I turned in my portfolio today applying for the Game Design and Development course here at the college I attend. I was restricted to 500 words which made this so difficult, my passion is endless and to be confined to 500 words was torture. This was a personal essay so its not as academic as I could have made it. The prompt was asking about what was the motivation, the driving factor, or inspiration to apply for game design and what message or effect do we want to have on the industry or culture. I dont know how well the format will transfer from Word.
Title: Mightier Than the Pen
My earliest memories of video games are of me sitting in my father’s lap as he played Wishbringer. It was an old text based game that came on the ancient 7 1/2 inch floppies. Minimal instructions were included and you were stuck guessing at vague commands. I didn’t understand much of the game and even now almost 15 years later the game remains unconquered.
As video games grew and matured the way I was drawn to them did as well. I loved playing video games with my brother, spending countless hours playing Kirby Super Star. But at this point games were still just games what mattered at the time was my brother and I having fun. Even when I started playing massively multi-player games online, they were just a fun way to kill time. My view on video games changed drastically when I experienced my first true single player role playing game. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind marked my awakening as an aspiring game designer. Though I played Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and other notable titles it wasn’t until I had matured as a player that I understood the emotional weight of the stories these games told.
Video games are the ultimate art, stimulating the eyes with animation and style, the ears with sound and the mind with challenges and competition. But most importantly the heart, with a story mustering some of the greatest feelings of joy and achievement or deep dread and sadness. There is nothing that moves me, in any sense of the word, more than video games. That is the reason I desire to design and create. I want to create games that evoke emotion, leave impressions, bring forth the questions of good and evil, life and death, and query the very nature of our personalities.
My dream has changed from wanting to be a professional bowler as a child to dreaming about the art I desired to create. I want to write, draw, design, animate and breathe life into worlds. I want to reward, challenge and doom players to the twisted machinations of the digital world. The video game industry has far surpassed the film industry and with technology independent developers are sharing their stories and their art with the world. I want to join them. Sharing both the sweetest of dreams and the most horrifying of nightmares as can only be conveyed in an art that engages the the viewer like video games. I have much to work on and much to learn, not for the sake of simply getting a degree, but because my ideas and visions are too complex, too vivid for me to recreate tangibly. Though I know through hard work that the time will come that I can do my creative ideologies justice and share my art with the world.
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What do you all think?
