
I'm not convinced that this wasn't the second biggest mistake of my life - baud147258
https://imgur.com/gallery/WCV3Gu7#Bzdk2ik
======
systemizer
Given the post's lack of detail relating to the experience of creating the
game itself, I fear OP is treating his craft as a means to an end; instead of
loving his craft for what it is. I fell into a similar trap when, after
leaving my job to pursue my "passion," I became my own slavemaster, treating
myself as resource for production, and eventually learned to hate my once
cherished activities. I hope OP's game succeeds; regardless, I would not
recommend, to anyone, to pursue a personal hobby, dwelling, or passion as a
means to reaching some external reward.

~~~
themodelplumber
I coach people in these circumstances. In most cases they simply lack a model
for what constitutes a hobby-type skill vs. what constitutes a full-time+-type
skill. They don't know how to tell the difference without diving in and trying
it. And I sympathize, having done that myself.

IMO a really basic helpful model is: 1) thing I could do in my sleep and still
amaze people with OR make money with == means of making a living and 2) thing
that excites me and yet always seems just out of reach == hobby.

However the devil is in the details and you cannot by easily diminish the
excitement of #2 (above) because you risk becoming the enemy just by
suggesting that it not be prized above all other work. So there are other
models which must be skillfully employed to help tease out this comprehension.
It's kind of a minefield, actually.

~~~
sireat
Regarding 1) thing I could do in my sleep and still amaze people.

It is a bit dangerous to be unconsciously good (ie in my sleep) at something
and think that you can make money with it.

Let's take something like chess. Unless you are a TOP 10 player, you are not
going to be making a good living from chess unless you go into secondary
sources of income: teaching,writing, coaching. Source: as a master I know many
poor grandmasters.

So there has to be a market demand for the skill that you have deliberately
practiced to be unconsciously good at.

Like that guy who can skip a stone 88 times.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0_hEvNOqGM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0_hEvNOqGM)

He certainly enjoys it and people are amazed by it. However there is a very
limited demand for experienced stone skippers.

~~~
themodelplumber
Yes, this is a good example of what I consider the fundamental work to be done
in the area of #1. A lot of career books and tools aim at this kind of
approach as well. I also use a Role/Group/Reward model that makes it clear
that even if you have an offer on the table where you'd be playing chess for
great money, you still have inquiries to make.

------
thescriptkiddie
> Anyone interested in an infuriating tale of mismanagement, fraud,
> incompetence, duplicity, backstabbing, turf wars, and tyranny of petty
> authority, I encourage to send a Freedom of Information Act request to NSA.
> Ask for the post "Beyond Mere Malice" from the Parting Thoughts blog,
> November 2016.

Anyone going to do this?

~~~
uniformlyrandom
Do you want to get your name on a list?

Because that is how you get your name on a list.

~~~
bigiain
I think you mean "another list"...

Surely one more list wont make any difference, right?

:sigh:

~~~
Scoundreller
Naw, we're all on a list. Where we rank is what matters.

~~~
clort
I think this.

I had a friend who formerly worked for military intelligence in the UK who
asked once (to a group) if we thought we were on the GCHQ database. I said
yes, I would likely be in there and when he asked why I gave my reason, which
is that I once did something that relatively, very few people have done and
thus I have marked myself as ahead of the crowd in some way since it is
probable that the government became aware of that. My friend did not confirm
or deny but acknowledged my contribution. I presume he would be forbidden from
revealing operational details like this but these days I think that yes I am
in the database because we are all in it.

Its going to be a relational database and there is no single 'rank' as such
but certainly accomplishments and connections are noted. If you speak
<language> and they hear about that, they will note that. They might need a
<language> speaker at short notice one day and you just happen to be there.
They might need a person with a particular type and colour of car. They might
need a pilot. All of these people are already available within the military
but they might want somebody else. It is their job to keep tabs and I think
they probably do it well.

~~~
linkregister
This is a compelling story that may be true for the UK, but there is no such
list in the US.

Sadly, recruiting for the intelligence community is probably around the same
efficiency of your local state government. Recruiters go to college career
fairs and review applications from the website. Most candidates are
unqualified, crackpots, or both. A couple schools have professors that
encourage students to work for agencies, so alumni from these schools are
overrepresented in the IC.

Occasionally, an outstanding person is identified and recruited, but this is
rare. It is almost certainly driven by a person on the inside giving a
referral. The recruiters have no bandwidth to be spending time pursuing
candidates in any kind of targeted fashion.

