The question of whether something you made is good or not when it’s yours is an interesting one. I think that a ‘good game’ for me really depends on whether I’m valuing the artistic or more cathartic qualities in stuff I make.
Some games, I focus more heavily on trying to make the prose beautiful- the same way I might sit and pick at poetry I’ve written to make the words work in service of whatever the image or feeling I’m trying to invoke is. I don’t write poetry by hand, even though I draft prose by hand sometimes, (mostly anyways, with the exception of After the Accident, which was first scribbled in a journal from a teenage diary) because I revise and cross out and rephrase and rearrange and really butcher and hack away at poems so much. It would be a disaster in handwriting.
It takes multiple revision passes, which I hardly ever do for my prose- the tighter constraint of a poem makes each word have to work that much harder to earn its place on the page. VESPERTINE is an example of a game I’ve made where the beauty, or the aesthetic qualities, of a game were more strongly emphasized in deciding if it was a good enough game for me to be happy putting it out there. I like it. I’m really proud of the writing in it, and I’m happy that I’ve written something that I think is beautiful to read. Even if there are a few lines where I wince, or the flow feels a bit awkward. For the most part, though, I’m happy with it, because the prose is pretty enough for me.
On the other hand, I have games where instead, the value in it to me, is the catharsis it brings in making the piece. Its a sort of self exorcism. In making it, it can stop nibbling away at my thoughts like a silly mouse in a pantry, and there’s a big sigh of relief in the emotional processing that inherently goes through the work of creating it.
A lot of my games are like this, especially the ones that deal with particularly troubling subject matter.
Sweetpea’s father and his struggle with alcoholism draws from my own experiences of growing up with an alcoholic, and the fear and uncertainty of being a child unsure of how to grapple with that unpredictable element. how do i love you? is a representation of abusive relationships I’ve been in- all of the events are true to life, (actually related to the SpringThing competition that had me joining this community and IFDB awards Brian ran!) though the details of identity have been obscured and amalgamated for people’s privacy. (They’re pretty identifiable to the people in question, though. My friends were surprised at how quickly they could figure out who was meant to represent them.) In it, all of the dialogue from the abusive boyfriend are things I have had thrown at me before from a romantic partner. (Thankfully, the dialogue from the protagonist catcrumb’s friends also echo the people I am lucky enough to be friends with today.)
It’s not always gloom and doom- the love i have known is a tribute to said friends and the love we have for one another, featuring direct quotes from (again, anonymized to everyone but them) people I cherish. THE FRONT BOTTOMS ARE WHY I AM ALIVE is a celebration and tribute to the band that is, as the title puts it- their music has gotten me through the worst parts of my life, and I’m grateful for it.
For those games, the beauty of the prose matters a lot less. Especially in more chatlog, or dialogue heavy pieces. Real people talking is kind of hideously clunky, and awkward, and a bit on the nose sometimes. There are definitely passages which could be cut out to improve a work, areas where I could smooth out transitions or flesh out passages or add more choices or any number of improvements. Sweetpea has a bizarre looping glitch because I made it without any understanding of, or use of variables. The UI is pretty hideous. It’s a flawed work. There’s typography issues in text placement, there’s a bumbled word that’s really obvious in the Decker piece, there’s not really much of a narrative in some of these and it’s definitely not carefully thought out or planned, more of word vomiting onto a colourful page.
And that’s like, fine. Some of them are ugly. There are definitely things I’d change, if I weren’t always rabbiting off in search of a new project. The value in those pieces to me, as in defining if they’re good enough or not, isn’t in how polished or beautiful the language is. It’s in that they were extremely cathartic to make. I felt better after making them. They were useful to process painful, difficult emotions- and often, games I consider ‘good enough’ on this metric are the ones that really resonate with other people and their personal experiences, as the comments on how do i love you? showed me. I’ve had people reach out privately to thank me for how I handled addiction and abusive relationships because it made them feel seen- and that’s a really special, wonderful thing to me: that human connection of being seen and feeling understood.
I think it’d be really hard for me to write a piece that I felt was good enough by both metrics. I don’t think that I have, yet. I don’t really know if I want to? But broadly speaking, I’m pretty happy with games I’ve made that were either meant to be good at being beautiful, or good at being cathartic.
