I made games for 30+ years and I had this exact question about year 4. I was sitting at home, writing some 6502 I think, and my cousin called. She had to call to tell me about a Commodore 64 game she bought from FisherPrice. She started to describe it to me, an educational game where you controlled a penguin who dropped letters down a chute to form words. I had to interrupt her to explain, I had written that game.
She had no idea I was the author and designer.
She spent the next 45 minutes telling me how it was the only game she and her daughter played together. She told me that her daughter was motivated to read, and became an avid reader, after playing my game.
I never felt more rewarded, or that I was doing the right thing with my life so mach as during that conversation.
Somehow I think it fair to add that the last game I was the producer for, involved pushing over a port-o-potty, putting wheels on it and then pushing it down a hill and off a cliff to see how far it would go. Don't laugh, Potty Racers went to #1 in the App Store...
On the flipside: I once worked for a major games vendor (won't say who) and had this terrible experience - worked 60hour-weeks 5 in a row, to get the online multiplayer backend running and able to support more than a few hundred users. Got it up, deployed, rolled out, in use.
Come in the next day, the CEO and all the head devs are crowed around the server console, watching the stats after release, this conversation happens, verbatim (I still remember every detail):
CEO: "Time for my favourite question - How long has the longest
player online been playing?"
HeadDev: "Lets see .. 12 hours since we launched, longest active
session is .. 11 hours, 45 minutes. No pause."
CEO: "HOORAY!! CELEBRATION! WE GOT OUR FIRST ADDICT!!!!"
HeadDev: "Yay!"
CEO: "Wait .. how old is he.. ?"
HeadDev: "Profile says: 12"
CEO: "YAY, he'll be with us for years!"
Me: "Isn't that a bit .. unhealthy .. for a 12 year old? Its summer,
schools out, the kid should be .. enjoying some weather?"
CEO: "We don't like that thinking here .. are you sure you
know who you work for?"
Oh well, that killed the games industry for me, well and good. Haven't logged on to a multiplayer game in 12 years.
TL;DR: The people behind the curtain do not have your best interests in minds, kidz ..
Some of my best memories from around that age involve playing a computer game for close to 12 hours straight. I remember spending at least a month of summer playing through the Bard's Tale on the Spectrum.
Indeed, similar things have been a rewarding experience for me for the majority of my life.
Last time I did something similar was at the release of WoW: Cataclysm, I think, with my girlfriend. It was a great holiday.
Ditto. All-night LANs at our parents' houses playing Counter-Strike and other Half-Life mods, WC3, Starcraft, Diablo 1 & 2 in the basement.
Online games aren't all addiction and grinding and no-sunlight, there are an immense amount of social interactions going on. I attribute much of my writing skill to posting on internet forums with people I met playing video games, and chatting in-game.
I was counting up everything I'd gotten from playing WoW alone the other day, and it included a great relationship, a business that made me $xx,xxx, a whole load of new friends, experience and ideas for managing large groups that I'd never have gotten another way, LUA programming skills, some fantastic memories, and a major film project.
Modding HL was how I got my first real introduction to C/C++; I follow a bunch of tutorials off of Wavelength/Radium (I think?) and managed to change a few things.
It seems like the mod scene for a lot of games has kind of died out, at least for shooters.
> It seems like the mod scene for a lot of games has kind of died out, at least for shooters.
Yeah, definitely. Although the Doom engine releases are neat to play with. If I was creating a total conversion these days, I'd probably do it with the Doom 3 engine... which is sad, because that thing is old. Still looks great though, and beats using Darkplaces!
Every now and then me and a school friend meet up and try to play through a game in one sitting. So far we've done Super Mario World, Mario 64, Diddy Kong Racing and Gears of War II.
My brother wrote the games, and I played them. I remember playing his tetris for hours on end because he wasn't aware that speed had to increase (he'd only glimpsed the original briefly).
Ah, I'm with you anyway, I did indeed spend hours and hours and hours, at one point in my life, gaming away .. for me it was Descent2 and Warcraft2, the good ol' 90's, and well .. it didn't last long. I realized I was better off writing code than running someone elses. ;)
CEO's attitude towards the business is stupid. I would quit that company not because I would feel that I was doing something unethical, but because the CEO knows nothing about an industry he works in.
I made several online games, and there are people who addicted to them. I don't feel guilty for it. In each case of such addiction that I've witnessed, the person was in such a situation and such a state of mind that I think they got lucky to get addicted to a game, and not something worse. All of them created relationships and friendships in the game, and when they wanted to quit, quit.
If it makes you feel any better, when I saw my nephews this summer they were all showing me their favourite things. The youngest is quite fond of Potty Racers, so we had some time together playing through it and he would talk about strategies etc. He usually gets drowned out by his brothers, so it was nice to have some quiet time where he could show off.
