Last week I talked about why I play video games. Video games have always been such a major hobby in my life that separating the “why” from the habit proved to be far more difficult than I anticipated when I sat down to write the article. Now, I would like to talk about why I design and develop video games as opposed to leaving the playing of video games as a hobby and nothing more.

When I was around twelve or thirteen years old I knew I wanted to make games when I “grew up.” It was just something I knew I wanted to do. And then when I got to college and surrounded myself with a more general type of engineer (I started my education at the University of Michigan as a Computer Science major in the School of Engineering). I felt so far out of my element that after two semesters as a CS student I knew that I wasn’t in the right field; I transferred to UM’s Literature, Science, and the Arts college and started my educational track into English, Creative Writing, and Secondary Education. I stayed on that path for a while but still ended up as a game developer.

The main reason I ended up as a game developer despite kind of wandering off of the path for a bit (though I don’t actually feel that’s what I did) is because games have always just been part of who I am. I grew up in a sort of gaming culture; played games, read gaming magazines, got involved in game and mod communities when I got aninternet connection, and I got started in game development and the independent game development scene when I fourteen. Regardless of what I was doing in “real life” at any point, there has always been some game that I was playing at the time. Despite not being around as an adult to participate in the garage game development days, I have grown up with games and seen them evolve over the last twenty-some years. I still vividly remember my first time playing Super Mario Bros. on an NES in my grandparents’ basement back when I was three or four years old and some of my favorite childhood memories are attached to the games I’ve played at different times in my life.

That feeling of growing up with the game industry is simply amazing. I have feelings of both fond nostalgia and present attachment to things that occur in the industry, advancements in game design, new technology being put to use in the latest games, and so on. More than that, the game industry is a young industry and video games are a young medium and now seems to me like one of the most exciting times to be in game development. The music industry has been around for what feels like an eternity and is so closely intertwined with modern life and culture that doing something completely new and innovative can be impossible (this is my way of justifying how completely musically inept I am). Film is younger than music — and sort of an off-shoot of theater which has been around since classical antiquity (or earlier in ancient Egypt, though it wasn’t quite considered an art forum until antiquity) — but a number of film and directorial practices are largely standard fare by now with an emphasis on directorial style more than any particularly experimental or new technical achievements.

I’m not a film or music buff, so I’m sure the previous descriptions are so completely arguable that I’ll regret saying them, but they serve as a great comparison for the current state of video games. The video game industry is in an amazing state right now; development teams, budgets, and expectations are all at an interesting place (which I feel may see a bit of a decline given the economy and generally overly ambitious sales expectations) where graphics in video games are not necessarily as important as they have been over the last decade or so. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 look like they’ll remain for a few more years, as a conservative estimate, and the importance of a game’s console release right now makes the use of a fixed technological target more important than adapting to the constantly changing hardware of the PC market. Recently, it feels like the actual mechanics, storytelling, and design of games are soaking up the spotlights and that’s a tremendously interesting thing for one primary reason: there is a lot of room for pure innovation and originality in the realm of game design.

The benefit of working within a young industry is the freedom to be creative in ways that no one has seen or done before. And even if a game idea isn’t new, the details of the idea’s implementation are completely free-form. Video games have traditionally had pretty easily-identifiable genres: first-person shooters, third-person action/adventure, puzzle, platformer, sports, and so on, but recently there have been a flood of major game releases that are incredibly creative. The work of thatgamecompany with Flower (and fl0w) is super clever. The same holds true with Number-None’s Braid and Tale of Tales’ The Path. None of these games can be easily categorized and instead must be explained through virtue of their manipulation of player expectations, story-telling, and emotional resonance.

The game industry is also filled with some of the greatest and most genuine people I’ve ever come in contact with. In my limited exposure to the game industry as a whole I have yet to meet or talk to any game developer with a prima donna complex or “larger than life” mentality. Game developers are all hard-working individuals from an absolutely insane variety of backgrounds and fill roles like artists, engineers, writers, managers, or a combination of any of those. Some of the people I’d consider my best friends are self-taught, self-motivated developers that I met through GameDev.net almost ten years ago. The one thing I’d really love to start seeing is more women getting into the game development industry to offset what is still a predominately-male industry.

So why do I make games? I make games because it’s one of the only industries that’s still young enough to allow everyone within it room to do truly unique work. And the fact that I’m in an industry where I can make my own unique mark on a medium that I first fell in love with more than twenty years ago with the kind of people that I love talking to a daily basis in person, on forums, on Twitter, or via e-mail is pretty rad.