I’ve played a video game where I had super-strength and could stack refrigerators on top of one another and make a staircase of refrigerators that I stole from other apartments, to get to a balcony I was trying to reach. I’ve decided whether whole fleets of robot AI ships will live or die. I’ve fought dragons.

Why is it our imagination only extends far enough to create fictional worlds where we crush some problem with our might?

We can have dragons and robots, but we are not telling stories where people have learned to treat themselves well?

I’ve spent years studying film and television and books and video games, trying to understand how to create my own stories.

And if you want me to make a story where people triumph over externalized circumstances, in order to crush some enemy who was the single problem in their life, I can make you a story like that; that’s what most of our stories are.

But I wanted to make games that told a story of a world I’d LIKE to live in. A world where practically everybody is someone who is aware of their own pain, and has built up the skills to deal with it. And so nobody is looking to externalize their pain and inflict it upon you.

What would that look like? Would there still be conflict?

So many of our problems or even industries today are built around correcting our mistakes made out of negligence or ignorance.

So much of our life is adjudicated by the few number of people we are willing to trust and rely on. The rest of the world is strangers.

What would a world look like that was full of people you were willing to trust, because your life had taught you that people are not only basically good and basically willing to help, but that it’s fun to add some variety and see how you and a new person will change one another for the better.

Our lives are spent running and hiding.

What would a world look like where we could boldly face one another, even those we did not know?

I believe that incompetence is always bad. I believe that trying to wrangle an agreement that we can all come to for what are the right and wrong ways to do things is a distraction from something we could all always be doing right now: Skill Up.

Incompetence is always bad. We have a nearly infinite capacity over our lifetime to add new skills and awareness to our skillset, so that we see our problems coming.

Imagine a world where you could learn from anybody you meet, because you’re not afraid that person is going to bite your head off.

That’s the fictional world I’ve been trying to build. It’s far more daring than dragons.