Why I make games

So someone I know in gaming has been having a rough year and is getting to the point where he's asking "Why?, Why do we do this?"

A little background. Working in video games is hard. Not grave digging hard or saving lives hard, but it is hard. I don't know many people in games who work a normal day. Invariably the day leaks an hour, and when things are going bad it's common to be at work for 12 hours a day, and on the weekends. And none of it is ever a cakewalk.

Why? Well, making games is currently a difficult proposition. The industry is young enough that despite the fact that there are some absolute gems, we really don't know how to do this yet. Every day we're inventing something new, and usually still something rather primitive. For all the power in the newest toys, we're still scraping the performance barrel just to move things around.

But beyond that, and just like any other creative industry, gaming is a gamble. We take people's money, somehow, somewhere, and bet that we can make something entertaining. The large pile of filer dross on the shelves should tell you that the odds on that are pretty long.

So it's hard, and we're more than likely not going to make it. Why do we keep on keeping on then?

When people ask "we" questions, they're really trying to find "me" answers. By looking at people with common ground, you're really hoping to find a mirror you can relate to, something you might have lost the ability to summon up. So I'll answer why I do this, and make no claims about anyone else's motivations.

I do this because I have to. I do this because doing anything else would require me not to be me. Religious people call this belief, and I supposes there's something to that. Being less of a mystic myself I'm inclined to dig deeper, and what I find is that the belief that I must make games comes from from the belief that I can make a good game. So where does that belief come from?

As it happens, I think it's always been there. As a child, I loved video games. Along with reading and music, that there is pretty much my childhood in a nutshell. In my mind, I formed over time an image of what gaming would be like some day, what the ultimate game would be. This has gotten re-contextualised and experiences along the way have pushed and pulled the image in all manner of ways, but principally I'm still trying to get to play the games I dreamed of.

Somewhere along the way I realised that I might be an artist, and still later yet I picked up programming. Now I'm pretty certain that I have something to offer and co-workers seem to agree, but the core belief, irrational though it may be, must still belong to that child staring at Combat on the Atari 2600.