Imagine yourself as an artist, author, curator, or other creative practitioner working in games in 10 years. What will motivate you creatively? Are you making political games to progress society? Or are you making radical fare that experiments with the form of the medium for its own sake? A different direction entirely? What kind of work will feel vital for you to make in 2029? If you foresee a major component of your creative work will be writing about games, what will you be writing about? If you’re curating games, what will be your curatorial drives and interests? Imagine you’re making enough money to live on without money stress. This exercise isn’t about a study in entrepreneurship, economics, or career planning. The purpose of the exercise is to help you tap into and focus your creative drives that will help you construct a satisfying potential future of what you could be doing and why.
What will motivate me creatively in games in ten years time is what motivates me now, not just in the games space, but in all creative endeavors I’ve tried my hand at or will try my hand at. My singular drive has been to create the kind of work that I, as a player/reader/viewer, want to see in the world--work that immerses players as completely as possible. This kind of work will not always be intentionally or overtly political, but it will naturally bend toward the political simply by virtue of the fact that artists cannot help but offer some form of perspective, even if they do so subconsciously. Nowadays, as I’m sure it will be the case in 2030, politics in one form or another are virtually inescapable. As with my work now, my goal is to be progressive and regressive in equal measure, to reaffirm and reassure but also to challenge and provoke, to adhere to the rules that serve my process and to reject the traditions and social mores that I find useless, detracting, or cowardly. Part of the artist’s job is to take that which he finds distasteful or immoral or inhuman and show the slight sliver of humanity within. We should be looking around at the state of the world and saying "what the fuck?" as often as we can. Life is simply too short to play it safe in this regard. As to the form my work will inhabit, breaking out of or dismantling tried and true idioms, formats, or structures like the page or the screen are of little interest to me. These structures are the way they are for a reason—they are battle tested. It follows then that adventurism or experimentation will come from the content itself, not how it is transmitted to or absorbed by the audience nor by what shape it takes.