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Jan
07
07
Why We Create Art
Greg just wrote about Why do we do what we do? and eloquently summed up the hard-to-define reason for why we at Intuition create art:
These are all things that fester inside me and I desperately want to expel them. Not that they’re demons of any shape, but it’s this compulsion to create that drives me.
I really like how he put this because it can be difficult to put into words. He makes it look easy. The only other thing I can compare this to is something from Judeo-Christian culture – the psalm. This compulsion is why I created MEHC. It’s not the kind of game I like to play, but I just needed to make it somehow.
Alec Holowka was kind enough to respond to Greg’s post and suggested we check out his recent post Why Art?. I was inspired enough by both of them that my comment to both of their posts turned into this. Check them out if you haven’t yet.
In Response To “Why Art?”
I’m very comforted and honored to be amongst such final gentlemen who can present a rational argument. Alec makes a good point that anger about discussing art often comes from fear or misunderstanding. I especially like the video he posted – that says as much about his point as the words that follow it. We’re just a part of the continuum, communicating something about humanity to each other through time. And because we are unique, the message will be different for each person. I like that attitude.
What I got from his argument about why games are art specifically seems to be that art gives him something about life to relate to, and because games also give him something to relate to, that makes them art. I would go even further and say that art is created (it doesn’t just happen), communicates something human (a story/idea/emotion), and is otherwise “non-functional.” By that, I mean that the thing in question has no function other than the act of communication itself (thus separating the word from design). And because video games have these properties, they are art, too.
I was a little confused by the statement about art being subjective, though. Did he mean that the experience of art is subjective? Or the work of art itself is subjective? There is a distinction to make here, and it partially forms the basis to my answer of “Why art?”.
I believe that art can be perceived in a subjective way. But isn’t the work of art itself – the video game in this case – an object? It is a collection of code and binary data running on a computer of some sort with input and output. That makes it material, existing in reality, which is objective by definition.
Furthermore, because art “speaks to us,” that seems to make it objective, too. Something is doing the speaking, and I think the thing that speaks doesn’t really change. It is we who change and hear different things.
Therefore, I’d say that a more specific argument would state that the perception of art is subjective, based on each of our life experiences and unique brains, while the work itself is objective. That can explain why we can look at a film several years later and see or learn something different. The film itself remains unchanged, but our perception of it changes. It communicates something about humanity in a different way than before, because we understand humanity in a different way than before.
I think this distinction is important because it suggests that a work of art is unchanging, yet communicates on a level higher than normal understanding. The fact that we can return to an object and subjectively learn something new suggests that we can’t fully comprehend the work all at once.
To me, that gives art a magical quality (in the emotional sense). That is one of the reasons why I think it’s important to call games art.
Saving the World
In the comments of Greg’s post, Alex and Greg were discussing saving the world with art. The notion may seem impossible to some, but I’d argue that we are living proof that it can work. Inspiring people through creation seems to be one of the simplest (though still very hard!) ways to change the world with art. Saving it is just a few steps away.
By making something of incredible quality that communicates to people and inspires them in a lasting way, you can inspire them to either change or to create themselves. And them creating will often lead to change later. Here’s a quote from Eva Zeisel to illustrate my point:
It’s very difficult to know exactly whether to live for an ideology or even to live for doing good. But there cannot be anything wrong in making a pot, I’ll tell you. When making a pot you can’t bring any evil into the world.
Just think about the games we’ve played that have inspired us to make games ourselves. Those games have done good things because they have inspired us to create, and those acts of creation have changed us. Those games have changed the world. Saving it is just a few steps away.
COMMENTS
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Jan
06
06
This started out as a lengthy comment over at Edmund’s Do’s and Don’ts Manifesto on IndieGames. [via @godatplay] You should read that before reading this.
Edmund’s points are all very sound, but like any list, it’s easy to pick apart. But really what came out was a discussion about how each of us as developers approaches things from what sometimes is a vastly different angle. Stephen Lavelle [increpare] mentions how he takes issue with most of the points, and with good reason. Stephen makes games for very different reasons than Edmund. It got me thinking again about something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I was talked to Ben about creativity. We were chatting about his ongoing sideproject: Aztez and we got talking about collaborations and he mentioned how he sees most developers as one of two different types of creative people: Artists or Entertainers. That stuck with me and forced me to take it on and ask myself…
Me
Am I an Artist or an Entertainer?
