This is kind of a joke! Droqen had some problems with the impossible games manifesto, and rightly so it is a bit wishy-washy. My feeling is that art manifestos are meant, above all, to be aspirational. A call to arms! So what is this manifesto asking us to aspire to do, and why all the “capitalist counterculture” stuff?
What follows is my simple-English wikipedia style generous interpretation of the Impossible Games Manifesto. Go ahead and open it up side-by-side with this one, so you can see how I have massaged each paragraph to serve my own motives.
Make what you want to make!
It is OK to treat your work seriously. The act of creating work is enjoyable, the results are enjoyable. That is good. You are good. You can share your work with others, if you want. You can put a price on your work and sell it if you want. Mainly: don’t get it in your head that your work is not good, or not valuable. (ed: as a curator of an arcade, I have observed that a lot of people do not believe their work is “good enough” to be shown, or shared. I myself felt this way, once. I remember the first time I met droqen he said that he had played Super Plumber Bros and basically assumed he was lying to be polite. “Selling” your game could just mean sending it to another game designer you respect).
- Focus on working towards your vision. You don’t need to succeed the first time, and you don’t need to win.
- Other people will have their own ideas about your work, their own interpretations. Their interpretations are valuable, but so are yours! It is easy to fall into a cycle where you show someone your game, and they play it and tell you about the game they would have made, and then you adjust your vision to be more like their vision. If you have done your work reflecting on your goals, then you will know what parts of their feedback are valuable to you.
- You have probably been conditioned to believe that “success” is commercial success. It takes practice to escape this conditioning. If someone says “your work was not good or valuable, as evidenced by it not selling”, don’t worry about it. You are not in this for the money. Make what you want to make.
Indulge your own silliness:
- Don’t be beholden to realism.
- Play jokes on your players.
- Be obscure and weird.
- Destroy the connection between time and space.
- “Good Game Design” is a lie!
Do something loud and outlandish; make a dating sim where you date a pug. Do what you want to do.
I purchased boots for my son in a small town, and the merchant asked “what colour bag would you like”. There were pink bags and blue bags, and me being me I asked for a pink bag. The merchant said, “blue?”, she was old and seemed hard of hearing. I said “oh um pink please”, to which she replied “Blue, yes? Blue for boys.” Then she happily gave me a blue bag. I am told that at one time in European history, pink was considered a very masculine colour. Some peoples’ ideas of “the right way” to do something align very closely with the ways of doing things that are in vogue at the moment, ie the “status quo”. You don’t need to do things that way, if you don’t want to. If you do things your way, you may end up with something interesting. If you cleave to existing genres/tropes/expectations you may be losing sight of what you wanted to make.
- You don’t need to do what people tell you to do, you can do what you want. (ed: it doesn’t even have to be about rejecting the status quo, you can just do what you want)
- If you spend time reflecting on your own needs and wants, or on what you enjoy or don’t enjoy, you may come up with better answers than if you just do what other people suggest as “the right way”. If you watch a youtube video where someone explains how you should make games, and then you just do that, chances are good that person was just charismatic and not actually wise. You will be sacrificing what you want to make (ie “yourself”) in exchange for their (imagined) approval.
- The more you reflect on your own needs and wants, the better you will know yourself. Like anything, it takes practice. With time you may become more interested in your own approval than in someone else’s. It is a skill to be critical of your own work, and another skill to be able to approve of it.
- Do what you want to do. Act on the values you discovered through reflection. Use those values to create work. If you really know what you want to make, and you make it, it won’t matter much if someone else doesn’t want it.
Do what you want to do
- There are a lot of people who think that they can make a small weird indie game and then become an indie darling and get hired at a studio and make games forever. This isn’t a good plan. It isn’t even really a plan. If you want to make something, you should just make it. (ed: If you actually want to “get into” the Games Industry, maybe try starting at the bottom and do it as your day job. But I mean, it isn’t a great industry, honestly. If you are a programmer, try web-development: it is a cushy job and you will meet lots of nice people. You can still make games, if you want to.).
- Not having a job in the games industry when you are a person who makes games is not a personal flaw. If you have been trying to get hired in the games industry and it hasn’t been working out, reflect on why. If you are making games and no one is rushing over to try to hire you, is that really a problem? Under capitalism, we are alienated from our labor. If you make something, and you find you can’t get a job making that thing, it means that there isn’t a capitalist out there who wants to make that thing. That’s not so bad, is it? (ed: I hope you are making enough money to live comfortably though, I mean if you are young and have family to fall back on the “rent-punk” or “starving artist” thing can be cool, and if you live somewhere with good social services maybe you can make it work in the long term… but the world doesn’t actually owe you anything and I think you should be realistic about trying to take care of yourself).
Just do it.
- Don’t tell yourself you can’t do it, or that you will do it later. Reflect on what it is you want to make, and make it. The more work you make, the easier it will get.
OK so, I do have some problems with this manifesto. Mainly, I think it has some underlying assumptions about the privilege of the reader. Not everyone has the privilege to be able to “stick it to the man”. Ignoring the demands the status quo is trying to place on your art/work is a good idea, but not everyone can get by on art alone and the least privileged are the least likely to be able to survive by just doing it. The stuff about making yourself impossible to hire is kind of terrifying. I, personally, always tried to make myself impossible to hire. I had this idea that if a potential employer took one look at my wacky resume and said “nope!” then that was probably a good move, because I wouldn’t have got a long with them. But I am incredibly privileged: I’m healthy, I have a family to fall back on, my skills have somehow always been in demand. When I was a young (arrogant) gamer, I would frequently recommend that people “make themselves impossible to hire” because I had not learned empathy. I imagined that what had worked for me would work for everyone because in my mind everyone was the same as me. Now, in hindsight, I would say that you should first make sure you can pay rent and feed yourself, and try to get an education or train yourself in a skill that is in demand. I’m not even sure what to say to people who are neuroatypical or differently abled and trying to get by! It certainly would not be “make yourself impossible to hire”!
I also generally agree with droqen’s reading:
My argument: this uh capitalism counterculture is fuelled by the fantasy (utter fabrication) that completely rejecting money and all good money-making strategies will somehow, in the end, be rewarded with money. Or it ‘should’ be and therefore we ‘should’ act as though doing this is a good idea, financially speaking.
http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=257.msg939#msg939
There is a culture of people who believe that the situation we are in with capitalism is bad and broken, and that we should reject it. They believe we should reject capitalism, and the financialization of everything. I am one of them. There are also people who believe that if they do this, they will or should end up being rewarded with money, and I believe this is mostly magical thinking.
But is it an “utter fabrication” that completely rejecting money and all good money-making strategies will somehow be rewarded with money? There are plenty of examples of people doing things that really should not have worked financially, and coming out on top. People who have “played the system and won”. People who have discovered new money-making strategies, but also people who have been rewarded precisely because being an outlier (rejecting money and all good money-making strategies) is a money-making strategy. You can write a novel without using the letter ‘e’ and make some money, I hear.
The thing that it is, if not an “utter fabrication”, is a risky plan. A gamble. It is like buying a lottery ticket. Perhaps most importantly though: it’s pretty shallow. Why not make the things you want to make?
