Purpose of making games

4th LIMITED ACCESS festival poster.

I always thought of this blog as a technical one but I’ve been recently thinking about writing about other aspects as well because I find technical stuff, simply boring. This leads to my point of this blog post, purpose of what I’ve been doing with my life for past several years, making games.

Even though I have a technical background, I always had a strong artistic side. Sometimes I nurtured it and let it grow and show itself, which was either as my experiments with making films, experimenting with making music or doing regular sketches and playing instruments. I’ve been lucky enough to attend to 4th LIMITED ACCESS festival, curated by Amirali “Ghaf” Ghasemi, and this triggered that side once again.

I think about my life a lot. It’s purpose and what’s the best way to live it. What can I do to make it more meaningful. What can I leave as my legacy, if any. As I age, I think about this even more, about the true potentials that I have and what I can really do with my life, in retrospect of what I’m actually doing. And to be honest with you, I find making games, just meaningless.

It’s true that it’s the only thing that I truly love, I mean if I turn to be the richest man on the Earth in an instant, I will continue to do exact thing that I’m doing, this much. But it doesn’t satisfy me. I’m still not as good as I want in programming or developing games, mainly because I didn’t just code my whole career and tried different paths as was needed in the project but still it’s not that easy for me. So after a long and hard day, I think about what I’ve been doing and what I added to this world and it just crumbles into, entertainment.

There is nothing wrong in entertaining people, I even find it very good that in this day and age, if you can even make some fun time for someone with your game, you’ve won but people can be entertained very easily and even if I stop doing what I’m doing, there will be someone else doing it. Heck, look at the amount of apps and games that is thrown in app stores everyday, surely there is no lack of app developers. Of course how good or bad they are is debatable.

Sad thing is, people are trying to find a good pipeline to make “better” games. And by “better” they mean a way that they find people like and teach so others can copy it and follow the same path because “it worked for Maio” or something. And that is sad. That is killing creativity by limiting and teaching whatnot. Of course you can teach someone basics but they are more likely to follow the path blindly rather than trying to get out of their comfort zone and do something new.

Art on the other hand, I find very amusing. One can do several things with art, or by combining art into games. With Art you can express yourself, talk about ideas, challenge people, share experiments and a lot of other things which I find more meaningful than just entertaining people. I’m not a teacher or anything but I really hate to be some guy who just makes games so people can buy and entertain so he can make a few bucks.

Yes you can do other things with games like Serious Games or educational games but over the years I’ve seen that almost no one plays such games or take them seriously enough so after several years that they have been introduced, good digital games for this purpose are almost non-existent, due to lack of market.

I can be wrong on some of assumptions that I just made but I’ve been seriously thinking about this and I really feel I can use my knowledge to express myself or be more “meaningful”.

Reading out of the box.

While I was honored to work along with some of the best developers on Garshasp video game, which each of them was a monsters in his/her field, literally, I was privileged to meet our fearless leader, Mr. Fassihi. Today (which was actually 5am to the “normal” people) I was reading my feeds that I encountered a post by him that was an ad for a game programmer, probably for next installments of the great dragon slayer, Garshasp. Since I’m a night owl and at these times my mind is hitting pedal to the metal, I read something between the lines of his invaluable post.

He is basically listing perks and feats that he requires a game developer to have, and it is a very interesting list to me, as I worked side by side by him and the team and faced each of them being as vital as any game developer out of his bedroom, can think of.

Why I’m writing about it is that you can actually, if you have his #13 perk, read this post in reverse and look at it from another point of view that these are the skills that you will require (and believe me, you DO) to work in a game development environment, I don’t spoil them and leave them to you to read them for yourself but take a good look at the last paragraph, knowing C++ or so, as one would think is primary, is optional. Because if you have those perks, you can learn C++ or whatever that is needed, in a glance. Bad things happen when one has C++ and such knowledge but doesn’t have those perks, so his talent and experience would be NO good, no good at all, for the project or even the team.

As he mentions, they are a rare bread, they are.

Very wise.

Waiting for someone or something to show me the way …

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

– First verse of “Time”, by Pink Floyd.

That sums up a big chunk of my life. All of these years that I remember having control over my actions, I was searching. Searching for a true master, a master in all things. Someone who I could get lessons from, a wise one. Through the years I was honored to meet a very few people who were fitting in my definition of “master” but I don’t know if they were not it or I was not a good student that finally it didn’t work out.

I don’t want to, and see no reason to, go through the list and names of the ones that I seek as one. I would like to think that I was not a good student and god/universe/karma/whatever already presented me with different masters and I was not ready/good enough for them.

And no one knows how I need a master … a true one … someone who got it all figured out …

اینگونه

بزرگ شدنم را،
مدیون غروب‌های جمعه‌ای هستم
که به تنهایی گذرانده‌ام؛
حس وحی دارد
..