If this is the first post you are reading, we recommend starting with our Overview post, followed by our Process post. If this is not the first post you are reading, thank you so much for reading our writing so far (and playing our game?) This project has meant so much to us and we are so grateful for all of the support that has gotten us this far. As our final post, we will be individually sharing our reflections and takeaways from terminal connection and the thesis overall. We hope you’ve enjoyed our games and writing, or at least found some inspiration, insight, or new discourse you are interested in! Thank you for reading!

Austen

Quick setting of expectations: I’m not really sure what the coherent narrative of my takeaways from this project is; so, I’ll try to explain where my thoughts came from, where they went, and where they are now. I will provide some insight into how my personal artistic practice has developed, and as a bonus, you might find something that makes you think about your own practices or maybe general expectations about life. (btw, these are personal reflections and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts of my fellow goofballs designers.)

Questions and Opinions:

I entered this project (and college) with a sickening amount of questions and opinions, on games, on art, on myself, on what I want to do, on meaning and impact and purpose and “the point”… Which is standard practice from what I’ve gathered? I wanted a space to interact with all of that on purpose as much as I could. The structure of this post vaguely follows some of the questions I had, but I’ll list out some of my opinions, biases, and assumptions that underlie[d] or have shaped my engagement with these questions (some of these are outdated and have since been purged, but they were still a relevant factor to grapple with in the process).

• There aren’t a lot of art games [examples and best practices].
• Games are the most effective way to provide an experience and teach someone [you live a proxy life and learn from real experience, and that is a good, effective thing that sticks for players on a personal level].
• AAA games are upsetting [systemically-ish] and cater to invented player expectations that have been sold to modern audiences and don’t actually reflect what people want, or are a product of expectations set by older games’ successes [why else would gamers be typified as an angry, unpleased group, surely there is no other contributing factor in the entire world that could explain this specific demographic of gamers  (/sarcastic)].
• Games can be art, games are a good medium for storytelling, and the fact that there aren’t many examples of games that we classify as “high art” or “literature” is just because the medium is new, uncharted, stigmatized, and we haven’t figured it out yet. [I want games to be as meaningful, impactful, serious, beautiful, and valuable as high art/literature is.]

I hope it is obvious I have complicated feelings about my own opinions. I am in the habit of challenging, modifying, and deleting them. 

Why Games? 

After making terminal connection, I spent a lot of time talking about writing and whether games (or any other media) are effective education in comparison to textbooks. I wrote my college apps on “games being the most effective medium for education because experience is the greatest teacher”. I’m pretty confused about all that at the moment, but I do sort of know where games do good things. Let’s call the overlap of education and entertainment, “impact”. I think games are good at that. They can have impact. I don’t really wonder about that. So then…

What do I want out of life games?

I want to make games that make an impact on people. Games that are good for you? Something like that. I spent a lot of time in college slamming my head against the wall of trying to make something impactful but got bogged down in learning about what ideal player experience should be. I didn’t like that. For this thesis, I really wanted to focus on making something that would be good for players. In hindsight, I think I had a bit of an “eat your vegetables” approach which can get in the way. Under construction.

So why do I want to make games that are good for you. Well, I’m sick of war simulations, and I think war simulations aren’t really all that good for you? I think I’m also a bit sick of violence in games. The hill I’ve been dying on recently is that violent verbs aren’t the only interesting ones to put in games [I played League of Legends for the first time in over a year last week, and it was unfortunately incredibly entertaining]. Also, quite simply, Celeste is a game that was really good for me personally, and I wish more games I played were as good for me as Celeste was. I want to make games like that.

I do also like making games. That was something that I discovered in college after I started making games, and this thesis was the final litmus test for whether I like making the types of games that I think are good. I can say that I do in fact like making games.

Why[/Who] am I making games [for]?

Let’s start with the nots. I don’t want to make games to get rich and famous. I also don’t think I want to make games that are only for me. This means I do want to make games that will be played by other people [and tragically must thus be legible]. So I want to make games for myself, and for [some] people. In part, I am making games for a fictional version of myself that can never exist. I am making games for the sad and socially incompetent sixteen year old version of myself that would have benefitted from some specific experiences. I am making games from the present version of myself that lives in a world where they haven’t had to lament over the absurd incongruencies that steer Practical Reality because a game they are playing is helping demystify the assumptions that led to the questions they’re asking. I am also making games for the future version of myself that won’t have to inevitably wither as the feeling of incompetence settles over them because the simplest change in perspective has once again allowed for a modification in the personal framework they use to navigate life that would have been so helpful a week, a month, a year, a lifetime ago…because a game they played just had that little shift at the ready to be experienced.

