A Very Long Post About How to Become a Creator.

Even by my wordy standards, this page is super TL;DR. I suggest just reading it until I get to the bit where I plug my new game.

It has come to my attention that quite a few young, aspirant creators find my opinions to be of value when it comes to making a career in the game industry.

It's true, and it terrifies me.

Kids, most mornings I don't know whether to crap or wind my watch. (You used to have to wind up watches. Also, people used to wear watches.) My own kids don't pay any attention to me. I see no reason why you should. If I'm so smart, why am I old?

But I do get asked for advice about making a career as a game developer. A LOT. And some questions come up again and again. So I’m writing an answer to the question. I know it is hopelessly, bone-jarringly arrogant for me to do something like this, but I wanted to put my answer on one web page so I can send them here.

These are the answers that worked for me. Your answers will definitely be different. But still, this is a set of possible answers.

(Also, I have a new RPG, Avadon 3: The Warborn, to promote. I need to get it attention to buy food for my kids. Sorry. That’s how the sausage is made.)

As a bonus, much of this advice also applies to other fields. This blogpostlet might be useful if you want to be a writer, or a comedian, or a sculptor, or make naughty needlepoint.

Much of it is focused on encouraging you to actually create something, by yourself or in a small group. There's a reason for this: If you want a real job in AAA gaming, the best way to get it is to have a portfolio to show them. Being able to point at something and say, "See? I made that!" is a huge advantage, if not a necessity.

Here are five bits of advice, elaborated in my trademark snarky, excessively-worded style. Each bit of advice comes with an exercise for you, the aspirant. Do not skip the exercises. They are more important than the advice.

This person took my artistic advice once. Then he embarked upon a memorable career in hotel management.

Disclaimer

This is MY advice. Mine. It is what worked for ME.

My advice is mostly oft-repeated cliches, written thousands of times already by more attractive people. My advice may not help you. It may, in fact, harm you. Do not use my advice without consultation with a physician.

A young lad in Dublin tried my advice, and he came down with simultaneous scurvy and rickets. He travels with the circus now. For four shillings, they'll let you poke him with a stick.

This advice is worth what you paid for it. Opinions are like assholes: Everybody has one.

That said, let's begin.

When you make 1000 things, make sure you make 1000 different things, not the same thing 1000 times.

Advice #1: Make Games.

"Eighty percent of success is showing up." - Woody Allen

If you want to make games, make games. You don't need permission. If you want to make board games, make them. If you want to make computer games, learn a programming language. Or learn GameMaker, or RPG Maker, or Twine. No wrong answers.

Or mod one of the many video games that are moddable. Again, you don't need permission. You can make a Skyrim dungeon and upload it and people will play it and let you know what they think, and this is amazing.

Once you have a game/mod/whatever, show it to anyone who will look at it. Get their feedback, and LISTEN TO IT. More specifically, listen when they say, "I liked this," or "This confused me," or "This made me want to quit." They will also give you advice for how to fix the problem. Ignore it. They're not the creator; you are. Just listen to how your work affected them. That is the precious feedback.

Then make another thing. And another. This is a very difficult craft to learn, and you will have to spend a lot of time and endure a lot of failure. In the end, the only way to ever learn how to make games (or sculpt, or write plays, or knit) is to do it. (It's the same for everything else. Want to be a carpenter? You'll have to saw a lot of wood.)

If your job and/or kids keep you too busy to do this, please believe me when I say you have my sympathy. Look at the bright side. At least you have a job and/or kids.

(Note that I am not saying, as some do, “You must create EVERY DAY or you FAIL.” You’ll probably need to take breaks sometimes. Just remember that, whenever you put the weight down, you do have to pick it up again eventually.)

It is sometimes possible to make a mod or adventure for a game so good that some company will just up and notice you and offer you a job. It has happened. Good, dedicated, serious talent is rare and valuable. (Warning: The quality bar for this is VERY HIGH. Yet, your goal is to be that good. That is what you are working toward.)

Exercise #1:

You should have these things around your home: A chess set. Checkers. A pair of dice. A deck of cards (any set of cards, from any game, even Candyland). Paper and a pencil.

Use some or all of these components to make a game. (If this exercise is too wide open, try using these materials to make a game where the players are trying to win a race. Limitations aid creativity.)

