But I want this, so as usual I’m going to try. There is money involved this time, so I might actually succeed in my goals. The game is actually coming along a bit, and I hope to have it done before the end of March.

While sorting things out for the game, I started noticing how I have a certain pattern of learning. I have always been a bit self-reflective, and I’m thinking that, trying to somehow get a business going out of this work, being a little bit more self-reflective won’t hurt. So it seems to me a good idea to write down these thoughts that occurred to me.

I already know a bit about pretty much everything. Spending most of my teenage years watching television (some if it educational), reading anything I found interesting,  watching other people fuck up lots and having a ton of free time has really given me a lot of knowledge on both a global, common-knowledge scale and about a bunch of different subjects. Basically I know a little about everything.

Generally this a positive trait, but I’ve noticed that it can get in the way of my learning. Usually when there are lessons for something, like say tutorials on how to make Flash games, they tend to be too simplistic, and I get bored. I already know a bit about Flash. I’ve animated with Flash, I’ve done some (very) simple ActionScript, I don’t need to know how to make a button, how to move a ball from one side of the stage to the other… So, getting bored I look for more complex lessons, and jump right into the deep end.

Of course, then it gets way too hard. All the knowledge I have about a particular subject is pretty much due to semi-random exposure, there’s very little structure there. So then I get annoyed, because this is too hard, and the other one was too easy, and depending on my motivation I probably give up and move on to a different subject at that point.

This is why there aren’t any Flash games with my name on it out there (yet).

This is why I have very little money.

Of course, I don’t always give up. Depending on my motivation I either adapt my strategies or my goals, or I push on and keep going, taking the easy lessons and moving on to the hard ones, giving myself structure and all that.

It is because of adapting my strategies and goals that I am pretty versatile with WordPress, something I knew very little about just a year ago.

It is because I will push on and just learn what I have to learn that this game will be finished, and will also actually be somewhat fun to play.

Being more aware of why and how I give up when I don’t want to should help me keep going in those times when things get a bit too hard and/or annoying. I am somewhat of an adult now, and I have a lot of compensating to do for being such a lazy fuck for such a long time.

I’ll be fine.

Now it’s time to show you some examples of interactive art, so you can get an idea of what others have done with the medium. Some of these are done by professional artists, some by kids in basements, some you can play around with right here in your browsers, and others were one time installations in countries you’ve never heard of.

All are totally rad.

Descriptions are ripped straight from their respective websites or whatever other source is appropriate, with some editing if necessary.

The Graveyard:

The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. You play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words.

My opinion: While it might seem like The Graveyard isn’t very interactive at all, it is a perfect example of how even a little interactivity can really create a different experience. By literally placing yourself in the shoes of the old lady you experience her story directly, and you will remember that story even after you walk out of The Graveyard.

Façade:

Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. You, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives – motivating you to re-play the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time.

My opinion: Pay good attention kids, this thing might’ve been made in 2005, but it signals the future of interactive storytelling. Couple the software behind this with some accurate speach recognition and fancy 3d graphics and we’re one step closer to the holodeck.

PainStation:

The PainStation is an arcade cabinet which gives two players the opportunity of playing a specially adapted and expanded variant of the classic video game, Pong, against each other. The electronic controls are connected by digital transducers to several components providing sensory feedback to players. During the game, the players place their left hands on the PEU (Pain Execution Unit) which serves as a sensor and feedback instrument. Possible feedback effects are heat impulses, an electric shock and an integrated miniature wire whip. The feedback generated is dependent on the playing process and can increase in its intensity. The respective opponent can try to alter his or her playing style to purposely change the intensity of the feedback.

My opinion: I had the pleasure of ‘engaging’ with the PainStation back in 2005 at a Dutch arts & technology festival called Robodock (which I believe is currently dormant until further notice), and unfortunately for the person I was playing against  I was pretty good at it too. Not only is it pretty fun (because pain can be hilarious) but it also gives the term “visceral game experience” a whole new meaning.