The hope I have is that there are real people who are similar to these fictional versions of myself who might benefit from playing a game I make. I mentioned vegetables earlier, and I’ll talk about why I don’t think they’re the full answer a bit. My hope is obviously not that people will suffer and struggle in precisely the way I have/might suffer and struggle so that my theoretically perfect game for their life circumstance falls into their laps at the perfect time to fix them, all their problems, and the universe in one fell swoop. Games are pretty conducive to being fun as my friends keep reminding me. In fact, a lot of people who play games judge them exclusively on the metric of, “how much fun I have personally”. I am starting to come around to the uses of fun. A spoonful of sugar or something. But also I think having fun is great and lovely and maybe even good for you? I hope to bundle even more things that are good for you into games that are fun (and I think that’s where impact can happen).

Are games even effective for doing what I want?

Maybe.

I’ve been reading books, and that has made me wonder why anyone bothers making anything that isn’t a book. Is there really any more effective way to teach someone than just disseminating the information directly? Why bother with all the show don’t tell bs. I then look at the covers of the books I’ve been reading and realize that they are novels, poems, and manga. I might just be frustrated with the landscape of games and how bloated most games are. (I do also read non-fiction things that are more for just disseminating information and/or theory, but those books are rarely entertaining. They are effective and educational, but they are often strictly educational and mostly vegetables. Games aren’t really great as mostly vegetables.)

Games are only maybe effective because of the youth of the medium (I hope that given time, they will grow to be often effective). Now, games are probably not as efficient [as textbooks]. But I hate textbooks. I can’t read them to save my life. Too much vegetable. I don’t know if learning has to be fun. I also don’t know if fun learning is necessarily effective. Too much fun? There is unfortunately such a thing it seems. Vegetables can be fun. Games just don’t know how to include fun vegetables yet.

terminal connection? 

It’s a weird game. I like it. I got to make a bunch of weird things while making it. I also got to make it with some lovely [and weird] people. My favorite. This project was such an excellent blend of self indulgence and critical investigation – a surprising blend of both throughout both semesters, despite the output being quite different. terminal connection is still not 100% the type of game that I want to be making, but it is a lot closer than anything I’ve ever made. Being able to just dive headfirst into questions and topics that keep me up at night AND turn that into a piece of outward-facing media was exhilarating. I’m not sure I’ll feel the same if/once I start beefing with negative reviews on Steam, BUT, I do think that will be part of the fun [I hope].

Steam, the internet, and mass media?

I’m a bit worried that we’ll get no reaction or engagement. I think that would be the worst outcome. I’d honestly be pretty alright with people hating the game (as long as they articulate why). I hope to learn about audiences and the way in which games as art are consumed as mass media. Part of the appeal of making games for me is the fact that a lot of people can see what I made, play it, own it, be influenced by it, make it their own. At least, I think I like that about games. I haven’t really made anything that has been interacted with by other people I don’t already know [at scale]. Not shipping with the final product is scary, and a lot of this writing was done in attempt to at least sort of ship with the game.

The friends I’ve watched play this game have had some of my favorite reactions to anything I’ve made ever, and that already feels like success to me. There is however a specific pressure that comes with your friend, the person who made the thing you’re playing, breathing down your neck as you inevitably suck at an unreasonably difficult level. Our conversations have been everything I’ve wanted and more, and I think the experience has been good, meaningful, maybe even impactful for them, but I do also spend my time discussing the ideas present in the game with my friends.

Do I like it?

It’s aight. 

The game is ok. 

I do like it, 

I do.

There’s a lot I still wish we could add, but this is the plight of developing games – there’s always more quality of life stuff to add, features to tweak, metaphors to tighten, and I will never make peace with it all. I will however click the publish button prematurely because it will always be premature, and at some point it’s better to just get the thing out there and move on with it. (every time I make the credits roll because I’ve clicked the exit button I want to throw up. the game makes me feel gross, which is part of our intended experience if I remember correctly. It makes me feel funny /derogatory as a feeling, but not /derogatory also since that is what we set out to do?)

