Mind Your Own Business

With this article I start a series about my thoughts on the media business. media meaning everything which enables people to communicate or interact with themselves through culture technologies. In the first article I'll let loose some thoughts on the gaming industry and my own history.

Recap: I work now for more or less about eight years in some sort of a technology/media related kind of business. I studied multimedia art and production and had been learning autodidact in that direction since I got my hands on a Commodore PET when I was eight years old. I've always been fascinated by the potential of computers being a creative tool. creative not only meaning the output of your work but also the way you work.

In the early 90ies I became a big fan of the then popular computer games like Ron Gilbert's Monkey Island and Richard Garriott's Ultima series, just to name a few. It became my dream to work with a small development team with a mastermind games designer like Peter Molyneux or the before mentioned. The computer games business seemed to me more like a creative playground than an industry, and I mean that in a positive way.

Still with this goal in mind I started studying. But from '98 onwards I became more and more disillusioned. Producing computer games turned into a real business, an industry. EA swallowed my heroes like Origin and Bullfrog. LucasArts dumped adventure games (with Grim Fandango as last man standing) and focused on a movie franchise (like many others). Of course, all this seems good from a business point of view. But what happened to game designers? They left. Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer from LucasArts. Richard Garriott and Chris Roberts from Origin/EA. Peter Molyneux from Bullfrog/EA. Warren Spector from so many companies I cannot remember. Certainly everyone of those has his own story and was tied to this certain companies in different ways and the circumstances under which they left varied. But I think what they have in common is that they were confronted with changing working environments where their creative minds and search for new ideas where no longer needed (or affordable). You don't need a Tim Schafer to create FIFA 2000.

Watching this progress I lost confidence and motivation. So a few things happened which got me on another track (still don't know if it's the right one). I (re)started doing short movies and animation. I designed web pages and (re)started programming. I did 3d visualizations for dubious province companies. I even made an e-card for a political party I do not support, but don't tell anyone. So while doing some stuff worth mentioning and lots of crap I didn't stop following the developments in the gaming industry.

I must confess that I've never been "in" the gaming industry but apart from that I recognize parallels between my own efforts and those of those "lost designers". I've never been employed by someone, because I thought I couldn't stand a Monday to Friday 8-to-5 schedule working for someone else. Of course that didn't stop me from working sixteen to eighteen hours a day for someone as a freelancer. There always was that kind of feeling of freedom being self-employed. Haha.

But look, I'm still self-employed, I'm still doing my own projects. And I'm still looking forward. And although I'm as far as I could possiblely be from the business I once wanted to spend my working life in, I still see hope. Even now that the gaming industry turned out to be that big (and McKinsey-like), there's still hope for small independet developers. There's even an utopia in my head: That somehow things in the gaming industry will develop like they did in the movie business, so that there's room both for the big studios and for small art-house-like developers. Reading that, don't think I like how the movie business runs. I'm just an optimistic pessimist.