This book is one of the best I have ever read on the art of making games.
I like books that permit me to create my frameworks easily. This is one of those. Multiple authors so that you don’t get the vision of just one person. And it’s great because every chapter brings insight, practical examples and a final set of exercises to make in order to grow as game writer.
I loved it!
A definition of talent is people or a person with a natural ability to do something well.
Companies are looking for Talents. Recruiters are posting messaging on the importance of finding the right talent. Coaches and leaders are repeating how is important to keep the Talents.
Natural ability. Let’s explore this concept.
What is a natural ability? An ability that’s inherited. Aptitudes that stabilize around age 14, that make certain tasks or activities easy to complete, and that require relatively less time, effort, or energy to perform. When we operate in an environment where we can employ these Natural Abilities, we are happiest and perform our best.
Is it possible to develop a natural ability? Skills are learned and don’t always come easily and take relatively more time, effort, or energy to complete. Natural abilities are just inherited.
According to the experts, you may have or not talent. You can put the effort you want to grow your skills.
Companies and leaders are looking to find and keep the talent. To test your talent they test your skills instead!
You may or may not have the talent, the natural ability. It is not your choice. You may be able to spot your talent and bet on it. You may be able to grow the proper skills and become a skilled talent.
Or you may never discover your talent. I would be a super talented technical artist, who knows! I work as a game designer. Am I a talent? I don’t know. My mother says I am!
You have your passions! So that you are growing your skills to nurture your passions. Still, you have not discovered your talent in this scenario.
You have your job! working everyday you are growing your skills for your job. Also here, it is very possible that you still didn’t discovered your true talent. You would be a tremendous guitar player.
You can think that you have talent in something, but you are just skilled enough to do your job above average.
It is good for our mental health to stop showing off our natural abilities, since those are there. Focus on grow our skills everyday, instead. Because it is the only thing we can actually control.
There is something that I have always missed out while playing role playing video games: interpretation.
Producing a story with many branches and possible endings costs too much, then you have to translate it in many languages. That is simply not viable. Reproducing that feeling of “do whatever you want” that is present in tabletop role playing games is hardly achieved by the videogames of today.
You will also need a human (dungeon master) to adapt the scene and the story to the spontaneity of the moment.
What is possible right now is to provide tools for the people to connect together in a server. Create and explore virtual worlds, also in real time.
Having a customized avatar that can interact with things and make gestures is also pretty suitable nowadays.
I was just thinking that maybe those new technologies which promise uniqueness and decentralization may grant tabletop role players being rightly represented inside a virtual community.
You start playing some designed adventure, just to get in touch with the controls and functionalities from a Player standpoint. Then you can look for your first party.
When you reach a certain status in the community, playing or mastering stories, the game government (developers) recognize your contribution by issuing NFTs.
If you are a player, the more you play, the higher the value of the Character (PC) represented by the NFT. You can sell it and start with new characters. New players may decide to buy a PC and skip the process of getting noticed, for instance. Developers earn a part of every transaction.
If you are a DM the Worlds and Stories you create will become publicly visible and free for everyone. You may want to pay for the developers to issue you a World-NFT or Story-NFT. Having one of those you can decide to let parties having an entry fee to your adventures, because you got a name in the community. As a dungeon master you should also create and use NPCs. The more you use those, the more your Players will be able to get in touch with them and enrich their background. Developers may decide to issue you an NFT to the highly recognized NPCs inside of the community, encouraging you to create meaningful NPCs.
Your creativity and interpretation, in that way, can be truly compensated!
One of the first book I have read to learn game design is one of the best books ever made: The Art of Game Design, by Jesse Schell. I find it the perfect balance between inspirational and practical book. That is why I always suggest start from this book, and some other one.
In one of the first chapters there is a tetrad that the author shows to explain the four main pillars of any game (not just video game):
I still use this tetrad combining it with the classic application of the Pareto’s principle: a new game should be 80% some existing game plus 20% novelty.
I always start from the experience and the feelings we want to give to the Players. Once is decided, generally it is easy to spot the best pillar to innovate on.
Maybe we just want to bring a specific game genre to a new platform. Let’s focus on technology. King is making billions just on this simple concept. They were the first in bringing the match-3 experience to mobile phones with a shared progression with Facebook. Technology was their strength.
Often, we just want to focus on a specific mechanic to bring the same story to the same audience. That are what indie developers do many times, for instance with the game Baba is You.
Maybe we want to create the next roleplaying game? It’s not necessary to invent new mechanics and combat systems, those can just be improved on existent titles. We may want instead find a great story to tell. It is what Horizon: Zero Dawn brought to the industry.
A game can be very successful also if we just amaze the Players with beautiful visuals and sound FXs. Look at GRIS and the beauty of its art and music, for instance.
I think that technology is beautiful and is never neutral. I believe that video games have always been on the front line of tech utilization. Video games have always pushed the boundaries of technology. In the last decade, they started to become a real massive entertainment medium, influenced by movies and streaming platforms.
