Busking – A Guide For Indie Game Developers

Another month, another blog post on Gamasutra!  This time around I’ve taken inspiration from showing Quarrel at ProtoPlay and written about why making games we want to play is so important to Denki’s approach.  The ProtoPlay experience also reminded me why game development has more in common with busking than you might first imagine…

“I doubt many game developers ever have cause to think of themselves as entertainers, but I’d argue that’s precisely what we are if we’re working in the games industry.

Not artists; or scientists; or technologists or any other “-ist”. Not engineers; or managers; or administrators. We might draw on these skills while doing our job, but they are not the actual purpose in-and-of themselves.

We are entertainers – more like a busker on a street corner than a scientist in a lab. But unlike buskers (and just like many scientists) game developers rarely meet their audience face-to-face, and that can have all sorts of unexpected and unhelpful consequences.”

Click here to read the article in full – as always, I’m looking forward to discussing this with everyone and finding out how others view the role of the audience relationship within the creative process.

Cheers,

Colin.