I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors:

“(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors” is a pixel-horror game that puts the player behind the tentacles of a titanic, writhing sea creature. It’s a tale of love, loss, and balloons with five different endings. Will you befriend the humans or fight them? The choice is up to you.

My opinion: Another great example of how Flash games don’t always have to hold to the regular ‘game’ conventions. Although this work contains quite some text, the poetry is all in the interactivity it offers and the choices you can make with it. You can find more information on the creator’s site.

Dyson:

Dyson is an ambient real-time strategy game with abstract visuals. Remotely command semi-autonomous self-replicating mining machines to take over an entire asteroid belt. The original game was made in one month for the TIGSource Procedural Generation competition. Much of the game’s content is procedurally generated. We are entering Dyson into this year’s IGF! Wish us luck!

My opinion: This one can be considered the most game-like of all items on this list except for the PainStation, but even so the ambience and mood make it much more of a meditative experience than a game.

Reaction Machine

Reaction Machine from jonash on Vimeo

Reaction Machine is an open system, in which the visitor’s reaction determines the art work. In the Reaction Machine different kinds of technologies are combined in one object, a television screen is combined with an old rusty gear wheel and a handle, all connected to a computer with a webcam, microphone and speakers. When a visitor sits down, he will see himself and somebody else looking at each other on the television screen. His head is filmed live by a web cam and combined with a recording of somebody else. As soon as he starts to turn the handle the video recording of the other person starts to play. After watching the video the visitor is asked to record himself. If he now keeps turning the wheel, he will be recorded. In the end of his recording his movie will be mirrored and the next visitor can watch and react on his recording. In this way people can play with the machine, discover its function, react on each other, sometimes in a direct and expressive way, sometimes in a intimate and exploratory way and sometimes in a way telling each other stories.

My opinion: I got a Max/MSP workshop from the guy that made Reaction Machine some years ago, and while his teaching abilities weren’t exactly, well… good, the guy definitely knew what he was doing with the software, and showed some cool examples of what he did with it. This was one of my favorites.

If there are any other cool interactive artworks you’ve come across, know about, or have been a part of, don’t hesitate to drop a comment and let the rest of us know about it.

I tend to have big ideas. Not impossible ideas, but big, ambitious ideas. Large projects that will take a lot of time. They come in all forms: stories, games, animations, music videos. They pop into my head all the time, I have no control over it. I know I’m not the only one. I know you have big ideas too sometimes. Either in the form of doing something new and fresh in whichever medium you prefer, or maybe by branching out into new or less explored mediums, or even a combination of them.

As a personal example, besides making posters for school, working on recreating the Battle of the Sabis in Rome: Total War for a professor at the University of Amsterdam, and attempting to get into chiptunes, all of which takes up enough of my time already when combined with school and the girlfriend, I’ve got a giant personal project I want to make this year. Whether or not I’ll actually be able to finish it this year is not entirely clear, but seeing as it’s a personal project it doesn’t really matter. Let’s just say that it’s an animation that will last about 25 minutes and has both 2d and 3d elements. Quite a lot of work, and so far the only thing I actually have is one half-finished 3d model and a notebook full of sketches and, well, notes.

Just like any large, ambitious ideas you might have, this project will require a lot of time and a lot of work to even get started, let alone finish. But the benefits will be amazing. I want this project to be of the highest quality I can possibly achieve, and that should be true for any ambitious projects you might have in your head (or notebooks) as well.

The Challenge

You obviously have to get started first, and this is something that can be challenging enough on its own. It’s likely that you’ve never attempted a project of such magnitude before (or at least not on your own), so not knowing what to expect could make you too afraid to get started. Well, then you won’t complete anything, will you? So forget that fear. Motivation is, as always, a huge factor. The biggest thing to consider is the payoff compared to the amount of work you put in. This can be monetary, if you are intending to enter it into contests or festivals, or even intending to sell it. But you could also be doing it to just get a sense of personal or artistic accomplishment, or to express your emotions. Whatever the case, the payoff needs to be sufficient enough for the whole thing to be worth it. So, do your best to find out what that payoff might be for you, and then evaluate whether or not that payoff will be worth the amount of work and time you will put into the project.

