The Emotional Price of Making Video Games
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"Making anything creative relies on you putting yourself out there and totally revealing yourself; it's scary," says Greg Zeschuk, who co-founded BioWare with partners Ray Muzyka and Augustine Yip in 1995 and retired last year. He is currently taking some time off from anything to do with games and is producing a YouTube show called The Beer Diaries about the other love of his life. "You need to be willing to be vulnerable in a very public sense. This experience changes when teams get larger and larger; if you're running part of a project, it's pretty natural for it to feel like an extension of yourself."
This sentiment is common among those in creative leadership positions. Ryan Payton is the founder of Camouflaj, a new studio working on the iOS game République, which was successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2012. Payton previously worked as assistant producer on Metal Gear Solid 4 at Kojima Productions, and later spent time as creative director on Halo 4 before leaving 343 Industries in 2011. He concurs with Zeschuk, stating, "In order to make an unforgettable game, I believe the onus is on me to find something I believe in and inject as much of that into the game as possible. I feel that the games I work on are an extension of myself, making game development a very personal and emotionally charged endeavor. I worry that I take a dangerous approach by investing too much emotionally in the development, but this stems from my belief that games should be more than mere 'products.'"
"The emotional journey, for me, looks like a seismograph," says Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games. Before the success of his game Bastion, on which he was creative director, Kasavin was an associate producer at Electronic Arts on Command & Conquer 3, the producer of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, and later a producer on Spec Ops: The Line at 2K Games. "It's not a curve with peaks and valleys; it's a violent jagged series of near-vertical lines. I don't know how emotionally stable I appear to be, but I know I'm less so than I appear to be. My emotional state changes from day to day, if not multiple times a day. I don't have sustained periods of high or low morale. Small imperceptible things affect me in significant ways."
"In every case the precise emotional journey is different," explains Zeschuk, "though there are a few similarities. When you start a game, it seems like anything is possible; the future is bright and the possibilities are limitless. Fast-forward to the actual production phase, and you suddenly realize that if you want to finish on a reasonable schedule, you need to jettison some stuff; it's helpful to be harsh and cold to do this, even if it's painful. Then, when you're finishing, even if you think what you're making is great, I always felt a bit of trepidation around what people would think of the game. You never really know. We'd always try our best, and put forward our best work, but there's always that risk that folks wouldn't like it. The most likely outcome is that you'd end up with some mixed response, though with varying degrees of happy and unhappy people."
