Making games is so tough that most makers do not stay beyond half a decade. Frustration, stress and uncertainty nip at them while bad management and poor practises sap their will. This tension is common to all of the arts and it breeds very negative creative cultures. Failed actors, alcoholic pulp novelists and game makers who develop liver damage from stress are all the same breed. They want to make people laugh or cry, or maybe just to make a generous living, and when neither happens they grow resentful.
The only real solution is to find a new source of positivity.
Maybe you wanted to get into games since you were a kid, but as an adult why do you want to stay? What is it the grown-up you wants to achieve? Start that company that makes the games you want to make? Write a blog that explores the art of games as you see it? Quit that middling-paid developer job at company X? Or get paid a whole lot more for your time and skills? Leave and retrain for a career that the adult you wants but the childhood you is afraid of?
‘Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul,‘ said Edward Abbey. You’d be amazed how far pushing can take you if you’re willing to do it, so think like an artist rather than a labourer. Artists change the world and become immortal after a fashion. Labourers just get used up and thrown away.
"alcoholic pulp novelists"
You got something against Bukowski?
What if the institutions, by merit of their parasitic design, are inherently negative while portending positivity in the "let's get along with the status quo" vibe, and being sincere about the need to re-assert humanity is the only authentically positive story, while seeming negative by virtue of its disruptive implications?
What then?
Posted by: Account Deleted | 07 October 2011 at 03:54 PM
The institutions are never as set in stone as all that, especially these days, and if disruption is an outcome then that's usually a good thing.
Posted by: Tadhg | 08 October 2011 at 01:25 AM