I think that what I’m beginning to realize that it’s time to be done with a project when I’ve learned so much about the game I’m working on that I feel the need to redesign it from the ground up. Now, I hope that one day I will get to try that in practice (the redesigning), but for the sake of a student project and a couple of devs who are still porous and malleable, this point in the process has meant that it’s time to move on and start polishing some other ball of dirt. Cool game. I like it. I don’t know if other people will.

What now?…

Some thanks!

Thank you to all of my incredible teachers and mentors I’ve had throughout highschool and college. All my art teachers, English teachers, global world things teachers and peers, college professors who told me to make weird things and keep making weird things and listened to me blabber about how frustrating it is to make things. This game represents the end of college for me, and I cannot help but look at the shoulders of all the people who have carried and uplifted me over the years. Thanks to my sibling and my parents for being chill with me going away and into the world to pursue some notion of education, and thank you for reading my funny words! Finally, thank you to my absolutely incredible and irreplaceable mosaic of friends who have had nothing but patience and encouragement for me through the years. You’ve seen me run forehead first into more walls than I care to identify, and I would never have made it this far without y’all. Shmassive hearts ❤

Well, the game will be live when this post goes up. I’ll probably obsessively read reviews and look at Steam metrics for at least a week or two. Or I might ignore it and throw all of my technology in a box and ignore the internet forever. Who knows. I’ll probably go read a book, or write something that I’ll never let anyone read, or play some stupid gacha game. I’m still wrestling with my terminal connection.

David

Coming soon 🙂

Zach

It feels pretty daunting to consider trying to sum up my takeaways from an entire year’s worth of different projects, so I’m going to just try to touch on a few main points here. I’m sure my thoughts on terminal connection and the thesis as a whole will continue developing over time (as the game is publicly released, time passes, I make more things, etc.), but hopefully I can just put together a sense of how everything feels and what’s on my mind right now. It’s nice to have a chance to just talk through some of these things, so here goes.

Artistic Practice

I think one of the most significant pieces of this thesis for me is the experience I got in creating and maintaining an artistic practice. I’ve spent a decent bit of time in my life working on games, but this is the first time that this practice has been so clearly and explicitly geared towards art; not selling a game, not working for a company, not buffing my portfolio. Creating art. To me, that means making things that I care about, making things fundamentally for myself, making things that connect to my emotions and to my life. 

I’ve seen this work in small glimpses previously: an outline for a project, a little bit of writing that feels like it connects to my emotions, a collection of small ideas that feel right in some way. But I’ve always struggled a great deal with followthrough. In games especially, the technical and time-based requirements for creating a complete and effective piece are extreme. And so much of the actual process of creation is entirely separated from the inspiration and emotional connection to the artistic core of the piece (at least in my experience). For example, it’s hard to stay connected to the core emotional experience of processing a pandemic when I’m five hours into debugging a simple issue that I just can’t fucking figure out. When I get into these places, when it’s not easy anymore, when it feels like it’s not going to work, when it feels like the idea is just going to fall apart; that tends to be when I bail. Those tendencies have left me with a lot of half-baked ideas that I can just never find the ability to develop into what I want them to be. 

A lot of this has to do with accountability. It’s hard to be held accountable to following through on a project when it feels like the very point of creating it is that I don’t need someone forcing me to do it. I should want to finish this, I should need to finish this, right? In an ideal world, I would say yes. I want my art to be a pure expression of intrinsic motivation, a seamless expression of my inner world, blah blah blah. But practically, it’s always just too brutal. The moment of seeing the first glimpses of the thing in my head and not liking it has always just been too difficult for me to push through on my own.

In terms of the thesis, I have two points to make about this. For one, as in all of the group projects I’ve worked on, the accountability that naturally emerges from collective making was powerful enough to push me through the rough moments. And, more uniquely, I had spaces to explore a more personal practice that had a kind of collective accountability and focus on process that allowed me to actually gain insight on what following through on personal art means for me. 

