Liking what you do

There are times when I feel as if whatever I am doing, it all does not matter to the world. Last few weeks have been such times. This week is perhaps the start of my healing process. It started off with me going out with my good, old friends and somehow everything looked much better after that.

Today, I found something that reminds me that it does not matter how difficult and painful the process is, it is my attitude while throughout the process that matters most in life. That thing is David Sirlin's (very long) article on the process to balance Street Fighter II HD Remix. If you are a Street Fighter fan, I recommend going through some parts of the articles.

What I would like to highlight is the overview and the feature list.

Let's start with the overview. Quoting the opening paragraph:

"Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix was originally going to be a graphical update of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but along the way some magic happened. HD Remix is now a completely new Street Fighter game—the 6th installment in the SF2 series."

I originally thought that HD Remix is nothing more than a masochistic project to update the sprites to Street Fighter II. Only after reading Sirlin's articles that I appreciate its magic. It is the product of hard work done by people who love what they do. (Also note the magic that a company actually allows such magic possible. It's much easier and less risky for them to do the masochist project.)
Balancing a game is very difficult. It is very easy for a player, who experience only a portion of the whole game to criticize, "Hey, this part is not balanced!" It's much, much more difficult to look at the whole game and balance every part (or at least most parts).

I guess the point it reminds me of is this. When I like doing something, I usually want to get better at it. And as I get better, the thought of doing the thing makes me mentally recall a long list of difficult things I need to go through to do well.
This is where I usually lose patience. This week I learnt that patience is not that difficult for the benefits it brings.

You might say that the introduction, like so many other introductions, is more interesting because it promises to give us things. Well, the summary of things the article gives is in the feature list. My highlights are:

• #7 double-blind character selection online. A simple point perhaps, but it happens every single time we play, so the cumulative effect is great.
  
• #13 hitbox display. It's obvious that the purpose for this feature is for players to refine their skills. If this does not show "love-what-I-do"-ness, I don't know what does.
  
• #15 dipswitches. I thinks this is the most hardcore feature of all: enabling known bugs on purpose because they affect gameplay. I personally probably won't use this feature, but I can appreciate that there are people who (like the game so much that they) do.

You can watch one of David Sirlin's matches: EvoWest 2007 Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Finals.