{"id":11450,"date":"2015-10-07T19:53:20","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T19:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/people-dont-just-play-your-game-and-then-shut-up-2\/"},"modified":"2015-10-07T19:53:20","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T19:53:20","slug":"people-dont-just-play-your-game-and-then-shut-up-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/people-dont-just-play-your-game-and-then-shut-up-2\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
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People don\u2019t just play your game and then shut up, they\u2019ll come back to you in force and really let you know how it made them feel. The vast majority of the response to stanley was extremely positive, some of it was also extremely negative. I had emails from people who told me I had forever changed the way they saw the world, emails from people who wanted me to know I was a spineless coward who should hate himself, emails from people asking for advice and for tech support and to look at their work and just talk about what they\u2019d been up to, emails from fans and journalists asking over and over and over and over and over where the idea for the game came from, until the answers to those questions simply became stock and lost their meaning and even I began to lose track of where the idea had actually come from. Thousands of people asking you to carry some amount of weight for them, to hear them, to talk to them, to tell them that things are going to be okay, to not turn them away. I tried, I did the best I knew how to do, but after a certain point the many little requests added up and their collective weight broke my back. I couldn\u2019t do it any more. I couldn\u2019t talk to more people. I couldn\u2019t continue to use other peoples\u2019 opinions of myself to feel good about myself and about my work. Every time I turned to someone else\u2019s opinion of the game, I felt less sure of my own opinion of it. I began to forget why I liked the game. I was losing the thing I had created.<\/p>\n

So I withdrew. I basically checked out of the world, told people \u201cI\u2019m just gonna be by myself for a while.\u201d I had never done that before. I spent a few months not really talking to anyone. It was lonely, but it was nice.<\/p>\n

Then toward the end of 2013, news outlets begin releasing their Game of the Year awards, and Stanley Parable is back in the spotlight. Suddenly the personal requests start flooding back in again. Suddenly I am the object of peoples\u2019 emotional baggage again. The GotY awards did not cause me to be depressed, they simply unearthed a depression I had been harboring and trying to bury since the launch of the game. But for whatever inexplicable reason, I felt depressed and anxious again. (part of what made the depression worse was that being given awards actually did not help me feel any better. \u201cIs something wrong with me??\u201d one tends to ask in a situation like this)<\/p>\n

So: to help myself better understand and isolate the feeling of depression around the GotY awards, I wrote and drew a comic to explain what I had been feeling. It was simply the best expression I had for the thoughts and emotions that were running through my head at the time at the time, I just wanted to put it into some words to help make it less nebulous and unknowable. I wanted something I could hold in front of myself and say \u201cThis. This is what I am experiencing.\u201d It\u2019s nice to get it out of your head.<\/p>\n

So I finished the comic, and read back over it, and thought to myself \u201cThere\u2019s no way I can post this online.\u201d<\/p>\n

The point of the comic was purely just to clarify that financial and critical success does not simply make your insecurities go away. If you were insecure about other peoples\u2019 opinions of you and addicted to praise in order to feel good about yourself, the dirty truth is that there is no amount of praise you can receive that will make that insecurity goes away. What fire dies when you feed it?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2019The Stanley Parable\u2019 creator Davey Wreden<\/a>
(via kenyatta<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People don\u2019t just play your game and then shut up, they\u2019ll come back to you in force and really let you know how it made them feel. The vast majority of the response to stanley was extremely positive, some of it was also extremely negative. I had emails from people who told me I had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-2YG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}