Teach the game to someone else. Play it 2 or 3 times.

If you want to create something (a game, a story, an earwax sculpture), and you've never tried to create that thing, STOP READING. GO DO IT. NOW. NO EXCUSES. YOUR LIFESPAN IS LIMITED, AND YOU WILL BE DEAD SOMEDAY! GO! You'll learn more from an hour of creating than from reading a thousand blog posts. This article will still be here when you're done, and blogs are dumb.

Real artists ship. Heck, I once had a big success with a game that looks like this!

Advice #2: Play Games. Thoughtfully.

If you want to excel in some art form, it is extremely valuable to be very familiar with that art form. Play games. A lot. Experience it. Know the history of your craft. Know how it developed and the mistakes and clever inventions people made along the way. The more you know, the more tools you will have in your happy little toolbox.

This is meant to be work. Playing one game fifty hours is fun. Playing fifty games of different genres and styles, for one hour each, is work. Really picking them apart and figuring out what worked, why it worked, what didn't work, and why it didn't work, requires effort and concentration.

It also provides an invaluable education, and you don't need to pay one penny beyond the cost of the games to get it. With freemium titles, bundles, and Steam sales, you get honestly get a ton of games (and thus a ton of education) for really cheap.

Exercise #2:

Think back to the last 3 (or more) games you played for more than ten minutes. For each one, come up with a list of three SPECIFIC things it did well, and three things it did badly. Then come up with one design element you can see yourself wanting to use in a game of your own.

You should be able to do this for any game. Every game has problems or rough spots, and I've never played for 10+ minutes a game so bad it had nothing to offer (even if it's just a cool little animation on the title screen).

A great example of inspiration from varied sources. Also a great topic for the "Find three good things. Find three bad things." exercise.

Advice #3: Absorb All Media.

Be a voracious consumer of media. Books. News. Movies. Even music. The more you understand humans and how the world works and stuff, the more resources you have to draw from when you create.

People always ask artists, “Where do you get your ideas?” Often, we get our ideas by filling our brains with as much stuff as possible and letting it swirl around and recombine until weird stuff pops out. The key step is the “filling” part.

For example, I am a news junkie. I read the New York Times every day. In 1996, I was writing a game called Exile 2: Crystal Souls, about a war in a huge series of caverns far underground. (I recently rewrote this game. It's pretty sweet. Check it out.)

At the time, the Siege of Sarajevo was going on. I read about it, and, as I did, it infected the story I was writing. It filled me with ideas for encounters and infected the mood of the whole thing, making for a grittier, realer, cooler game.

But others drew much deeper, more productive inspiration from that tragedy. For them, it inspired a terrific indie hit called This War of Mine. I can think of no better example of how being attuned to your world can improve your work.

Exercise #3:

Go look at a reputable newspaper and read the headlines. Pick an intriguing one and read the story behind it.

Now design a game based on that. Not just a few quick sentences. Really think about it. What genre? How would it play? What are the goals? What makes you fail? Try to get your mental design to the point where you can close your eyes and picture a minute of actual gameplay.

Then think of one aspect of your design that really intrigues you, and one aspect that is underbaked or unfun or won't work.

(For example, at this moment, I'm looking at an article about a young woman who died young and had her head cryogenically frozen. It is very sad, yes, but it also makes me want to write a funny, macabre business sim set in a second-rate fly-by-night head storage facility.)

I tried to come up with the best royalty-free image to convey the concept of "College Debt."

Advice #4: Be Careful About College.

At some point, if you're young, you have some formal education ahead of you. Perhaps college. In these exciting days, you don't have to teach yourself to make games. There are educational programs specifically designed to cram game stuff into your brain folds.

I am REALLY nervous about giving kids advice about where to throw tons of their post-tax education cash. I'm not trying to ruin anyone's life here. I must, however, say this:

Most people who try to get into the gaming business don't succeed. And most people who do get into the gaming business leave within 10-15 years.

When choosing a place to buy your diploma, ask yourself: "If I don't work in games, will my education plan still help me get a job?"

If the institution grants standard-issue bachelor's degrees, the answer is yes. Otherwise, be honest. If the answer is "no" or "probably not," think VERY hard before going into debt to go there.

