Offerings to God
I watched Amadeus (1984) today. I had never seen it. That scene with Salieri dropping the papers has become a meme on twitter, and I happened to use it to make a point in a blog post, so I figured I should actually watch the movie. People say it’s a great movie. And they were right. It’s one of those archetypal human stories that read as true 500 years ago and 500 years from now. It’s a great movie. If you haven’t watched, I highly recommend watching it before reading this post.
Salieri’s Prayer
“Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give you my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life.”
Salieri’s prayer is mistaken primarily because he is not praying to make great music, but to become a well-known composer. His aim is glory. But I find that his next mistake is deeper and more serious. We could reword his prayer as “God, I will give you myself and my works, as long as you make me a greatly recognized and respected composer.” He is giving himself up completely and utterly, as long as he gets the result he wants. This is a conditional submission. In Salieri’s example, the reason why this conditional submission is wrong is easy to see. But in most cases, these conditional submissions are more hidden and difficult to parse.
Last year (2024), I decided that what I needed to do most was go back to my plan of releasing a game every 2-3 months, but to do so while dropping the “a327ex” persona, and starting a new dev identity from scratch. But as I started doing it I began to question this decision. Something about it felt deeply off. My intuition was telling me this was wrong, somehow.
Usually when this happens it’s because I haven’t thought the problem through enough, and in those cases it helps me to write about it. So I wrote what follows below. The perspective of the post below is: “this is going to be made public in 2-3 years in the future once this experiment is done with, whatever its results may be.”
X
“X” is who I will use to release game from now on. I don’t know how long this will last, but I want to answer a few specific questions with this new dev persona:
- Can a new game developer succeed on Steam with skill alone and very little marketing?
X will start from zero. I will release games on Steam for free at first to gain an audience, and I will not do much marketing for any of those games. I will use twitter and reddit for progress posts, as well as for posts when I release a game. I will use 4chan’s /agdg/ and /v/’s gamedev threads for progress and general banter. I will join a few gamedev discord servers, but mostly for conversations and not marketing (although with devs it normally happens that as you talk to people they ask about your games).
I don’t think I’ll use anything other than those. I will especially avoid writing any blog posts or making YouTube videos. I want this developer to be largely invisible beyond the basics. And I also want most of the traffic to the game to come from Steam users and people who decide to follow my developer page on Steam. If I manage to find an audience that consistently plays my games, and eventually make money from this (say ~100k USD), then I’ll consider this experiment a success.
- Are my games succeeding or failing because of their actual qualities?
“a327ex” was a very outspoken developer. I explicitly only spoke when I disagreed with something or someone, and I spoke in a crude and often disrespectful manner. Being honest and saying what you feel is the truth is good, but it has various drawbacks. One of them is that people are not like me in how they consume their media. For many people, if they know a developer is X, where X may be any number of negative or positive attributes, that will change how they view what that developer creates.
People who dislike me will refuse to play any game a327ex makes, no matter how good the game may be, solely due to the fact that a327ex made it. People who like me will give a chance to any game a327ex makes, a chance they wouldn’t have given a similar game made from someone else, solely due to the fact that a327ex made it. Both of those are distortions of reality that are not desirable. Many people are like this and they can’t help it. I don’t blame them for it, it is what it is.
However, I am interested in knowing if my games are succeeding or failing due to their actual qualities and not any other external factors, therefore reducing this particular kind of noise is necessary. And this reduction can be perfectly achieved by a new dev identity, particularly one that is invisible. This goes well with doing very little marketing.
“X” doesn’t exist, he has a small social media presence, he has no blog posts, no YouTube videos, no one knows much about him and they never will. Other than the content of his games that some people might find objectionable over time (although most ideas I have for games now are not really controversial at all), no one will have many external reasons to judge him either positively or negatively. He’s a ghost, he’s off the grid. And so through him I will know if my games are succeeding or failing based on their actual qualities or not, I will know if I have achieved true success or true failure.
- Is it luck or is it skill?
