B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

I guess at some point I should talk about making video games, as that's what I spend all day doing.

Hm.

It's not playing games all day. To be honest, I rarely play anything at work until a project reaches the testing phase, and then I play the same game over and over again, eight hours a day for up to a week or more to find new and exciting ways of breaking it. It's not playing God, either, at least not at the level I'm at where all our games involve other people's properties and we're forced to work around their approval, their time frame, their budget and their storage space. It's hard and frustrating and a long, long process involving months spent carrying an ever-changing idea through all the steps of production in the hopes of ending up with something that holds together and does what its told when buttons get pushed. And that something had better be fun and worth it, or you have to start all over again.

At the same time, it's also one of the most engaging and addictive creative styles I've ever worked in. Game design - and by default, games - aren't just the up-and-coming tenth art form, it's where the rest of them meet and spin off in to something new that, at its height, can't be touched by any other medium. There's such potential in games to effect the audience in a genuine and real way that we're barely scraping the surface of, and yet even our first stumbling steps toward emotionally complicated games are something to behold. We're moving to a new sort of gameplay experience, one where the beautiful visuals of slaying the monster aren't as impressive or important as the regret you feel after sticking the sword in.

Making games, even relatively small scale we work on, is less creation and more conducting, pulling all the elements you can find into a massive Spectorian wall of sound and firing them back at the player. You bring in what you know - art, poetry, song, storytelling - and stick one on top of the other, ending up with something new that is not observed but experienced. If games aren't respected I think it has as much to do with that as it does Laura Croft's cup size of or Doom's shotgunning of alien demons: games are an equalizer, inviting the player to participate in the story and in many ways make the work their own. Sharing responsibility for the effect a work of art has isn't an idea that's very popular or taken very seriously. Neither is asking an adult to come and play, for that matter. But that's something for another ramble, I think.

Game design, this fascinating, frustrating thing that found me and burned its name across my brain, isn't like playing God. When done right, when done well, it's stealing the controls and doing him one better.

posted by chris  # 4:09 PM