NFT, cryptocurrencies, tokens and so on are technologies. As technologies, I think that they can really help with some use cases and features for video games. As technologies they are not neutral. Right now, according to the experts, it is a problem for the environment. So that not only are they not neutral, they are at this very moment a dangerous tech. Also, those technologies will never become games themselves.
Play-to-earn games, for instance, are fun. They offer the investor fantasy, but in the long term when Players take them seriously, they are not a game anymore. They become a gamified investor experience, which is way different from a game. A gamified experience is an experience that adopts some element from games to be more enjoyable. Hardcore players of play-to-earn games do everything to earn more money. They actively participate in a community, they share things and make meaningful experiences. But the end game always involves a marketplace. Not beating the final boss, not climbing a leaderboard. Not for now, at least.
Then there is the industry. As I said in previous posts, the industry does not exist to me. People do. My honest fear is that a lot of money and effort will be completely wasted. Why? Because I look for the names of the founders of new startups and cannot avoid noticing that those people before were all-in on another smoky concept: e-sports. They focus on attracting investments and brands and create hype for some metaverse, but they are not fully aware of what it is to really make video games. They ignore the basics. That could never be good.
On the other side, I see veteran game developers lose their time on Twitter speaking against the “cryptobros”. They speak as the owners of the truth, they lived in the industry since its beginnings. And they mostly still have not realized how many surprises this industry brings. I remember greatly the things they said against the free-to-play business model. History proved them wrong. More than 50% of the global video games revenue comes from mobile. The industry grew and conditions for workers improved a lot thanks to the free-to-play. Whoever denies that, does not see the truth. Full stop. They are the people which really can use NFT tech in a useful way, anyway. They know how to create games and great playful experiences. If they could only put their ego aside, I am sure, they will really help shape the future of all of this.
Yesterday a contact on LinkedIn asked for help because he is not able to find any job sending resumes to companies. I told him that that system is completely broken. To me, in fact, it is. I suggested him to focus on his job, to do the job. Then the salary will find him. I am pretty sure about that, especially in a talent eager industry such as the games industry.
Today I read the same guy saying that he would like to create a network of people who can donate maybe 1 euro for him to research and learn new skills everyday. On the same network, on LinkedIn, which is a professional network.
If I imagine to be a company recruiter and I read something like this, in this exact sequence, what can I think about this guy?
Creative work is very different from performing creative activities. If you really want to work in a creative industry like the games industry you should really show off your ability to solve problems, from one side, and be professional from the other side. If you can, you should also worry about what you are sharing with your community.
Working in the games industry is not having creative freedom or being in a hippie community. This is a business that moves billions. You should constantly do the job and learn new things to stay in line with the times. You are there to create serious value bringing fun to people.
It is what I think. In fact, any software industry is a concept. An idea, an adaptation of something physical that does not have a concrete form in our context.
People does exist. I mean, people making software. People making games. So why do we care so much about the industry? People matters, not abstract concepts.
Life is a great adventure, and as every great adventure you need people to live it fully. Good characters for your plot. Good writers. We should care more and more about the well being of the people of the industry.
My main professional resolution for the next year is to try to build a new reality. A new metaverse, where millions of people will use their cryptocurrencies to buy NFTs and trade them… no, I am joking.
I feel the need of build something, so that this new year I will try an experiment: invest in young talents to make simple games. We will start from mobile, but I do not exclude to try other platforms, too.
Barcelona is a city full of high-level games studies centers. A lot of people every year comes out from universities and private schools. Many of them are real talents, but they struggle in finding their job in the industry. The industry asks to be a “ninja”, to become a “unicorn”, to have “talent”, without defining anything of this. Then they ask for 5 years of experience, which is almost impossible for a junior professional. Only the best joins directly the industry.
What about the others? The others, I believe, have their talent too. Maybe we should stop asking for a lot of references and just believe in the people. Leave them grow, make their mistakes. Support them.
That is my resolution for the next year. I want to build the talents of tomorrow. I want to create a team capable of completing very simple games. And of course, I want to dedicate part of my time in find funds for it.
My final wish for this year is to see all the realities I help really grow as they deserve.
I am a lucky guy. I have a great employer, which really cares about my progress as professional and lets me work also in other projects. And I have clients which always pay on time and respect my time.
They both value me a lot, this year I felt really an expert. This is not because I know everything, but because they made me feel like this.
I wish you all to feel the same, have a great year people!
This year (and the past one, too) has been very fruitful on the M&A side of things. We saw a whole lot of companies being acquired or merged with others.
For the next year I hope to see the early fruits of all that movement. I would like to really see how big corporate can improve their portfolio giving always better experiences to the people.
Also, I hope to see more deals made with small realities. I am noticing that investors are always more betting on teams without a single game published. I suppose they bet on their own experience bias, because the founding teams are always composed by industry veterans.
Young talent has a lot to say, and also if I am aware that investors are not willing to trust newbies, I believe that corporates should. They were young and junior at some point. They know how hard is getting. And maybe they can delegate to young startups some quick prototyping or more in general activities which are not core to the business but still really important.