The final group presentation I worked on this summer required our team to come up with a new product that we would create a narrative architecture around. We landed on challenging the learned behavior of only trying skills and activities based on our ability to be “good” or “bad” at it. Our brand would encourage people to fully experience a skill or activity and only decide to continue or stop doing it based on how much they enjoyed their time spent.
The team realized that some time between childhood and adulthood that we forget the joy of doing something just for the sake of doing it. My experience was that I became aware that I was better or worse at others in certain areas. When I did well at something, I received praise and recognition. When I did poorly at something, I received poor grades and felt shame. Over time, I learned to only do things I was good at and stopped trying things that I was bad at. Art was the main activity that I told myself for many years that I would never be able to do.
Our presentation was based on our own experience and knowledge, so take all of this with a grain of salt. But we came up with the hypothesis that it is more important to focus on the enjoyment of doing the activity versus focusing on a single outcome. If I love doing art, I should refocus my attention on enjoying the time spent working on art and not on how much I like or don’t like a specific sketch or 3D model that I make. As I spend more time on the activity, I will build my skills over a long period of consistent practice. How quickly I improve at that skill is the just a matter of how effective I am at using my practice time.
This is how I want to approach making my games and growing my studio moving forward. I love the whole process of making games. From writing code to make a character move all the way to editing videos that will be used for marketing material. There are many individual skills that I am at a novice level with and the studio is nowhere near profitable, but I trust that those things will improve with time as long as I keep focused.
I want to invite you to consider what story you may be telling yourself about an activity that you enjoy, but think of yourself as bad at. If the outcome didn’t matter at all, would you just have fun doing it? I would love to hear what skill or subject came to your mind and I look forward to talking again soon.
Cheers,
Connor