My goal is to be one of the most influential video game designers of this century. I may not be considered the absolute greatest (rankings like that are very fickle anyway, and never universally agreed upon, even in the sciences). But I do want my works to be considered necessary for any future survey of the major works of this period.
Shouldn't your goal be to make great games? Otherwise, aren't you striving for a goal defined by other people? For goals like yours, politics and personality can matter as much as the work itself.
If you are enjoying the journey you are on, then go for it (and I hope you are spending as much time on your social network as you are on games). Otherwise, I'd urge you to consider the opportunity costs of a narrow, intense focus.
That was an implied sub-goal. The verification criteria I gave was merely to illustrate what the concrete results of my endeavors might look like. If I said flatly "I want to make great games," then someone might reasonably respond "how do you know you're succeeding?"
>For goals like yours, politics and personality can matter as much as the work itself.
This is quite true. But Paul Graham has a great quote which I think might be applicable here: "Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are... And so there is a great temptation to work on problems you can treat formally, rather than problems that are, say, important."
Being influential and making something great aren't necessarily linked. In music, for example, lots of musicians I adore list Captain Beefheart as an influence. Captain Beefheart never really achieved much commercial success. I don't like his stuff at all.
Anyway, I sincerely hope that your work towards making something great is enjoyable or at least doesn't consume all of your time. Life is short and there's more things worth experiencing than we have time for.
They've made Doom, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1-2, Everquest, Master of Orion and all the other classics in the 90s and very early 2000s.
Most games released today are either donationware (WoT) or completely derivative works (think long running series like CoD or sports games), or survival-game clones like No Man's Sky (and about 500 others)
Your best bet would probably be to join Valve and get them to release Episode 3 if you ever want to get any renown and not just endlessly try to push your games on Greenlight.
Sorry if this sounded harsh.
This is like going up to an aspiring writer in ancient Greece and saying "The Odyssey has already been written, there is nothing more to be done." Not realizing that 2,000 years later, authors like Joyce and Nabokov would still be breaking new ground.
Assuming the human race endures long enough, video games are at the very beginning of what is going to be a very long and interesting history.
Star Citizen is the only thing on the horizon that shows promise, at least to my personal tastes.
Best of luck in your endeavors.
I do think there is some possibility for innovation in gaming with AR/VR, but I also agree we've probably reached the point of diminishing returns with what we can do with current control schemes (monitor + mouse/keyboard/gamepad).
The highest level of gameplay involved very little spreadsheet hell and a lot more skill, leadership and coordination that one might think originally if they did not have a strong corporation to align with. It's true that there a LOT of numbers behind the gameplay that you had to consider, but spreadsheet hell was a result of poor UI/UX choices and not necessarily of game design.
If Star Citizen can replicate that, but with better graphics, and personal ship control (instead of EVE's point and click) - they will already be a success in my book.
As it happens, though, I'm already too late to be the initiator of this sort of cultural shift. Universities like NYU and CMU already offer MFAs in game design. There are conferences and journals dedicated to game studies. So the wheels are already in motion.
The point being that high art can be right in front of us and we may miss it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/pearls-bef...