My free time is falling into a pattern lately, one I’m not sure how to get out of. The more I think about it, the more I realize there may not be an exit: this patter is a result of the life and career I’ve chosen, and I am now utterly doomed.

I don’t have a lot of time for playing games. Sure, there’s the daily rides on the Q to and from work with Professor Layton and the Curious Village for company on the DS, but the little bit of time I’m home Monday through Friday usually finds itself split between little things like eating, sleeping, actually seeing the girlfriend and writing. It’s okay, I tell myself, there’s always the weekend. Only then the weekend, that little oasis of free time, arrives, and I have no idea what I want to play.

And it’s not like I’m hurting for options. I own many, many games, spread across six platforms (seven, counting the computer and the near-limitless possibilities it opens up), many of which I’ve yet to beat and a few I’ve owned for months and haven’t even tried yet. Others I’ve dabbled with, playing for maybe an hour or so without ever going back. It’s not their fault, not really – I’m just looking for something they don’t offer. Not that I know what that something is, of course. Some amorphous quality, some random handful of gameplay elements that, when combined just so, will produce the experience I’m after. Not exactly the sort of thing you’re going to find on the back of a box at GameStop, yeah?

This is hardly a new thing with me. I go through similar phases with music, comics, movies, etc. – the stuff I have just isn’t doing it any more, and I need some shiny new thing to appear and hit all the necessary buttons. Something always turns up: some amazing new record or the exactly right song about girls, a new volume of Scott Pilgrim or a properly dumb movie like B13 to scratch the itch for something new for a while. The same is usually true for games: last Fall was particularly good for my raccoon-like personality, with a bounty of games doing new or otherwise outstanding things for my entertainment. Only now I’ve played (and mostly finished) them, and in hindsight have come to realize something: it’s not the same. With music, comics, and all of that, it usually doesn’t take much to satisfy me for a while. With games, though, the effect isn’t nearly as pure – there’s almost always a bit of lingering frustration a bit here or there that could have been shored up more, some second-guessing of design decisions or wondering what a certain part would be like if they done it a little differently instead. And it’s all my fault.

Oh, I didn’t cop to it at first, deciding instead to blame the traditional post-Xmas shallow release schedule. Only that hasn’t been the case at all – since the start of the year Burnout Paradise, No More Heroes, Endless Ocean, the new Advance Wars and the aforementioned Professor Layton have all been released, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl arrives this Sunday. It wasn’t until this past weekend, while going back to play the original Halo of all things that I let the full truth of it hit me – by entering the games industry and becoming a designer, I had damned myself to never fully enjoy a game again. Oh, I still dearly love them, and love playing them, but the more I learn and the further I progress, the more I can’t help but see the inner workings of any game* I play. It’s like knowing how sausages are made and never being able to look at the things the same way again.

But maybe that’s okay. Game Design idol and hero of the people Warren Spector has written at length about his experience with the same frustrations, and how he turns them into fuel for his creative process. Instead of just griping, he takes the “why didn’t they do this instead of that?” moment and, y’know, makes a game what this happens instead of that. It’s a driving force I’ve noticed in my own design processes (and part of that whole “paths not taken” thing from yesterday’s post) – so many of the things I try to accomplish on a given project come form wanting a more elegant solution to a problem I had with another game. It might not be apparent to anybody but me, but a lot of the games I’ve worked on (and particularly the ones I’m working on now that I can’t so much talk about here) include a bunch of little touches like that, attempts at righting some wrong encountered elsewhere. While part of it no doubt comes from some sort of petty sense of pride at solving someone else’s problems, a lot of it is just wanting something better.

In a piece for The Escapist, Brenda Brathwaite has a quote from designer Ian Schreiber where he not only admits to enjoying designing games more than playing them, but suggests it might be a defining characteristic of good designers. I can’t help but agree – while I think a love of playing games is important to the job, and playing as many games as possible is a vital way for designers to keep adding to their personal knowledge base, I think you have to love making the things more. As Brathwaite points out in her article, game design is not only a game unto itself, in many ways it’s a more satisfying experience than sitting down with a controller in your hand. In the same way that stressing over work, bills, family, and life in general is one of the many things that makes us long for a good game to act as an interactive release valve, frustration with games themselves is one of the things that pushes me into making them. If that something I want from games doesn’t exist, if I can’t even say plainly what is is, then I’m just going to have to build it; piece by piece, solution by solution, a little at a time over the course of everything I work on. All in all, there are worse dooms.

*Other than Portal, that is. I’m perfectly happy believing it’s made of magic.

Filed under: talk about games, thinking outloud