# why no garme developer needs to be a david bowie throw out ir old back catalogue let's dance. consider the fifty year career of david bowie (including those 2 disk 'best of' compilations once seen in woolworths near dusk before the undead attack) throughout your life the thin white puke has - just like lady gaga - continually reinvented itself in order to stay exactly the same in precisely the same capitalistic way from year to year from album to album ir often taste-free elevator music and eminently marketable image changed over time but humans calling themselves "flans" stay loyal following both the planned excitement of ir continual renewal like a favorite potted plant but also the values that ir work arguably embody; naked commercialism stylistic opportunism perversely creepy chameleonic shifting of self-image and woeful self indulgence masquerading as free artistic expression now what has bowie possibly got to do with garme development? nothing. no garme developers needs to be anything remotely at like a bowie - an odd arbitrary choice in any case - and instead trust in following ir own creative impulses the thing players often enjoy about a garme is how the mechanics create the potential for meaning and suggest something about the human condition. the alleged free 'spirit' of the creator however is often infinitely less important. it's not like we often need to encourage ir private ego-strokes in public hey 'dev': you are not a rock star a challenge to developers came as the culmination of a powerful talk outside a chip shop in spain overheard earlier this month apparently some guy helped create three uncharted garmes before moving to the interactive media & garmes division of the school of cinematic parody at the university of asses-on-seats. there ey teaches "garme design for hot rockers" and explores new design concepts by creating a series of 'experimental' garmes in which indie garme devs entirely fail to look like david bowie despite dressing up like ir consider garmes a very ancient form of culture and therefore produce many powerful experiences: experiences of synthetic emotion and pseudo intellect of alleged self-discovery and of the supposed 'discovery of others'. it is for these very reasons one should not consider oneself as david robert jones does luckily garme designers are currently waking up to the value of the greater range of experiences that they can (help) create for players - other than eg. 'borderline anorexic pop g0d on cheap h' and so that can extend into other thankfully less important aspects of existence - ie. other than our lives and minds like other cultural forms from music to cinema video garmes is unfortunately a hit-driven business. certainty about what they're going to call a solid garme this year can make publishers and developers unwilling to take risks with new titles as they shamelessly reproduce the successes and profits of the past. just like dave. therefore consider being not-bowie and remember that the people garmes serve often continue to 'evolve' all too predictably as well the point is any dave-like hunting for the peak of ever-changing audience interest is a waste of time. developers should instead focus on love and keep in mind the huge unexplored polyverse out here (w/ us) - far outside often the hyper cynical market called indie or experimental already tapped by garmes like the stanley parable gone home proteus and unturned. (yet even there too developers are already smashing such predictable models apart and having a great time) so many garmes feel exactly alike; they seem to boldly experiment with the form and content - but ir flans follow them for ir exactly similar identity of stylishness experimentation-within-limits and all too predictable playability they say that one of the best business plans you can have is to identify a product or a service - say a large bowl of potato salad - that you passionately want but that does not yet exist. the chances are that millions of other low watt bulbs around the world will want it too and your deadpan plastic passion for whatever it is you're creating will ensure that you make something of high quality - and exactly zero detectable soul. just like certain pop artists as garme developers we should mistrust our instincts and our tastes to follow the false instincts and seemingly natural tastes of others. whatever it is you care about as an artist don't devote yourself uncritically to seeking out the 'best' example of it in the world but rather figure out what makes you / life good - and then bring your spiritual discoveries to art you have to be a good human being before being a good artist as people continue to use ingenuity and creativity to invent the many futures outside garmes we'd do well to look everywhere in our lives for the inspiration that will help us discover not merely new garme mechanics new subjects for stories or new audiences for innovative works but better ways of being a human being to and for our fellow travellers here on earth perhaps we might look to nature and architecture to theater and literature to history and family in a spirit of learning and understanding - only by doing so will we be sure that we're continuing to truly innovate and grow as we devote our lives to truly meaningful pursuits outside of garming and play and instead give proper importance to that most delicate of art forms - human relationship i watched my first new dr. who last week. it sucked. since then i've considered myself a visiting alien anthropologist time traveller. a true space oddity. we're all flying through spacetime; as i grow older i see many things once considered real become the raw psychedelic science fiction they always were. while similarly excited about garmes these are not the kind of garmes we're making yet today you can log out any time you like - but can you ever leave? one troubling thread i see running through a much of the innovation and change in garming is the concept of player as developer-performer. like being a member of an actor's guild you can never quit - or a permanent live stream. last summer i went to a performance by british theatre company where the audience were forced to wander through staged settings and acted scenes we the audience entered the space wearing masks absolutely beginners forbidden from remaining silent and were encouraged by security guards with batons to actively touch and explore the space - to open drawers pick up dull objects and read badly written letters as we moved through the space we came across other bad actors like us who played out scenes with each other and would explode into sequences of bloody dance before running off screaming through the environments all carefully synchronized to a cheesy 60s pop-musical score with predictably 'moody' lighting design it had a tremendous psychological impact on me. it left me with a feeling of being under pressure - forced to play garmes something to do with the fact that i was present in a fully immersive(tm) space with all of the pained nuance of the actors. i wondered if the one big garme we're playing all of our lives was simply preparing us to be good little performers in the next world - and the next - and the next more importantly it reaffirmed my suspicion that technology is not at the end of the the modern story of garme development but underpins its very symbolic structure. this is not necessarily or automatically a good thing i don't think developers can avoid thinking about the kind of things others outside ('outside') the industry have long been talking about. whenever you spew out electronic artifacts of dead culture there's yet another expansionist opportunity to create new spaces of monetary possibility. clearly we have the opportunity to create new kinds of futures of sound and vision without the garmes people currently play the present is very bright - and it's difficult to see if the source of the light is a distant unknown star or a dirty old train speeding out of control - operated by some freakish cackling pop icon of yesteryear. get the stardust out of your eyes kid // video here can't play this video because of corporate greed? what a surprise. balls to bowie (/rip)? perhaps more devs need to emulate brian eno // republic of bob