intruder:

As for me the reasons arent as profound as the 2 first poster.

No seriously, I have been playing video games since my early age in the begining of the '80 when my dad first brought a C=64 into the house.  I got very interested in learning how to program so I can make something move on the screen and hear some sound out of the TV speaker.  I first learned basic, but I find quickly that this was limited in what I wanted to achieve.  I then learn 6502/6510 assembly and start to do my first intros/demos in 1988-1989 then join up the demo scene.

Holy crumbs, have you been reading my diary?!  I started out with the VIC-20 and moved to C=64, Amiga, then PC.  What ever happened to the good old lightpens and 180k disk drives?!

For me, it's about the shear bloody unconfined joy of hitting F5 and it actually does what you want it to!  I also enjoy making those difficult choices - you know the ones, like "well I could put that in...but would it fit?"  And for me there's that transitional period between "I can play this game the way I want to" and "EVERYONE can play this game the way I want to" - that's real achievement for me.  And the fact that I get to express myself visually, musically and technically is great.  My wife's a graphic artist and she's done 90% of the artwork in my Carrum game so it was really nice to be the boss in the house for a while ;0)

The whole creative buzz is great....not so keen to 6-hour debug sessions and jackhammer testing but hey, rough with the smooth and all that. 

Regards,
Mike

That one is one I know for sure - the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I'm not going for another Left Behind here, but rather, having every game give glory to God, and embody His principles through the story or gameplay.

For example, I'm thinking of doing a tetherball game - not too sure of the story yet, but I'm feeling very slapstick. Though it might not directly preach the Gospel, I'm going to put in a good and simple moral about sportsmanship and honor. That's sort of my plan - a bunch of really fun games that have deeper connotations thrown into the characters, gameplay, and story (though I have a dream about doing a huge RPG epic.... down the road)

I dunno. That's my reason!

I find games that try to force a morality lesson to be a major turn off and generally not fun at all. It seems that people trying to teach through a game lose focus of why people play games in the first place - to have fun. Games can be art, definitely, but it's important to remember that they're entertainment first. Anything that distracts or detracts from that goal is going to hurt the game itself.

Pfhoenix:

I find games that try to force a morality lesson to be a major turn off and generally not fun at all. It seems that people trying to teach through a game lose focus of why people play games in the first place - to have fun. Games can be art, definitely, but it's important to remember that they're entertainment first. Anything that distracts or detracts from that goal is going to hurt the game itself.

Any game that has a story will probably have character development, and any story with character development will deal with moral and ethical cause and effect. It doesn't have to be overt, and usually isn't. But it's almost always there. It's storytelling 101, in fact.

Also, you're making a pretty broad generalisation that the kind of games you like are the kind of games everyone likes.

How we define "having fun" will be different for everyone. Not everyone requires a game to fit your definition in order to enjoy it.

@DrMistry

Noooo, but I know why... you must be... yes my long lost EVIL twin brother noooooooooooooo ;-).  Probably we arond the same age and we start on computer in the begining of the micro-computing era.  Those were the pioneering age and what is for me the golden age.  They were so many different platform (hardware and software).  Also to make game it was relatively simple, alot of 1 man team, now it is large teams of programmers/artists with budget in the millions.

Yah those floppy disk that you had to flip side to go read the other side ;-) and punch a little hole on the side if you wanted to use the second side hehe!

Fred

faultymoose:

Any game that has a story will probably have character development, and any story with character development will deal with moral and ethical cause and effect. It doesn't have to be overt, and usually isn't. But it's almost always there. It's storytelling 101, in fact.

Also, you're making a pretty broad generalisation that the kind of games you like are the kind of games everyone likes.

How we define "having fun" will be different for everyone. Not everyone requires a game to fit your definition in order to enjoy it.

Actually, I very clearly said "I find", not "Everyone knows". Clearly, storytelling of any sort involves character development, which presents moral choices made by the characters, and by proxy, representing a message of some sort from teller to audience. However, there is a very clear difference between presenting a character making choices in a sensible/reasonably possible scenario, where the choices are ones the player could easily identify with, contrasted with characters in contrived situations being artificially forced to make choices that leave the players wondering just what the hell the developers were thinking.