Now there are a lot of problems with grouping someone in such a broad category. Certainly there is a vast spectrum there between those two values and the words Artist and Entertainer are insufficient especially in lieu of the “games as art” dead horse. Perhaps a better divide would be Artists who want to Express an Idea v. Artists who want to Express Emotion? I dunno…
Labeling things like that will only upset people but if you can get past it and ask yourself “which am I?” I think it provides an interesting insight into the “why” of creative expression. If nothing else, it’s a good starting point. So let me start…
If you don’t care about quality and you don’t care about money or recognition, by what metric do you measure yourself at all?
Rob Fearon
Whilst I obviously can’t answer for Stephen, I can answer this for myself. Getting the idea out of my head and onto the screen is far more important a factor for me than anything else. If it turns out to be an idea with some merit (however one might choose to define that on a personal level), then ace. If it isn’t, at least it’s out of my head.
But crucially, I don’t measure myself on the body of my work and wouldn’t care to either. It doesn’t define me. There are far more important things in life to worry about, y’know?
Rob’s feelings on the question of “why” are pretty close to what I feel about making games. Or anything for that matter. Right now I have an idea for a visual poem I want to do. A comic strip that I want to start. An iPhone game that refuses to find a home. These are all things that fester inside me and I desperately want to expel them. Not that they’re demons of any shape, but it’s this compulsion to create that drives me. Showing it to other people is a nice side effect, it’s always nice to hear someone got something out of something I did, but it’s not the why. The why is much more selfish.
the people who are most successful (both in terms of quality and recognition for that quality) tend to do most of [Edmund's] things.
Screw quality, screw recognition, screw success.
I understand what Stephen is saying here and I think his heart is in the right place and I definitely feel the frustration of forcing a “focus on success” type of attitude. Too often do we assume that everyone else in the world wants tons of money and fame. Though I do take issue with the bit about quality. If I have an idea for something and I can’t execute it like I see it in my head then it’s never as satisfying as creating something that I feel is 100% realized how I envisioned. Now, that doesn’t really exist, just like no circle is perfect, but there are things that I’ve done that I’m still proud of today and then there are many that I am not. I am highly critical of myself and if I weren’t I probably would have gotten bored of this a long time ago. It’s that unreachable goal of perfectly capturing and conveying an idea and transferring it from my head to the screen/page/canvas that also drives me [mad].
Exactly why I do what I do
I want to get more specific though, because this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. For me, the real reason I make video games boils down to a very specific, very discernible moment.
It’s “seeing it live”. It’s a feeling I clued in to over a decade ago doing Final Fantasy VII fan sites in PageMaker. I would type in some code, save the file and then load it up in the browser. I’d see the changes and it would work! It felt awesome and I was hooked. I had this thing [webpage] that I could endlessly modify and watch it work and show to others. It had this whole hairy underbelly that only I knew about and I would be pulling the levers and setting it up just right. Games are a lot like that. Animation; 3D modeling; they all have elements of alchemy that let you surprise yourself. There’s something very abstract about the process, much like Pollock probably experienced when he was playing with gravity and paint on a canvas. The work would surprise him and he’d respond and refine and respond and refine…
That’s why I make games, or why I do anything creative. I’m addicted to that. I enjoy drawing, but when I draw I usually find a way to play with my subconscious by laying down a doodle and then responding to it, or venturing into watercolor or inkwash and letting the water do its thing with the paper. In my early college years at Iowa I did a lot of symmetrical abstract work in Photoshop using the Liquify filter and hundreds of blend layers horizontally flipped to create something incredibly unexpected, yet recognizable. The moment just before turning on the blend mode to see what it would look like was that nugget of crack that I craved out of the whole process.
So in the end, it’s completely selfish. There was a time that I thought what I was doing would somehow make a difference in the world, or help people understand each other a bit better so that maybe the world would be a better place, but the last few years of my life have taken that view out of the idyllic and into the realistic. It’s impossible to save something that doesn’t want to be saved even if it needs it. I don’t think what I’m doing is bad, and I still do believe in what I’m doing is for the good, but it’s clear now that it’s much more for myself than it is for others. If others get something out of it, then that’s the icing.
