MIDNIGHT OIL WARNING: This post was written in the small hours of the morning. May contain grammatical errors, semicolon abuse and egregious hyperbole.
So everyone’s been making a really big deal about Jesse Schell’s DICE talk about the future of games. I’d been putting off watching it, because I knew it was about casual games and Facebook stuff like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, all of which I completely and utterly do not understand, despite being 25 years old and evidently in the perfect demographic for the inexorable monetization of social networks. But I finally watched it anyway, because everyone said it was a work of absolute genius and I just had to see for myself. Here’s the talk, and at half an hour I think it’s a perfectly reasonable length. So take a look, and I’ll join you past the jump:
I’ve said recently that I don’t “get” most art. In some cases, this is still true, but my conversations with game artist, fellow Full Sail student and preternaturally observant philosopher Maher Sagrillo have helped me make progress. For the record, Damien Hirst still bugs the crap out of me, but at least I have a clearer idea of why I don’t like his work.
Thanks in part to the recent Art History of Games symposium, the “games as art” discussion has surged once again to prominence among gamers and developers. The ongoing dialogue facilitated by Twitter is impossible to ignore, especially if you follow enough people in the industry. This is great. I’m glad that so many people are engaged in this debate, even if I don’t consider myself properly equipped to participate.
Lately, however, I’ve discovered something about the issue that had frustrated me, even though I hadn’t figured out what it was: many of the arguments presented – on both sides – are divisive and specious. That is, they try too hard to put games in a neat little box with clearly delineated “right” and “wrong” ways to make a game. Most discussions on this topic simply revolve around deciding which box to put them into, without acknowledging the possibility that games can be all these things and more.
Finally got enough of a break from my fantastic yet all-encompassing education at Full Sail to actually come back to this site and post something. I can only hope that once I’m actually working I’ll be able put interesting progress updates here, but for the next year or so I’ll just have to write whenever I can. For the record, I’ve also created a Tumblr for bits of writing that don’t really belong anywhere else.
That being said, let’s talk about selfish creativity for a minute.
Something short today, as I need to get back on this project, and much of what I can say on this subject I’ve already said in other contexts. Nevertheless, it’s been on my mind lately, and I’ve arrived at a conclusion that may be of some use to others.
Over the past few months, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly impatient with the game industry’s ongoing “games as art” debate. Until recently, I was fascinated by the topic and would pursue the discussion at every opportunity, but eventually I began to notice a nagging doubt. I couldn’t identify it, but somehow I had the vague sensation that I was wasting my time. Not that the debate is pointless – far from it, in fact – but I began to suspect that I, personally, had no business entering the field to begin with. Then, last week, it hit me:
I don’t have the slightest effin’ clue what “art” is.
One of the things that became clearer to me at GDC is the importance of inspiration. Or more specifically, the importance of personal inspiration as opposed to industrial inspiration. Game development being the creative medium that it is, everything hinges upon The All-Important Idea. With rare exceptions, if The Idea doesn’t come from an interesting place, crafting a compelling game is going to be an uphill battle.
Hmm. It appears that I’m well on my way to crafting a persona out of this frantic rhetoric. This could be fortuitous, or it may blow up in my face. I’ll take the risk. I can only hope that there are enough of you out there with your eyes turned skyward. I would rather be burned by hubris than crippled by doubt any day of the week.
Many thanks to former IGDA executive director Jason Della Rocca for fueling the fire with his parting rant at GDC 2009. It turns out that my amateurish zeal is not misplaced after all.
When it comes to videogames as a medium for storytelling, I often find myself at odds with other developers. The prevailing theory in gaming’s indie scene (whose members, by the way, are a fine group of gentlemen) is that videogames and narrative are inherently incompatible; that any attempt to tell a story through a game is antithetical to the medium’s greatest strengths and if you really want to tell a story you should just make a movie instead.
Polysyllabic thunderstorm inbound. Brace for impact.
Creativity is a fickle creature. It’s no wonder the ancient Greeks attributed inspiration to flighty, unpredictable muses; it often feels like a wholly separate organism living inside one’s brain, choosing to alternately bless and curse the craftsman according to its own unknowable whims (I insist on the term “craftsman” because “artist” has a lot of baggage attached to it). Days, months, years can pass with nary a glimmer of the muse’s enchanting smile, and yet the most insignificant thing can trigger a dizzying rush of hallucinatory madness that claws desperately at the inside of its cranial prison until one finds oneself scribbling frantically on year-old receipts at 4:30 on a weekday morning.
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