Pfhoenix:

faultymoose:

Any game that has a story will probably have character development, and any story with character development will deal with moral and ethical cause and effect. It doesn't have to be overt, and usually isn't. But it's almost always there. It's storytelling 101, in fact.

Also, you're making a pretty broad generalisation that the kind of games you like are the kind of games everyone likes.

How we define "having fun" will be different for everyone. Not everyone requires a game to fit your definition in order to enjoy it.

Actually, I very clearly said "I find", not "Everyone knows". Clearly, storytelling of any sort involves character development, which presents moral choices made by the characters, and by proxy, representing a message of some sort from teller to audience. However, there is a very clear difference between presenting a character making choices in a sensible/reasonably possible scenario, where the choices are ones the player could easily identify with, contrasted with characters in contrived situations being artificially forced to make choices that leave the players wondering just what the hell the developers were thinking.

Fair enough, but how do you define that difference? Because no doubt, again, we'd define it differently.

It seems to me (ie. I think) that your original post was a little bit of knee-jerk in response to someone who was expressing interest in games focused on their religious beliefs. I'd argue that regardless of how contrived you or I might think such moral plays might be, there is an audience for them.

Storytelling is contrived by its very nature, and unless we're talking a game based on the life of everyday Bob, "sensible/reasonably possible" scenarios aren't going to present themselves very often. I can't say I found the choice to save or kill genetically modified little girls in the bowels of a decaying sunken city overrun by psychotic, drug induced mutants as particularly 'sensible'. Nor did I find any of the scenarios in Mass Effect particularly reasonable, but I still engaged with the moral choices made throughout the game.

Perhaps you could provide an example of the kind of artificially forced choices that you're talking about? I've been trying to think of a game that felt particularly overtly contrived, but I'm coming up short. Maybe Max Payne? I quite enjoyed the series, but the narratives were a little cliched (perhaps deliberately, to maintain the film noir essence).

The only time I've ever been annoyed by moral choices in a game is when the game presents me with a selection of choices which I do not wish to make. Deus Ex 2 was full of these limited selections, so that no matter which path I chose, I felt mild distaste that I'd been forced into that perception of self. Perhaps this was the contrivance you're talking about, because I walked away from the game just feeling that it was annoying - I didn't come away with some deeper understanding of myself, nor any respect for the Wikipedia-raid style of storytelling (let's just grab whatever sounds cool and nihilistic and suitably deep and write a story about it).

Still, I'm sure some people loved it. It rated well.

This is an awesome thread.  I just thought I start with that.  I looked up Jonathan Blow's keynote and watched the thing in parts over the course of today.  I think the important thing here is that we are not coming up with the best answers (I'm not sure they are either better/worse, but certainly different), the important thing is that we are on to the right question, and we are asking it.  Of ourselves, of others.  And we should continue to do so.

In my intro to communication class we learned something (I forgot the quoter, but if yall are interested I could try to look it up) "Words don't mean anything.  People do."
I would extend this logic to technology/games/computers/controllers/BluRays/DVDs/Books/Stories/etc don't mean anything, yet people still do.  By this theory, the people are what matters.  I have to agree, the more I grow the more I love people (I mean this in a sense of agape, unconditional love).  Ed Catmull said at his Keynote at Siggraph this past year that when asked "What matters more to your company, a great idea or great people working?"  Too many people gave the wrong answer or weren't able to answer at all.  It should always be the people first.  The people of your dev team, company, audience, fans, consumers, family, friends, critics, whomever.  People are the most important.  On that note, I suppose there's a certain amount of meaning that is applied to every game, even the "just for fun" "time wasters" like Tetris.  I agree that it's 100% okay to make a game just to entertain.  But there are people involved in the code, the playing and often the meta-gaming of sharing scores with a friend and competing.  So the enabling of people to share experiences that I facilitate as a developer is something that motivates me.(we don't create the full experience of the player, they'll always learn to do something we didn't intend).

That's all a more recent thing, some previous motivations were that game dev was a natural marraige of just about everything I enjoyed in life: art, science/math, competition/sport, socialization with certain groups (I'm an introvert and care more about a few great relationships than many on the surface).

