So for the time being, I’ve been looking for a better job than the one that I have now. It’s a crummy job with crummy pay, and by golly, don’t I deserve something good?

I don’t know. I always think the notion of believing one deserves better is such a mixed bag of hope and self-sabotage. Of course, I’m just sitting at my computer high out of my mind on warm tap water and prayer.

But lately I’ve been thinking about venturing out from this mundane existence and putting aside the notion of a baseball simulator for the time being.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about the ocean.

It doesn’t really matter what ocean it is. The whole thing honestly scares the shit out of me. The notion of willingly going out into that abyss, left to survive with other people somewhere in the dark, cold ocean, is the stuff of nightmares.

It’s the mere idea of existing in a place where you might even begin to wonder if you’re really alive.

Just think about being inside a floating tin can where practically anything could come along and destroy you, and that’ll be the end of it. Anything can happen, and the next thing you know there might never even be a trace left of you.

I guess that’s why the ocean might be the scariest thing on the planet.

Well, next to being abducted by aliens or coming face to face with one of those massive spiders supposedly living in the jungles of Vietnam.

You know there are stories about G.I.s witnessing giant spiders over there. Giant ones. Like something you’d see in one of those great fifties B-movies. You know the ones. There’s a dance party going on somewhere and somebody’s shouting in Spanish while a gigantic radioactive insect slowly makes its way toward town.

What I’m trying to say is that sometimes what scares us the most is what brings out the creative side.

Now, I’m not thinking about making anything involving giant spiders.

I hate those things.

They creep the heck out of me.

So instead I started thinking about some of the games I’ve played over the years involving ships and submarines. Besides Battleship, obviously.

There were always Battleship clones on the C64 and MS-DOS. It felt like every shareware disc somebody handed you had at least one of them hiding somewhere on it. Same basic game, different coat of paint. Sometimes you got basic symbols representing the ships and sometimes somebody had clearly spent far too much time drawing some surprisingly nice-looking little vessels.

There was something charming about that.

And there’s also something almost beautiful about what your own fears can drive you to make.

Nothing bad, obviously. I’m not talking about banning farmers markets or anything.

But I honestly don’t think I ever would have seriously considered making a game about sitting inside a metal tin can at the bottom of the ocean if the idea of being inside one didn’t scare the living hell out of me.

That’s where my mind has been lately.

A submarine game.

Not some arcade thing where you’re blasting fifty enemy ships every four minutes while inspirational music plays.

I’m thinking darker.

Cold War.

You’re underwater. You don’t know exactly what’s around you. Sometimes you’re hunting something. Sometimes something might be hunting you.

Most of what you know about the world outside comes from instruments, sounds, messages and the nervous people sitting around you.

The ocean doesn’t care that you’re there.

That’s the part I like.

There’s something deeply unsettling about hundreds or thousands of feet of black water sitting underneath you while you’re depending on a machine made by human beings to keep that entire ocean from crushing you into a very expensive soup can.

And somehow that sounds like a fun video game to me.

What am I trying to get at?

Oh yeah.

The in-laws are sick and I have nobody to watch the kids, so I’m calling in because I have to stay home.

Which means instead of going to my crummy job, I’ll probably spend the day thinking about submarines, giant spiders, Cold War naval warfare and whether or not there’s some horrifying undiscovered creature sitting at the bottom of the Pacific waiting patiently for mankind to finally annoy it.

Watching scary missing-people videos.

Seems about right.