Escaping Game Design
I've been happy to see some recent writing questioning beliefs about video games being inherently good. Joey Schulz (To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction) and thecatamites (tumblr post) especially.
I feel almost stuck in place when I try to talk about these things. No scale feels large enough to write about what's wrong with video games, because (like thecatamites gets at), what's wrong with video games is what's wrong with art is what's wrong with how we live our lives.
For now I only want to write about what to do with these disillusioned feelings as an artist.
1. Consider not making video games
I left this comment on Schulz's post:
"... If video games are rotten then we can simply make something else. If your goal is truly to make art then that shouldn't scare you as a starting off point. ..."
There are problems with video games that go beyond just differences in how the medium works. Deep economic incentives to make dissasociative trash, and a shallow history that has always been poisoned by commercialism in a way that music or theater or poetry were able to grow outside of (they have other issues of course). This would be really unfortunate if we were assigned game developer at birth, but luckily we don't have to make video games.
I think the fear of letting go of your identity as a game developer or even as an artist, is in essence a fear of being economically useless. If you are not a "game developer" or an "artist" then you are just a person, making things. And why are you doing it? That question is impossible to answer without confronting your self-worth, and your purpose as a human being rather than a worker (or in the case of indie devs, an aspiring important person). It's easy to be a game developer, it's hard to be a human being.
My point is, you have to give up on being a games person to figure out who you really are and what is truly valuable in your life. Maybe it's learning an instrument, or raising a family, or cooking. It probably isn't making a really satisfying vertical slice. If you are still drawn to sharing ideas through art, maybe writing or acting or making music is better suited to your principles. And maybe there's something worthwhile to be created in unity engine after all.
2. Think of "game design" as building a format for the real thing you are creating
So what do you do in a game engine if video games are not the starting point? "Video games" as a medium, to me, are really a platform for creating new formats for art. There are established formats: visual novel, walking sim, etc, but video games themselves can be anything.
I think this open-endedness is both the strength of games and their curse. You cannot sit down and make, for example, a video game memoir, without first agonizing over which genre would get in the way of the themes the least. Do I want to talk about my trauma in the form of Bandersnatch or gambling, it is embarrassing and humbling. At first I solved this problem by just removing all game mechanics. Everything had to be a walking sim visual novel hybrid because trying to make something "gamey" feel serious was humiliating. In this rejection of game design I eventually found something more constructive then just its negation. It is this:
"Game design" should really be thought of as building a format for the work of art you will be creating. Think of it as constraining yourself to a set of tools. Maybe the "design" of your "game" is "everything ren'py allows me to do". Or perhaps it is "a series of still images taken from real life"—in this case you have game designed your way into photography. Thinking about games this way opens you up to a much larger world of art.
From what I've heard, when David Kanaga made Oikospiel, he had a friend make a set of scripts in Unity for 3d character movement with music and event triggers. He made the whole game using those scripts and nothing else. To a game developer that is an extreme constraint, but it's this kind of process that gets you out of your game designer brain and allows you to get serious about story structure, writing, acting, or whatever it is that the format you've chosen focuses on. You should decide these constraints as soon as possible and take them seriously.
It helps immensely to base your format on an existing medium with a history and established norms. Maybe that is a game genre like "walking simulators", but maybe it is theater or comic books or haunted houses instead. If you do this there will be something to work off of, books on craft to read, teachers to learn from.
I'm calling the current format I'm working in "asmr-likes" (Wingless Fairies is one of these). The restriction is: completely first person, no interaction but moving your character's head, everything must be on a realtime timeline, characters are fully motion captured. Coming from a video game lens it is weird and stilted, but coming from playwriting it is: first-person, tactile, close-up, digitally constructed. These are concrete, easy to work with variations from the norm if the norm is playwriting. Sometimes it takes your second game to figure out what the format actually is.
3. Learn about craft
In games we focus way too much on clever formal ideas. "The way you presented dialogue in this game was so unique", things like that. We forget about what the words actually say, and we don't focus on improving them because no one in the games world cares. There is something lost in this way of thinking. In a word: fundamentals.
You can have an incredible idea for a game, but if you cannot structure a story, write prose, etc, then you cannot convey ideas, and your art will only inspire people to make more video games.
Music, theater, poetry, have existed for thousands of years longer than video games, they come from before capitalism, they've been written about by communists, they've been used for every purpose you could imagine, they've been debated into the ground. There is so much more to be learned from other artforms than video games. I'm currently reading Playwriting by Stephen Jeffreys with my partner so we can write a game together, and it feels revelatory. In other words, I feel stupid for thinking about video games so much. He hasn't even said the words coyote time once.
I could put a fourth suggestion here, which would be "aggressively experiment", but I think that's clear enough from what I've already written. In short, video games are just art you make in a game engine. You aren't bound to them or their problems.