Every Game is Early Access

There is an idea presented in the Tao Te Ching (chapter 64) that might be understood thusly:

To force an endeavor to completion is to ruin it as it is nearly ready.

In what might be called a more “Western” fashion, Paul Valéry wrote:

In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, of the book to the fire or to the public, whether due to weariness or to a need to deliver it for publication, is a sort of accident, comparable to the letting-go of an idea that has become so tiring or annoying that one has lost all interest in it.

This might be more familiar in the form of the aphorism “A Work of Art Is Never Finished, Merely Abandoned”

What makes you choose to say, “The game’s not ready”? Why is it as difficult to throw a game to the public as it is to the recycle bin?

Regardless of when a game is “launched”, does the developer not have 2 options? Can they not choose to move on, as though planting a seed and leaving it to nature? Or, alternatively, can they not nurture it, prune it, allow it to grow and, when possible, aid it to grow further?

Players will tell you, regardless, of the ways that the game is deficient; and loving them for it is taking in the greatest nourishment from them, as they represent care and opportunity. A boat can sail with the wind, or against it, and sailing against it does so at the cost of energy.

The truly abandoned game, sent to the recycle bin, lives on as regret — the possibility of what could have been and what might still be.

Any game can be abandoned; all eventually will be. But it is in the journey, not the destination, that opportunity presents itself.

Be spontaneous with your craft, and you can only gain from it.