9/26/23

Our intention this week was to pick up the Rest project again and continue developing it, hopefully getting more of our plans into the actual project to see the ideal behavior of the system. In our first few lab sessions of the week, we began to come across a real need to slow down: we spent a lot of time discussing the games we were making, the conversations we had with our professor, and the new information we were reading. We needed a little bit of time to gather ourselves, and the plan was to spend our last long lab session of the week in engine making our adjustments to the Rest project. 

To put it simply, life got in the way. It’s been a difficult semester for personal reasons, and going into the lab session, I was just not even close to an emotional state where I could do any work, let alone artistic work. So, we canceled the lab and decided to put down the Rest project until a later date. Because we don’t have more to show from a project perspective this week, we wanted to take the opportunity to share some of our discussions about how we want to engage with art and life at the same time: how do they cross over, intersect, interact, and how do they clash?

Our previous conversations on the topic gave us an approach to our work that we have been practicing (and deeply appreciating) throughout the semester. We are very used to sitting down for meetings on game projects and just being blindly productive until the meeting is officially over. For the Thesis, we are spending a lot more time allowing ourselves to really show up to our work entirely. A lot of our labs start with conversations about how we are doing, what is going on in our lives, and how we feel, which sometimes are only a quick check in and sometimes take up a decent chunk of our lab time. We are all very close friends outside of the project, and it means a lot to us to be able to bring those relationships and that care into our artistic work. And we’ve been finding that when we put effort into taking care of ourselves and each other in that way, we’re able to allow our lives and our emotions and our relationships to inform our creation in really meaningful ways.

This week opened up a slightly deeper conversation on the topic though, one informed by a new question: what happens when life can’t sit in the same place with art? We saw a need to acknowledge the fact that there is a subjective line that each of us must walk when doing this kind of work. A lot of the time things in life can be difficult, but bringing our feelings to the Thesis and giving space to talk and work through them can be cathartic and helpful. On the other side of that line, sometimes life becomes entirely too much. It stops being good to sit in a room with one another in a “working” space, and instead, we need family, focused emotional support, time to be alone, etc. It’s really important for us to see this line and be able to start engaging with it more formally. Moving forward, we have the question of “To what extent is life affecting our ability to engage with art?” to help guide us in finding and maintaining a healthy and meaningful artistic practice. 

We are now getting back into practical project work, but it was definitely important for us to take some time to slow down and work through some of these conversations. This Thesis is not only about the experimental and artistic practice of creating games as art, but also about how we want to relate to the process. Topics like these are becoming a throughline in our conversations, and they are a very important piece of the work we are doing. 

Zach Reflection

This is such an important topic and it’s been really meaningful for us to be able to engage with this in the Thesis. As the semester has continued from the point of writing this post, we’ve really been digging into some very personal and artistic projects. Our self-portraits really spoke to vulnerable internal experiences for us, and our work with A Little Treat and The Tower began moving us towards discussing our experiences with burnout, capitalism, and hyperreality. I have found a great deal of personal artistic expression in these projects, and in the conversation of how art and life interact, I have really been seeing the overlap. It has been important to really bring myself, my emotions, my opinions, and my identity to my work, and it’s really special to me to have this space. We’ve really allowed ourselves into the games we make, which in my opinion, is one of the main points of creating art in the first place. Our conversations about how we feel as friends have transitioned into conversations about how we can express our feelings in an interactive piece, and that movement is just so great to see. 

David Reflection

All too often I think there is a silent expectation, when it comes to work, to grit your teeth and just get through it. In service of this elusive definition of productivity, we are asked to disregard our emotional and physical wellbeing. The glamor that this type of behavior is often given to me is wrong. It should not be an expectation to put your personal needs aside for your work, and doing so should not be celebrated. I think in order to set yourself up for a successful art making process, you must cater to your personal needs. Art exists alongside life, they are deeply entangled and influenced by one another. When you choose to sacrifice your wellbeing in service of your art making, oftentimes the result is your art making will suffer in the long run. I’m glad that we were able to take a break from this thesis in order to take care of ourselves. Despite losing a week of production I think we’ve gained a valuable recharge of energy that has served us well in our subsequent projects.

Austen Reflection

Asking for help is easily one of the most difficult things for me to do. Often I find it easier to simply cope and be miserable in the context of whatever I’m working on. That said, I think I might want to make games for the rest of my life, and I don’t think I want to be miserable in the process. Coming into this semester, we spoke a lot about how excited we were to put our everything into this thesis, work long hours, and make space for our lives to influence our art and our art to influence our lives. I must confess that when it came to the internal expectations I had of myself, I did not really include stepping away to give space for life to happen as a part of that. Even though that’s a concession I would make without hesitation for any of my friends, no questions asked, I definitely had/have a double standard when it comes to myself. Despite knowing that the artists I look up to and respect explicitly speak about how they often make space for life to exist and how, in doing so, it positively impacts their art, I think I still have quite a ways to go to deconstruct away from the expectation of “optimal productivity”.