i studied and worked as a graphic designer at the start of my career, and i still do a lot of design focused work, and i feel like my head is most always in the realm of aesthetics. and then my career moved more into game development, and found a new focus on technical skill and process. i feel like this is very common, you find yourself artistically motivated and you want to learn to do a thing, and on today's internet you will find endless resources on how to achieve a particular aesthetic, or improve your technical abilities. Learn color theory. Learn to draw the human hand. Learn to build a finite state machine in gamemaker. Learn to sidechain your bass in ableton live.
i practice photography in my free time as a hobby. it's simple enough to be relaxing, gets me outdoors, and helps hone my visual composition skills. photographers are notorious gear freaks. i'll watch videos and the conversation 90% of the time is about sensors, film, settings, lenses, filters. if you're lucky, you'll get people talking about composition, locations, times of day, light and shadow, weather. i kinda get the same mindless relaxation out of watching these as videos of guys putting PCs together. i'll watch videos of people walking around the city taking photos, "oh i like the light here" or "oh i'll snap a picture of this person on their bike" or whatever.
the other day i stumbled upon a video about the japanese street photographer Daido Moriyama, and it opens with him saying "I have always felt that the world is an erotic place... for me, cities are enormous bodies of people's desires. And as I search for my own desires within them, I slice into time, seeing the moment. That's the kind of camera work I like."
and it just kinda snapped me awake. like, that's an artist's statement, that's a point of view, that's a wild way of interpreting the world. it has nothing to do with the tools or technique. you could do anything with that, you could write a book, you could write a song, you could make a painting. that's a spark that will take you places no matter what you're working with.
and it's got me rethinking how i want to make things, how to combat this feeling of sterility in my work. it's really hard in games because it is such a technical medium, and i'm in a position where i feel like a lot of my attention is on making a Product that will earn enough to not make me destitute. but i really want to break past empty aesthetics and craft and find a way to make this more meaningful.