The Organization

Oh, you silly amateurs, you don’t need to be organized, right? You just do things, and then stuff happens, and then you’re happy. Well, if you want to do things that are a little harder, things that take a little more time, you’re just gonna have to act at least a little professional and get a little organized. I know, I know, it’s no fun, but it’s just part of the whole ‘hard work’ thing, there’s no getting around it. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do that much. Just set up a rough schedule for yourself, and narrow that down to whatever kind of schedule works for you. Set yourself some deadlines, but don’t go cry in a corner if you miss them. Write things down, get yourself some structure, be at least a little disciplined, and you’ll be well on your way to the end of your project so that you can be bored again and can kill that eventual boredom with an even more ambitiousnesserer project.

The Education

It is extremely likely that you will have to pick up some new skills for a project like this. Both technical skills and techniques, and general (or specific) artistic principles that you will need to apply. You also might need to learn to work with new software, or even hardware, depending on the scope of your project. There are many ways to get yourself educated. The most common path amateur digital artists take is the path of the trusty tutorial. Now, while there’s no doubt that you can learn a lot from tutorials, there’s only so much they can teach. My advice would be to only resort to tutorials when there’s a specific technical trick you don’t understand. Besides to tutorials, there are plenty of other ways to learn. Even books about art history can give you insights you hadn’t considered before. You can also start taking some classes, or workshops, and attend seminars. This can usually be very motivating because you have a physical place to go to, and have other creative people to interact with. Last but not least, the very best way to learn: experimentation. It is only by playing around, both technically and artistically, that you can really create new things.

The Alliance

This is something I will probably talk about a lot in the future, because I think it’s very important. Maybe, depending on your lifestyle, you do not have the time to learn new things. Maybe you don’t have the interest. But you still have ambition, you still want to do something new, something much bigger than you’ve ever done before. What to do?

Collaborate.

If you lack a certain skill you do not have the time or interest to learn yourself, find someone else who does have that skill. While I might not always be a fan of digital art communities, one thing they are good for is finding people to work with. Need an animator? Need someone to make the music? Need someone to help with the programming? Ask for help. If there’s one thing I know about amateur digital artists, it’s that they’re always willing to help, especially if the project is large and ambitious. Beware, though, because collaboration does not come without it’s problems. Make sure the rules are clear. If you want to maintain complete creative control, say it. If you are willing to accept any ideas the other person(s) might have, it’s just as important to let them know. Communication is essential when you’re working with other people. Set up regular chat sessions, private forums, conference calls or maybe even real life meet ups, whatever it takes. All the stuff I mentioned before about organization still counts, only it gets a little more complicated and the whole group has to be aware of it. Don’t be afraid to kick someone out of the group if they’re not doing their part, just be sure to be fair. If everything goes right, your big idea will become a reality, and you might even make some good friends in the process.

And always give credit where credit is due.

The Backup

Hate other people? Hate learning? All hope is not yet lost! You can still resort to free resources, and if it comes to it maybe even paid resources. There’s certainly enough free stuff out there, but as I’ve said before, using resources you did not create yourself (or were not created specifically for you) does not come without risks. Be aware of them, they will have a big influence on your project.

The Consequences

The project can end up in two ways, success or failure. What determines whether or not it’s a success or a failure is entirely up to you.

A failure will at the most make it seem like you wasted a lot of your precious time, but there is no better way to learn to walk than to fall flat on your face. And with an ambitious project, you must have learned a lot, so there’s absolutely no reason not to try again, which something that will surely lead to…

Success! What is success? Success is different to everyone. For some, it might just be the journey of attempting to bring a big idea to life. For others it’s the recognition of the quality of the finished products. For others, it’s making a fat ton of cash from all the hard work put into the creation.

Both end scenarios will have consequences, both positive and negative, so be ready.

And make sure you’re wearing a parachute when you jump.

