Also, though, I think a big part of it is that he can never regain two ingredients that made his PS:T work possible: the energy and detachment of a young man are lost to him forever. Even if he had the same creative circumstances and team around him, I doubt he'd want to, or be able to, work the same long hours. So the game would have to shrink, or his role would have to shrink, or both. We are all laid low by life.
A consequence of the industry, perhaps, but it is striking how different the ingredients of success are here described from other creative enterprises. Many of the finest works of literature and film were made by people older than Avellone. Spielberg released
Poltergeist when he was 46,
Schindler's List and
Jurassic Park at 47,
Saving Private Ryan at 54,
Minority Report at 58, and is still directing top movies in his 60s. Kubrick released
2001 when he was 40,
A Clockwork Orange when he was 43,
The Shining when he was 52, and
Eyes Wide Shut after his death at 71. Tolkien began writing
The Lord of the Rings at 45, while Martin started writing
A Song of Ice and Fire at the age of 43, and is still at it at the age of 67. Maybe we should add Dostoyevsky since he is brought up so much on the Codex:
Crime and Punishment at 45,
The Idiot at 48,
Demons at 51, and
The Brothers Karamazov at 59.
Chris Avellone is 44, unless I'm mistaken, so he is at the age when writers and film makers produce most of their greatest masterpieces. This should be the height of his career - it certainly was for the above directors and writers - not the middle of the long decline. In case the video game industry is not structured so as to allow creators to realize their visions at their fullest maturity, then perhaps that is a problem with the video game industry, and not with the age of the creators.
I can't speak for "the industry" -- either on its behalf or as someone who has gone through its meatgrinder. I'm fortunate that it's always been a hobby where I can avoid jobs that have perpetual crunch time or whatever.
What I can say as a writer/designer, though, is that I think this is a pretty good example of how analogizing games to the non-interactive* arts is misleading. (* Obviously, all art is interactive to a degree: we assign meaning to the art as we absorb it, mixing it with our own experiences and imaginations. But you know what I'm talking about: movies, books, comics, songs, etc.)
I am confident that Spielberg worked really hard on those movies and that those writers worked hard on their books, but it's a totally different kind of work than the kind of work Avellone did on PS:T. One crude measure is that Avellone wrote about three times as many words for PS:T as Dostoevsky did for The Brothers Karamazov. Quantity isn't quality, but certain kind of gameplay
demands quantity in a way that (IMHO) isn't true of film or fiction. In the case of PS:T, the quantity and quality are (IMHO, at least) inextricably intertwined. While you could definitely have cut some parts of the game (like Curst, perhaps) without harming the core, Curst is subject to excision precisely because it is
underwritten and (as I understand it) not really written by Avellone.
What makes PS:T special -- or, one part of it -- is that there is this huge diversity of characters and encounters, which can be approached and resolved in a huge variety of ways, but running through all that diversity is a coherent authorial voice. The reason why (again IMHO) having one author makes such a difference is that there are some things that are not reducible to "writing standards" or fixable through editors doing back-end passes.
For example, sometimes a writer says, "This is going to be a theme/symbol, and I will weave it through multiple encounters." He could put that in a file called "Design - Themes/Symbols" alongside other writers' themes and symbols, and they could cross pollinate in that way. All well and good. But oftentimes a writer doesn't even know he's weaving a theme or varying upon a symbol throughout his writing. It just happens because that theme is a part of him, the writing is an expression of him, and so the theme appears throughout. Things sit in a writer's mind like grains of sand in an oyster, and writers work them over unconsciously.
So I think PS:T is more than what Avellone consciously put into it -- that's true of any work of writing. When it is a composite work of writing, it is easier to harmonize the conscious elements than it is to harmonize the unconscious elements. A good editor can catch
some of the unconscious elements, but sometimes there are elements that are unconsciously written and unconsciously read -- neither the writer nor the reader knows they're there, but they are, and they build upon each other. When those double-unconscious elements harmonize, you end up with a work that feels "whole," like PS:T, though PS:T is of course not perfect in this regard or in any other regard, merely very, very good.
In a movie, a strong-minded director can impose an auterial vision and thus (to some degree) achieve that kind of harmony. But whereas a movie might take a few months of hard work, a game like PS:T takes a writer years of grinding. A novel can take much longer than a game to write, but novelists are not necessarily working under the same time pressures: a game writer has not merely the pressure of the publisher/market, but also the fact that there are other team members working in tandem. All of this means that you can go about it with a crop-cycling rhythm like GRRM: you work your field till the soil is dead.
You can do that at 20, but not at 40.