My Emotions on Projects and Collective Accountability

On that first point, it’s no surprise that one of the best ways to create accountability is to have other people who you care about working with you. I think this point is pretty self-explanatory, but I think it is very relevant in better understanding how creation works for me. 

I need to start by expanding a bit on the main issues I run into when making things. Generally speaking, on any project I work on, there are ups and downs. In the up periods, I am excited about the project, I feel good working on it, it feels like it’s working, like it’s important, like it’s unique, and I care about it. In the down periods, I feel like there are extreme (potentially insurmountable) problems with the project, I feel heavy and often even dread working on it, and I generally feel disconnected from the original intention of the game. These cycles vary based on the length of the project (and my ability to overcome the difficult moments), but generally speaking, I start off feeling good, have some amount of extreme changes in my feelings over the course of the project, and then I finish feeling good again (to different degrees and in different ways, and assuming that I am able to finish the project at all). On weekend long game jam projects, I have a notorious experience of just being an absolute mess late on Saturday night (about the halfway point), just hating the project and wishing with every part of my being that I could quit. But I push through (mostly because of the accountability that comes from working with friends), and I see the game develop and grow into its true self, and then I feel great about it. On larger projects I have these patterns as well, but generally following broader cycles and updating based on the project hitting certain milestones. Yes it feels a bit extreme, and I’ve gotten better at moderating my feelings, but this is a core piece of how creation feels to me.

On terminal connection, I absolutely had these down periods. There were moments when I just thought that we were throwing a ton of time into something that wouldn’t land with anyone, not even ourselves. Luckily, I had the accountability that comes with collective creation as well as opportunities to focus on work that felt a little bit less vulnerable for me (sitting down to just program systems for a while feels a lot less taxing in this state than doing sound design, for example (I know, being creatively vulnerable just scares me sometimes (ok fine, most of the time))). Luckily, I didn’t have to spend too long in the down period before we started seeing some of the core pieces of the game working how we want them to. Playtests going well (or at least having a glimpse of what we want to see) can be huge in making me feel that what I am doing is worthwhile, and seeing something polished and looking fucking sick helps me connect as well.

I want to add that ideally, this isn’t how this isn’t how this always feels for me. In the practice of creation I am learning how to manage and work with these emotions and still make things, but it’s hard work. There’s always a balance to find between not forcing myself to hate my work but also having the resilience and care to understand and push through the difficult times to allow me to make things that I truly love. I am getting the sense more and more as time goes on that this will be a central struggle of my artmaking life for a very long time. 

Personal Artistic Practice in a Collective Space

In addition to creating collaboratively, I was very pleased with our ability to find opportunities to have a deep personal connection to our work within the context of a collective creation process. Our self-portrait projects were a great example of this. The projects had the same accountability of working together (we were all working towards the same deadline) that allowed me to follow through, but at its core, it was entirely my own piece. This was one of the first times in my life that the stars have aligned in this way and gave me a chance to ideate, create, iterate on, and complete a fully personal project. And it genuinely meant so much to me. Having Austen and David by my side working on their own projects had such a unique and special feeling to it, and being able to share our work with one another at the end was an incredibly connecting experience. It was just an interesting project with an interesting prompt, and I ended up with a personal piece that I thought communicated something important about myself. That feels like about all I can ask for in regards to my artmaking. 

It was especially interesting seeing the ways in which we found space in terminal connection to personally connect with pieces of the project. As discussed in the Process blog post for the game, we split off pretty early to create our own individual levels, and with a lot of iterations, these prototypes made their way into the final game. Even now, we often still refer to those sections of the game as “Zach’s level”, “David’s level”, or “Austen’s level”.

In making terminal connection, we fundamentally agreed on so much about hyperreality and social media, and those points drove the core vision of the game. But we found as we explored the topic that we each have slightly different pieces of the experience that we feel the most deeply and care the most about discussing. For me, that was the sense of twisted vulnerability that emerges in these capital-driven hyperreal spaces. Our decision to split off and make our own content gave me the chance to fully explore my own ideas, both conceptually and emotionally, and create my own window of deep personal connection. As I engage more and more with collective artmaking, I am coming to appreciate the advice that we were given early in the thesis from a professor: find different things that you each care about in the project and allow each person to own their piece. Ownership of my work is a big factor in generating connection and pride for me, and I’m just very pleased that we were able to successfully find a working structure for this. It really makes me feel that terminal connection is still a very personal piece for me, even though it was created as a collective. 