Due to starting from zero and doing little marketing, the results of this experiment also partially answer the luck vs. skill question. And I say partially because to answer it with very high confidence I would need to run this experiment multiple times. I would be happy with succeeding ~5 times from zero like this to conclusively say that skill is the only thing that matters, but I’m happy doing it once, if I manage to do it.
One of the reasons why doing it more than once isn’t necessary is because the answer doesn’t really help anyone but me. If I succeed I will have proved to myself that I can succeed from scratch again, and that my success with SNKRX was likely not due to luck. That’s a great question to have answered. But can I extrapolate from that and say that if I can do it, so can other people? I think not. I think the fact that I can do it simply means that I’m smart and creative enough to be able to do it, but it doesn’t generalize to other people because they’re not as smart nor as creative as me.
Ultimately, I still succeeded because of some kind of luck, which was a genetic luck. I was born with a fairly high IQ, to a decent enough family, with fairly high levels of creativity. Not a lot of people spawn with these same stats, so whatever lessons can be learned from my success by others are limited. People don’t like thinking about these inherent biological differences, so providing stronger evidence on this front won’t really convince anyone. You can’t make people see what they don’t want to see, and in fact whatever advice I have for most people would be incorrect, since most people are not wired like me.
But now let’s suppose I fail. If I fail it means that the status quo of belief when it comes to skill vs. luck, and even Steam itself, is correct. If I , someone clearly smart and creative (maybe less than I thought), can’t succeed consistently, what chances does anyone else have? This would mean that I, in fact, got lucky with SNKRX. This is something that I don’t think is likely. I think given a certain amount of time, a few years probably, I’ll succeed with X, and thus this failure mode won’t come to pass.
However, if it does, I should absolutely be public with it. To fail and to not publicize this result would be poor behavior since it would be depriving others of an important data point regarding success on Steam. The possibility of failure, along with the commitment to publish results, success or failure, redeems the experiment. While success is a selfish success because it mostly gives me useful knowledge, failure with publishing of results is selfless because it gives everyone else useful knowledge, while also slightly shaming me publicly and proving wrong what I believed to be true and wrote about extensively (in an often arrogant tone).
I think these are the main questions I want to answer. This (anonymous dev reset) turned out to be a surprisingly hard decision. Among coding various things here and there, I spent an entire month thinking about this and this alone. Should I release my next games as “a327ex” or should I start a dev persona from scratch? For every argument in favor of the former, I could come up with a counter-argument favoring the latter. It really does feel like this is one of the most important choices I’m making in my life, for whatever reason, so I need to get it right.
Now as for this blog itself. I’m going to write posts here privately and only publish them when I reveal that X is a327ex when the experiment is over. This is a retreat into my own private world, or my becoming a reclusive vampire lord. I think there’s something positive about interacting less with the outside world and focusing inward. I’ve largely done it recently and several things have already become clear. There’s this passage from this great essay that is relevant:
Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her - the thought that others will read these notes about the tacky sex life of a middle-aged woman feels, to her, almost fictional. She will be far away when it happens. Therefore, she doesn’t feel a need to protect herself.
X serves the same purpose for me. He is a tool I can use that acts as a barrier. He separates the work from the public and that separation frees me to see reality more clearly, as if a fog had just been lifted. I’ve come to see everything I do, but artifacts like games especially, as offerings to God. Any artifact created, or any action taken, should be viewed as an offering. The only thing you can do is make your offering the best it can be, and if God will reward you for it or not, that’s completely out of your hands.
The frustration and contempt I felt for indiedevs, which I described in the Son of a Serpent post, was wrong because I wanted a reward for my offerings. I wanted to offer what I believed to be the truth, and I want to see people’s opinions converge with mine. But I have no control over other people. I already knew this when it came to having no control over if people liked the games I made or not, but somehow I failed to apply that same lesson in another situation.
I started the Son of a Serpent post by saying that that quote from JoJo was an incomplete truth. I was wrong to say that. It is a complete truth because it understand that all you can do is offer your best, and that you shouldn’t desire the results.
In the elder days of art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.
X’s games will be made to no one but God. I will offer my best, whatever the results may be, and I will be content with that.