We just sit there, in front of the computer, a tool that has made it easier than ever for us take that need of expression and turn it into artworks that our friends, our families and bajillions of strangers can enjoy (or hate) and yet we do nothing. We (sometimes) pay for and install expensive, complicated software, with the hope of eventually making something great with it. We copy others and make ourselves believe that we’ve actually learned something. We read about ‘real’ artists, and hope we that they can inspire us to become just as good someday.

But what is the sum of all this work?

Nothing. Not much, at least.

You could be awesome at Photoshop, you could have animation techniques that would make Aleksandr Petrov weep with jealousy, and have some beats and loops you made stored on your hard drive that Timbaland would love to steal.

But unless you get that creative brain to really express yourself, unless you use those (proverbial) beats and loops to make that (proverbial) song and get it out there, Timbaland is just going to find someone else to steal from.

They say that there’s a book inside all of us. This is only really true for those of us who aren’t boring or who have peculiar eating habits. There might be a number of great drawings inside of you, however, or animations, or songs, or films, or interactive real time 3-dimensional massively multiplayer online hamster wheels. You visiting my little blog means that you, at the very least, have an interest in creative expression, and at the very most are an accomplished artist who has decided to me with his digital presence, and if he’s really nice also a comment or two. So I’m right in assuming that you consider yourself creative.

All it takes to call yourself  ‘creative’ is that need to create. It’s some weird instinctual message from your brain telling you to do something meaningful with your time once you are done gathering food and procreating.

But guess what? Just as much as you need to create, the world needs your creations. It does. The world can be a terrible, awful place, filled with violence and suffering. Every little piece of creative expression helps to lessen some of that suffering. At the very least your work will relieve some of your own stress, and at most it will inspire revolutionary uprisings hundreds of years from now, finally liberating the human race from their robotic overlords once and for all. So make it good. Make it real.

Your art is your power, your ability to influence the world. Your real voice. Through the digital medium, this voice can spread farther and faster than pathetic little sound vibrations ever could on their own.

Just remember that anyone can slap on a lens flair, anyone can set some keyframes, and anyone can install and start up some software (my grandmother excluded.) You may already have fantastic technical skills, but what about the important skills? What about your creative expression? What do you have to say to the world? What do you have to say to yourself? Don’t just draw some lines, don’t just make anything, make something. Something new, something that is yours. Keep it private, publish it on your website, profit from it, or remove all rights and share it freely with the world, it doesn’t matter.

As long as you make something.

Not just anything.

image by marfis75

As I explained in my earlier articles, motivation can be seen from two perspectives. Sometimes this is seen as a positive/negative reinforcement thing, sometimes it’s more of a yin-yang thing where both options have their pros and cons. There is always some sort of weird funky duality at play, where it doesn’t really matter which path you take, but just that you walk that path the right way. It’s all relative and personal and works different for everybody. So sometimes you have a choice, sometimes that choice is clear, sometimes it isn’t. In this case, you don’t really have a choice at all. I think that we can all agree that being a professional digital artist means you get a monetary reward for your efforts, sometimes fairly, most times not fairly at all. Money, being the thing we buy necessary commodities such as food and videogames with, is usually a strong motivational factor for most.

But you, by definition, don’t make any money, or at least certainly not enough to be the strongest motivational factor. I myself have recently joined a machinima-like project where I’ll be doing mostly camera and editing work. I am getting a small compensation for my work, but there is a reason why I emphasised ‘small’ back there. A little extra money is great, but I’m not doing it for the money, I’m doing it because I enjoy it, because it’s a learning experience, because I get to meet new creative people to work with, because it will give me entry into further projects, and because I love being part of a creative process. I would do this just the same if I wasn’t getting paid.

Because I’m free.

Free both in the sense that I (normally) don’t charge a price for my work, and free in the sense that I have no limitations and no real obligations.

Money can’t be a significant motivational factor for me. I don’t have to skills (yet?) to generate any kind of real justifiable income, and to be honest I don’t even know if I really ever want to give up that freedom. You see, while obligations and a rigid structure, and by that I mean thing such as the dreaded deadline, can have a very motivating effect, the problem is that, as an amateur, and enthusiast, someone who does this for the sake of doing it and those other nice things I mentioned up above there, you don’t actually have any real obligations. So what do you do?