I will tack on to this section a brief addendum about the type of art that I want to make going forward. I’ve definitely found through this project how important it is to me to make art that feels personal to me. For the time being, I’m hoping to find ways to explore my own personal, independent process more and create things on my own, but I absolutely love making things with other people and will likely swing back in that direction after a little bit of time on my own. For now though, I want to understand my voice a bit better. 

Voice

Another significant takeaway from the thesis was developing voice: both the practical understanding that I gained regarding my/our voice as well as the meta understanding of how voice is developed. To start, when I refer to the idea of a voice in art, it can be a bit elusive, even in my own head. I think I generally understand it as threefold (and to be clear, there are probably many better frameworks for this, but this is useful for me in analyzing my own work): 

1. What does the artist care about exploring through their art?
2. What do they understand/think about the topic? What are the opinions and perspectives that they are presenting? What type of lens do they use to understand the topic?
3. How do they go about presenting their explorations and thoughts?

My Voice in my Self-Portrait and Beyond

Unsurprisingly, the self-portrait that I made was extremely valuable in beginning to get a more concrete sense of my own artistic voice. Here’s a breakdown of how I think the self-portrait helped me understand my voice in terms of the three parts posed above:

1. The self-portrait brought out the fact that I care about exploring my inward experience of my own emotions and memories. It showed that not only do I care about exploring my identity through my art (by virtue of my excitement to be doing a self-portrait in the first place), but that I find emotional state, and specifically how they change over time, to be an interesting topic in identity exploration.
2. I understand my identity, and my emotions, to be very fluid. I often feel thrown around and extremely weak in the face of my emotions, and this lens of vulnerability is one that tends to resonate with me. In addition to that, I recognize the importance of how I relate to my emotions: I believe that finding acceptance and self-compassion towards my own emotions will lead me to a happier place in my life, and I care about presenting this hope for the future.
3. I have been greatly influenced by games like NaissanceE and The Beginner’s Guide as artistic games, and as such, found myself gravitating towards the simplicity and groundedness of a first person walking simulator. Beyond that, I used simple mechanics with a simple feeling to represent something core about the metaphor of my own identity, and tried to fill the surrounding space with aesthetics that feel right to me. I care about achieving some level of polish in order to stay connected to my own work. Audio is often an important aspect of how I approach creating or finding feeling in my art, and this came through with the specific song and ambience choices I made. 

It was interesting to find some patterns in my own voice carrying over into my independent work on terminal connection (as well as some divergences). I found an immediate draw to the same topic of emotion-informed identity creation and personal vulnerability, now in the context of social media and how boundaries are drawn between individuals in these spaces. The thoughts that I presented on the topic were much more pessimistic than those in my self-portrait, which I believe fits the overall tone and intention of the piece much better. My reliance on audio as well as relatively simple, almost walking simulator-esque mechanics paired with more visceral aesthetics was definitely carried over as well. 

Are these points that I think are fundamental to all of the art that I will ever create? Not at all. I hope to make pieces that contradict the statements I am making about my voice here. I only present these to put forward the fact that this was how my voice felt to me on this project, and it provides a concrete example of my own creation that I can use as a springboard in the future. I have found artistic voice to be a very grounded thing: it is hard to get a good sense of it without making things and seeing what sticks. This is one (admittedly very early) exploration into my voice, and I’m very excited to see where it develops in the future. 

Our Collective Voice

Over the course of the entire thesis, we spent a great deal of time, both implicitly and explicitly, exploring and understanding our collective voice. To summarize some aspects of our admittedly multifaceted and contradicting voice through the same lens: 

1. We care about exploring capitalist hyperreality (we’ve defined this a lot in other blog posts, so I’m not going to dive in here). Within this topic are many subtopics that we find important, including but not limited to: what it feels like to grow up in this space, what happens when you rely on it, who you are in this space, how it manipulates and oppresses you, and how you can break free from it. 
2. Generally speaking, we focus on criticizing this system. Though we recognize many positives, we feel connected to expressing our own discomfort with the world we find ourselves in. That being said, it’s important to us that there is some expression of hope in the piece, however small.
3. Highly abstract aesthetics, paired with a somewhat grounded core character controller, was an approach that emerged from our creation. Creating a solid and internally consistent metaphor, even at the potential cost of some clarity of presentation, was important to us. We cared about finding a place for exploration of experimental mechanics that interact with the core metaphor of the game. 

