It shipped

On Tuesday the game I've been working on for most of the last four years came out. I still won't name it here, partly out of habit and partly because the studio would rather I weren't the person who does. If you know, you know. If you don't, it's a big one, and I wrote a lot of its small parts.

There's a moment at launch when the thing stops being yours. For four years it lived on our machines. We knew every crack in it. Then on Tuesday morning it went out, and by Tuesday night more people had played it than everyone I've ever met put together, and none of them knew where the cracks were, and none of them cared. I slept for eleven hours on Wednesday. I'm told that's normal.

Since then I've been doing something I promised myself I wouldn't, which is watching strangers play.

It's a strange way to meet your own work. People stream themselves playing and talk the whole time, and you can sit there in the dark and watch them walk into a quest you wrote in a gray week two winters ago. They don't know you're there. They talk over your best lines. They skip the dialogue you rewrote nine times. They laugh at things you didn't mean to be funny, and then, now and again, at something you did, and the relief of that is out of all proportion.

And sometimes they go quiet. On Thursday night I watched a woman in Ohio play a quest about a father and a debt, and at the end she said nothing for about ten seconds, which on a stream is a very long time, and then she said, "Okay. Okay," and went to make tea. I closed my laptop and walked around the block twice.

Then there's the blacksmith. A man streaming from somewhere in Germany walked up to his forge, bought a sword, and got the second line, the advice that's slightly too specific. He stopped and said, in English, "That's weirdly specific, man." His chat filled up with people telling him to leave the blacksmith alone, he's sad. I don't know how they knew. I didn't put the sadness in that line. I only put it underneath.

A few lines from the quest that was cut last October turned up in another one, sanded down, the way I said they might. Someone has already quoted one on a forum. They don't know it came from somewhere else, and I'm not going to tell them.

I'm proud of it. I'm tired. I'd like to sleep for another eleven hours and then start the next thing.

If you've ever watched a stranger use something you made, what did you want to tell them?