COMMENTS
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Dec
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tl;dr: I know this is over 2K words so if you just want to get an update on what’s going on right now and what we’re planning, skip to the 2010 heading at the end of the post.
Most individual years of my life have been pretty homogenous. Save an errant semester, my entire life up until a couple years ago has been calculated in years; Freshman Year of High School; Senior Year of College. While there are definitely a lot of up and downs within those years, nothing has been so completely sporadic as my 2009.
But like any year, it boils down to a handful of very important moments. Not all of them were instrumental, but in some way each defined a project or a period of time. I think this year was particularly unique because it was my first real year of being completely on my own. Kongregate was no longer funding Dinowaurs [although that stopped well before 2009 started] and everything was pretty much up to us. What game we were going to make and how that was going to pay the rent every month. We’re still learning, but we’re much better off now than we were and it’s thanks to this roller coaster we rode and the lessons it taught us.
Effing Hail
The year started off like 2008. Dinowaurs. To our surprise we were still working on it. What seemed like endless bug fixing and gameplay balance was still going on and would be until February when we would go gold. We were all more than burnt out and looking for a way out. So in late December I chatted up Jiggmin for a side project to skirt some of the monotony.
Jiggmin
do ya have any neat-o game ideas that you’ve been wanting to give a try?
I’d love to hear ‘em
Me
yea i do actually
i’ve been looking for a coder to collab with
and brainstorming
typing game
grid based film noir taxi game
your character is in the back seat and you’re typing out “go left!”
and stuff like that
to order the taxi driver
because you’re following some getaway car
so it’s on a big, simple grid
so the typing isn’t linear, you make choices based on if you type “hey dude! go left!”
a set of canned responses and all that
kind of like moves
this making any sense?
Jiggmin
type: use go go gadget wheels!
hehe
Me
haha totally
but the dialog would kind of create teh mood
Jiggmin
what happens when you catch the car?
explosion?
Me
haha
next level
or something simple
so there’s that
Taxi Typer
or whatever
So that was the start of The Great Red Herring Chase. Eventually we would make Effing Hail and three other games that we have yet to release, and probably never will.
The collaboration with Jacob was enormously important to how I would approach game development in the future. Without that experience of not only creating a hit like Effing Hail but also proving itself as a possible business model, I might not be here at all. That’s probably a little drastic, but I can’t imagine a life where that didn’t happen. Jacob came up with the Effing Hail idea [name and all] about midway through development on TGRHC and it immediately stuck. I got to work right away on it and we had something up and running in no time. We knew it was fun but we didn’t know it would be as successful as it was; on FGL and in the press. To this day, Effing Hail is far and away our most popular game and it accounts for about 75% of traffic on the intuition site.
After the whole deal was settled it sent a shockwave through the office. Everyone saw what happened with Effing Hail and got excited. The trouble was we were still in the throws of releasing Dinowaurs and it was as painful as ever. It didn’t necessarily help the situation that I was having more success in my side projects than we were seeing as a team.
Dinowaurs After-Party
I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure we were done with Dinowaurs in early February. There’s probably blog post somewhere floating about… Nonetheless the day was memorable, but not for the release and reception of the game, but what happened afterward. It was about 1AM and we decided to get Jimmy John’s and talk it over. We had finally tied up all the loose ends and now we could breathe a sigh of relief and look ahead to the future. But that’s not how it went at all. We all looked dead; we were tired, and not the sort that comes with accomplishing a huge task. It was more of a defeat and a hopelessness. Morale was at an all-time low.
The kind of atmosphere caused us to ask the tough questions.
Us
Why are we doing this?
Why are we making games?
What’s next?
