The Daily Grind
"Working as a game designer is like the mouse on your computer; some days it clicks and some days it drags." - Alan Emrich
"A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it." - Alfred Alistair Cook
"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." - Thomas Alva Edison
"You must say to yourself every day, 'I make games because I love it.'" - Alan Emrich
"Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work." - Robert Orben
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." - Bertrand Russell
"What? And give up a career in show business?" - Punch line to an old joke about the travails of the job
"We have to serve our self many years before we gain our own confidence." - Henry S. Haskins
"Jesters do oft prove prophets." - William Shakespeare
"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows." - David T. Wolf
Failed Projects
"Great blunders are made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers." - Victor Hugo
"It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize." - Robert Mallett
"I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: try to please everybody." - Herbert Bayard Swope
"Any new venture goes through the following stages: enthusiasm, complication, disillusionment, search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent, and decoration of those who did nothing." - Unknown
Finding Inspiration
"Anything the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve." - Unknown
"The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." - Carl Jung
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London
"If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk." - Raymond Inmon
Focus
"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof crap detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have it." - Ernest Hemingway
"Striving to better, oft we mar what's well." - William Shakespeare
Money Matters
Pecuniae obediunt omnia. (All things yield to money.)
”The statements of performance in your cover letter, design documents, and other selling documents tell the publisher what you’re proposing. Your budgets and schedules tell the publisher whether or not you know what you’re talking about.” - Luke Ahearn from his article Budgeting and Scheduling Your Game
"Business is a good game ― lots of competition
and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money." - Nolan Bushnell (founder
of Atari)
Office Politics
“Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.” – Thomas Jones
"Clever lairs give details, but the cleverest don't." - Anonymous
"A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror." - Ken Keyes, Jr.
"The offender never pardons." - George Herbert
"The shortest and best way to make your fortune is to let people see clearly that it is in their interests to promote yours." - Jean de La Bruyère
"Suspect him the most that trusts the least." - Anonymous
"The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." - Japanese proverb
"An associate producer is the only guy who will associate with a producer." - Fred Allen
"Whoever gossips to you will gossip of you." - Spanish proverb
Plagiarizing (using available techniques)
"There is no work of art that is without its short cuts." - André Gide
”About the most originality that any game designer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.” – Alan Emrich, stolen and adapted from Josh Billings
”In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.” – Kenneth Ewart Boulding
”The original game designer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.” – Alan Emrich
"He who is most creative conceals his sources the best." - Anonymous
Planning
“It was not raining when Noah built the ark." - Howard Ruff
"The beginning is the most important part of the work." - Plato
"Well begun is half done." - Aristotle
"People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune." - William McFee
"It is the end that crowns us, not the fight." - Robert Herrick
Playtesters
“A good spectator also creates.” – Swiss proverb
The Press, Reviews, and Critics
”No matter how well you perform, there’s always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it’s lousy.” – Laurence Olivier
"Most editors are failed writers. But then, so are most writers." - T. S. Eliot
"To escape criticism: do nothing, say nothing, be nothing." - Elbert Hubbard
"Asking someone in the game business what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs." - Unknown
"A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it." - Danielle Steel
The 'Team Concept'
"The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit of doing them." - Benjamin Jowett
"Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan." - Unknown
"A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say." - Michael Winner, British film director
"A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." - Barnett Cocks
"The more help a person has in his garden, the less it belongs to him." - William H. Davies
"The cemeteries are filled with indispensable men." - Charles de Gaulle
"Those not present are always wrong." - Phillipe Destouches
"Sometimes a fool makes a good suggestion." - Nicholas Boileau
"When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong - or absolutely right." Albert Guinon
"When we ask advice we are usually looking for an accomplice." - Charles Varlet de La Grange
Simplicity
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." - Albert Einstein
Working with Clients
"Things are always at their best in the beginning." - Blaise Pascal
Writing
"Eschew obfuscation." - Floyd Grubb
"Be concise and be definitive. And above all, be readable.” - Wargame Design, Notes on Game Design, Stephen B. Patrick
“Writing rules is not one of the more ‘glamorous’ aspects of working on games. It is a task that is, in general, more drudgery than glory.” - James F. Dunnigan
Verba volant, scripta manent (Spoken words fly away, written words remain.)
"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one." - Baltasar Gracian
"Writing is turning one's worst moments into money." - J. P. Donleavy