On Game Development

She had no idea I was the author and designer.

She spent the next 45 minutes telling me how it was the only game she and her daughter played together. She told me that her daughter was motivated to read, and became an avid reader, after playing my game.

I never felt more rewarded, or that I was doing the right thing with my life so mach as during that conversation.

Somehow I think it fair to add that the last game I was the producer for, involved pushing over a port-o-potty, putting wheels on it and then pushing it down a hill and off a cliff to see how far it would go. Don't laugh, Potty Racers went to #1 in the App Store...

Then one day we got a letter. It was from a man who suffered a host of physical ailments, including quadriplegia, and could barely leave his bed, nevermind his house. In his letter, he wanted to thank us for making our game. He made friends, lead a successful guild, and could feel powerful and accomplishment in a way he couldn't in real life.

The stories would repeat themselves over the years, too... I know at least one very successful HN denizen met his now-wife in our game. Families would stay in touch and play together, groups of people who didn't know each other would raise money to help guildmates who needed surgery or had fallen on hard times and had trouble making ends meet, and so on.

It's for those people that I make games. (Or at least that's what I tell myself when I'm having moments of doubt and questioning why I spend so much time pushing bits.)

What are we solving all those other problems for if not to make more time for things like games?

Especially after the impact that Minecraft has, my impression is that creating games is your best bet to create new ways of story telling and user interactions. My feeling is that we didn't even scratch the surface of what is possible.

A lot of people forget how important two particular industries have been in terms of pushing the envelope when it comes to computer processing and Internet bandwidth technology: Pornography and gaming.

While porn and games are certainly among the more hedonistic (and certainly less virtuous) of products, because people care so much about them is in large part the reason why we have more powerful CPU/GPUs - for example - or faster connection speeds. (I guess you can thank U.S. military investments for some of this stuff as well.)

My point is, gaming is important. Like, really important. It might not have the direct impact on African schoolchildren that Kiva or Doctors Without Borders does, but one could argue that those organizations would not be able to leverage the technology that they rely on so much if others hand't paved the way. Keep doin' the good work, son! ;-)

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I spent some time trying to make games in my high school years (NeHe's tutorials helped me a lot)and trying to understand how other games work (I remember the sense of achievement when I managed to switch textures in some crappy FPS game).

Today I deeply regret that I didn't put enough effort to study this field properly... I like my current gig, but I will always look at real game developers with a sense of envy.

Just being entertaining, I think, doesn't legitimize games.

Surely earning lots of money has something to do with gaming as a legitimate full-time culture-making pursuit. A coworker taught a General Assembly class whose attention immediately rose when he pointed out that Clash of Clans earns more than $1 million a day selling virtual goods. But I don't think the creative folks behind that game are necessarily proud of its making money—I know I'm not exactly proud of making a slots game. And I don't think casinos—the highest revenue game in town—are all that respected.

Being a growth industry probably doesn't legitimize games either, it seems.

The challenge though: that's why I make games. I think it's bigger than breadth & depth of computer science. In one scientist's words, a game developer rewires people's brains without reading any scientific literature. Little could be as thrilling. And I know I look at guys like Brian Reynolds and Will Wright as inspiration—smart cultural observers whose technical wizardry turned into real social commentary.

And as the gaming population becomes older, gaming will account for a larger and larger percent of human play.

Apart from that it poses many interesting technical challenges and will make your a better programmer.

We see it a lot here: People talking about how they want to change the world, how they wish they were doing something more meaningful, etc. The reality is that almost no one does work with any sort of profound (positive) impact on humanity or the world around us; the kind of philanthropic work that gets this sort of love just is not that common.

The vast majority of work available, and the similarly vast majority of potentially viable business models, just don't fit this mold. I'm not saying we shouldn't aspire to be and do better, but I am suggesting that the expectation that we should be involved in positive change at all times just isn't reasonable or practical.

I've came to the conclusion that making games is far more constructive than watching TV or playing games, but untimely you're wasting your players time. Creating content now isn't novel, you're competing for users time which is already saturated with other games (plus other mediums such as TV).