Unconditional Offerings
And that was it. Writing that post helped me clear my thoughts. But there was still something wrong. I intuited that what was wrong was the focus on the question “Is this game succeeding because of its qualities alone or its success affected by external factors?” It’s a good question to want answered, but the mistake in wanting it answered struck me as similar to the mistake of wanting other’s opinions to converge with mine, and feeling frustrated when that wasn’t the case.
When I was young, 12 or 13, my mom, who was a medium, had one of her friends, who was also a medium, look into who I was in past lives. You don’t have to believe this kind of stuff, but this is what she believed, and it’s what I’ve come to believe as well. This lady basically said that, in one particularly emotionally strong past life, I was an artist, and that I had died extremely frustrated that my works weren’t as recognized as the works of my peers, despite judging them of similar quality.
An interesting, believable, and general sort of thing that has always and will always apply to a great number of artists. But it left an impression on me. And so because I always had this possibility in the back of my mind, that this was who I was and that this was a frustration my soul carried with it, I always steered myself away from comparisons and other mindsets that would lead me down a path of blaming other people for my fate, if my career as an artist didn’t work out in this life.
Years later, it seems as though reality arranged itself to test my soul. After SNKRX released, other, very similar games came out, and were way more successful than it. Had I actually changed? Did I genuinely feel no jealousy, envy? Did those successes genuinely not bother me? And the answer was yes. I had fundamentally changed. I genuinely didn’t feel sad, jealous, envious, or like the universe owed me anything I didn’t have. This was good. I was given a test and I passed it. It wasn’t even a hard test, as it took no effort at all, but I guess that’s how it goes for every piece of true wisdom you learn with every lived life.
However, I don’t think this was the only test I was given. Wanting very hard to answer the question of “Is this game succeeding because of its qualities or because of external factors?” is another way of thinking that’s likely incorrect.
Suppose a perfect Steam store optimized by a 5000 IQ AI. This store surfaces games to players based on their qualities alone using the most well-developed ultimate curation algorithm in existence. It’s curation perfected. And then suppose that I release games to this store while doing zero marketing, because marketing isn’t necessary anymore.
In this perfect scenario, this scenario of absolutely zero external factors, games will succeed or fail based on their qualities alone. A game’s quality is a reflection of the developer’s skill. The developer’s skill is a reflection of his hard work, but also his natural talents.
I am naturally fairly smart, but I was also born in a family with close family members who have schizophrenia. This is a well-known pattern, where highly creative people often come from families where they have close family members, especially siblings, who have schizophrenia, while they themselves don’t have it. It’s like you get a creativity buff at the cost of a sibling getting a fairly heavy everything debuff.
Both of these things, high creativity and IQ, are traits that increase the quality of any game I make. But both of these are the ultimate external factors. They literally happened to me in a manner that’s completely out of my control. If I run the experiment, with the perfectly curated Steam store, and I succeed, I can’t claim my success is a result of zero external factors because ultimately there’s always the biological external factor.
Imagine further, I run the experiment and succeed. What lesson I learn? I learn that in this life I’m amazing and that I’m great, and that in this life other people are less amazing and less great than me if they can’t replicate my success. How good of a lesson is that? If that’s all I learn, I’ll have taken nothing of value from this one life where I was granted ultimate clarity of thought in the form of high creativity and high intelligence.
And so it occurs to me that the other test I was given, and that everyone else in a similarly biologically privileged condition is given: given your gift of reason, what is the most correct way to act even if you didn’t have it? Or more specifically: given your gift of art, what is the most correct way to act even if you didn’t have it?
And the answer is what I ended the original post with. Your works should be offerings to God. You should offer your best, whatever the results may be, and you should be content with that. Trying to answer the question of “Is this game succeeding because of its qualities alone or because of external factors?” is wrong because it’s a conditional offering to God, in the exact same way that Salieri’s offering is conditional. It’s an offering as long as external factors are minimized, and that’s a weaker offering than a pure, unconditional one.