Once again, this is by no means comprehensive and is entirely informed by my own perspective on the game and what I found important about it. It is in the context of the specific projects, developed from previous projects leading up to it, and would absolutely be further developed with future work. 

The Process of Developing Voice

One of the most interesting parts of this discussion on voice for me is seeing the practical process for developing voice first hand. As I mentioned above, I’ve found it to be very grounded in first-hand making: you have to go out there and do it to find where you are organically drawn. This fact is a big reason why I am so grateful for the structure of the thesis: many smaller projects, slowly growing in size, before creating one large final piece.

We had such a great opportunity to naturally develop our ideas and tendencies with one another, and the projects we made truly speak to this process. At the beginning of the first semester, we were pretty all over the place, exploring many different topics and approaches. Our self-portraits were a huge step in understanding what each of us as individuals are bringing to the thesis, how we create things, how we understand one another, and what we care about. Each of these little projects gave us more insight into our identity and voice as a collective, moving us forward through the process. 

In my interpretation, A Little Treat was the first project that began the process of narrowing and focusing. It was at this point that we were finding emotions in ourselves that we cared about exploring: in all honesty, that game began as a multi-hour rant. It was the first time that we bent the prompt heavily to support the type of game that we wanted to make at the time. We wanted to make something that expressed some of this anger, we wanted to be less careful and a bit more visceral and genuine about our approach. And we created something that is still one of the games I feel the most connection to in the entire thesis.

From there, we narrowed even further, finding the idea of hyperreality as something that we really cared about exploring. At first, we were very concerned with core definitions and fundamental truths about the topic: what is reality, what is subjectivity, and why is the world constructed like this? The Tower was a reflection of all of this theoretical exploration. We constructed the game in a way that would hopefully create an emergent experience that felt true to the emotional experience of navigating hyperreality, but in terms of the theory backing it, we were creating a vast metaphor for a vast topic.

Starting into the second semester, we further narrowed our approach to orient ourselves towards a less theoretical and more emotion-driven experience. Aero-Dynamics was this movement, and in all honesty, we found out a lot about what we didn’t want to create through that game. We made a lot of choices oriented towards traditional storytelling, and that was something that absolutely didn’t stick for us. But, the project was a great trial run for finding ways to narrow the subject of hyperreality into something a bit more digestible: for that project, it was the specific experience of growing up and developing identity while navigating hyperreality.

All of this development and gradual focusing led us to terminal connection. We knew so much more about ourselves, about our voice, and we used that knowledge to dive into a deeper project. These explorations are all reflected in the final product of terminal connection: our deep emotional connection to the topic, our specific and targeted approach of discussing hyperreality through a doomscroll, our reliance on abstract and non-traditional storytelling, our drive to lean into experimental mechanics, etc. 

This process is something that I am coming to understand as what terms like “ideation”, “prototyping”, and sometimes even “preproduction” are actually supposed to mean. It is the first time that I’ve felt this type of explicit space created for so much abstract and non-targeted exploration, and it is so encouraging to see how it led us to a game that we cared about making and knew how to make (at least to an extent). The openness we had to throw things at the wall, see what sticks, and move on (in short, to actually fully iterate on ourselves and our work) is a part of the creative process that I hope to take with me forever.

Art and Life

One topic that we were very explicit about exploring through this thesis (and discussed in length throughout the process) was how to create art in a space that overlaps with life. We’ve been taught (in an industry that is pushing back against crunch culture) to separate work and life as much as possible. We know the importance of setting and maintaining boundaries, of not overworking, of knowing when to stop and take care of oneself. And we absolutely did set up safeguards to protect ourselves from unhealthy patterns. 

But, to the extent that we approached this thesis to make real art that came from a personal and emotional place, we cared about exploring how art and life can interact to generate meaning in our creative process. I’ve always wanted this; for a long time, I’ve been clear about wanting to create art that is informed by and informs the life I live. I want art to serve as a tool for interpretation and meaning-making in my experiences. 

