Recently, I was listening to an episode of Eggplant with the game developer sylvie, in which it was mentioned that she has made something like over a hundred games over her career. This filled me first with shock and then with dread. How can someone make that much stuff? And why the fuck am I struggling to make a single damn thing?
In the interview, sylvie mentioned this piece, which I realized had been sent to me by one @twky a bit ago, “How to Make Small Games” by John Thyer.
One of the main things Thyer wants to convey here is the concept of games making promises to players. Essentially, these promises tell us what to expect from the game, and can be communicated in a lot of different ways. I think this is a really valuable and interesting way of thinking about goals as a game designer. It’s not the only way! But it’s very clear to me that this can help set scope as a designer.
But I will be blunt. I have a hard time swallowing a lot of this. Both in the sense that I feel a desire to reject that it is perhaps irrational, but also that I feel many of these points are disagreeable. Specifically, what I really don’t jive with is how it talks about ambition. It says it wants to meet readers halfway, but I think it sort of fails in those moments. Thyer says we need to change our perspective and we’ll have more fun. That’s easier said than done! And the author himself doesn’t seem fully convinced, either, given how the piece ends. Yet the text seems to almost shame ambitious developers, telling them they should play more small games instead, stop trying to surprise players, and let their dreams die. This is profoundly discouraging to read.
But I also know that I am biased because I have dreams of games, dreams that will likely never go anywhere. But I don’t want to give them up, because they’re mine, and I like them, and I want to keep them. Is that wrong, then? Should I give up on those big dreams, kill my darlings? I’m not sure I ever will, but maybe that’s my downfall.
Now, here’s the thing: I do have dreams of games that are small, too. I’m not someone who is all that grandiose. And I’ve made Twine games. I’ve toyed with bitsy. I’ve played and enjoyed many small games. I have no shortage of small little ideas I know I could make, know I have the means to make, know I could if I set myself to do it. But you see, I haven’t.
The problem, I think, is two-fold: unchecked executive dysfunction, and yes, that pesky ambition. And I think these are linked in a pretty key way here. The art I get excited about making, the art I want to produce, and the creative work that gets me really going, these aren’t always little things. I have written many short stories, short poems, composed little melodies. But a little game doesn’t often spring out of me. Part of it is because of how much has to come first. I have to do all this stuff before I even get to the creative part, to make what? A game I have to convince myself first that I want to make in the first place? It’s always going to be easier to get excited about making something raw and molten spewing out of some inner furnace.
As an example, I’ve been working on a Twine game for several years now. Not dedicated work, mind you, but occasionally returning to it from time to time. Currently, it’s around 14,000 words long, and maybe two-thirds done. The irony is that I wanted this to be a small project I could bang out to publish pseudonymously. But then it grew, not feature creep, but a creep of meaning, a creep of excitement. I was excited about what I was doing, and so I kept making more, and now it’s burdened by all the promises I’ve made, not to an audience, but to myself about what I think it needs to be.
Artists often have big dreams. I was thinking a bit about this because of a video from the channel Little Joel where he talks about how, despite trying to force himself to take it less seriously, he just kept returning to that. I think part of being a person is struggling to square what you want and what you have. Part of being an artist is squaring what you want to make with what you can make.
Many artists are able to revel in the state of process without any concern for product. I can get there sometimes, sometimes when I am playing music. But I don’t get some deep resonating joy from writing, which is why I’ve written less than some of my peers, despite my occasional deluges. I think in words all the fucking time, I struggle to keep words out of my head, but the act of putting those exact same words down on a page doesn’t hit me in the way it seems to hit others. Because the creativity isn’t the process, the creativity is some animating force in you, and it comes out through process, and takes shape in process. It eventually becomes a product. And we can revel in process, we can, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be proud of the product. Most importantly, simply saying that we should enjoy the process will not make anyone suddenly start enjoying it.
I don’t really know how to make myself write more; I’ve written short stories and poetry and little essays. None of that has made it easier. And making one-page tabletop games, making little Twine games, forcing yourself to scope small, none of that makes it easier to make games.
So… what the fuck do we do about it?
I have no idea. I’m trying to figure it out. Like the Simpsons joke, I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas! Truth is, this is a sort of totalizing issue, and I don’t think I’m alone. I think a lot of people probably struggle with motivating themselves towards their creative work. I’m not the first person to ramble about this and I won’t be the last.
As an aside, another issue I will fully admit I have is that I have this thought process that I need to make stuff myself always. I can’t use the mountains of community-made assets and systems that would make all my ideas easier to achieve. That would be “cheating”, that wouldn’t be “real”, it would mean I “wasn’t a game developer”. This is, in a word, silly, and I want to get over it. But this is sort of related because a significant reason I find myself not working is because, when I think about all the stuff I would have to make to even get to the stuff I care about, I grow extremely weary and immediately want to give up before even starting.
One idea I’ve thrown around is a sort of stepping stone approach. Using smaller projects as way of building foundations and iterable systems that I can continue to utilize in future projects. A concern, though, is that this would instrumentalize the project, which runs a risk of sapping motivation once again. (“This isn’t the game I want to be making, I’m just doing it as homework, so why am I making it at all?”) I dunno.
I’m happy for all the artists who enjoy the process alone, even if I often don’t enjoy it. But I’m not there yet, and I don’t know when I will be. I can’t snap my fingers and make it so. I cannot quell my petty ambitions for now. So it makes more sense to find a way to make peace with them, first.
To make this not a blatant vent-post, how do you square your ambitions? How do you think about your goals in relation to what you’re capable of at the moment? How do you tailor your expectations of your work? What processes do you use to manage them?