My post yesterday was really a preface to the hardest question.

This post is very rambling. If anyone attempts to read it, it’s probably worth skimming. It’s not that complicated.

I am supposed to be creative. When I was young, I was very creative. Even into my 20s. Then I got (back) into computers, as a job and career. I worked in sales, system support, and finally development. Even as a teenager (back in the 80s), while I was mostly just scribbling and doodling, I wanted to make computer games. But I couldn’t find a game idea that both filled me with enthusiasm, and was within my capabilities. I was too impatient and too distracted. (I had similar problems with writing stories and drawing pictures, but before the Internet, at least I had the focus to draw.) So I made business application software, and later, mobile apps.

You can make games alone. But very few people can make good games alone. No one can make massive open world role playing games alone. Not unless they want to make games that have retro, old school pixel art graphics, and also know how to make good pixel art. I haven’t made pixel art since I had DeluxePaint! on my Amiga 500 in 1988.

You need motivation to make things. Either you love the work, and don’t care whether it succeeds (is any adult really like this?) or you really want to succeed, and you do the work because you must. I suppose, if you’re rich enough, or know how to bamboozle investors, you can pay other people to do the work. But you still have to want to succeed (or convince others that you do).

What is success in commercial art? (I think video games count as commercial art. Feel free to dissuade me.) Some people would say it is success to simply finish it. Well, that’s necessary, but not sufficient. Even making your money back isn’t sufficient (but, also, necessary). An artist—even a commercial artist—wants to achieve credibility. That means you find your audience, and you impress upon them something that matters to you, and some of them even agree with you. Or at least find it worth their time to engage with what you are trying to say.

You don’t have to say anything important. But you do have to say something coherent. For an artwork to be coherent, the concepts and content have to be amenable to the medium.

Games are versatile. But you cannot say anything in a computer game. Well, you can shoehorn anything you want in there, but that won’t make it enjoyable. Players will just skip over annoying diatribes—unless you don’t let them, and then they might just quit. But if they want to skip your diatribes, you’re doing it wrong. The word and category “game” is also very versatile. There are things like walking simulators which, while using game semantics and technology, are not really games, because they offer no challenge.

Games are meant to be challenging. Not necessarily full of conflict or fighting or simulated violence. There are many many kinds of challenge. But not all ideas can be framed as a set of challenging choices or activities. Or if they can, it could be very difficult, and probably self-defeating. Even if I am wrong, it doesn’t matter. Let me say, instead, that the market for games has expectations. While there are always people with open minds, hungry for something new, one can only subvert the tropes too much. Assuming, as we supposed earliler, one wants to be successful, and make back the money one has invested in the enterprise. Being avant garde is another story. A mostly miserable one. At least, in the world of digitally reproduced, mass-marketed and sold commercial art.

Still, games are certainly even more versatile than I might assume, conservatively. There is this problem of contrivance, however. And objectification. Those issues come down to how you feel about narrative games.

At least since the 80s, there were attempts to merge games and stories. I am mostly thinking of Choose Your Own Adventure(TM) books. (I’m sure there were other precursors that I don’t know about.) But have you ever “read” one of those books? Cute, but ultimately a simple waste of time. Ignoring the clumsy interface of flipping pages to follow choices: you rarely had more than two or three choices. Any more would be absurd. How can you simulate the subtle interactions between human beings, or the difficult choices of life, if you reduce all decisions to three choices? Well, even the biggest commercial video games do that. And it’s pathetic.

But you cannot simulate an interactive relationship with another person using a typical computer game NPC. And few people want that. (Or do they? Maybe not classic gamers, who want to master the mechanics and win. But completely different groups of people, who mostly avoid games—or violent single player games, because they have no other options.) Regardless, it would be very ambitious to try to start a game development career by building a game about relationships, and trying to make it engaging and compelling and immersive. Even if one had the technical skill to simulate a person well enough, they would have to exist in some kind of world. That world would have to be compelling as well, and at least seem more complex and rich as the simulated character. And it should be interactive.

What I’m struggling to say is this: mechanics are objectifying, by necessity. A game inevitably creates—not characters, but puppets. Players are thus free to do what they will with those puppets. They may still be able to evoke empathy, and feel concern for such characters. But they can also shoot them and blow them up and otherwise abuse them, without any sense of remorse, because the characters are obviously not real, and nothing that happens to them is permanent. Even in games with permadeath, you can start a new game. Interactivity is the quickest way to destroy—or badly deform—one’s ability to suspend one’s disbelief.

In true narrative, by contrast, what the author says happened is what happened, and that’s that. A reader can choose to imagine a different ending—or even write a new one—but those are alternate universes that don’t really count. At least, I don’t think so. But I’m nobody, and of course anyone is free to imagine alternative outcomes to their heart’s content. But I think that might undermine the intentions of the author just a little bit. If you care about such things. If fiction is merely for escapism, instead of part of a great artistic conversation, then, OK, reader response all you like. Authorial integrity isn’t what it used to be.

Not that authors always get it right. But an artist wants something. And they want to achieve it through the work. They might want to get attention, or communicate, or overcome a formal artistic challenge. But they are groping towards something, whether intuitively, or consciously and concientiously.

What do I want? I can’t explain it!

I don’t know. I want to show people that the world is not what they think it is. That it is more subtle and complex. That there are more possibilities, and more alternatives, and more choices, than they might have realized. And that a lot of those choices involve—not mechanical manipulations, but communication, and social interaction, with other people. But that it is very difficult to communicate and interact, and to overcome disagreements, but that it is not necessary to resort to dehumanization, demonization, and mortal conflict. We can do more than one thing! We can achieve more than one goal. And we don’t have to kill one another over it.

I am extremely frustrated by the general dearth of imagination and lack of belief in the possible. And also stupid simple-minded ideologies and bloody-minded fixations or singular answers and silver bullets. Life is not simple. Anyone who says so is a scoundrel.