Anticipation
I haven’t been posting much because I’m drafting a new novel, and if you look through my old posts you’ll see numerous months with no posts and those are almost always places where I was working on some long form writing.
But sometimes I get a thought in my head and I have to write it out before I can get on with the other thing, and last night I started thinking about how when I was a child or a younger teen, I’d look forward to coming movies or games or books in a way that I rarely do now. Some of this is due to growing up. Some of it is due to having my own money now. Generally along with stress we acquire some discretionary funds as we age, which though they might never see enough are usually in a quantity that we never would imagine we’d have available as children.
I then started to think about what I am looking forward to.
In media a lot of it seems to be sequels. There’s a new season of Andor coming, the first season was arguably my favorite all time Star Wars story, certainly my favorite of the television series. Or there’s the sequel to The Tainted Cup, the first as such a unique and interesting fantasy novel I had to give it its own blog post.
In games I’m really looking forward to Draw Steel the new table top RPG from MCDM. It was this that got me started thinking about this after a post on the Blueskies last night.
What I wonder is if the crowdfunding of games is this era’s version of looking at the TSR catalogue or seeing ads in Dragon or other gaming magazines back in the early 1980s. Having backed other games I can say there’s the sense of anticipation knowing something is coming in the mail eventually, but often with these things it’s easy to forget about them after awhile, and while the surprise when those things come can be nice, the sense of anticipation gets lost.
What I think MCDM has done well is being fairly transparent about their process. They share YouTube Q&As as well as email out test kits and notes to backers. Better than that, on their Patreon they share all sorts of information about the design process. I find this helpful as a writer to see creative people experiencing a similar sort of trial and error. It’s a helpful reminder that creativity is work more than a lightning bolt of inspiration. As a consumer, it’s great to be able to take in this information mostly because it keeps in my mind that I have something to look forward to, but also because it brings back that sense of childlike wonder and hopeful anticipation that I used to get when I flipped through a games catalogue or through the pages of a gaming magazine.
