talentless hack manifesto

i don't know what a manifesto is, but that's because i'm neither a revolutionary nor a writer.

the talentless hack's manifesto.

. you are talentless.

you don't have talent. nobody does, because talent is fake, and it's really a combination of circumstance, practice, brain chemistry and luck. that's not to say people aren't skilled at their chosen field. they are. just not you. 

.. you are also a hack.

'there is nothing new under the sun.' you will try to create something new, and you will fail. that's normal. unfortunately, you don't have the infinite historical memory of the world. you only have the limited perception of your human eyes and ears and brain and hands. thus, when you make a roguelike deckbuilder or a pokémon clone or a boomer shooter or a schmovement platformer, you are making something that people have seen before. not everybody, of course, but a lot of people. 

... why make anything if you're a talentless hack?

good question. you shouldn't.

.... if everyone is a talentless hack, and nobody should make anything, how do things get done?

they don't. not the way their creators want them to, at least. you can go to an ikea, buy the simplest of all possible bedside tables or chairs or designer bookcases, and when you go to assemble it, you take the screws and drive them through the planks with the biggest hammer you have on hand. you don't have a screwdriver, nor do you know how to use one. all you can do is negotiate with reality over the shape of your particle board bookcase, because you are a talentless hack and reality is more qualified to handle things like that. the resulting furniture will not look like the box. that's because someone out there has spent many thousands of hours practicing assembling ikea furniture, and now they are paid large amounts of money to take the pictures on the box. you have not spent thousands of hours on this. thus, you are a talentless hack at assembling ikea furniture.

..... do you just need to practice something to become talented?

no, of course not. there will always be someone better suited for the thing than you. someone smarter, stronger, more invested, more adjective than you. there are nearly ten billion humans around right now, and sometimes you're not just competing with the living ones, but the dead ones, or even hypothetical ones. even if you are, in fact, the absolute best at something in the entire world, no you aren't. you are, sometimes, under the right circumstances, and that's hardly a stable argument. sid meyer can't make civilization. toby fox can't make undertale. tarn and zach adams can't make dwarf fortress. humans, like ants, simply build their little anthills out of a sense of obligation or instinct, either to themselves or whatever greater power guides them.

...... hey, i like some of those games.

that's because you didn't see them before they were made. they made seven civilization games, and they still haven't gotten it right. undertale is on its fifth spiritual sequel and it's drifted around like an unmoored boat in a hurricane. dwarf fortress isn't even done and it's been twenty years. nobody is good at making things. a crack team of professionals with decades of experience will churn out a buggy mess that gets shuttered within a month. that's because, despite their years of practice, they are all talentless hacks who aren't the best at what they do and have no say over what they make. the game that exists in their mind is a fourth-dimensional object, some inscrutable tesseract that can only suggest its shape through crude shadow puppets cast by imperfect, human hands. if you could play the Platonic undertale, you wouldn't recognize it. nor would you enjoy it. 

....... so, what?

everything sucks. you are surrounded by imperfect facsimiles and rushed approximations of the worlds inside the heads of others. you are a talentless hack, and cannot do anything to meaningfully change this. and yet it all still exists. talentless hacks have created everything you see, have seen, and will see. humans will always build our anthills. and when we cast the shadow of the towering mountain in our mind on the wall of the cave, or when you set your coffee down on your uneven ikea table - not there, that'll spill, like this - you are brokering a deal with reality. you offer it that little part of your soul you can afford to lose in between your drudging job and your crushing rent, and in return, it offers you the only thing that matters: a chance to be one of the pages on itch.io, a chance to be on the Steam store, a chance to be one of the millions of stars in the night sky.