Why games

Sam

, 2023-08-05

Hi, welcome to my blog. This is the very first entry to the blog, and I am excited to share it with the vast emptiness of the internet.

Here I want to explore and explain a bit how I arrived at the decision to start making my own games. It might be a bit rambly, but I tried hard to organize my thoughts in a decent, readable way. Enjoy!

So, why did I start to develop and publish games? I think it is best explained by breaking it down into three main factors that contribute heavily to my motivation.

Reason #1: Games are a great medium

Now this is something that is of course very obvious to many gamers and almost all game developers. But it sometimes seems quite controversial to others. I find this controversy difficult to understand: People who only embrace books, movies and board games seem to be oblivious to the richness of experiences that we find in games. Even though those other mediums had and have their own controversies. Would anybody ever think that Mein Kampf should have any impact on how people look at books? Or would the existence of cheap porn movies scratch even the slightest bit of the film as a credible medium? I would be very surprised if anybody would think so. But then why are games as a medium condemned, just by referring to GTA, Doom and other controversial examples?

My best explanation for this difference in perception is the following: Games have for a very long time been labeled as “simple toys”, “gore hobbies” and a sub-culture thing. And it is surely also a generational thing.

Maybe, one day society can overcome those stigmas… I really hope people will at some point be able to recognize the status of games a form of media (while admittedly still immature) and what it can contribute to culture.

So, for you, dear reader, I would like to present a few examples that I find to demonstrate very well, why games are quite a great medium and why I think they are an enrichment for culture and society. I will try to highlight some parallels to other media, where people in general already agree to the cultural value. But keep in mind that the very core aspect of games is the interactivity of the medium itself, and therefore only allows for surface-level comparisons. The audience is what brings life to the medium. Other media is in no way capable of establishing this kind of relationship between the “object” and the “consumer”.

Also, while the following examples might not all be known to the wider public, they are in general known to people who develop or regularly play games. All examples listed below have sold millions of copies.

Example 1: Minecraft

Okay, almost everybody knows this one. Minecraft is the most sold video game of all time. But that is not the reason I bring it up it here.

While many adults may have left LEGOs back with their childhood, nobody would hesitate to recommend it to their own kids, to admire professional builds or even have a small theme-set put on display somehwere in their living room.

The creative potential of LEGO is something undisputed. The same should be true for Minecraft. There is creativity, play, technology and more to be found and learned in this game.

Minecraft is to video games what LEGO is to toys.

Example 2: This War Of Mine

Now, to a much less content example, This War Of Mine.

There are many high rated and well known anti-war films. Seeing that the same idea can succeed in video games is very surprising to me. Almost all video games come with some sort of power-fantasy, where the player’s character takes on a role where he can beat and overcome enemies, a goal or difficult situations, often completely intangible to the players real life. (Even in very peacefull games like city builders or farming sims, the player’s goal is to extend his properties and wealth as much as possible.)

This War Of Mine completely subverts the idea of a power-fantasy. The player takes on the role of a group of civilians who need to survive an ongoing war in their city. While there are a few guns and weapons available to use, they are very rarely usefull and food, stealth and survival have a much higher priority than trying to shot or kill anybody. The goal is to “just and barely make it through”. And from personal experience I can assure: The experience really gets to you, this is not a “fun” game. This is a well crafted immersion that lets you feel the desparation of civilians in a war.

This War Of Mine is to video games what Apocalypse Now or Schindler’s List are to movies.

Example 3: Papers, Please

Papers, Please is another, less “fun”, kind of simulation. The player is an immigration officer who needs to check documents and decide whether a person is allowed to enter the fictional country of Arstotzka. While the mechanics of the game itself are very interesting and challenging, there is a deeper meta-story going on. As a government agent, the player is being watched and some of his mistakes will have consequences. The player gets very little money for his work, but needs to pay bills and take care of his family. The game uses this to present a set of moral challenges to the player, like:

• Do you let a person in need enter the country, illegaly?
• Do you accept a bribe at the counter, because you need to pay for the treatment of you wife?
• Do you work faster to get paid more, but risk to get punished for mistakes you made?

