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I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about the past and the future. If you know me, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was due to my age. An earned sentimentality. In reality, I've always been this way. As interested in history as I am in what comes next. They are joined. There are no events, just a seamless flow from past to future.

Recently I have, quite literally, revisited a part of my own past. I won’t get too specific, but I have found myself doing things that I didn’t think I would ever do again. Using tools and skills that I had once been fairly adept at, but had let rust and wither. It brings back memories, but more than anything it makes me think of the future. How far some elements of the business have progressed in my absence and the direction they are likely to go in at least the next few years.

As I work and live, acquiring new knowledge and skills, I regularly think back and wonder what I could have done in a certain job, had I only known what I know now. What could I have accomplished. Of course the answer is, that didn’t happen. I knew what I knew and I did what I did, and that was the way it went. If I hadn’t done those things then I wouldn’t know the things I know now. Just a seamless flow from past to future.

The things I write here mostly concern video games, but since myself and video games are roughly the same age, my own history and the history of this medium enjoy some parallels. Now that I am actively developing video games, a lifetime, my lifetime, of thinking about, playing, and sometimes creating games is proving valuable.  It’s an easy trap to only look back, but If my recent adventure has taught me anything, it’s that at this moment I know exactly what I need to be able to make the games I make now. In the future, today will be the past and I can look back on it and wonder what I was thinking, but again, I will be precisely where I need to be to make the things I make then.

This has maybe gotten all a little bit too Doctor Who, but I’m okay with that. Tomorrow I’ll write something else.