06.12.07

Why Do You Make Games?

Posted in Thoughts at 12:05 pm by Jordi Fita

If you read any game development forums you will see that there are countless people wanting to get into the development of computer games. Have you ever wandered why there is so many people wanting to start writing games?

I’ve met people in the past that thought that making games is “cool” because, hey, games are cool!! They quickly believed that they could do the next Quake and get rich and famous (at that time MMORPGs were not so widely known, but I guess if I met them today they would believe that they could make the new WoW). They learned a cruel truth: developing a game is very hard work.

Still there are a lot of people that resists the temptation of giving up, put a lot of effort and makes beautiful games. Why is this? What do these people have that makes them spend a lot of time in front of a computer in order to have little creatures move around the screen? Surely there are a lot of reasons, but my guess is that the top reasons is a passionate love for games.

Now, there is a little dirty secret of mine: although I do love making games, I do not like to play them that much. All games, not only my games ;-). Then why I love making games? Because I like a lot watching others playing games! Yes, it is weird, but I like it.

Here is a little story: At early stages of Amoebax’s development (we didn’t released any version yet) I used to met a person on the train to home. Not a friend, but someone that was very pleasant to talk about almost everything. One day she discovered that we were doing a game, because I bought my GP2X to show how well the game were running on it to Ferran, one of the project’s contributors. From that day on almost every day she spent the whole trip playing the game, sometimes giving some funny comments about the amoebas’ faces, others moving the console when the falling amoebas were going to step on a bad place (a curious instinct, as if moving the console would affect the amoeba’s position…).

While she was playing at it I just felt an extreme happiness because she was playing my game, and better yet she was having fun with it. I think the most accurate way to put it in words is by using the japanese sentence: “shiawase ga afuredasu” (roughtly “the happiness overflew“ if my japanese is not so bad). I remember thinking: “Now, I understand why I spent all this time making it…”.

So, it seems that my motivation in making games is just to see my users playing it and most of all having fun with them. And I feel good because I know that the effort I put in making it was worth, even if it was only for another person to have fun for thirty minutes.

If you make games, what is your motivation in doing so?

Permalink