Established creative types tend to be somewhat suspicious about schools that teach art. If you have drive, talent, and inspiration, you don't need a degree to express it. If you don't have those three things, you probably aren't going to make it no matter how many degrees you get.

Don't get me wrong. Going to college in your chosen field CAN help. It really can. You get to spend several years focusing on nothing but honing your craft, relatively undistracted by the hassles of life. Even better, you get to do so in the company of passionate, like-minded students, who can work with you, challenge you, and provide valuable networking contacts later on. These things are truly precious.

Also, a real college will require you to study a wide variety of different subjects, and this can be very valuable to a budding creator. Revisit Advice #3, above.

Yes, college can help. Just, if games don't work out, be sure you have a Plan B.

One more thing. College can be fun. Live a life. Just never forget one thing:

Somewhere in the dorms, there is a young woman who is working her ass off. She is going at it hard, day after day, studying like her life depends on it, because it does. You don't know her. Nobody does, because she is too driven to leave her room.

In five years, she is going to be your mortal competitor. When you start your business, if you aren't ready, she is going to kick your ass.

So I think it might be a good idea for you to be ready. Don't you?

Exercise #4:

If you're in college, finish your blog-reading break, and then get back to work.

If you aren't in college, you have saved yourself a ton of cash, but you will need to educate yourself. Go do Exercises 1-3 again. And again. And again. Also, find your own community of like-minded folks, online or in reality. Challenge each other. You can make your own college experience, if you try.

This article is long and I am tired and coming up with incisive images is a lot of work why are your still reading zzzzzzz.

Advice #5: Find Your Own Voice.

You are a unique being. Humans are unimaginably complicated. There has never been a person exactly like you, and there never will be again. You have within you, somewhere, a game/book/song/scarf that only you can create. Your job is to find your way to let it out.

This is called Finding Your Voice. If you can do this, and your work is good, you are very close to attaining your dream.

(Of course, it's possible that, in the end, nobody will want the things that only you can make. Don't feel bad. Happens every day. It will happen to me someday. Then I'll get a soul-deadening job writing database software until I die. Oh, well. I had a good run.)

The problem is that, as you work, everyone in the world will be screaming at you what you should and shouldn't do. These loud people come from all design aesthetics and from both ends of the political spectrum. They all have one thing in common: They want to control you. You don’t have to let them.

Academics and college professors will tell you the true meaning of "Games" (or "Ludic Creations" or "Interactive Oppressions", or whatever intentionally obscure term they come up with). If your professor comes to you with friendly, concrete advice about improving your work, give them a serious listen. Otherwise, duck and cover.

No matter what you make, someone will try to bully you for it. Everyone in the world will have an opinion, and it will be LOUD. Don't let them into your head. Find your own voice. It's more fun that way.

This is art. Nobody knows anything, really. Just remember that, at several points in your learning, a trusted authority figure, in person or online, will serve you up a plate of pure, good olde-fashioned crappe.

This is OK. It's part of the process. Often, figuring out why someone’s bad idea is bad is far more educational than just meekly absorbing a good idea.

Just don't ever take anyone's words as Absolute Truth. Your path to success might be proving them wrong.

Never forget that, in the end, all of the teachers and web commenters and friends and family and me will fade away, and it'll just be you sitting there staring at a blank screen. It's all up to you, friend.

Exercise #5a:

You might profit from spending a little time developing confidence and humility. You should know about and beware of Imposter Syndrome. However, you should equally beware of its evil opposite, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Learn about them. You have to be confident enough to persevere, but not so confident that you can't tell that your poop stinks.

For a little reality about the road ahead, you should hear about the 10,000 Hour Rule. When you are 5000 hours in and not sure you're making progress, this will remind you that you are still getting better. Just slowly.

Exercise #5b:

You need to be able to recognize when your own work is flawed. Go back to the best games that you made. For each, identify one flaw or way it could be improved. Then make it better.

Sometimes I can't resist ending with a bonus inspirational quote.

The Hard Truth Of The Thing

A career in games is hard. You really have to scramble to get a long-hour low-paid position, and you may well be laid off right after your game ships. In other words, it's as harsh and demanding as most artistic careers.

Don't try to do games for a living unless you're pretty sure you couldn't be happy doing something else. You can always write games as a hobby. It's still a fun creative outlet, and who knows? You might have a financial success and end up doing it for a living despite yourself.