To put my takeaways simply, it’s a balance. There are times when bringing life to art allowed us to connect deeply with our work and one another. We spent time that we were “supposed to be working” talking about what was happening in our lives, being there for one another. It was absolutely worthwhile to do that because we had a good sense of what everyone was bringing to each piece we were making (and it’s also nice to be friends). Being in tune with ourselves and each other was such a huge part of being able to develop that voice that I discussed: our feelings about the world became our art in a very meaningful way.

Exploring this balance was also a very personal process. We set aside time (to varying degrees of success) on our own to “stare at a wall”, essentially just going somewhere and sitting with our thoughts. Through that, I had a good sense of where my head was at, and I was able to actively engage with how that informed the art that I created. This was where my self-portrait started, and it’s one of the main reasons why I was so connected to it. I knew what was on my mind, and I explored it through my art. 

But there’s the other side of that balance: sometimes, art can’t accommodate all of life. Sometimes things get to be too much, and bringing that into art is more overwhelming than meaningful. There’s a blog post (titled “Art and Life”) that I wrote towards the beginning of the thesis when a lot of personal issues pushed me over that line, and it contains a lot of our reflections on where that line sits and how to find and maintain that balance practically.

All of this is to say that I am so grateful for the practical experience I gained in exploring this space of crossover between art and life. This is the most I have ever explored those goals of meaning-making through art that I expressed above, and it’s given me more of an understanding of how I want to engage with art than I can fully express yet. Everytime I am able to understand an emotion better through the art that I make, I get a clearer glimpse into the life that I want to live. This thesis really pushed me forward on that.

Writing While Making

The final piece I want to touch on is the experience of writing blog posts throughout and after the process of making games this year. In my time making games, this is undoubtedly the most in-tune and knowledgeable I have ever been about my own work and my own process of creating games, and I attribute that largely to the practice of blog writing.

As I discussed above, iteration, both on individual game topics as well as on process, was huge in getting us to a larger product that we’re happy with. Blog writing, especially in the retrospective approach that we took, really gave us an opportunity to be explicit and intentional about this iteration. We had to actually talk about what worked and what didn’t, we had to disagree and argue a bit, we had to sit and reflect on our own experiences, and we had to create frameworks that could actually express what we were learning about making art games. Each time we went through this exercise, we found new and important vocabulary and ideas that we would then bring into subsequent projects and use to inform our creation. And as discussed above, finding clarity in how we felt about each project, what we liked and what we didn’t, was huge in iterating on and finding our voice. 

In addition to the clarity we gained, writing about our work was very important for me in staying optimistic about what we were making. Especially early on, it was sometimes difficult to look at what we had made and feel good about it. For example, after making Rest, we had some real frustration with the fact that we had spent a full week working and had ended up with some colorful cubes moving around on a flat plane. It was very easy to fall into patterns of self doubt; there were a lot of times when we felt like we weren’t actually doing anything. But in writing about the project, we clarified and understood the amount of theoretical work that we had put in. We presented a framework that we had discussed and explored in depth and that, at least in some aspects, we were proud of. It made it so that the game we made didn’t always have to be the product. This was something that we learned very early in the thesis: the products we are creating are not the executables we finish with, the products are ourselves as artists. The process of the blog, and specifically how we reflected on our experiences and generated takeaways, gave us a way to actively understand and engage with our development as artists. 

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This thesis has been such a huge milestone in my personal and artistic development, and I just want to finish this by saying some thank yous. To all of the professors who pushed us to dig into this work at USC and helped us explore our thoughts and feelings about art games, including but not nearly limited to Peter Brinson, Martzi Campos, Sean Bouchard, Richard Lemarchand, Robert Nashak, and Sam Roberts: thank you so much for your time, thoughts, care, and attention throughout our time in college. I want to give a huge heartfelt thank you to all of the friends and coworkers who I’ve explored game creation with over the years for helping me find myself and my priorities in each and every project I’ve worked on. Thank you so much to my family for always pushing me to follow my feelings and explore games as a passion, it’s really led me into this incredible space that I now call home. And finally, thank you so much to Austen and David for everything; this thesis will stay with me for the rest of my life, and I can’t thank you enough for being with me as we dove into this weird world of art games. I couldn’t be more happy that we did.