Game design, with paper and a crappy pen. If you compared this recent drawing to one I did 30 years ago, for a game called something like “Jungle Swingy Man”, you’d be hard pressed to pick the one drawn by a 10 year old. It’s the tactile angle of games that interests me the most, so they all start out tactile and handmade. Unlike that fake coffee stain on this slide, which is not fooling anybody.
Just do.
You can learn only so much by research and talking. At some point you have to stop theorising and put stuff into practise.
Go out and try stuff out.
Don’t be paralysed by fear. Don’t be afraid to try things. You can learn from things that fail just as much as you can learn from things that work.
Everything is practising, everything you try makes you a better artist.
So go outside and play.
When we play, we are doing more than having fun.
We are sending messages to our brain, we are rewiring our neural pathways to better understand strategy, relationships, decision-making, emotions,
To be playful is to learn, to evolve and to better understand ourselves and the world we live in.
With the In B Flat project, we developed an interface that allowed people with any music ability to create their own ambient spoken word track. By choosing which videos to play, and the YouTube volume switches as a mixing desk millions of individual pieces have been created. A project that is part game, part creative act – but playful and fun and providing meaning.
When you design, do it playfully.
Robin Hunicke
Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic incorporating value of the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. The irregularities of handmade would be valued over machine-generated perfection.
Embracing simplicity can be a game’s strength. Focus on what’s most important. Accept flaws and limitations as Inevitable and valuable.
Sabi relates to beauty that comes with age, like weathered stone or laughter lines.
Does the digital format necessarily divorce games from natural processes? Consider Jason Rohrer’s Chain World passed from player to player, each leaving their mark.
Cha Holland
Approach anything you create with the care of crafting an artifact;
Think of the person you admire most in the world and imagine you
are creating it for them.
Being independent may limit your ability to compete on quantity and scale,
but it will never limit your ability to surpass in quality and design.
Follow YOU
You are handmade.
There is a reason you have followed the path that got you to here. You have a unique set of historical contexts, values, perceptions & influences that all rub against each other & enlighten your individual thinking. These interactions lead you from challenge to challenge… unless you choose to only listen to what other people tell you is the right way forward.
Sure, you can follow them if you want to. You can wait for someone else to give you permission to be right.
OR… you could take a few minutes to consider what opportunities could be carved anew if you just, for once, listened to yourself and trusted that you actually might not fuck it up.
Value is so often measured in dollars and cents.
Handmade objects defy this measure.
Oft the only viable measure is the pleasure that people derive from these objects.
This pleasure is only ever a fraction of the enjoyment that the designer experiences.
Next time you see something handmade, try to imagine the pleasure that went into its creation.
Paul Taylor
Making things with the hands stimulates neural connections. Under experimental conditions, commissurotomy patients (with brain hemispheres severed surgically to treat massive epileptic seizures) actually can’t tell you what’s in their hand if the opposite eye can’t see it. The more you use your hands, the more your hands can do.
Esther Anatolitis
When people walk into our office, they often see us making strange hand gestures to each other while arguing about code – we look like crazy people.
What we’re actually talking about is how objects such as players, AI characters or props move around in our game world.
From the outside, programming 3D games looks abstract and theoretical, while in truth it is a direct, practical and collaborative process.
Our hands as we communicate vectors and matrices are a window into that world.
It’s become a meme that videogame criticism is “in it’s infancy”. It’s not. There are just not enough critics. There is no “right” way to write about games critically, though there are several wrong ways. We still don’t have enough right ways, but there are not enough critics. There is no way to ‘automate’ or ‘script’ or ‘program’ criticism, so videogame criticism is handmade. Videogame criticism will always be handmade. We need more hands. We need more critics.
Ben Abraham
In 2004, I was here talking about tricking people into writing about you. In 2007, I co-launched a PC-generalist website. We’ve gained a reputation for being nice-guy indie-friendly sorts.
These are our Top 10 reviews, arranged by popularity. The red games are ones which are indie. The light blue is an imported mainstream game. The next ten include games like Machinarium, Spacechem and Cthulhu Saves The World. VVVVV and others follow closely afterwards.
Hits = money.
In short: you shouldn’t need to trick anyone into writing about you. It’s not about being progressive. It makes cold, hard financial sense. And we made a business on that. Thank you.
Kieron Gillen
The entry barrier into the world of game creation has become lower than ever, and we have begun to see a trend in games where the style and personality of the individual creators is central to the play experience. Whether it is a visual/aural style, a mechanic or story quirk or any combination of the above, this “handmade quality” is an endearing hallmark of modern games, in particular indie games. Larger studios will have to adapt and learn how to infuse their projects with this same sense of style and personality.
Matt Scorah
Last year, I said at the end of the festival to go out there and make things.
I’ve changed my stance…
I think that rather than just make something, it’s far more important to make something that you care about. Writers are told to ‘write what you know’ but what people know are trips on public transport or other books that they’ve read or their friends or bickering while doing the dishes. It’s terrible advice. Much better to write about what you care about because people care about love and loss and desire and fear and the things that lurk in the dark and the things that help them find their way out.
Make what you care about, because in the end the things that you make are the only things you have any real control over.
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