This was an incredibly important moment for us and for me personally. We were all more or less hopeless and vulnerable so we answered these questions honestly and openly. Not that we wouldn’t have otherwise but this kind of “dire straights” situation made us take these questions as seriously as possible. Here we realized how serious it is to know the answer to these things. What is the dream? If you don’t know that, then you better figure it out or you’ll end up in a nightmare. You can quote that. ;)
It’s really easy to gloss over “Why do I make games?”. It’s uncomfortable to really answer it honestly and I’m convinced few people actually do. It exposes you as an artist and as an individual, but if you never confronted and shared my dream with others, I’m not sure I’d ever have the chance to achieve it. These are the questions that I return to when I feel like we’ve gone off track. It’s not a matter of necessarily keeping eachother on track, but moreso to understand where everyone is headed. Life is complex and ever-changing, so it’s important to check in as often as necessary.
So we sat there eating our subs silently mulling over these questions. We got it all out right there. Everything was on the table and we knew were we stood. For the first time in over a year we could look to the future with excitement. Soon we were talking of a new idea and riffing on building something great again, something brand new! This was the same kind of joy and giddiness that we signed on for in the first place.
GDC & Gray
Just before we headed off to GDC Mike and I brewed up a little prototype for a game that we would later name: Gray. Over the week of GDC we worked on it some, but in addition to Gray, GDC is always a milestone event for us. It marks another year of full-time game development, our dream and meeting new friends and reconnecting with old. Since we live in Iowa we don’t have much chance to hang out with our brethren but when we do it’s like we never missed a beat. Most importantly, probably, I met Colin Northway and Andy Moore there [Fantastic Contraption] which led to a collaboration between myself and Andy to create
Protonaut. We continue to keep in contact and are planning on starting work on a new game shortly.
Beyond that though, we came home fresh from GDC recharged ready to knock out the rest of the work on Gray. To this day, Gray is still the game I am most proud of. I feel like it delivers exactly what we set out to do with it. It’s the only game I’ve worked on where everything has been precisely placed. That’s mostly due to the scope of the game, but it’s also a part of the art direction and our increased comfort with the Flash platform.
The most important part of making Gray was the personal realization that these are the kinds of games I want to focus on. I’ve done a few personal installations, animations and interactive media experiments that were shown in student galleries but I never received much feedback about any of them. I was happy people got a chance to take a look, but it never felt like any of those punches connected. However, with Gray that was certainly a game that connected with a percentage of the audience and that connection was great to see that this is something that could actually work. While I love games as entertainment and will always be interested in making games like that, I decided after Gray that I would pursue more personal game development with all of my side projects.
Indiecade & Liferaft
Strangely enough, while Gray got us into IndieCade, it’s Liferaft that was the real story for us at the time. Mike and I had started work on Liferaft in mid March sporadically and then set our complete focus on it sometime in early May. We’d been going strong on it but the game continued to grow. From what was once a prototype of a grappling circle, we now had an overly-involved storyline with grandiose plans of unique environments, enthralling level design all to be completed by before the IGF deadline. And that was just the first episode!
In early October we headed to Culver City to what would set up the wake-up call of the year. IndieCade was so incredible and so inspirational that it completely bucked us off course on Liferaft, and with good reason. We were in over our heads and had no business thinking we could deliver. Now that we were in the middle of a Kickstarter drive we had responsibilities to our backers and the whole thing became a pressure cooker. Returning from the sunny and friend-filled life of California we came to some realizations about Liferaft and o did I regarding my own life.
There were two lessons here for me. One was the age-old, don’t let a project get too big. It’s a beginner mistake really, but it’s easy to let it get a hold of you and your game. Like so many mistakes in my life I can point to the Ira Glass on Storytelling snippet of advice. Basically, we weren’t ready to pull off the kind of game Mike and I want to make together… ultimately. We need to keep that at the front of our minds when we consider a new, riskier idea.
The second lesson from all this was the workaholic stuff. How not to live my life and what I can do to make sure that doesn’t happen again. This was a huge revelation for me and probably one that was had been waiting in the weeds for well over a year. I linked it earlier but here it is again: Hi I’m Greg Wohlwend and I’m a Workaholic. But like any breakdown, it doesn’t end there. My life got substantially better after realizing what I was doing to myself, but the real-world effects of cutting off Liferaft for the good of our sanity and livelihood soon came knocking.