Time For a Big, Rousing Finish. Cue the Trombones!

At least 20% of what I've written is useless garbage.

For you.

If you try to be a creator, you will end up developing your own way to do it, your own process, your own workflow unique to you. This always happens. Some of the smug, cookie-cutter "wisdom" above just won't apply to you. It's OK. You're a free person, and it's awesome.

I love making art. All guidelines can be ignored. All rules can be broken.

I especially love making games, because games are weird and new and nobody really knows anything about what they can do. Plus, games! Games are fun! Wheeee!

Your elders can give you a ton of advice, but, in the end, it's your brain on the line, splatting itself out for all to see.

You're a creator now, another in a lineage of creators millennia long. That is awesome. Be proud.

Get going.

###

Little nuggets of my dubious wisdom can sometimes be found at my Twitter. The really nifty retro RPG I just released is on Steam.

Never Write a Wacky Surprise Ending Again.

I am Jack's incredibly tired writing trick.

One of the sad things about the video game industry is that it has very little institutional memory. People go into it young, get burned out on infinite crunch hours for minimal pay, realize they want to raise a family/live their lives, leave, and never go back.

As a result, you don't get enough skilled crafters who put in the decades it takes to get really good at it. (Not to mention the obvious effects of having an entire art form almost exclusively written and designed by young people, still mostly men.) This is especially clear when it comes to the storytelling.

Good storytelling requires a very fine understanding of humanity. How it acts. How it develops. How people react to success and failure. And, sorry, this sort of fine awareness is only helped by living, experiencing things, and thoroughly absorbing what others have learned and experienced.

(ProTip: If you want to write game stories or anything else, you should be a voracious reader and watcher of things. Cast a broad net. If you take any sort of visual storytelling seriously and haven't seen, say, The Godfather, or Casablanca, or just about anything by Orson Welles, you're doing it wrong. Money on the street, and you're just walking by.)

The surprise ending, it turns out, is that Bruce Willis is actually an Uruk-hai.

So, in the absence of a lot of writing experience, young writers tend to grab what they know. What's cool and shiny. What did they grow up watching? The wild, unexpected twist ending. The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Saw, every Shyamalan movie and every other film that, while they might have been good, should perhaps not be taken as a template for all storytelling forever.

(And yes, a lot of these movies are good. One of my favorite films is The Crying Game, and everyone got so overheated about its crazy twist that they often failed to notice it's a fantastic film about how complex and unpredictable love can be.)

Surprise wacky twists were good for a while. Now they're in half the games I play, and we need to take a break. They are the enemy of good storytelling.

Yeah, You Read That Right.

Good storytelling is, in the end, about humanity. About the choices they make, the results they have, and how those results affect us.

You know something? Those results are almost never surprising. That's the point. It's part of being human: The things we bring upon ourselves, good or bad, are often entirely predictable. You saw them coming a mile away (or you were deliberately not paying attention).

The patterns in the lives of others are frequently obvious, but the patterns in our own lives are often almost impossible to see. We can only recognize them when they are shown to us, so we can go: Oh. Yeah. That's me. Or that's not me, and I know why.

That is how great storytelling works. THAT IS WHY WE HAVE ART.

(Which is why it's so horribly depressing that our schools have been systematically purged of arts education in lieu of eternal test prep. A cynical person might think that we're removing anything that creates fully rounded humans and citizens of a Republic so that we can instead mass-manufacturer mindless work drones ranked and measured according to meaningless test scores. Happily, nobody has ever accused me of being cynical.)

Pictured: Art.

A Caveat

I am not trying to eliminate all surprises in drama. You can have big reveals. What I am specifically calling out are wacky twists, defined as those that require withholding key information from the viewer, out and out lying to the viewer, or using other storytelling tricks to obscure a key fact that would otherwise be instantly obvious.

Why Surprise Twist Endings Are Stupid

Here are some reasons.

1. They lie to the reader/viewer, or they withdraw key information. When you're telling a story and trying to make an emotional connection, you're doing something difficult. Don't waste your time. Focus on creating your characters. That's a tough enough job! Say the most relevant, interesting things about them. If you do your job right and make them compelling, you don’t need secrets in the first place.

