Personally Professional
This visual talk is about the many paths to indie survival. How feeding your identity struggles may inspire others, and the ups and down in the serious business of making games personal. In early days of my time in games I was told I needed to learn to separate personal from professional life. Years later, it’s become obvious I not only failed that class, but that failure was likely the largest factor; in allowing a barefoot clay-wielding queer artist with a fractured sense of community and home, to crowdfund a metaphoric prototype, found a company with a stranger, raise significant funds and interest while essentially homeless, to release an art game, develop other interactive work for cultural heritage , and inspire people from diverging backgrounds to reconnect to important parts of themselves through games. It covers the importance of interface (ingame and beyond the game), 5Ps in the Price and Power of Polish; Perfectionism, and Poetry, timeless time and other systems of measurement. It evokes the risk and reward ratio, Kickstarter, biomimicry, artwork, taxes, bootstrapping a team, accepting loss, selling dreams and composting the scraps. Tolstoy once wrote : If you want to be universal, start by painting your own village. What’s singular in a game as well as in the process of making it, can be a mediator. Like many, as well as a cultural product, we see games as practical acts of transformation, aesthetic spaces to carry meaning. There are so much works of the mind…ours aim to represent the heart. A kind of flawed truthful essence many call for, in games and media in general, so we wanted to make it. Including others in a process that’s so personal (when your game fantasy houses your crushes, your grandmother’s death, your breakup, moves, and questioning identity…) can be dizzying. At times stripping yourself bare and at other times, stripping yourself of the equation completely; so another can find their home, aspirations and battles in it. Those unlike you or what you represent because you’re building games for others and you need others to make it happen. It takes what it takes, to work with passion, and also accept to polish mold off walls that are not yours. This talk is about being both gentle hustler and genuinely yourself. So hopefully people see themselves in you, and find in games personal ways to move and be moved.
Event Timeslots (1)
Monday
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Alina Constantin
