Why Make Games?

[warning : This post may contain some deep symbolic and reflective content]

Like most people, I sometimes struggle with the meaning in day to day life. With everything that is going on in the world, as it has been since the dawn of space time, it is very easy to be caught into a web of disillusionment. To become over whelmed with fear and anxiety about ones place in the world and in the universe. These feelings can start to get in the way of our dreams, hopes, goals, and day to day activity. It can even send people down roads of self destruction and cause us to question our motives and even behave in ways that a person wouldn't normally behave. This is no new quandary for the human condition, keeping that in mind is a small reassurance in and of it self, but it doesn't allow for calmness and clarity to begin to come through. The calmness comes with a realization and understanding of who and what one truly is in the context of the universe. I am not the one to suggest directly a path for ascertaining this awareness, but rather urge everyone to pursue a path of self knowledge.

So what does all this have to do with games?

Well, for me, I have been finding myself over whelmed with the world around me lately. This has left me asking myself if I have been wasting my time pursuing creating tools for making games, and with wanting to make games in general. It seems that I was so overwhelmed, that I begin to forget why I wanted to make games in the first place. Games are cool, fun, and interactive, this is all true, but the main power behind games is the ability to share ideas, to use them as a communicative medium. To be able to share perspectives with one another, and to be able to display concepts, ideas, and share virtual spaces with one another across vast distances in real time.

Games as they are in their infancy, are very limited in these areas, as today they are mainly used for pure entertainment purposes. There are a few games that have attempted to use the potential of the medium, to be expressive as art, and some of these have even hit the mainstream. Even hidden nuggets of truth make there way through in commercial titles from time to time, but for the most part, games have been put into a mold that caters to what mass production companies have given us and we have come to expect.

This will change in the coming years, and while I don't expect things to happen over night, I think it will become more common place to use games as the potential medium to express ideas will happen. It will become more synonymous to movies, as we can already see happening with many major motion pictures having games produced, and even Kiefer Sutherland expressed the same thought of the two industries merging at this years Spike Tv VGAs.

This post kind of turned into something that it wasn't initially meant to be, but sometimes in life, you have to follow the natural flow of things and this article is how it turned out. In closing, I'll continue to strive to make games, in the hopes of inspiring future generations to form a better world. In the hopes of inspiring those around us to better understand our connection with who and what we are, and in the hopes of bringing joy into peoples lives, providing them a space where they can interact with their loved ones, and can make new lasting relationships.

The horizon before us is only the beginning. It's the bits and pieces that we connect that end up connecting us.