The Nature of Game Design

 How you doing.

I have been neglecting this blog. While it is true that i have been preoccupied with other ventures, i cannot claim those to be the reason. The cold, hard truth is that i have shunned this blog because it failed. The original aim for this blog was to find a way to package and sell pure game design to an audience, as a way to escape the clutches of the grind and accrue enough of a following to be able to finance my design. That has failed utterly and i have been thrown into the, for me painful, struggle to make a living. In that venture i have failed time and time again as well and looking back, this past year has been a string of failure upon failure ontop of previous years of ventures that also fell apart spectacularly, leaving me reeling, with no courage remaining to sally forth again to try my luck in striking gold. These past years have been me making a bet with the devil- i will give it my all and if i dont make it, then i can die and rest knowing i did what i could. The cruel hand of irony however had other plans for me and my ability and even willingness to struggle against the current has deteriorated with each time i rallied myself and tried again. In truth, i didn't manage to give it my all. The raging fire of passion has been dimming and now not even embers are left. Each time i hit rock bottom i must've slammed into the bedrock with enough force for it to give away and reveal a new low each time and now my high points are what i once considered the abyssal depths. And every time i fell, i found my art waiting for me at the bottom.

My relationship with game design has weathered enough "what if i gave up and tried something else" to surpass the status of obsession. It is undoubtably a part of myself at this point and it is crazy because like, the world is crashing around my ears and the only thing that can keep me standing are games. Have i lost it? Am i desperately clinging onto pitiful trappings? Am i trying to turn away from reality into the sweet allure of escapism? 

You don't have to voice concern at this grim attachment that i have to game design. Games have fallen out of favor with me multiple times and judging from my skill level at them i have fallen out of favor with the damn games myself. There have been many many nights where, instead of passing my time with a game, i participate in the - i hear traditional - pasttime of doomscrolling, panic attacks and eventually flopping onto my bed. My love for game design has managed to cut through everything and find me, wherever i may go. Eventually this happens enough times where one has to ask the big questions. Why. Why does it keep coming back. Why does it matter. Why can't i let go, even though ive tried. The good news is that i have managed to cobble together a few responses to these questions.

You might be surprised to hear that i am staunchly anti-escapism. My philosophy to dealing with personal issues has been to charge the beast until it dies and only recently have i been reconsidering my approach. Which might sound weird to a lot of you because games as a form of escapism is ubiquitous. But for me, that simply isn't what art is about. I find art's connection to reality both inescapable and essential to art itself. After all, art is created by real humans, who live in a real environment, meant to be consumed by real humans, who share that very real environment and to induce very real experiences and emotions in them. I see nothing fake in any of that; hell, the mere act of immersing ourselves into the created is to break the barrier and be influenced by it, as if it were truth. When creating any sort of game, the most important thing that i grapple with is reality. Art itself isnt meant to undermine or replace reality; they are meant to go side-by-side. Art is there to interpret reality and reality is there to contextualize art. They have an inseperable bond, which is why denying reality through art, or even worse, denying the reality inherent in art is unhealthy. Yes, that means politics in games, cry about it. Only when the artist respects their art's relation to reality and cultivates it do they produce art that resonates with people. Art that resonates with people gets internalized. They take it everywhere they happen to end up. And when everything else falls apart and people are left facing themselves, that internalized art is there as well, one part of the self, staring back at us. 

This is why, when all the bullshit of projects and business ventures and whatnot stops mattering to me and i am left with nothing, game design is still there with me. Game design is a part of myself, after all, and creation, game design included, is inherent in all humans. Game design isnt just a part of me, it's a part of you reading this. It's a part of everyone. It is all-encompassing and universal. 

I understand if you raise your eyebrow at grandiose statements like the above, but that is the truth that i have found. How can this be? Well, i ask you this question. What is game design. Well, the discipline of designing games, duh. This is not it's essence, though. What is game design for? To make good games. This is not it's essence, though. How do you do game design? By designing games.

This is not game design's essence, though.

The answer to game design's essence is the answer to the essence of art. Art is something that is part of every human. It is all-encompassing and universal. If that sounds familiar, that is because game design is art. So, to uncover the essence of game design, a subset of art, we must uncover the essence of art. What is art?

Art, is a medium. Different people have wildly different reactions to each piece of art ranging from their lives being changed to treating it as a shit under their boot. The inherent "subjectivity" of art. That is a good hint as to what art is. Let's analyze it a bit. Art is when a human comes across a piece of paper that has been marked with different colors and somehow they start feeling something. Art is vibrations in the air that a human intercepts and somehow they start feeling something. Art is symbols on a piece of paper which a human decodes and somehow they start feeling something. The thing of importance here is the human subject. Without a human subject, art is incomplete. Art itself isn't the piece. Why isnt art just the piece? Because artists do not create the piece without the expectation of it being experienced. Even art for the artist's sake has the artist themself as the final recipient; so, in order for a scribble on a paper to constitute art, a human must be in the equation somewhere. This means that art isn't just the piece, art contains the piece itself and the human subject experiencing it. A piece however cannot be created without being influenced by the artist. So, art contains the artist, the piece and the audience. This makes apparent art's true nature; art is a process. Art happens not when an artist assembles the piece. Art happens when the audience experiences the piece. Because part of art's construction is the audience, the resulting art can very wildly depending on who experiences it. 

Art is the process of a piece, created by an artist, being interpreted by an audience.

An artist encodes an intended experience or feeling into a piece with the intention of inducing that experience or feeling into the audience.

A piece is the vehicle for the coded experience or feeling to reach the audience.

A piece is interpreted by the audience, which interprets the piece and receives an experience or a feeling.

In truth, art is communication.

Which is why a piece of art can, paradoxically, at the same time, induce similar experiences or feelings in two members of the audience, and something completely different in a third. In the process of the artist encoding the message and it being reverse-engineered by the audience, the audience has different ways of experiencing art, leading to a different interpreted message. It's like sending out a message with radio waves and intercepting it with different equipment or different parameters on the same equipment. The coded message will appear different.

To extend this to game design, game design itself is the discipline of crafting the medium of games. How we encode the intended experience and how the player decodes it are what game design are about. Sending these kinds of messages are part of human nature. They are truly ubiquitous, the only difference is the vehicle we choose to transport them to the audience. And to take it back to our point about reality, the very real feelings and experiences of the artist are sent through the medium so the audience can also experience the same, real, thing. Thus, no matter the distance in space or time, the artist and the audience can be connected through the same, or similar, experience. And, to be honest, in my pitiful and downtrodden state, now it is that i hunger the most for connection. This is the reason i am currently writing this, for you to see. This is the current easiest way i have to communicate with you. If i manage to cobble together some more courage, i might be able to craft a message through a medium that demands more labour to be realized, such as games.