Why Games Matter in a Time of Crisis
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
Alan Lee, The Edge of the Wild, 1991
I write to you from deeper in the woods into which you have just chosen to enter. I am a guide to those who travel here. My usefulness to you comes in the form of being able to confirm what you already know. I have seen and worked with 17 years of game development students as they went through their projects, and I write to you with their voice, not my own.
Making games is absolutely strange and brutal and weird. I don't need to tell you that. If you're reading this, you're in the hardest part of a process that has called you to wander off from the beaten paths and into a murky place. It used to be shocking to me that the tools didn't always get easier, until I picked them up myself and realised the paradoxes involved.
You know this already. I am here to confirm two things:
It is a strange time to have hope.
You make computer games because you are hopeful.
Your instinct is correct. Your soul is on fire. You know it can do good. You know it works. You can see your future clearly. You're not wrong. You're not labouring under any illusion; you're labouring to dispel them and cast new ones.
Let's deal with the first factor; let's not shy away from it. The name of our epoch is horror. The end of liberal democracy, the police and fascist violence, unchecked ecological lunacy, and genocide of the Palestinian people could each terminate every single creative and functional act you choose to make each day. Giving up is absolutely encouraged everywhere you turn. You will each choose your own level of involvement of both resistance and acts of community in the resistance to these horrors in the coming years. I can tell you only what your generation worked out far quicker than mine did—political involvement and functional creative work lend power to each other.
Whatever you choose, that's our time. Our epoch. That's the field of play right now.
So why make games? Why be interested in making games?
Imagine I am turning my gnarled wizard's staff at you.
Like you, I believe computer games are fundamentally noble at their core. That they divert the computer from the evil forces of busy work and the Web and social media. Like you, I know that play is a fundamental and even missionary good. Like you, I believe that computer games are the most noble use of the computer. Of the electricity you use.
Because you believe games are fundamentally dignified, you have come to believe you can build danger and wit and history and reflection and poetry and politics in games. You're building on a belief, shared between you and me and everybody, that games posses these powers. You have come here because you believe in the impossible.
Even the buggiest fighting game is fundamentally more dignified than Excel. You know this. Excel can be harnessed to good ends, sure. But that dignity comes from you and the task.
You are answering a fundamental, atomic and subatomic question of what the electrified rocks in our phones and computers should be doing next to our bodies. You are saying: something good. I go back and forth on what games can and can't do, what entertainment is for. When I see a prototype of a new game, a janky greybox, a piece of concept art, a chunk of code work as intended, I am back in these woods.
When a game has well-loved art and music and kinetic things, the dignity explodes outward. It fulfills the purpose of the rocks and metals in the computer chip and the plastic mold. It completes the dignified cycle of our planet—redistributing carbon elements of the earth to make good the experience of life in the moment.
I make no apologies for romance. But nothing here comes close to what every game student, indie dev, hobbyist or tinkerer, given a clear flat minute of time, would express with more force.
I say again—making things is a challenge to the world of work and pressure and noise and social media feeds. It is integrated in those things, yes. Games can be evil, yes. But you know already that making a game is a fundamentally generous act; you want to entertain, to inform, to delight. You have thrown a stone at the vast stony face of nihilism. The music has begun.
That's not the same as fantasy or escapism. You are not proposing to build a second world, but you're attacking the first when the first tells you to lose hope, that you deserve nothing, that you have no commonality with others.
Enjoy your time in these woods. You're allowed to fail. You're allowed to leave if you can't nourish yourself. This isn’t a manifesto of any kind but an expression of what others in your shoes have said just a few steps further than you. But know that your two heartfelt instincts - that the world needs you well, and the world needs more games—are correct. It’s not just you.