Revel in your freedom. Think about how much making digital art must suck for a pro if the main reason they do it for the money. You know you’re not, so when you feel a little down, when you are not sure if you are good enough or if you can achieve your goals, remember why you do this in the first place.

Because you want to.

It is entirely your choice, it is entirely in your control. You are free.

Enjoy the feeling, it is a great and wonderful feeling. I haven’t lived for long, but very few things make me feel as good as being creative. Life is busy, life is messy, a lot of aspects of our lives are out of our hands. So take the freedom you do have, and use it as much as you can.

(Ironically, the best way to achieve something with that freedom is to give yourself some responsibility and obligations, but I will discuss all the stuff surrounding discipline and personal responsibility in later posts)

In the meantime, enjoy yourself and your freedom and go out and create some awesome masterpieces, or pieces of crap. It’s your choice!

To wrap things up, I can imagine that in the (distant) future I might actually make enough money from my creative work to actually call it ‘income.’ If I did, I would really miss being free.

image by brionv

Also, don’t be a wuss and get all insulted by reading this, sometimes people need to be slapped around a bit to learn a lesson. So here’s your lesson: YOU SUCK. You are just not good enough. Hell, there’s a reason why you’re an amateur, isn’t there? The quality of your work is severely lacking, and you invest poorly in the stock market.

Wait, let me take a step back there…

It’s all about perspective. In this case, the neutral perspective is that your work is not as good right now as it could be. The positive happy crappy perspective would be “you can always learn and improve etc. yadda yadda blergh” and so forth. This perspective is true. All perspectives are true, but a much more useful perspective is the one with the little voice in your head telling you how crappy your creative output is and how you’ll never be good enough to make even your grandmother like it. How in the holy punishing afterlife is this supposed to motivate you to do anything, you ask?

First, stop asking questions. This is a post that doesn’t change unless I spot an error or need to update something small. It is very unlikely that the post will magically change to answer your question exactly. Second, if you are going to ask something, look at that little comment form down there. Use it. Third, your greatest power in this life is defiance.

The more people there are who tell you you suck, and that your work isn’t worth the bytes it’s made of, the better you feel on your way to the top, and the more satisfying that middle finger will feel, raised up in the air.

You should want people to tell you how much you suck. People are awful, they’ll have no problem criticizing your work if you ask them to. You should appreciate that, and take any constructive criticism that comes out of it, because plenty of it will be dreck. This is why I tend to avoid places such as DeviantArt to display my work, as the criticism there tends to take the shape of unending praise no matter what the quality of the work (and don’t take me wrong, there are some amazing creations on that site.) It’s good to have criticism come from a variety of places.

And with this constructive criticism, you will be motivated to better yourself and prove your detractors wrong. Being aware is about the most important thing you could ever do or be.

This is where the pride comes in, and my blabbering about perspective. Everything is some sort of magical Einsteinian relative duality, and finding the balance is exactly what will get you to the top. Be proud of your abilities and talent, make work, if it sucks, take the criticism and better yourself, and make more work that sucks less.

Really, what feels better than proving people wrong?

