Navigating the teleological terrors which assail creativity in the current age.
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In a recent fit of madness, I began working on a new game project.
This, of course, begs the question: WHY?
It is, after all, a crazy time to make anything.
Audiences are so over-served that they’re literally developing mental disorders, 90% of games on Steam earn nothing, gasoline is priced in kidneys, and effort is a shameful waste of attention that could be better spent watching cartoons about flatulent watermelons and Dark Knight x Joker Deepfake erotica.
In such a setting, choosing to make something is an aberrant behavior - a genuine act of idiocy.
Anyone can have anything they want with a snap of their fingers (as long as what they want is “something.”)
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So, why make a game? Why make anything?
Answering this question seems urgent in this day of our lord and savior Chat GPT, but the truth is that it has always been the foundation of any creative endeavor:
Why are you making this?
If you don't know why you're making something, you're going to be in for a bad time.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” leaves you rudderless when the water gets choppy, and the winds of inspiration* bring the scent of other, newer, shinier, easier-sounding ideas.
*Also known as the winds of lifelong undiagnosed ADHD.
Knowing the reason why you are making what you’re making (as well as knowing what things are not the reason) gives you a compass when you hit the resistance that all creative endeavors longer than a single afternoon come to eventually.
You could be doing anything. Why keep doing this?
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Don't worry, I'm working for the noblest of reasons: This project is how I’ll break into the games industry!
Oh no.
Please, please, please, please
Please, please, please, please, please,
Please
Don’t make the reason that you are making a game, “So I can break into the games industry.”
Firstly, there is no binary “now you’re here” switch to flip. There is no roster of accepted writers to join. People who wrote incredible game stories are currently looking for their next gig while working at Walgreens. People currently writing game stories are largely doing so as freelancers, and they got the job because someone on the dev team knew them. (And full-time, salaried game writers are looking for the next studio long before they submit the last deliverable - they know that they’re going to be laid off the moment they hit send on that puppy. Who keeps a narrative designer until launch? That’s dead weight!)
Secondly, creating a project to be your ticket to what you actually want is a fantastic way to embark on a miserable design experience. You have made creation into merely a means to an end. (An end that is totally outside of your control, by the way.)
It’s… kind of like dating someone just so you can be cool enough that the person you really want to date will come and ask you out, or writing a novel so that your favorite celebrity will suddenly call you up and ask you to ghost write their memoirs.
You can’t make that happen. However, you will make the here and now terrible.
Finally, where you want to arrive is not, intrinsically, a good destination.
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Wait, what? But my dream is to make games for a living! Are you telling me to not follow my dreams?!
The strange wrinkle in creativity is that there are a lot of bad reasons for making something:
"Because somebody's paying me to do it,” is one of them.
Get a job doing what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life!!!
- Confuscius
(This is why prostitutes have been, throughout human history, the happiest people to ever live.)
…Writing a game just because somebody is paying you to write it is a great way for a project to make you miserable.
Projects that exist just to exist are never going to bring you joy to create.
After all, a robot could do it.
I can tell you, the life of a human machine is not a joyous or fulfilling existence.
The next time that you are doing something you love, stop and ask yourself,
"How much do I want managers, meetings, and deadlines right now?"
These (except for those wretched few who feed off of such activities) are enormous taxes on the human soul – the very thing that doing what we love is supposed to refill and refresh.
If you are repeatedly performing a creative task simply because money comes out the other end… you will quickly find that you have not made work into play, but play into work. The hurdles that work brings are numerous: deadlines, managers, milestones, agile development sprint meetings, mandatory teambuilding exercises, quarterly reports, Keurig machines, every major creative decision being made by people with business degrees.
If all that matters is the money, why be in a creative field in the first place? (After all, the money is almost universally better elsewhere.)
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But if you’re good at something, never do it for free!
Money is a kind of permission, perhaps the ultimate permission of our society. Locking yourself - talents, dreams, and passions - behind the most external (and increasingly rare) permission that exists is an excellent way to live a life devoid of, well, talents, dreams, and passions.