$34.13 Thanksgiving
I’m not sure if it was 13 cents exactly but what the hell, it’s unlucky enough. I went on Thanksgiving break with that much money in my bank account. I didn’t really know what was going to happen, or where I’d have to go but I just kept working. I was continuing a collaboration with Tyler Glaiel called Tetraform, we were in the midst of a bidding war for EON and we were in talks with a friend for some contract work. Business wasn’t bad, in fact, by all accounts it was bustling.
Bustling or not though… That kind of money and uncertainty made me seriously question if this is going to work. Everyone around me thought it was time to give up and strongly advised I do so. Today, it’s still in question. At that point I realized that the only person that’s really going to believe in me is myself. It’s lonely, sad and probably a good bit destructive but from the outside looking in this is by no means a way to live. My income is well below the poverty line, I don’t have health insurance of any kind and I can’t afford much more than the basics. I have a deep seated urge to live in a big city where there are more people of my ilk, local shops and markets and etc. but I can’t afford to.
I kept hope though. I knew EON would come through and Tetraform would sell soon enough. It worked out, but it left a mark. It reminded me of the huge mistake that was Liferaft. Spending multiple pay-less months on a project that will most likely never see the light of day. It’s a folly I will never forget. For this to work we need to continue with what we know works and take small steps towards big rewards. We know how to make small games that can float us and then some. We’re making more on sponsorships with each game we make and we retain all ownership. More people are coming to us for contracts and collaborations than ever before. Things are looking up. But just one month ago they hit an all-time low in terms of where our business was. Luckily we worked through it and saw the upswing and had faith in it. We’re climbing now and I’m very excited for our future.
2010: A Mikengreg Odyssey
Mike and I are planning a new brand: Mikengreg. We’ve been working on it for over 4 months bit by bit and it’s starting to shape up. We’ll release it when it’s ready and we’re both really proud of it so far. For now, all I can tell you is that we’ll be combining our handmade beer [and possibly bread, pasta and other handmade food] with handmade games. Not sure how just yet, but it’s sure to be tasty!
Other than that, game-wise we’re working on a Gamma IV entry that Mike and I are really excited about as well finishing up EON with a level editor. We’re also kicking around a couple of game ideas that we’ve had for awhile now, one of which is multiplayer. We’re toying with releasing an X-BOX Indie Game and maybe something PC downloadable. Those are our big milestone targets right now. One thing is for certain though, we will continue with the 2-week game cycle to fund our riskier moves. Expect the same kind of little interesting and/or fun games that we’ve been churning out over the last year.
Also, I will be continuing work on Pterogative which I hope to have finished sometime before GDC. I took a break from it and recently found a coder to help me with out. :)
Happy New Year!
COMMENTS
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Dec
16
16
I’m pretty much done with a new game called MEHC. It’s a Unity game meant for sponsorship on a game portal, so I’ll start the process of shopping it around now. Here’s the trailer:
In gamer lingo, it’s a 3d, physics-y, psuedo-pixel-art cannon-shooting game with a strategic probability management element. Based on tester feedback, it seems to be pretty addictive, too. Here’s the “official” description:
As a producer for the Japanese game show Megabank Executive Humiliation Challenge (MEHC), the nation is counting on you to keep them entertained by humiliating the best of the best in Western banking executives. Balance money-making obstacles and hire better executives to make the most profit you can in one season. Don’t let your nation down!
It’s an experiment in many ways, including emotional, commercial, and production..al, but not so much in gameplay. It’s kind of weird to look back at your baby after you’ve given birth. Sometimes you didn’t see yourself making that kind of game, and I can say that about this game. However, I’m happy with the work I’ve done. It’s quite a fun game. I’d also like to thank the Gratton brothers from the Napkin Sketch collective for doing the sound.
Even though I didn’t originally see myself making this kind of game, I think in some ways I needed to make it, at least to just express my frustration with my current feelings on the nation’s economy and moreso on capitalism in general. I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with it as a system lately. And maybe I needed a break from taking game design so seriously, too.
I’m hoping to find a sponsor for it by the end of the year. And it should end up on FGL in some form or another soon for auction. The sponsorship space seems pretty barren when it comes to Unity games, so who knows what will happen…
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Dec
03
03
We’re making a final push on publicity for EON, and I’ve uploaded the latest version that adds local highscores, a bunch of changed levels that have a bit better progression for noobs, you just click on the screen to spawn wells instead of the dumb dragging thing I started with, other stuff I’m sure is important… Oh, and a cool loading bar, the last one was suck.
