Doox

I remember when my school collegue, Vincent Diamante, once mentioned that “To make the result beautiful , the process of it should be beautiful, too.” I don’t recall where he actually quoted it. As game creators we need to focus on the joy of making something rather than the hype of the result. We need to focus on the process of making something and actual quality of it rather than thinking about how it would be received by people. That’s why we should be totally truthful to ourself when it comes to making something we believe.

I want to live my life enjoying and feeling proud of every moment by putting honest efforts on my work rather than thinking about how to be successful out of it. The crazy hypes spoil the whole experience. Isn’t it enough by itself to create something you truely believe in? I mean really!

But , whether it is from the desire toward fame and fortune or not,  worst of all is not doing anything. There’s no excuse on being lazy, man!

Games are usually made by more than one person. Eventhough there are games that are from one-man-band, games are perfected when they are played by users and polished throughout their feedback and it should be done every step of the game development from the prototype until the shipping. All these are quite obvious. But what I want to say is there are processes that must be carefully designed/guided by an author who has a clear idea of the work. Apparently the person doesn’t have to do everything alone but should be able to decide which idea to pick to achieve the main goal of the work. Generally a person who has broad knowledge over different disciplines of game development is able to recognize the overlapped area of seperate categories to boost up the development process and naturally select ideas that stick to the core concept to keep it coherent. But most importantly, the author’s role is tremenously important in terms of maintaining the key idea of the game and doesn’t digress to the ideas that may weaken the uniqueness of the work. So to speak, the lowest common denominator effect.

I believe in colletive effort on a work of art but also I understand how it becomes exponentially complicated to stick to the innovative ideas when so many other non-work-related aspects of the game development have to be met to finish a game. Also I believe just increasing the number of people doesn’t guarantee to speed up the process or increase the quality of the work.

Basically, even without any speculation, games are considered to be for fun or at least has an aspect of entertainment in it. I want to use this appeal as an entertainment media to mainly invite users into the work in a more approachable way. There are not many games that go beyond the mere purpose of entertainment and acheive delivering a message, of the creator’s choice of subject matter, which is naturally emitting throughout the ‘fun’ play of the media. We, as game creators, should deeply ask ourselves one of the most important question.

“If the message you want to deliver out of your work of art could be delivered quite enough or even better through other type of medum such as movie, why would you choose game or interactive media?” I think apparently the answer should be interactivity. As creators of games, we need to find how to deliver our message through the interactivity itself. The interaction happening in the game should be carefully designed to reach the goal of your key ideas. The activity done in game should mean something by itself instead of being used to unlock certain kind of award which is usually cut scenes or more progression in narrative. In this kind of structure, the place where the key messages should be delivered is shifted from the actual interactive experience to a linear experience.