------
rudiv
I wish OP well, but as a person from South Asia, it's very hard to not have a
bitter taste left in my mouth when you mention you used to be an CIA officer
in South Asia and then moved on to work for the NSA, no less.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
I understand that the CIA have been villains in many different countries, but
I didn't know about their involvement in South Asia. Could you elaborate a
bit?

~~~
jmknoll
Here is a (very) incomplete list of recent CIA activities in South Asia.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Pakistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Pakistan)

Going back to the 80's, you have Operation Cyclone, which was the CIA
operation to arm and finance the mujahadeen against the USSR, which led to the
creation of the Taliban, 10 years of brutal theocratic rule and ethnic
cleansing in Afghanistan, and ultimately to the September 11th attacks on the
United States, and to the (still ongoing) NATO occupation.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone)

I don't know much about India, but it looks like the CIA may be implicated in
the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and bombed a plane in the 50's in an
attempt to kill Zhou Enlai.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_India)

I think GP is pretty justified in saying that the presence of a CIA/NSA
operative in South Asia would leave a bad taste in his mouth.

~~~
jonnybgood
> which was the CIA operation to arm and finance the mujahadeen against the
> USSR, which led to the creation of the Taliban

That is actually not what happened. The mujahadeen are not precursors of the
Taliban. Matter of fact, the mujahadeen and Taliban fought each other. Many
members of the mujahadeen left to join the Taliban but they are not the same.
The Taliban was started by students.

~~~
vidarh
Mujahideen just the plural form of mujahid: a person who engages in Jihad. It
is not a specific group. The term applies equally well to the Taliban as the
many other groups that operated in Afghanistan.

~~~
aedron
Not in this case. The mujahideen were a specific group of warlords who fought
against the taliban (which just means 'students' by the way).

~~~
vidarh
No, they really were not a specific group. There was eventually an
organization that organised some of the biggest groups of mujahideen in
Afghanistan into a couple of alliances (the Peshawar 7 and the Teheran Eight
being two of them), but there were many other groups as well.

The Taliban did not in any case organize until after infighting broke out
again among those groups, and the Taliban's growth came in large part exactly
because these groups were far more disunited at the point the Taliban was
rising than during the war against the Soviets.

------
davidscolgan
I can't speak much to the military things in this post, but I will just add
that as someone who also tried to make money from video games for quite some
time in the recent past, it's _such_ a hard way to make money.

Web development has not been nearly as "fun", but it's been so much more
lucrative. If you want to make video games as a business, I'd say make your
money first with "boring" work and then making a video game can be fun since
you don't have to have the financial pressure overhanging it. You hear the
indie darling success stories like Undertale, Stardew Valley, etc. But I
imagine that the common case is: "Spend lots of time, then nothing happens."

~~~
tvararu
Currently saving up a retirement nest egg to work on video games full time.
Your advice matches with my own research.

------
stallmanite
Not to make light of a serious situation but if this is some kind of viral
marketing I’m actually impressed. It’s captivating.

~~~
api
It's a commentary on our age that your first thought is that it might be a
lie.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Was there an age when people blindly trusted everything they read? Healthy
skepticism can be a very good thing.

~~~
MarsAscendant
It's taking things to an extreme – like automatically mistrusting the source
because it seems to attempt playing the reader's heartstrings – that's a
defining characteristic of the Internet era.

Not everyone makes up their stories, and not nearly everyone is lying – but
there are people who will abuse the natural trust people exhibit, and take the
profits into their pockets, as opposed to helping their fictional cause.

It's so prominent because there's a whole lot of people who do that. Similar
to the "vocal minority" phenomenon, people start assuming that everyone in the
same group is <something>, regardless of how valid the assumption is, because
of the exposure towards a certain kind of the group's members.

------
jessaustin
_Anyone interested in an infuriating tale of mismanagement, fraud,
incompetence, duplicity, backstabbing, turf wars, and tyranny of petty
authority, I encourage to send a Freedom of Information Act request to NSA._

Haven't we gotten the distinct impression that the unsupervised services are
rife with such experiences, even more than other federal government
bureaucracies? When it's illegal to go the press, very few people do so.

~~~
jonnybgood
It sounds like big organization problems and office politics that you can find
anywhere. Academia is a good example. Nothing unique here or surprising.

~~~
jessaustin
Wow that's dystopian. I've worked in large organizations enough to know that
they aren't my cup of tea, but I've never seen things sink to these levels.
Why would humans voluntarily join such organizations? (Yeah, I know, to make a
living... but TFA seems to indicate that there are other options.)

When work situations get really intolerable, the civil courts are always an
option. Except, for the unsupervised services they aren't. I'm sure that makes
a difference.