Also, gaming and video gaming moreso is so ingrained in culture, in my identity, my life, my generation that it's kinda like being the leader of the Spartan army: doing what you were made/raised to do.

Like others of you, I feel a certain call from God to make games that glorify Him.  I need not force my religion on anyone...in fact I rarely force it on myself these days, hence the reason I attend church so seldom.  I have an awesome personal relationship with the creator of the Universe and to me that's enough.  But he wants me to follow my passions in life, and this is one of the big ones.  I think that without beating people over the head with the bible, I can just be who I am and let that be part of my games, and thus influence people to love God and others like I do.  In a somewhat related, or entirely different motivation, I think that game designers, and now maybe just simply indie game designers like us are the Rock Stars of this age.  Being a Rock Star is less about the music and more about the attitude and the state of being.  By this I mean that what makes someone a RockStar is that they have courage and folly to understand the conventions of society and break the rules because they can say F#%^ it, I'm going to be myself even if I'm not like what everyone wants me to be.  You may wonder how I'm about to tie dropping F-bombs back to God.  Oddly enough God loves us as we are so we can say F--- it, I'm gonna be me! Also, Jesus is in many ways one of the first historically documented RockStars.  Sounds silly, but he did things his own way.  He was Jewish, but he's like screw the Jewish law, my dad is GOD!  The thing I love most about all these people actual rockstars, Jesus, game designers...is that we all have broken away from the bloated unhelpful systems of society "breaking the law" almost always in order to uphold the values and protect the people that those laws were originally designed to do that.  Life hackers if you will...we break the code and bend it to the will of what is beneficial to people.

One last thing:  Play is imperative.  Science has proven that many animals play and that they would have no reason to play if it weren't beneficial to their survival and livelihoods.  That's why even when it's mindless fun, it's still meaningful and beneficial to society.  I should differentiate that beneficial is the goal here, not the mantra our society in the US is addicted to "You must be productive all the time."  That doesn't even make sense.  What you do should always be beneficial though, and you can easily live within that constraint.  We will all agree that sleep is not productive.  But it is beneficial.  It refreshes the mind and body for the next day.  So killing time isn't ever productive, but it can be beneficial, and to that end, play is always beneficial.  It relieves stress, it gives you something to do, and heck, you may learn something from it.  Going back to the science, many animals play in ways that may benefit them later in life.  Consider a domestic cat, it plays with a toy mouse and sorts through ways of stalking, hunting, killing and eating said mouse bye enacting them with a toy.  If released into the wild the cat will have algorithms for successfully hunting for food, which in turn keeps it alive.  We too can learn great things from a game that allows us to enact situations in a controlled, low risk environment.

I really like your question, and this question is important to ask yourself, when things looks bad. This question should also make you go on, and ensure you're doing what you want and like.

The reasons I make games, is mainly an ego thing.
I want to be better to C# and I need to explore new areas where I can use C#, so XNA is a great opportunity for me to do this.

The other reason, is that I want people to play and enjoy something I've created. If it's a picture, website or a game, as it is in this case, I want them to enjoy what I've made - and get some credit for my work.

Yes so I'm basically making myself happy by making games. But that's fine with me.

I make games because it's fun, you get to play games for free, and it tests my programming skills skillz.

Three reasons:

1. I have ideas and stories in my head I would like to tell, and believe people would like to hear. Every other gamer I have talked to has at least been interested in them, so why not give it a shot.

2. I am dissatisfied with the current state of the games industry. I believe they keep making games more and more complex and realistic at the cost of having fun. Having a game be fun should be the top priority of any game company. Too many have lost sight of this in the face of "telling a story" or "super realistic graphical food chewing engine 9.xxx!". It has to be fun, period.

3. I would love to work for a company like Microsoft as a game lead but I dont have the proper degree name.  I am sure they wouldnt even interview me when they see my resume of non game related items. In other words industry isolationism leading to a chicken and egg problem. Dont get me wrong, I have been making simple games since the Qbasic days, and the opportunity to make your own game has never been better. Especially since Microsoft has taken the initiative with XNA, Creators Club, and Xbox/PC portability. I am deeply grateful to them to provide so much for so little. More power to them.