“I could have made something, but no one would give me permission to do it,”
is the epitaph on a thousand creative graves.
You don't need anyone's permission to create, least of all money's.
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Ok then, Mr. High and Mighty, why are you making your project?
I spent 15 years writing game narrative stuff of varying kinds.
I have now exited the industry. (The only winning move.)
I have one project that I am truly proud of.
It was the first thing that I ever worked on professionally: Defender’s Quest.
It is janky and obscure as all get out, but it is also, you know, a good story.
I never got to hit that high again.
…That’s a weird and unhappy realization to come to after a decade and a half.
I have a certain set of talents which ache to be used. By doing the dream - working on other people’s stuff for money - I spent years not using them: not really, not fully, not as I knew I was capable of and pined to reach for.
Heck, I thought that Defender’s Quest was a cavalcade of obstacles and constraints that didn’t let me actually use my muscles the way that I knew I could - I dreamed of doing it right next time.
It took years to dawn on me that next time had never come. The trail of projects behind me had each been a step farther away, not in budget or quality, but in what I really wanted: the opportunity to use my talents as best I could.
So, I’m going to make a game for the same reason that I’m writing Vim is the Color fo Rust and Sun:
…Because I can.
Because I have the talent to.
Because talent cries out to be used.
Because I want to use my muscles and just see what they can do.
A game takes a long time to make, so we think if it as different and special. (Once again, I think our little brother inferiority complex with movies gets the better of us.)
If I can make it by myself, why should I approach it any differently than drawing or painting or rock climbing or lifting weights or sculpting tiny monsters or composing melancholic space music or making papier-mâché puppets or any of the billion other things that I do because I love doing them?
I love the doing. The end result - the thing entirely out of my hands - is almost inconsequential.
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But I’m only doing this because I want a finished product! Everyone knows that the creative process is sheer misery that’s only worth it when you finally pop out a shiny new finished product that retroactively makes all that stuff you absolutely hated worth it!
It’s worth noting that it’s the process that you do.
If you hate drawing, no amount of wanting a picture is going to make drawing worth it. After all, there are a million ways to get a picture that don't involve drawing it yourself.
Once we have decided that creation is misery we must experience in order to purchase a finished product, then shortcuts are the only sane course of action. To deliberately do things the hard way – prolong the misery – is an act of idiocy, an act of actual self-harm.
What's truly odd is that those who want to argue for the value of process often accept this fundamental belief in end product as the only thing that matters. Instead of saying, "I do it myself because I love doing it," we launch into elaborate arguments that the end product is actually better if we do it the hard way.
Regardless of whether or not this is true (and the infinite counter argument will always be "nuh-uh"), it accepts a fundamentally anti-creative belief:
What matters is the end product, and everything between us and getting it is cost.
...This is not the belief of a creator, but a consumer. The consumer wants maximum product for minimum cost.
Again, if you are only making something because you want to consume the finished product, there are much, much, much more direct ways to get a consumable.
(Sometimes, I think that what AI has really offered us is the ability to create as an act of consumption, but that is, perhaps, a line of thought for another time.)
"Creation is misery, but it will all be worth it when the product is done," is a very dangerous current to ride.
It is the great lie that pulls thousands of miserable souls through hellish crunch and pathetic pay and a million other abuses - often (as I have felt myself) self-inflicted.
Before all good things the gods have prescribed sweat…
Tears, certainly.
Blood, even.
But not hatred.
Misery is not the currency with which we purchase a finished product.
Athletes put themselves through grueling training, but they still love their sport. In fact, they love the training.
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The reason I create things is the love of creating, not the love of things.
I love the act of creating so much, that I create things. The more I engage in the act of creation, the more I love it, the more I do it, and the more things I create.
I have talent. I’m going to use it. I want to use it. I feel - as the parable which gives us the word tells me - obliged to use it.
Because I can.
Because God has given me talent, and he expects me to do more than throw it back and say, "IN THIS ECONOMY?!"
Because I have the muscles to lift heavy things, and I’m tired of moving feather pillows for other people in the hope that they’ll let me keep some of the loose change that might be underneath.
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