Today's gaming industry is characterized by hackneyed themes, pigeonholed genres, and formulaic stories. Gaming is, as it has been since the first simple computer games, an entertainment industry. Gaming is just so much bread and circuses.
How ironic, then, that this industry of mass-produced toys is powered by people who are trained as and work as artists. Game coders are not robots. Gamer writers are not clowns. They are artists in any sense of the word. How then can this paradox be explained? Maybe it has just been easier as an industry to focus profit and expediency rather than art and beauty.
For whatever reason, I see no reason to play into the conventional system. As an artist, I always look for ways to break the rules. Innovation is the only way true art ever comes about. But instead of asking myself, 'how many more lasers can I add to this gun?', I ask myself, 'how can a game be fun without a gun?', or 'what can I tell other people through my game?'. In fact, I wonder if I can ask questions like these through games. And in wondering, I am taking the first step towards finding the answer.
The answer, I firmly believe, is a new kind of game. A game that is not a pre-packaged, explosion-packed sequel of every other "great" game on the market. A game that is not an obscure, confusing indie art game. When I see the kind of game I want to make, I see not just a game but a story, an alternate life for the player to lose themselves in, to learn in, to explore, to be inspired by.
I've had this same conversation with Alex at least a dozen times before, so I thought I'd record it. Some previous posts have touched on similar topics, but lately our vision of a new kind of game that will act as sort of a 'multi-art' combination of visual art, writing, philosophy, music, culture, and technology has really come together. We're laying the tracks for our own personal revolution, as it were.
-Ian