2. They degrade the viewer's trust in future works of art. When I played Spec Ops: The Line, I was constantly distracted from immersion in the story by the suspicion that I was being lied to and some crazy twist was coming at the end. Of course, it was.

3. You're risking all for an uncertain payoff. The movie The Sixth Sense worked because the insane twist at the end was pretty cool. It's also a very fragile thing. If your ending isn't really that clever, or if someone spoils it, your movie better be able to stand on its own. Which is usually can't. And if your movie could stand on its own, why did you need the twist in the first place?

4. There's just a better way. There is nothing in the world, not spaceships blowing up, not a guy turning into a big green guy, nothing more interesting than human beings, the dumb ways they act, and why. Real stories, stories that LAST, are always about this. (And if you aren't trying to do this, why aren't you? Life is short.) If your wacky twist doesn't make your story be more about real people, you're just wanking. Throw it away.

And, finally, one key point specific to video games.

5. Most people don't finish video games, even short ones. If you put the crazy detail that makes your story make sense at the end of your game? Then, for most people who play your game, the story will never make sense at all! It's a big waste.

You may want to find out how the game ends before you get too comfortable ogling those.

A Real Life Example

I enjoyed Bioshock: Infinite a fair amount, but I really didn't get into it the way most people seemed to. It seemed to feel obligated to have the trademark, crazy "Bioshock twist," which resulted in a story with far less punch than it could have had.

(Spoilers ahead for Bioshock: Infinite, of course. Stay calm.)

So here's the story. You play this guy named Booker who is hired to rescue a woman named Elizabeth from this floating racist city in the sky. When you find her, she's missing the tip of one of her fingers. As you run around and shoot racists, you explore the mystery of where she came from and why you are there.

You learn, at the end, that Booker is Elizabeth's father. He sold her to pay off a gambling debt, and, when he tried to get her back, the tip of her finger was cut off.

Holy crap!

What a fantastic set-up for a story. A tormented father, guilty of a horrible crime, given a chance to redeem himself. A confused young woman who learns who her rescuer is and has to come to terms with what he did to her and the violent creature he has become. (Because it's a video game, so he's still spending a lot of time decapitating racists with his robot hand.) There's potential for a lot of cool, meaty drama and dialogue here.

Of course, none of that happens. Because Booker's relationship with his daughter (and that she is his daughter) has to stay secret until the very end of the game, for no reason.

It means that the whole, long game is spent with none of the characters ever talking about what they should be talking about. Elizabeth constantly goes on about her Disney princess "Oh, I wonder what life is like on the land?" issues, and expressing ambivalence about Booker's psychotic violence that doesn't come to anything, and constantly bugging you about the five dollars she found, instead of getting into any of the cool stuff that the story should have been about in the first place.

(If you want to see the superior drama that comes from letting a violent old guy and his young female ward talk about what they should be talking about, I plan to write about The Last of Us soon.)

And, again, a huge number of people don't finish games, unless they read the Wikipedia page. On Steam, as of this writing, only 58.2% of people who got the game achieved the Tin Soldier achievement, which means finishing the game at all. That's actually a really big percentage.

It still means over 40% of the people who bought Bioshock: Infinite on Steam never learned one thing about Booker and Elizabeth and the finger and what was going on. I honestly feel that if all the crazy bananas stuff was openly presented in the beginning, it would make people more engaged in what was going on then just another generic Mystery Box.

Like I said, fun game. I did enjoy it, and there were a lot of good things about that story. And yet, I am allowed to be bothered by wasted potential.

That's right. I said something critical about Bioshock: Infinite. Now's your chance to jump ahead to the Comments and fix me.

But Jeff, I've Played Your Games. Your Stories Suck!

That's right, kid. Get it out of your system. Nothing easier than a big, categorical cheap shot. Still the Internet, after all.

The writing in my early games was, frankly, lousy. It's a side effect of having to spend the 10000 hours it takes to gain proficiency in public.

I have tried, over the last two decades, to write games with good stories. My resources are limited, and I have to write a game at the same time as the plot and dialogue. This is not to excuse my many failures, but to explain them.

I do believe I've written some cool stories, and I think they're getting better. I have some story ideas for a new game series, which I might be able to write someday, that I think are fantastic.

But if you think my stories suck, hey, cool man. Some people like them. De gustibus non est disputandum. 