Most of the changes are responses to first-time user input, hopefully it’ll make the experience for new users painless and as awesome as possible. We’re really excited about this game, it’s probably the most “fun” thing we’ve produced lately and I’ve watched it suck in more of our friends for longer than our previous games. It’s not the super hardcore gameplay of Fig. 8, and it’s an obvious fun game as opposed to Gray, and I think the mood and zen atmosphere is really successful, if I do say so myself :)
We’ve got the current version up on FGL, but you need to have an account there to check it out. Once we’ve gotten a sponsor signed up and I’ve finished implementing the microtransaction system we will be golden. Hopefully it’ll be out by sometime next week, unless we run into more snafus.
Of course, there are always snafus…
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Nov
10
10
Be forewarned, this is a rant, and not all that coherent…
I started EON, like really started making an actual game at TIGJam early in October. I had spent the week between Indiecade and TIGJam messing around with a copy of Asher Vollmer’s sweet particle-thing, but it was just messing around for the sake of learning to handle a lot of particles in flash. At TIGJam I had about 2.5 days to really take a particle-demo and turn it into a game, and by the end of TIGJam the game was finished, or at least feature complete. I had streams of particles, black holes, collision detection, a level editor, color blenders, pretty much all the components of the game, and I haven’t added any new gameplay elements in the past month. For all intents and purposes, the mechanics and rules of the game were fully programmed and finished in about 30 hours of work.
So, what the hell have I been doing for the past month?
UI, end game states, sound effects, music, save states, fixing mouse event bugs, a new cursor that changes over active objects, a timer, tooltips, a main menu that looks cool, an intro that looks cool and seamlessly shifts to the menu, intros and outros for each level, fading, a new color system to represent various shades of each major color, new procedural visual representations of black holes, gas giants, absorbers, the sun, the letters E and N, a new starfield, a lighting system for the main menu that I scrapped because of speed problems, memory leaks, performance optimizations… That’s about all I can think of at the moment, and that’s a lot of shit. And it takes a ton of time, and it’s totally boring as hell. I’m not in this game because I like programming UI, and I really really hate implementing tooltips, so why the hell couldn’t I just release the game that I spent 2.5 days on and make my money and move on?
All of this, of course, fits under the category of Polish, and from my experience, at the end of the day a player is going to like a well polished turd more than a really rough diamond. This is why Modern Warfare 2, much to the chagrin of the Phil Fish’s of the world, is going to sell a bajillion copies while Unfinished Swan is likely to sell a couple hundred thousand (which would still be awesome, but that’s beside the point). People want their experiences with their games to be smooth, easy to jump into and without any sharp corners, and I’m not standing on a pulpit looking down on the unwashed masses, I totally fall into this trap. The Thief series is one of my all time favorite set of games, I love everything about them, and a mod team has put together a really fine re-envisioning of the game for the Doom 3 engine. I know that I’ll love it and play it through in one sitting and rave about it online when it’s done, but I can’t force myself to figure out a bug that’s preventing me from playing. I spend about 10 minutes online searching for an answer and then get tired and move on, and this is coming from a die hard fanboy of such games! Really, it’s pathetic!
Honestly, I’m not sure what the point of this rant is because I still don’t see any way around having to polish the shit out of your game before letting people see it or pay you for it, it just sucks. The industry seems to be a lot more focused on releasing more and more polished games rather than innovating on gameplay, which makes sense from a business standpoint. It’s easy to see where there was clunky UI or where bad wall-hugging hurt player experience in Gears, it’s not so easy to see how people will react to a totally new game mechanic, especially when you remember that it’ll have to be polished up to the level the consumer expects. The cost of creating something new is so high at this point that it’s very very hard to justify.
This slow buildup on the expectation of polish is easy to track, try to play your favorite game from 10 years ago and see how your rose-colored glasses are shattered by how difficult the controls are, or how clunky the inventory system is. Going back to play X-COM is a real trial for me, and it gets worse as the years pass, even though I used to play it so much I dreamed in isometric.