Walkure:

3. I would love to work for a company like microsoft as a game lead but I dont have the proper degree name.  I am sure they wouldnt even interview me when they see my resume of non game related items. In other words industry isolationism leading to a chicken and egg problem. Dont get me wrong, I have been making simple games since the Qbasic days, and the opportunity to make your own game has never been better. Escpecially since Microsoft has taken the initiative with XNA, Creators Club, and Xbox/PC portability. I am deeply grateful to them to provide so for so little. More power to them.

This isn't a unique issue - any industry that requires technical laborers suffers from this. Games, however, have a somewhat unique advantage that you can take any component of game creation and work on it on your own, building up presentable and independent experience. So, while some companies may say "show us what games you have shipped", you can always show them a portfolio of independent work and get started that way, in the absence of professional experience. The thing with XBLCG is - finishing a CG project all the way through counts as real game accomplishment experience if done right. I can't think of any other avenue to professional game programming that's as readily accessible as XBLCG, aside from simply making your own PC game and trying to publish/distribute it yourself.

The idea that "video games are for entertainment, not messages" is kind of a strange one to me.  I mean, you could, if you really wanted to, say that about any art form, right?  You could say, people go to the theatre to be entertained, so why make a movie about the human condition?  You can make way more money making a superhero movie than you can making Requiem For A Dream, so shouldn't we just stick to superhero movies?  But people do make those more serious kinds of movies, because human beings need more than just entertainment.  Personally, and I know I'm not the only one, I find the idea of a society in which entertainment is all that people care about to be frightening.  I think what we're really looking for out of art is not entertainment, but experiences.  But not all experiences necessarily need to be "fun" to be worthwhile.

I mean, I really like hardcore punk, bands like Fugazi, Refused, etc.  And those are bands with intensely political messages.  Should we say to them, "You're losing sight of why people listen to music, man!  Just be entertainers!"  No, of course not.  So why do people feel the need to say that to video game designers?  Why can't games be every bit as politically, morally, emotionally, or socially driven as any other art form?  I'm not saying that all games need to be "serious" - I've always loved playing hockey games, for instance - but to say that there isn't room for serious games, or that people who want to make them are "losing sight" or something like that, I find that to be insulting both to myself as a designer and to the potential of video games.

I'm not sure who said "video games are for entertainment, not messages". Video games are entertainment, regardless. Some have messages, some do not. A game that tries to send messages but isn't entertaining to play will ultimately fail to be profitable (thus providing a negative pressure on developers to do such again). Games that try to be both entertaining and message-filled have historically done well for themselves when the developer has meshed the two intents where one doesn't override the other (i.e. different people end up liking different things about the game, but can agree that the game is overall good just the same).

Your mistake is in failing to recognize that the fact that you enjoy political messages makes you favor entertainment that has such. Different people like different things - it's one of the wonderful facts of life. Some people don't want morality lessons in their entertainment, while others don't consider it quality entertainment without one. It is, all of it, entertainment just the same, however.

Actually, I think we're pretty much in agreement.  I was replying more to the general tone of your argument, but I've definitely heard people say that video games should not have political messages, period.  My point was exactly what you said in your last paragraph - that games with messages and games that are just for fun should co-exist.

Adam Bishop:

Actually, I think we're pretty much in agreement.  I was replying more to the general tone of your argument, but I've definitely heard people say that video games should not have political messages, period.  My point was exactly what you said in your last paragraph - that games with messages and games that are just for fun should co-exist.

I think that attitude is disappearing. Given the rapid advancement of this industry, it could almost be considered archaic. The concept of games as a "toy" is being challenged constantly. I assume you all saw the GTA4 DLC featuring full-frontal male nudity? As an Australian, I'm witnessing the government debate over an R rating for games. I'm sure I read somewhere that the 'average' gamer is a 30 year old male? At any rate, ten years ago games were for geeks, but now a console is considered a common part of the household entertainment center.

As a side note, having worked in both film and games, I see a huge disparity between the perception of people in both fields as to what the other requires regarding skillsets, time, and quality. Next gen AAA games take as much skill and talent to produce as any feature film, but the funding and attitudes do not recognise that, in my experience.