------
zerogvt
Funny enough I had a related talk with a friend just yesterday. Say that there
is a hard contest with cruel winning odds which -if you succeed- you get a
permanent position in a public sector body (say ECB) with very good salary for
life. Also say that the situation in private sector (job market) goes to hell
and shows no signs of reverting any time soon. Then say you succeed and get
that lifer position where no one can fire you from but yourself. Then imagine
you get a boss or an environment that it is so damned toxic that is
unbearable. But still no one can fire you. No one but you. But now the dilemma
is huge. Do you quit a permanent position and jump back to hell (even less
well equipped since the time you left it) or do you just hang on in there
hoping for a wind change? The stakes are much higher than if you were in yet
another private job where you'd be just refreshing your CV and interviewing.

Dunno - I guess there are cases where you need to be careful what you wish
for.

~~~
vitorbaptistaa
This sounds like the tale of many Brazilian civil servants. Civil servants in
Brazil are either indicated by someone ("comissionados"), which means your job
is tied to the current administration, or you've passed in a selection and
have your job stability for life ("concursado"). These selections usually have
tens or hundreds of thousands of people competing for a handful of vacancies,
so people spend years studying and doing many of these (they're called
"concurseiros"). Once you're in, you're set for life.

Adding to this, the public sector pays much more than the private sector
(often 50% ~ 100% more). Have job stability, generous vacations and other
benefits. Depending on where you are (federal, state or municipal government
levels), you also have a special retirement plan that gives you 100% of your
salary when you retire (the private policies are capped at around 4.5 minimum
wages, for comparison a good dev in the bigger cities can get about 10~15
minimum wages).

And so we have many "lifers" in the public sector, and this kind of job is the
dream for many people (which is terrible IMHO).

~~~
zerogvt
To a large extent a job is what you make of it. I understand why being a lifer
might seem terrible to one and a dream to another. There are no constants here
- it's all relevant.

Someone gets a permanent position and is dragging his feet and dying out of
boredom. Someone else sees that as an extra degree of freedom (not having to
worry about his job security) and he is branching out say to
explore/contribute to a tech stack that is not popular with employers.

------
tfandango
I hope it's a blockbuster. But this line bothered me:

"This ends here. Anything you write from here on out, we have to approve. If
you write a tell-all book without our permission, you go to prison. Any
questions?"

I hope that does not apply to software.

~~~
irrational
I expect there to be a follow-up that OP died in a tragic "accident".

~~~
MarsAscendant
He did say "CIA", not "FSB".

~~~
rasz
you are right, a suicide then.

------
xellisx
Was hoping for this:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_(urban_legend)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_\(urban_legend\))

~~~
Asooka
Oh, that was in my local arcade when I was a kid. They closed it down a couple
of years ago sadly.

------
angel_j
"I can take some fictional people, make everyone betray them for all their own
petty and cowardly reasons, and our protagonists will just have to deal with
it."

Birth of a genre.

~~~
smacktoward
Too late. George R. R. Martin beat him to it :-)

~~~
Scarblac
Also reminiscent of _Consider Phlebas_ by Iain M Banks.

~~~
Sharlin
Or an average RPG campaign based in the WoD Vampire setting.

------
karmakaze
Suffering makes for great art. And this looks like some truly creative shit.
Sorry, and thanks.

~~~
vanderZwan
I'm going to go off on a tangent here, and I want to make it clear that I am
_not_ railing against karmakaze or suggesting they implied things they didn't
say. It is just that in a more general sense I wish this notion of "suffering
for art" would die, and this is just me venting my frustration with this meme
(in the original sense of the word). Because I think it applies to the tech
industry just as much.

Hannah Gadsby's put it into words better than I can in "Nanette", but sadly I
can't link to a 1-hour Netflix special so my own angry take on this will have
to do.

Yes, _some_ art, specifically art _about_ suffering, benefits from people who
experienced suffering. Otto Dix is brilliant _because_ he shows us the horrors
of war he experienced[0][1]. And there is such a thing as posttraumatic
growth[2], so sure, overcoming "suffering" can have benefits in general.
Emphasis _overcoming_ , though!

Other than that it's romantic nonsense that has been debunked by psychology
time and time again. And it's _dangerous_ nonsense too, because it leads to
movies like Whiplash.

Don't get me wrong: it's a brilliant film, but because it's so dazzling I
don't think people criticize the issues it has enough. Think about it: two of
the most privileged white dudes in the world complain that Jazz is dying, and
our main antagonist spends the entire film bullying, tormenting, sometimes
flat-out gaslighting his students because he somehow believes that
traumatizing them will make them as good as some of the worlds greatest
musicians. Of course, he is being completely ignorant of the context that the
latter lived in, of their personal histories. Suffering in itself does not
inspire greatness, dammit.

Perhaps Whiplash's underlying thesis is that this is _not_ true, nor
justifyiable, but if so it's just like anti-war movies that end up glorifying
war.