Some of those choices have a direct impact on the success of the player, other choices will just leave the player with a feeling of guilt or failure. These kinds of “feedback loops”, that target the player himself, is something that is simply not doable with any other medium.

Papers, Please is to video games a bit what Crime and Punishment is to books.

Now those were only three examples. I think there are many, many other examples of great and impactful games. Other people would certainly list different titles, but those three are the ones that immediately jumped to my mind.

Now let’s get back on track, the next reason why I started making games:

Reason #2: I love programming

I have been programming roughly since the age of 10. The passion for it never went away. Today, over twenty years later, I still feel that same excitement when creating programs and tools by just sitting down and arranging a few symbols and characters based on a set of rules… It feels like mapping an unclear, abstract idea inside my mind into something that has a real-world representation and impact. You could almost say: Bringing things to life from not more than a few simple words.

The file was new end empty, the cursor was blinking over the surface of the terminal, and the fingertips of the programmer were hovering over the keys. And he wrote <circle cx="50" cy="50" r="50" fill="yellow"/> and there was a circle. And the programmer saw that the circle was good.

This enjoyment to bring mere ideas to become something real, just based on abstract building-blocks, easily maps to the process of making games. While the central aspect of game design evolves around the experience of the player, taking the idea of a game and puting it into something that people can actually experience, requires a lot of very abstract steps (abstract in the sense that the relation between the concrete step, like writing a line of code or setting the color of a pixel, is very far removed from the intended, final experience). Similar to mapping customer requirements to the final program in software development, there is no clear path on how to get from the former to the latter. Walking down that path is something that many programmers, including me, love to do. And if the result of that process is something entertaining or introspective that affects other people (like a good game), that is even more motivating.

Reason #3: “Art”

Okay, while the previous two points have since long been important ideas for me, this last point is something that is a more recent development and I have been thinking about it a lot. What I am talking about is basically the concept that games can be used as a medium to convey ideas. Ideas that are not clearly defined, ideas that need to be discovered by the creator during the process of creating something. And the idea to produce something that, in the optimal case, touches other peoples minds and leads them to reflection about the world and reality. In short “making art”. There is of course a case to be made for creating games with a maximum entertainment value. That is fine, and I highly enjoy such games as well. But as a motivation, a driver to create my own games, there needs to be more than pure entertainment. There needs to be meaning. I think the best way to describe it is to say:

I want to create games that are motivated by “art” and meaning, without losing the entertaining aspects that we are used to in gaming.

I actually really hesitated here to use the term “art”. For one because it is very loosly defined, it can mean a very wide range of things. And second, because its usage seems very often to be directly connected to the traditional, non-interactive kinds of arts, like music, pictures and sculptures. And this somehow feels like a disconnect from this medium of “interactive experiences” we call “games”. However, there is a big but: It seems to me that, when I try to find out what exactly “art” is supposed to be, I stumble upon the following points regarding what “art” is again and again:

Art

• is self-expression
• conveys ideas in an indirect way
• has an impact on the audience
• lies in the unknown and needs to be found

Or, to put it a bit differently and more concise:

Art is about finding, exploring and communicating ungraspable ideas.

This describes exactly the sentiment, why I would want to create games. So, last but not least, a reason why I want to make games is because I want to make “art” (there, I said it ;).

Update a year later

Brian Moriarty expressed it similarly in his GCD talk:

Art is the still evocation of the inexpressible.

His talk is very interesting, you can find it here.

So, these are my thoughts about why creating games is a worthwhile undertaking and it shows to a big part how my journey in game development started. Right now I am just at the very begining, my first, very small game is still in process and I cannot for sure say how this journey will continue in the long run. But I really hope that I will be able to create and publish games for many years coming!

Thanks for spending your time here and reading this,
Sam