Why do we do what we do?

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…

Raymond Arnold

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.

Raymond Arnold

the people who are most successful (both in terms of quality and recognition for that quality) tend to do most of [Edmund's] things.

Stephen Lavelle

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.