Getting ready to take a ferociously necessary vacation, after what has been the most hectically busy year of my career thus far, and having those thoughts every creative person has every so often. The stuff like "Do I enjoy what I'm doing" or "What is actually important to me" that you have to kick the tires on every couple years, to kind of assess your relationship to your craft and what your value system is, as a creative professional.
Here's where I'm at, right now.
I believe, at a deeply fundamental level, that it is not possible to produce great art unless the people working on it can do so playfully. I think that's true of all art, but is especially true for games. Without a spirit of mischief and play, you might be able to produce a functional piece of craft, but any truly great art that results is going to be the exception rather than the norm.
Playfulness + craft is what lets a writer use a dialogue system with timed choices to make a DDR minigame.
It's what lets a level designer hide a mimic disguised as a treasure chest in the room AFTER the boss chamber.
It's how you get a wizard who plummets screaming from orbit and smashes into the ground at the player's feet, dying on impact, with a note in his inventory that says he was working on a jump spell.
For every carefully-crafted multidisciplinary moment of a game, where 30 people spend 2 months working to make 5 seconds really sing, there are just as many weird little moments of a single person popping off on a funky little tangent with the sole intent of making themselves or a coworker laugh. Show me a game/movie/whatever where the crew is laughing for most of the day, and I'll bet you they're doing better work than the one where everyone is angry and miserable, about 8 times out of 10.
But playfulness doesn't just happen. It's a weed that will always try to pop up, but the second it finds the air isn't right, it'll wither and retreat back underground. Playfulness requires space. It requires safety. It requires permission and a lack of reproach. It requires nurturing and cultivation. Sometimes it requires a lot of loud construction and electrical work that seems unnecessarily complex or frivolous, until it's done and everyone steps back and goes, "Oh, it's a tree-house! We can have so much fun in there!"
So much of what I do on a daily basis is just trying to create the conditions where playfulness can arise and thrive -- because I think art produced without it is, most of the time, doomed.
In the same way that most experienced writers learn to trust the instinct "If I'm not enjoying writing this, no one will enjoy reading it," I believe that if a game is produced under unjoyous, unplayful conditions, it's probably safe to bet no one will find it very joyful to play.
And on that note: I'm going on vacation.
Executive Coach for School Principals, Facilitator, Speaker
1moI love these thoughts Mel! I can see your joy (and the of your whole fam!) in this picture. Rest and restoration is a practice, and I can see that you believe in the practice as well. Great work, I mean Great Play!