It's Just a Fad

I'm not really worried about it. Wacky twist storytelling is a cul de sac. There's really only so much you can do with it, compared with the infinite potential variety of simple stories about actual people doing actual things. As video games evolve as an art form, there will be a lot of dead ends.

And look at the bright side, if a writer is taking the time and effort to construct a twist, it at least means they care. They're trying! That is such a step up from game storytelling in the past.

The fact that this conversation could happen at all means we've come a long, long way.

The 10000 Hour Rule.

This image appeared on my Facebook the other day, and I really liked it. (The quote is killer, and it is available at a much more readable size here.) It reminded me of a bit of wisdom I value greatly, and I'll pass that on in this blog post. Lucky you.

I am a huge fan of the many Rules, Laws, and related discrete wisdom chunks you can find on the Internet. Sturgeon's Law. Poe's Law. Rule 34. (NSFW) The Iron Law of Oligarchy. But one of my favorite, as an important lesson about How the World Works, is the 10000 Hour Rule.

I would describe this law thusly:

To master any non-trivial field requires 10000 hours of dedicated practice and study.

Sometimes, this law is stated with "10 years" in the place of "10000 hours." Or, as an old saying elegantly puts it, "You have to write a million bad words before you can write a good one."

Drawing. Writing. Chess. Singing. Tennis. Designing Games. Acting. Golf. Playing the violin. Leatherworking. Poker. In each case, mastery requires work. A lot of it.

What does this law mean? It means that fantasy you have, about picking up a guitar and finding that you have a deep, innate talent for playing and that you're the next Hendrix? It's just a fantasy. Better get practicing, pal. You got 10 long years of work ahead of you. Free lunch? No such thing.

I Will Now Deal With Your Objections

People don't like this law. People hate to be told that they can't have Free Stuff, and gaining mastery without sacrifice is the epitomy of Free Stuff. But there are several obvious objections people come up with to rebut this law. I will dispose of them now.

It Doesn't Take That Long To Master Something! I Can Master Tic-Tac-Toe in a Minute!

That's why I said it takes 10000 hours to master something non-trivial. Obviously, some things are easy, but nobody cares about whether you can do them. Learning to tie your shoes is much simpler than learning to play the violin, but nobody will pay you to watch you tie your shoes.

What About Child Prodigies? Mozart Was Composing Symphonies When He was Four!

Yeah, but nobody wants to hear them. They want to hear what he wrote later. Many, many hours of work later.

Child prodigies exist, and they can do amazing things. However, the main advantage of being a child prodigy is that you get to start putting in your 10000 hours at an early age. You still have to work for it.

But Some People Have Amazing Innate Abilities!

People need to believe that they can possibly have the innate ability to do amazing things. Some sort of magical penumbra that gives you the supernatural ability to write or play baseball or whatever. Not really.

Now don't get me wrong. Some people do have the innate ability to excel at a field. It is the opportunity, resources, and drive to put in the many, long tedious hours mastering a chosen field. It's the ability (the time, money, and energy) to sit down and work. That's the only innate ability that really means something.

So I Just Have To Spend 10000 Hours On Something and I Become Awesome?

No. It has to be 10000 of meaningful practice. Learning new things. Stretching your ability. Occasionally failing, learning from your mistakes, and improving. Repeating the same lame thing for one hour 10000 times will not cut it.

I've Hardly Spent Any Time At All Learning To Do [X], and I'm Amazing At It!

Are you sure? One of the main reasons people are mediocre at a profession or activity is that they lack the ability to recognize when they have done it poorly. One of the main things successful craftspeople and artists have in common is a loathing of their own work.

I'm not saying you aren't that great. Hey, I've never met you. But are you sure?

It's an Unpleasant Rule

The 10000 Hour Rule is about crushing dreams. It's about understanding that there are limits to what you can do in the all-too-short period of time we spend on this Earth. It's about giving people who have achieved mastery the respect they deserve. It's about, before taking on a new task, honestly evaluating whether we can afford to give what it takes to complete it. And it's about forgiving yourself for not being able to play the guitar like Hendrix.

I have a lot more to say on this subject and how it applies to writing computer games. Next time.

(If you're interested in reading more about this stuff, I've heard that Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is a good read. I'm not so much a big Gladwell fan, but it's a very interesting topic.)