A Little Cure

A friend and ex-colleague of mine invited me to a lecture he was giving at AFTRS so I went along for it last night. It was focused on the use of sound for narrative purposes, in particular video games. I enjoyed it a lot even though I don't really know what my goal was in going to the lecture. There were many things that I learnt, some things I already knew. But I realised that even more than learning something new, what I enjoyed the most was once again looking at video games from a design/narrative point of view. 

Lately, I haven't been playing many video games, besides the odd casual game or two on the iPad or PC. And I haven't been keeping up with industry news much either. My mental space lately has been in quite a negative state lately actually and I've been having a more negative, skeptical view of video games and the industry in general. I think its a completely natural thing that occurs when you've worked in the or any industry for a while and you know the workings of it so well. So for me, I had gone past that initial wonderment of games and how it was built and what kind of creativity goes into games and had ended up at the (for the lack of a better word) business side of things. 

Primarily, making video games is a business. People make games to make money. Sadly, the people doing the actual making of the games normally don't end up making the majority of the money, but that's a whole other topic. But yeah, its a business. And with business comes processes, budgets, systems, hierarchy and a whole lot of politics. 

It's a little difficult to try to explain what I'm trying to say or what I have in my head but basically the biggest question for me when I started in the industry was "What kind of story/vision do I want to create/share with the world?" and over the years, it turned into "What am I doing here? Why are things done this way?"

I love story games, actually more to the point is I love stories. If they come packaged with good solid gameplay, all the better. If the gameplay is forgettable, that's fine. If the gameplay is so bad it destroys the story, that pisses me off. And I think the essence of a good story is that I'm able to escape into it and put my own self in that story.  As much as I love being in a story, I would also love to be apart of creating a story or a whole new world for other people to be able to escape to. 

Well, that's what was in my head when I first started work in the industry. And I used to push quite a lot for that idea of creating a world, within the constraints of the gameplay, licenses, etc of course. And over the years, that push got less and less and my brain started filling up instead with "the business side". The politics and the numbers and the drama that was going on out of the game's story. 

Well, last night's lecture brought back a little of that old vision to me. For a good 3-4 hours, I was looking and thinking about video games purely from a "how do I tell this story and create this world" point of view. I wasn't thinking about any  negative stuff. 

This is a good thing, it's a healthy thing and I feel a little more positive and healthier from it.