Because it ends with giving Terence Fletcher a moment to tell "his side" of
the story. He shows no regret for bullying one of his students into suicide,
"because a _real_ Charlie Parker would have been able to take [my abuse]."

Holy freaking self-serving cherry picking survivor bias, Batman! First of all,
_we don 't know_ if Charlie Parker would have been any less brilliant if he
had had proper therapy for his inner demons. Perhaps he would have been _more
brilliant_ , ever considered that? Young John Coltrane suffered from heroine
and alcohol addictions, but he wrote "A Love Supreme" _after_ he had a
religious experience and overcame those addictions. Not to mention the fact
that we are ignoring countless of brilliant artist who are not suffering,
which you don't hear about _because_ it's not a juicy story.

So at the end of the movie the main characters are just as horrible, misguided
and unaware of their own institutional whiteness and privileges as before, and
haven't really learned anything. Then they give a dazzling performance that
seems to suggest to us that yes, all of this was justified to give us this.
It's ignorant, insulting and wrong.

Believing that suffering for art is necessary is a misguided, romantic and
outdated and dangerous view of genius and I can't wait for it to die. No
matter what field we are talking about.

[0] [https://www.ottodix.org](https://www.ottodix.org)

[1] The appreciation of "ugly" art is actually a very interesting topic, I
recommend _Talk about a Painting: A Cognitive Developmental Analysis_ as a
nice starting point.

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_growth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_growth)

~~~
vict00ms
I don't disagree with you entirely but I think "suffering for art" is really
just a corollary (admittedly, often taken to its absurd extreme) of the idea
that art can't be created in a complacent vacuum.

~~~
vanderZwan
I wholeheartedly support the claim that art cannot exist in a vacuum - I've
ranted plenty of times about the whole notion of "autonomous" art (an
invention of modernism), being problematic for that very reason.

But I disagree with idea that suffering for art is just "a corollary" to that.
That would ignore that The Suffering Artist is an age old trope with a long
history of examples of (IMO misplaced) hero-worshiping, which has nothing to
do with this "complacent vacuum".

Yes, art (or science or tech or social change or whatever) is always created
within a certain context, and this context may have obstacles that need to be
overcome to create said art. Sometimes those obstacles involve suffering, and
not everyone is willing to pay that price.

There is a romantic notion of believing in something greater than yourself and
suffering for it, and sometimes that is true: Snowden was _willing to suffer_
to get the truth out, and without it we wouldn't have known what we know now.

But knowing the context and the price of what you want to do, and paying it
willingly does not imply that great art (any kind of "greatness") requires
suffering, or worse: that an artwork becomes better if the artist suffered for
it. That's an utterly banal reversal of causality.

------
tobyhinloopen
I'm not convinced that this wasn't a sob story to advertise his game. Well
done, because it seems to work.

~~~
HiroshiSan
He says it is at the beginning. See comments above.

------
kennyadam
"It's going to be a lot longer than that before I'm finished. But it's time
for me to start moving along, and I'm releasing the game as an Early Access
title on Steam next month. I don't know how well the game is going to sell.
I've started looking for my next grownup job after this"

Am I understanding this correctly? He's dumping the game on 'Early Access' but
isn't going to finish it? Hardly early access and more duping people, if I'm
not mistaken?

~~~
xg15
Maybe he plans to continue developing the game as a hobby/side thing though
and wants to see how much community interest there is for it. With some luck,
it could become an ongoing thing like a webcomic.

------
nindalf
I wish the author had posted this after it was available on Steam. I’ve read
his story and I’d like to support him but I can’t. By the time it’s possible
to buy this game I would likely have forgotten about it.

Still, kudos to him for persevering and getting his project to completion.

~~~
magpi3
You can follow it on Steam and they will tell you when it is available, no?

A real question. I don't use Steam.

~~~
oddevan
Yes, you can add it to a wishlist.

------
ivan_gammel
Wasn’t it some external contractor doing sentiment analysis for media
publications for ISAF? The contract was cancelled by DoD after publication of
an article in Stars and Stripes about censorship and denying access to
battlefield for some journalists based on that reports. What was the role of
the author in that?

------
baud147258
I took the title the author used on a thread, since I think the title of the
album is not explicit.

~~~
baud147258
Well, the mods updated the title to the one of the album.

The previous title was "I started making a video game because the CIA was
ruining my life"

------
vectorEQ
if it made you happier, it was a good choice. if it makes you sadder, it was a
good lesson, and that should make you happy :D

------
jeffrallen
Excellent marketing, at least!

------
anjc
This petty, begging article might be the third biggest mistake

~~~
aritmo
Some may not like the article, but now he is standing out of the thousands
game developers. He got the attention.

------
tomerbd
what are the expertise needed to create such a game? it always looks magical
to me how those games are created?

