When a good friend recently referred to me as being “insanely ambitious,” it took me a while to really glom onto what she meant.  I don’t really think of myself as an ambitious person.

I’m a dreamer.  I would like to call myself a visionary but that seems a bit pretentious.  I like to spend a huge amount of time thinking about other worlds and the people who might inhabit them.  Mind you, the worlds I think about aren’t James Cameron Avatar worlds or Star Wars worlds or J.R.R. Tolkien worlds.  The worlds in my imagination tend to be a lot like the one we all share but with a few subtle but often significant fantastical twists.

It’s challenging for me to try to imagine the smallest possible event with the largest conceivable impact on the nature of reality and life on Earth.  It takes a lot of time, time that I might seem, to others, to be wasting gazing at nature, esoteric books and art.  So it’s hard for me to see myself as ambitious.

I certainly don’t consider myself a lazy person but I do often have difficulty with focus and concentration.  There are a lot of possible worlds, you see.  I find them tugging at my mind at the most inconvenient moments.

On the other hand, I really don’t concern myself at all with inconsequential and, ultimately, harmful activities such as getting haircuts, wearing suits, finding ways to betray others for a percentage, playing golf, drinking cocktails or inhabiting the cavernous emptiness of the largest, most expensive and fuel wasting form of transportation that I can barely afford.  Those things seem to me to be the opposite of ambition.  They deprive one of humanity in it’s fullest sense and so, to me, they seem to be merely a forming of giving up and giving in.

In either case, I think what my friend meant when she called me ambitious is that I want to make a difference in the world, to leave it a better place (if that’s even possible) than I found it.

I want to create, live in and share with others a world that is challenging yet nurturing, mysterious yet accessible, compassionate yet joyful and, most of all, filled with gentle adventure.

I think she’s right.  That’s pretty ambitious.

There are so many countless ways in which I cannot achieve those sorts of goals.  I am hopelessly dialectic when it comes to politics.  I’m impossibly eclectic when it comes to religion.  And, as for business, I am far too much a fan of consensus decision-making to ever be effective in hierarchical structures.

I do have some strengths, however.  While I do often struggle to give skills the long term focus to really excel at them, I do have some natural talents.

I’m a pretty good visual artist, able to work anywhere from cartooning to portraiture.

I’m a pretty good writer, able to communicates events and ideas if not concisely then at least with a certain vividness.

And I seem to have a weird intuitive grasp of software engineering, programming, computer systems and networking.

When you combine those things together, one obvious possibility for making a difference in the world presents itself.

So I’m building a video game.

I’m building a really, really big and complex video game.

In fact, I’m building something called an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game).  If the word “Massively” makes that sound like a ambitious undertaking, then perhaps the term is a bit of an understatement.

I’m building, by myself, from scratch, both the scalable server architecture and the graphical game client for a 2d online game capable of scaling to thousands of simultaneous players.

Why 2d and not 3d?  Honestly, because I get motion sickness and 3d games make me instantly nauseous.

Why online and not single player?  Because I want to build a role playing game and I think people play roles best when they share the activity with others.

Why from scratch?  That’s actually kind of hard to answer.  Mostly it’s because nothing really exists for free that fulfills my requirements.  However, a big part of it is because I want something that uniquely meets the needs for what I have envisioned for my game universe.

Why so scalable?  Because I like to build big things.  And, if I’m being totally honest, because I’d really like to have an excuse to build a big server cluster so I can walk in late at night, turn off the overhead lights, sit down against the wall and watch the pretty, pretty blinky lights.

And, finally, how will any of this make a difference in the world?

Because I want to do something a little different for an MMO.  It’s not just that I want to make a game that’s fun for casual players, of which I am one, but I want to make a game that’s fun for casual gamers whether or not they enjoy simulated violence.  I want to offer fun alternatives to violence to solve in-game problems.  I want violence to possible but I also want it to come with consequences.

In other words, I want to broaden the emotional range of interaction in an online game.  I want to explore different modes of problem solving in a way that’s entertaining to others.  I want to present a wider range of options for dealing with in-game threats, the way that characters in anime and manga (by which I’m inspired) often overcome enemies not just with battle but sometimes with understanding, compassion, wit or transformation.

In short, I’d like to make a game where murder is not an obligatory means of interacting with others.

Why?  Because I believe there are many, many people like myself who would like to play a game because it’s entertaining, because by doing so we get to participate in a compelling story and because we believe that adventure is more than just an endless socio-pathic killing spree.

So, why am I telling you all this?  Because, as I build this game, I’d like to make a concerted effort to tell you about it as often as possible, to share the adventure of building it with you and to leave a record of where I was coming from as I did it.