1. Be aware of your abilities. While a challenging new project can be a very good reason to pick up new skills, learn new techniques or even completely new software packages, and this is indeed a strategy I have used before myself, you have to realize that this does not come without a price. Learning for the project can be very educational, but also time and energy consuming, and if you cannot learn whatever you need to learn in time, very demotivating. Besides that, if you jump into a project without the intention of learning new techniques and so forth, but just to make something nice without realizing that you are just not that far along yet, you will run into quite a few roadblocks and you will just end up wasting your time. So… Make sure you have the skills, and if you don’t, that you are able to pick up and learn those skills within a realistic time frame. Yes. Indeed.
2. Figure out how much time it’s going to take. If you’re aiming high in the first place, chances are this is a project that will take some time to finish. First, you have to make sure you actually have that time at all. Next you must use that time effectively, so do away with laziness and distractions, and make yourself a little planning. It doesn’t have to be anything too extensive. I’ve noticed that effective planning differs from person to person. Some may need to have everything written down exactly in an organizer, and others can just have a few notes scribbled on a scrap of paper. Just use whatever works best for you. Just remember that you’re making a significant time investment when working on a large or challenging project, and if you can’t make that investment, you shouldn’t bother.
3. Learn from your past mistakes. Because it’s a bit hard to learn from the mistakes you will make in the future. You should really use your experiences with failure in the past to you’re advantage. If you keep in mind the stumbling blocks you’ve had in the past you will be better off in the present. If you know you suck at planning (see point #2), you should take more time to better that part of yourself and stay disciplined, or figure out ways to work around it if that works out best for you. You will fail in the future, and I’m sure you’ve failed many times in the past (I know I have), but the more you learn from those mistakes, the smaller the chance that you will make those same mistakes again. To extend this idea even further, you can use those past experiences and your knowledge of your own weaknesses to theorize and prepare for potential mistakes you are prone to now.
4. Cut the project up into separate parts. If the project is potentially too much for you to handle efficiently, cut it up into separate parts to make it a chain of smaller more manageable projects. This will give you a lot more flexibility in both the time and the energy you put into that particular project. You are an amateur, you don’t have a lot of free time for this work, and you have less experience, especially with large scale projects. Cut that mother up. Every time you finish a part you will get an extra boost of motivation that will help towards finishing the next part, until  you are done with every single part and look back at the completed work with pride and perhaps even glee. Yes, glee! I am currently doing this myself with a large project and I find that especially being able to reuse assets intelligently makes the entire process much less daunting.
5. BE REALISTIC. The most important commandment of all, so important I wrote it in caps, is the last four points all bundled together in two little words. Well, one little word and one larger word. But it’s important, very important. For the title of this post I used the metaphor of aiming. Aiming is a conscious act, and the best thing to do with all conscious act is to be aware of everything. Your surroundings, your own abilities, everything. It is only by being honest to yourself that you can shoot down your target and bathe in the glory of a thousand exploding pieces of whatever it was you were aiming at. If you don’t have the abilities (yet!) and don’t have the time or energy to learn them, if the project is just too large for you to handle, don’t waste your time. With this I don’t mean to say that your idea is a waste of time, or that you’re not talented enough, or whatever, so don’t get all wound up over nothing, ok? I mean that instead of trying to tackle projects you aren’t ready for yet, it’s a much better strategy to spend your time wisely on the work you are more than capable of.

It’s great to shoot for the stars, as long as you remember that you have to overcome the earth’s gravitational pull first.

Being proud, on the other hand, can be very very good. The idea is to tell yourself you’re awesome to the max and all that, and to use your work as a confirmation of this fact. “But Jer-Jer,” you ask, “what if my work totally sucks?” This is a very valid question, and in one sense a good argument for the Evil Anti-Pride Movement to denounce our beautiful plan. Too bad for them it is easily shot down. Before you can be proud of your work, you obviously need to make work worthy of your own pride. How do you make your work worthy?

Be proud of your abilities.

If you know within yourself that you can create amazingly awesome things, then any barrier you might encounter, such as lack of technical knowledge or bad planning, will be easily smashed and burned. It is the greatest motivation you could ever have. Getting an idea you like is a good boost, but it’s only temporary, what will really get you going is knowing that your idea is great and that the finished product is something you will most certainly be proud of. Whether or not you can match the final product to your grand ideas does not matter for this to work. In fact, this kind of attitude will prevent your failures from getting you down. Don’t be delusional though, figure out why your project failed, take whatever criticism you get, and learn from it. But keep believing in yourself and all that jazz, because if you don’t, why would anyone else?

Don’t think you’ll get lucky and wait for a project or work to become successful, and that you’ll gain confidence from that. It shouldn’t work that way. Get the confidence first, use that to make your work as good as possible, and use the reciprocal magic to create an endless cycle of super confidence.

Just don’t get cocky.

And stop calling me Jer-Jer.