I read a review of Max Payne (the film) and it was - arguably rightfully - not a great review. But in it, the reviewer said "No one has ever cried for a video game character". I found that an incredibly ignorant and patronising attitude. I've cried plenty - ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy 7 (SHUT UP!) just to name a few.

I think the thing that's holding games back from becoming as respected as film or literature as storytelling devices is a combination of audience and production. Main stream non-gamers, which make up the vast majority of the gaming industry now (THANKS MICROSOFT! lol ;)) share the 'games as toys' attitude and don't spend their money on anything which doesn't feature eye popping explosions and dismemberment, and production is out to make money, so they make these kinds of games. On the same token, the games industry (in my experience) is predominantly staffed by people with similar attitudes, who have no interest in telling a great story, only making pretty stuff explode in a pretty way, and I think this goes back to the attitudes between film and games - if you want to have high ideals about what you do, you work in film. If you want to "LOL ***" everyone, you work in games. I acknowledge that this is a MASSIVE generalisation, but I can say that it is true in my experience. I'm sure others have different stories to tell.

I don't usually make games, I usually write utilities that help me but are of new use to anyone else. A case in point being a Java program I wrote to keep track of non-standard scoring in some darts game, and a program to calculate sums of prime factors.

The game I'm working on now started off as a bit of a joke during a long train journey but turned into an "actually, this might work" chat. So my motivation for this project is to see if it will work. No message, it's just something I like and hopefully some others may like too. Kind of like a (hopefully) less pretentious version of Ars gratia artis

Some people like working on hot rods.
Some people like woodworking.
I like building video games.

It's my virtual toolkit that I can build anything with. Making money would be nice, but it's not a requirement. My games will be ready when they are ready. I do get a kick out of reading the threads where people released a piece of crap game / screen saver / love toy (I know there are some good ones. I'm not referring to those), and then panic daily over not knowing sales numbers.

Reason #1: I love creating virtual worlds, and then playing in them.

I like to create things, software is the most flexible creation tool out there and games are the most visible way to demonstrate that creativity.

Zazu Yen:

Reason #1: I love creating virtual worlds, and then playing in them.

Reason #2: I love programming challenges and the challenges you face making games are unlike any other programming job. Think about it, writing a game you deal with AI, physics, path finding, 3D spatiality, audio/video streaming, shaders, event scripting, collision detection... just to name a few. You also have to come up with assets such as 2D art, 3D models (with animations), textures, music, sound effects etc. etc. 

Web service programming is dull, dull, dull comparatively.

Yes, but it can more than pay the bills and give you more free time to spend on creating your own game than if you were working for a video game company.

RetroGamer79:

Zazu Yen:

...

Web service programming is dull, dull, dull comparatively.

Yes, but it can more than pay the bills and give you more free time to spend on creating your own game than if you were working for a video game company.

Here's some additional reasons I make games, and I believe there's a growing market here:

• I'm now 30 and have 2 kids, which means:
• I don't have time to play 80-100 hour games
• It took me over a year to finish Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. 100 hours of gameplay at 2 hours a week = about a year.
• Control schemes have gotten much more complex. If I'm only playing a game for 2-4 hours per week, then I usually have about a 20-30 minute period of time where I have to get reacquainted with the control scheme. That can be 25% of my game time.
• If I play games like Halo online, I get pounded because I don't have time to memorize maps, serve in clans, etc.
• I've started breaking out my Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64 more and more, because I like being able to sit down and accomplish something in a short period of time.
• I like to be able to play games with or in front of my kids, but it's rare now days that a decent game comes out that is not full of sex and extreme violence.

There's been a lot of talk over the last 10 years about how gamers are growing up and need more adult content and bigger games. Well, some of us are getting older, are having kids, and our needs are changing once again. Pretty soon I'll be an old man in a nursing home who can only push one button, but I'll still want to play decent games though. I think there are a lot of people in similar positions as me that want well made games that are shorter and easier to pick up in a limited time span and that are geared towards adults, but that they can still have on in front of their kids. I think Community Games is the perfect environment to make that happen.

To put it simply, programming is like a really advanced version of LEGO to me.

I program games because it's a lot more interesting than graphing software.