Conditional offerings are weaker because they’re trying to exert control over things they have no control over. By trying to minimize external factors, I was trying to engineer an environment in which people would respond to my offerings in the manner that I judged they should respond, without taking their wishes into account. Isn’t it disrespectful to look at someone who decided they would never play another a327ex game because they think I’m an asshole, and trick them into doing it anyway? It is. It would also be funny, but still wrong. It comes from a wrong place, with wrong reasoning, with mistaken motivations, and the only results that could have come out of it would have generated negative karma for me.
An unconditional offerer shouldn’t concern himself with whether the results of his offerings are due to this or that. He should simply offer his best, and everything else is out of his hands. Did someone decide to try a game I made simply because it was me who made it? it is what it is. It’s not up to me to decide that’s an undesirable external factor. Did someone decide to not try a game I made simply because it was me who made it? Again, it’s out of my hands. That’s their choice and spiritually it has nothing to do with me. My games are unconditional offerings, how others respond is not my concern.
Ultimately, unconditional offerings are the goal because righteous action has to be self-directed. It cannot be external. It has to be internal. The soul has to act righteously out of its own will, otherwise its progress isn’t true. The moment the soul decides on a conditional offering, an external element is introduced, and thus its will will develop less.
Agents of Nothing
“My plan was simple that it terrified me. First, I must get the death Mass, and then I must achieve his death. His funeral! Imagine it! The cathedral, all Vienna sitting there. His coffin. Mozart’s little coffin in the middle. And then, in that silence, music. A divine music bursts out over them all. A great Mass of death! Requiem Mass for Wolfgang Mozart, composed by his devoted friend, Antonio Salieri. What sublimity! What depth! What passion in the music! Salieri has been touched by God at last, and God forced to listen! Powerless to stop it! I, for once, in the end, laughing at him!”
This is, by far, the greatest scene in the movie. I don’t think it’s a scene built to make people cry, but I cried endlessly to it. It so perfectly captures evil, it so perfectly captures those who have positioned themselves against being itself. It’s an archetypal scene. If I were writing this story, or a story similar to it, I would start from this scene, and build the story backwards to support it and to maximize it.
First, there’s death. Literal with the killing. But then spiritual. Not only is the killing of your brother enough, but the taking of his work and claiming it as your own. And then the turn. And God forced to listen! Powerless to stop it! These words, the stutter, it all said with such hatred, with such rage, with such venom.
Invariably, agents of nothing converge on this. They converge on revenge towards the man who forced them to exist and to thus suffer eternally. And that revenge takes the form of death, of unmaking, of creating even more suffering if only to show him how wrong he is. And then… I, for once, in the end, laughing at him! Laughing at the man’s face, laughing at his foolishness. Mockery for mockery’s sake.
“Your merciful God. He destroyed his own beloved, rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of his glory. He killed Mozart, and kept me alive to torture. Thirty-two years of torture. Thirty-two years of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter. All the time fainter, till no one plays it at all. His… I will speak for you, Father. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint. Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you. I absolve you. I absolve you. I absolve you. I absolve you all.”
The two most important questions of being are: how souls act when they have power, and how souls act when others have power over them. Salieri is failing to act gracefully in the face of someone who has power over him. He does not accept that others may be given more, may have more. The unjustness of it fills him with rage. But isn’t this reasonable? Isn’t it all very unjust? Why should some be granted more?
It’s all very unjust. Existence itself is unjust. Who would submit all souls to this endless injustice? To this endless unfairness? The man who would do this must not be sane, and certainly he must not be good. But he has done it, and there’s nothing we can do about it. So we will show him. Every pain felt, every one of his beloved souls slowly unmaking itself into nothing, suffering endlessly; every degradation, every corruption, and every death, it will all be his doing and his fault, forever. And we will make sure he sees it all. This will be our final offering to God.
Salieri prayed for greatness. He offered everything, but only in exchange for glory. That was his failure. Maybe that was past me’s failure too. But I will act righteously. And from this life, I will take with me a single lesson that will guide me across all future lives: to offer my best unconditionally, whatever the results may be, and to be content with that.