Anonymous asked: What are your ultimate goals both with regard to the industry of video gaming and your penchant for community projects?
I don’t have any goals for the industry at large, just an interest in seeing more games being made! I would, however, like to see more games that are made for the purpose of personal expression, or as exploration of a theme or some quirk of programming in a particular language or for a particular machine. Right now, even in many independent games, and even in many games given away freely, decisions are made on a sort of commercial basis — if not what sells, then what’s popular right now or what’s going to generate a lot of hits to this or that website. Contrast this to about 25-30 years ago, when you saw a lot of stuff like Defender, Missile Command, Centipede, Wizardry, Tempest — even as commercial releases (and very successful ones, at that), these were all, perhaps as a side effect of the limitations of digital games at the time, exploring the hardware they were made for, exploring themes and telling stories through their mechanics, and, especially in the case of Missile Command, expressing a genuine reaction to the world in which the authors lived.
As far as community projects are concerned, I’d like to see games used as a medium of expression in people who are generally marginalized, because, in a way that writing, photography, music and cinema cannot, games allow others to experience specific situations and react to them in a very real way, even in games that don’t at all resemble the real world graphically. In sharing these experiences, people from wildly different backgrounds can share a common understanding of a situation, and also pull some insight from seeing the different ways people may react to a situation.
With the recent revelation of the Civil Rights photographer Ernest Withers as a paid FBI informant, my first thought was the question, “how could it have felt for him, to have become a part of all those people’s lives and such a trusted figure — a journalist of the Civil Rights movement — while secretly sharing their secrets with a government that condoned the treatment of African Americans — including himself — as second class citizens?” Withers isn’t around to tell us anymore, and he took his secret with him to his grave. Even if he’d written everything out in a tell-all book illustrated with historic photo prints that shot to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List, I still wouldn’t have a satisfactory answer to that question. Setting up a game as a loose approximation of the rules of the society he lived in, and starting players off in a situation akin to what his might’ve been when the FBI first contacted him would be the best way to share his experience with the world.
These are just a few thoughts, so bear with me if they seem scattered. This is a really good question!