The end result of this is that I’m realizing more and more that if the game prototype isn’t done within a few days, your polish period is going to stretch out in an exponential way. This makes it even more essential that you find the core of the experience quickly, and that you’re excited enough by it to see it to the end, because once the fun is over there’s a long road ahead. I’ve heard Chris Delay say that DEFCON was done in 24 hours, and they released it after a year of polish, there’s something very disturbing about that.
EON is 98% polished now, and people are starting to have fun with it, so that’s really rewarding. It’s probably the most polished thing we’ve put out, which is probably good for our bank accounts, and I still like the game a lot, which is good for my soul.
Maybe I’m just a crybaby and all I want to do are the fun bits of development. I probably am. I suppose I’m just asking all the other dev’s to comment here with a “Right on!” or “yea, polish sux!”
That would make me happy :)
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Nov
03
03
Right now I’m in the middle of working on Mikengreg, a tentative new brand/company? for… Mike ‘n’ Greg. We’re also working on a couple of games semi-simultaneously, each one headed up by one of us. Mike’s is called Eon, which he is polishing/wrapping up this week. My game is called Pterogative and it’s serious business [that's what we say now instead of art-games].
Before we decided to pull off of Liferaft I had an idea while we were attending IndieCade in early October. Like every other idea I have I wasn’t sure about how doable it would be, but I started fleshing it out right there in the park next to the Ivy Substation in Culver City.
Like Gray, the idea is best boiled down into a simple phrase.
Cliche
“If you love something, you have to set it free.”
This wasn’t the initial spark, but merely a way to compact the complex personal issue I wanted to express into something that would be easier to hone in on. Pterogative is definitely the most personal game I’ve ever worked on. It’s only recently that I’ve started allowing my personal life to influence my games, previously they involved larger issues like politics, religion or Wal-Mart. At IndieCade Daniel gave a talk about how he works and the intangible things that go into the games he makes. It’s always interesting to hear how other people approach creativity, and occasionally bits and pieces can really change the way I approach it. One little bit stuck with me [paraphrasing].
Daniel
“You know it’s getting to the right place when you get a knot in your throat. I’m usually embarrassed or exposed when I release a game. That’s how I know it’s honest.”
That sounds more like the opposite feeling you want to have when releasing a game, but when it comes to communicating something personal about yourself honestly, if you don’t feel naked, then it needs more work.
When I talk about the origins of Pterogative to Mike or other close friends, it’s always embarrassing to some degree. I suppose that’s what reminds me that the idea is honest and worth pursuing. That doesn’t mean the game will have the same effect, but I think it’s on the right track. We will see.
But why would this idea be best expressed in a game? Why not just write a short story about my experience, fiction or non-fiction? That’s fair, but I feel there’s more potential in a game. Beyond any other art-form, games include personal interaction as THE device that allows for a deeply personal experience. People don’t change unless they want to. Yes? If they pick up Passage and don’t let it in, well they weren’t vulnerable enough to let it affect them in the first place. If that same person saw The David in person, I’m not sure that’d garner much more of a reaction than “Whoa, that’s a big naked dude!” Not exactly the intended effect…
Interpretation will always be personal, but games have this whole interaction thing that’s happening every second of the experience [mostly]. Games are actually much more directed. The rules are set, the player has to admit to them and control the game in order to continue. The give and take there creates a bond, however fragile, between the game world and the player’s brain. Rather than leave it up to chance, the game can create its own context and influence people directly. If you don’t think that’s true, then you haven’t noticed the 10+ million people playing WoW.
The cliche itself, “if you love something you have to set it free”, doesn’t really resonate with many people strongly enough to make any real impact. It’s too abstract, too lifeless. The work I want to do now would take an incredibly real piece of life, interpret it simply, then communicate it back to people with that elegant simplicity while retaining as much of the original emotion as possible. Clarify, reflect and change.
Whoops. Re-reading this and it looks like I went on a bit of a rant. BTW, what do you think of the title? I’m still unsure about it and suggestions would be welcome. Do you “get it”? Or is my latin mish-mash far too clever/pretentious?
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