long. There wasn’t enough space in my mouth for the dental instruments, and everyone involved kept saying things to me that were impossible to reply to. Standard procedure.

At the end of the cleaning, it was determined that the cause of the smell was an abscess due to gum disease. That was what Mathilda told me it was before she had me come in. The dentist would have to drain it. I also learned that there was bone loss; I listened to the associated spiel, but she knew I was not going to start flossing at age thirty-five.

Dentistry is a form of torture, but if I have to be totally honest, it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. At the risk of sounding like a pervert, I think there’s something sexual about the experience. It isn’t because it was Mathilda doing it this time, because I’ve felt this way since I was a kid. Maybe it’s that even the distasteful parts of it— the smell of spit and the constant stabbing at the gums and the difficulty swallowing— aren’t that bad. I don’t get turned on at the dentist. That’s not it. It’s just an erotic feeling. It’s similar to what gay porn is like whenever I see some incidentally. Obviously erotic, but not arousing.

Mathilda grabbed at my dry lips and made them drier by spraying water into the back of my mouth, where hardened medical paste had started to stick. What felt sexual, I suppose, is the fact that she was entering me. That’s an unusual feeling for me. I’m not typically getting entered. 

The dentist was not attractive. She was a hunchback with incredibly small eyes, shrunken even further by the magnifying glasses or binoculars or whatever they were that she wore. I never saw her face once in the ninety seconds  she was there. Dentists wear so many layers of masks and cloths that their faces are inscrutable. They must like it. I know it’s best practice from a medical standpoint, but they must feel protected behind it too, with the bits above and below the eyes being all anyone can see. There’s nothing sexual about the get-up, nothing for me to latch onto.

The procedure started with the dentist putting a needle into my mouth and injecting lidocaine into my gums. It was incredibly painful for about ten seconds. After that, I felt nothing in my gums for six hours.

The dentist cut into my gum. Blood and pus soaked out and onto my tongue. I could taste it, and I could feel some flecks of skin sliding down into my throat. I didn’t expect it to taste sweet. It wasn’t anything I’d want to eat at a restaurant, but it didn’t taste like the bad breath.

I was supposed to do all kinds of things at home afterwards. I told Mathilda that she’d have to do it for me. As a joke, I guess. She didn’t look amused. I felt terrible. I didn’t realize that she did set up the appointment as a serious act of care until then. Not just something she could do, like getting me a root beer at the store or something. She did it out of love.

I know I should say that I love her for it. I even think I do. But there are material concerns to attend to, and things are much more complicated than they should be.

◆

I think I used to think there was only one thing games could do that other mediums couldn’t: create an infinity. It’s usually important that player choice influences the gameplay or the story, but I thought that was a subset of the fact that, theoretically, anything could happen. Item drops can be randomized, builds can be randomized, and enemy and NPC behavior changes every single microsecond in millions of different ways that can’t be re-created. Once the engine is done, figuring out how much of the game is going to try to seem infinite is the game designer’s only job. And people are entitled. We think we’re entitled to everything having everything, but if it does, we’ll say it’s not focused enough. If something’s too specific an experience, we’ll say it’s missing what it doesn’t have. It’s disgusting. It’s seriously disgusting. It’s a total misread of what can be done.

How could any game be sufficiently infinite when there are only so many buttons on a controller? By the same metric, how could you ever have enough? It’s always the same thing over and over. Left trigger to walk, right trigger to shoot, right stick to aim, click to crouch, Y to get on a horse, Y to get off a horse, left bumper to toss something, right bumper to run, A to interact, button press, button press, button press.

There’s only one thing to do. You accept how little there really is in the game, and then, eventually, you just quit. You’re supposed to quit. You can’t go forever. You’re supposed to stop playing, to give up on whatever infinity you’re imagining— honestly, even if it’s really there— and move on.

They’re saying there’s not going to be crunch this dev cycle. I’m skeptical. Hoping it’s true.