They'll Rush Anything That Moves and Call It Progress

Harrow Corners has seen worse, but not by much.

The grange talent contest wrapped up last week, or tried to. The winners were promised a date with the mayor and a parrot that repeats everything it hears, sometimes in voices it has never met. Neither prize materialized as expected, since the parrot flew off mid-contest last year and the mayor has had another grandchild since, which has made her a whole different woman to that bird. Not that it matters. Around here, you learn to hold prizes loosely.

What I cannot hold loosely, and will not, is the spectacle of grown outfits with accountants and lawyers rushing half-finished work out the door because November has a deadline and shame apparently does not. Game publishers, I am looking square at you. You have been looking square at the calendar and nowhere else, and it shows.

Take a game like Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Reused bosses. An open world that feels like a yard sale laid out on a tarp, plenty of surface and nothing underneath. You can see the corners they cut from twenty feet away, and I have one good hip and bifocals. A cake made of nothing but sugar looks pretty on the counter. It will not feed a soul, and it will not be remembered fondly. The people who bought that game paid real money for a promise that dissolved the minute they got it home.

Now, Blood of the Dawnwalker is a different matter. You play as a vampire who can only fight during the day, and time only moves when you commit to something that matters. Every decision carries weight because the clock is real and the cost is real. That is not a gimmick. That is a design philosophy, and it is the same philosophy that keeps a house standing: you do not spend what you have not earned, and you do not pretend a shortcut is the same as a road.

Then there is Silent Hill: Townfall, which had a notion worth pursuing and then fumbled it like a wet bar of soap. A television that picks up signals for hints, one enemy visible at a time. I have navigated a foggy night with a one-eyed dog and I will tell you that is not a feature, that is a condition to be managed. The idea needed more time in the oven. It came out raw in the middle and nobody at the table was going to say so because the box looked fine. That is not craftsmanship. That is wishful thinking with a price tag on it.

I have lived in Harrow Corners long enough to watch the county fair run nine days longer than it was scheduled, with nobody able to leave, and I have learned something from that experience: time does not always behave, but your obligations inside of it do not change. You still owe the work. You still owe the effort. The clock being unreliable is not an excuse for your output being sloppy.

Ever since the lake gave the Hendersons' boy back, I have watched him sit on this porch, quiet and a little sideways from the rest of us, having missed the last seventy years of everything. He does not complain about what he lost. He just gets on with the business of being here. There is a lesson in that for anyone willing to look at it straight: you do not get credit for showing up halfway. You do not get credit for almost finishing. You get credit for the thing itself, whole and honest and built to last.

These publishers are so busy watching the calendar they have forgotten that the people on the other side of the screen are spending something real, time and money and the particular kind of hope that makes you buy a game you are excited about. You do not get to take that lightly. You do not get to hand back a half-assembled thing and call it a product.

Do the work. All of it. Or sit down and let someone else have the kitchen.

The fruitcake I baked in 1954 comes back to me every Christmas without fail. Nobody eats it. Nobody throws it out. Seventy years and it is still in circulation because it was made properly the first time. That is not a miracle. That is just what happens when you do not cut corners.

Mind your craft and salt your porch. , Aunt Dot
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