Ever since I watched The Story of Missile Command, a discussion on the conception of Dave Theurer as Dave Theurer sees Missile Command, I’ve noticed something. Nobody else has a story like Dave Theurer has a story about his games. I have not heard of the person who had nightmares, who ached over conceiving an idea both nightmarish and impossible. In some sense, games are about their creators, and perhaps the reason so many games seem so creatively bankrupt is because those games are a pale reflection. Games, such as they are, no longer reflect the creator, but the afterglow of a creation. In some sense, the problem is games being too public.
Before the larger corporate atmosphere emerged, a game could not be tested in the same manner games are tested now. No game ran the gauntlet of quality assurance and focus testing. Certainly, there was always an instance of a test, of an experiment to try and gauge interest, but there was no E3. There was no ESRB. There was no Nintendo Seal of Quality. Games were not yet a process, but an expression. Honest and often exorbitant, but not so much about appeasing an audience, the producers, the CEOs, the corporate concept of an audience, the focus testers, the person down the street. The expressions may not have necessarily been pure, as creators must work in teams to necessitate creation of the medium, but they were true discourse. The overly tested is a result of the creation of the network.
The more connected we are, the less honest a work can be. There are benefits to such connectivity, such as the possibility of funding projects which are creations of passion, but once these are funded, they are also projects of audience. They are now, in some sense, owned by the public, not the makers. The result forces some degree of bending towards expectations about what a game should be and is often dishonest about the game itself as a result. Again, no discourse is ever entirely pure, and in some sense, any creation released to the world is corrupted by expectation.
At the end of the public journey, a piece emerges, a work to be considered. But once it’s in the world, it’s clothed in all its imperial majesty, rather than a modest assessment of a modest goal. To make an experience true to the self. The longer a creation exists in the public eye, the more warped the concept is often forced to become, burdened by expectation, put through the trenches of what it should look like if you’re crafting, what it should look like if you’re exploring, what an experience should be not for the creator, but for the end-user. It is little wonder that the developer has some disdain for the end-user, not because they believe the end-user corrupts the creation, but because the end-user forces a certain amount of dishonesty towards it.