Stretching definitions
Lately I’ve been repeating the same stupid joke to friends, acquaintances and strangers whenever they mention a videogame and ask me if I’ve played it, or if I’m familiar with it. I look at them and say: “I don’t know, I don’t play games, I just make ‘em.” This is a lie. Of course I play videogames because they are simply one of my many interests. But there is something to it. I believe every deadpan joke contains a degree of truth to it--that is precisely how one can keep a straight face while saying it.
I don’t identify as a “gamer”, and I generally don’t think I’ve played as many videogames as most of my peers in game making circles. While I have played videogames in childhood, they were never a significant part of my identity growing up. I was twenty and studying graphic design in 2014 when it finally clicked with me that videogames might be an art form I actually want to pay attention to.
I’ve entered the world of game making not as someone who aspired to be a game developer, but rather as someone who thought it’d be interesting to use the medium as yet another way to experiment with art and my interest in sequential storytelling. I was, among other things, fortunate to be able to just go to AMAZE Berlin on a whim--I lived in Switzerland then--and make friends with like-minded artgames people, some of whom I am still friends with now, a decade later.
It wasn’t until I moved to Melbourne, Australia, and started making games myself that I encountered the “industry” surrounding game making, becoming aware of the politics, institutions, companies and notable individuals at play and the many complications and power dynamics created in the process of aspiring to legitimacy. This brings us to what I actually want to talk about in this essay.
A popular sentiment I’ve observed consistently in discussions regarding institutional support for videogame making is the lamenting about key people in relevant decision making positions not caring about videogames because they:
Haven’t worked in the videogames industry in any capacity, and/or;
Haven’t made a videogame in any capacity, and/or;
Don’t play videogames.
I find this a little puzzling, and frankly a little alarming. I genuinely do not think working in “the industry” or being a base-level consumer of videogames would necessarily translate to making decisions that help a given creative scene actually flourish as a cultural ecosystem in “the Arts”, beyond the profit-first framing of “industry”.
You can have worked decades in the games industry, be a hardcore gamer, but that genuinely does not really matter if you do not have basic curiosity in videogames as an art form separate from the money of it all; if you don’t care about expanding the definition of what the videogame can be on a cultural and artistic level, nothing will be done to that effect.
If anything, I think a lot of people who entered the games industry because of an initial love for playing video games have a very narrow understanding of the actual cultural value of any given videogame. They are, in my opinion, often too easily impressed by marketing--because they primarily interface with videogames as consumers: to a lot of them, a game is Culturally Important if it has a big budget, or took a long time to make, or looks technically impressive and photorealistic, or if it sold millions of copies and one of their relatives has heard of it.
Let’s consider the question head-on: is it responsible to assign de facto expertise and decision-making to a person who is likely to take marketing at face value?
Besides, it all just feels very sweaty gamer territorialism to me, this strange obsession with arbitrary credentials, as if a person who has no personal attachment to videogames as a medium could not possibly have a permissible vision for the type of art they would support to exist out in the world. As if they may not have more to contribute to the development of videogames as an art form by virtue of--and not in spite of--having an outsider perspective of it.
After all, I too entered the game making world as an outsider, and in many ways I still am a relative outsider within what remains of/amounts to/tries to be the Melbourne game making community. Yet I feel it isn't entirely unearned or conceited for me to say that my contributions to it are bona fide.
Now, it is fair and necessary to criticise government agencies and ministries for the Arts for not supporting videogames as a valid and important part of cultural outputs with international reach. However, I think it is rather short-sighted to only point the finger at the fact key people do not have the right profile to lobby for the games industry. It is also just a very boring conversation to have. If we are to have this conversation seriously, there needs to be a problematicisation of the entire underlying incentives behind the policies considering the Arts: the neoliberalisation of the Arts prioritising the developing of commercial-focused industries and markets over cultural development would have been part of the discussion when it comes to other artforms, but is seemingly seldom talked about when it comes to funding incentives for videogames in Australia. There are many reasons for this, and I won’t go into it because I don’t really want to right now, but I do think it’s important to at least think about.
I don’t think more gamers and game makers in policy-making positions will save the Arts, or create a vibrant scene of interesting projects being made, some of which may lead to commercial success. So what will? I don’t know. I don’t have the answer to this that isn’t a flippant ideological punchline like “obviously we need more permissible welfare for unemployed people so we can make art and live with dignity without having to constantly think about job security”, even if that is what I genuinely believe. It’s easy to remake the world in a blogpost essay.
I’ll just keep making games and support my peers with making games until I get sick of it or I die or find something better to do.