Don't forget the stress relief video games can give. Society managed to make even sheltered 1st world lives stressful thanks to unrealistic expectations imposed on a personal and professional level. We're all apes though, despite all that's expected of us. And these apes love to wonder about their world and explore its every corner. Video games satiate this desire somewhat - and that will do, on a fucking Monday night after a long, frustrating day at work.
Some games can be really stressful though - real time strategy games for my part. But I prefer games that are more explorative and adventourus, like RPGs.
Hah! Real time strategy. Try playing Dead Space without stressing out. Constant deficit of ammo and horrifying monsters ready to jump out at you when you think it's safe.
Jonathan Blow is one of my favorite game developers of recent times. Not only is he brilliant technically, he's also an amazing game academic (there are plenty of people on either side, but few manage to be both). The whole of his lectures, talks and writings are heavily recommended!
If you liked Jonathan Blow's lectures make sure to check out Chris Crawford's. A number of them are on his channel on YouTube. Crawford was more or less the first game developer to combine practical work with academic study of game design (and he's wrote the first-ever book on it). Your might know him as the developer of Balance of the Planet and the founder of the GDC; the latter he then left after the famous "Dragon speech", which is probably the first thing of his you should look up.
Oh yes, I absolutely love Chris Crawford's work as well- thank you!
An up and coming dev I really like is Andy Hull (from the Spelunky remake fame). He gave an amazing talk at GDC about drawing inspiration from children's toys in game design, and I see much promise in him. :)
I used to make MMOs and we'd often question why we were doing it when we'd read stories about people's relationships falling apart, kids flunking out of school, or other really negative things that happened when people played too much and didn't keep a handle on their life.
Then one day we got a letter. It was from a man who suffered a host of physical ailments, including quadriplegia, and could barely leave his bed, nevermind his house. In his letter, he wanted to thank us for making our game. He made friends, lead a successful guild, and could feel powerful and accomplishment in a way he couldn't in real life.
The stories would repeat themselves over the years, too... I know at least one very successful HN denizen met his now-wife in our game. Families would stay in touch and play together, groups of people who didn't know each other would raise money to help guildmates who needed surgery or had fallen on hard times and had trouble making ends meet, and so on.
It's for those people that I make games. (Or at least that's what I tell myself when I'm having moments of doubt and questioning why I spend so much time pushing bits.)
I'm curious about your experience developing MMOs. Would you mind emailing me[at]lukewal[dot]sh? I am a student right now and interested in hearing from someone who knows the full landscape.
Yes, it's like saying "you can have sound, you can have pictures, you can have plays. But god forbid you from mixing them together, because that's like useless and evil". Why do we even have this conversation? Either all art is useless or games are not useless.
It would be a drab, depressing existence to live out your slightly longer life on a planet where everyone was a doctor and no one a novelist. Kudos for making beautiful experiences.
I see game developers, especially those one-man indie efforts, to be modern reincarnations of renaissance artist-cum-technologists. At their core is the artist that longs to explore unknown world through manipulation of certain mediums that may or may not lead to useful applications. I see the author as somebody that takes pride in seeing his work affect people's daily lives. An artist might not even care if anybody understands his work or if anybody cares about it at all.
Especially after the impact that Minecraft has, my impression is that creating games is your best bet to create new ways of story telling and user interactions. My feeling is that we didn't even scratch the surface of what is possible.
A lot of people forget how important two particular industries have been in terms of pushing the envelope when it comes to computer processing and Internet bandwidth technology: Pornography and gaming.
While porn and games are certainly among the more hedonistic (and certainly less virtuous) of products, because people care so much about them is in large part the reason why we have more powerful CPU/GPUs - for example - or faster connection speeds. (I guess you can thank U.S. military investments for some of this stuff as well.)
My point is, gaming is important. Like, really important. It might not have the direct impact on African schoolchildren that Kiva or Doctors Without Borders does, but one could argue that those organizations would not be able to leverage the technology that they rely on so much if others hand't paved the way. Keep doin' the good work, son! ;-)
I specially liked the "Why should people bother playing the game I make?" part. I keep making myself this question over and over again, and your answer really clicked with me.
While it's true that games don't necessarily have the same impact on people's lives as other, more "important" work, for me, making a game or studying how a game works is such a fun process that it's worth doing anyway.
I spent some time trying to make games in my high school years (NeHe's tutorials helped me a lot)and trying to understand how other games work (I remember the sense of achievement when I managed to switch textures in some crappy FPS game).
Today I deeply regret that I didn't put enough effort to study this field properly... I like my current gig, but I will always look at real game developers with a sense of envy.
