Small things
On the shelf above my desk there's a ship in a bottle. My father made it the winter I was born, from a kit he bought in Two Harbors, and it's meant to be the boat he worked on, though he admitted the kit was for a different boat and he'd painted the stripe on himself. It's about the length of my hand. You can see all of it at once: every rail, every hatch cover, the tiny lifeboat on its davits. No part of it is somewhere else.
I've been thinking about it a lot this winter, because I work on things nobody can see all of at once. The game I'm on is big enough that I don't believe a single person in the building has played every part of it, including the people whose job is to play every part of it. I write my piece, someone else writes the piece beside it, and we meet at the edges in a spreadsheet. That isn't a complaint. Some of the best work I've done was at those edges. But I keep catching myself wanting to make something the size of the bottle. Something one person could pick up, and turn over, and know.
I said this to Owen at lunch on Thursday, over the bad pho in the building across the street, and he gave me the reasons it can't be done, in order, which is how he gives everything.
Small isn't cheap, he said. The parts of a game that make it feel alive cost the same whether the world is a mile wide or one room. Small means every corner gets looked at, so every corner has to hold up. Small means nothing to hide behind. And the thing I actually want, which he says only sounds small, is the most expensive direction there is, because I don't want a smaller game, I want a deeper one, and deep is where the money goes.
He's right about all of it. He usually is, about money. I went back to my desk and wrote barks for a market scene, eleven of them, for a man selling eels, and they're fine. Somebody will hear two of them.
The bottle has a crack near the neck, from a move I won't describe. It's never mattered. You still see the whole ship through it.
What's the smallest thing you own that feels complete?