> games don't necessarily have the same impact on people's lives as other, more "important" work
This is honestly more for lack of trying than because it just doesn't. Some people are trying, but game development has the disadvantage of coming into its own after the ascent of capitalism and thus most people have been introduced to it as a cash cow rather than as an artistic medium.
That's an interesting thought. How different would the interactive games landscape be if it was around during the renaissance. If game designers had sponsors that supported their lifestyle.
As I write this, I think this is the utopian vision of crowd sourcing. Creating a new class of patrons of the arts.
I've been playing around with MonoGame and it's not too bad. Considering Microsoft has stopped developing for XNA, it might be time to look into it.
I've been using a component based approach to building my game from scratch and it's been an excellent development experience. Too often I feel like I'm in the deep end and unsure if I'll sink or swim. So I try, sometimes an idea works, sometimes it fails but it's all fun.
I'd strongly recommend starting at a lower level than MonoGame. OpenGL isn't conceptually difficult (at least through vertex buffer objects) and encourages you to understand the actual process of what you're doing. I find it enlightening and it makes me better able to work in higher-level systems as well.
After the 100 millionth time in my life of staring at a black screen and wondering where my triangle is, I switched to higher level frameworks and never looked back.
When I was 11 years old, I was using GameMaker 3.5 (man I miss GML scripting, its what got me into programming in general) to build games, and get my ideas out. That was fun!
I'm 23 now, and am currently learning how to build games... this time, using C, SDL, and Lua embedded for scripting.
I also happen to have Unity3D installed on my computer, which I use for my actual game project, but I'm doing things the hard way and building my own engine and game on top of it as a learning process.
Fortunately it's been rare that someone has condescended to me that games are pointless, cruel, evil or mere diversions in general. Games bring joy. Although the same could probably be said of pornography, and yet porno isn't getting any more mainstream of an art form…
Just being entertaining, I think, doesn't legitimize games.
Surely earning lots of money has something to do with gaming as a legitimate full-time culture-making pursuit. A coworker taught a General Assembly class whose attention immediately rose when he pointed out that Clash of Clans earns more than $1 million a day selling virtual goods. But I don't think the creative folks behind that game are necessarily proud of its making money—I know I'm not exactly proud of making a slots game. And I don't think casinos—the highest revenue game in town—are all that respected.
Being a growth industry probably doesn't legitimize games either, it seems.
The challenge though: that's why I make games. I think it's bigger than breadth & depth of computer science. In one scientist's words, a game developer rewires people's brains without reading any scientific literature. Little could be as thrilling. And I know I look at guys like Brian Reynolds and Will Wright as inspiration—smart cultural observers whose technical wizardry turned into real social commentary.
Why write them? Because games are play which is the most vital activity humans, indeed mammals, engage in. Without it, not only would I not have this very alphabet I'm writing in (which descends from drawings), but I and everyone reading this would still be sitting in a bush very practically gathering as many berries as we can to survive.
And as the gaming population becomes older, gaming will account for a larger and larger percent of human play.
Games are entertainment, leisure time, fun and ignite creativity. If your game can provide that to people, its probably doing alot more good to them than many of the "life-changing" social apps out there.
Apart from that it poses many interesting technical challenges and will make your a better programmer.
I wonder if the idea that what we're doing can and/or should be important or world-changing is particularly strong in our industry, if it's something more widely shared, or if it's more narrow (e.g. an HN thing).
We see it a lot here: People talking about how they want to change the world, how they wish they were doing something more meaningful, etc. The reality is that almost no one does work with any sort of profound (positive) impact on humanity or the world around us; the kind of philanthropic work that gets this sort of love just is not that common.
The vast majority of work available, and the similarly vast majority of potentially viable business models, just don't fit this mold. I'm not saying we shouldn't aspire to be and do better, but I am suggesting that the expectation that we should be involved in positive change at all times just isn't reasonable or practical.
I started making games when I was 5, and I love doing it. From flash to 3D applications I've probably given it stab.
I've came to the conclusion that making games is far more constructive than watching TV or playing games, but untimely you're wasting your players time. Creating content now isn't novel, you're competing for users time which is already saturated with other games (plus other mediums such as TV).
Also, think of all the potential Hitlers that will be just playing your games instead of doing anything mischievous. The more time you make those people waste, the better.
She had no idea I was the author and designer.
She spent the next 45 minutes telling me how it was the only game she and her daughter played together. She told me that her daughter was motivated to read, and became an avid reader, after playing my game.
I never felt more rewarded, or that I was doing the right thing with my life so mach as during that conversation.
Somehow I think it fair to add that the last game I was the producer for, involved pushing over a port-o-potty, putting wheels on it and then pushing it down a hill and off a cliff to see how far it would go. Don't laugh, Potty Racers went to #1 in the App Store...