If you aren’t passionate about your project, do you really understand your project?

One of the best TV shows of all time is Reno 911. It’s a mockumentary style series in which a squad of inept police officers in Reno, Nevada are followed around by a camera crew for…some reason. ^[1]btw, I am super happy that the mockumentary genre has so far avoided needing to justify the cameras. Somehow, this complete refusal to acknowledge the occasion, and instead fall hard into the ego … Continue reading

One of my favorite skits involves an apartment fire. A panicked tennant tries to convince police officers and firefighters to brave the burning building in order to rescue the only copy of his in-progress novel. This man’s life work is about to be destroyed.

This scene is a potentially heavy one wrought with questions about the frailty of a human being’s contributions to a world always trying to destroy them. Think about it: in one instant, this person’s entire record of being, his legacy, could disappear completely. In a way, destruction of a legacy is even more daunting than destruction of one’s own life. A legacy is forever. A life isn’t.

Instead, Reno 911, being a comedy show, pauses to allow the police officers and firefighters to consider the merits of the novel before deciding whether or not to rescue it. This forces the novelist to defend his work…which he simply cannot do. Over the course of the skit, the officers and firefighters ask questions that the author cannot answer. Simple questions about the book’s plot are met with the author’s deflated attempts to rationalize the book’s hackneyed themes. In the end, we see the author learn a valuable lesson, as spoken by one of the firefighters: “If you can’t get excited about your work, how can you expect anyone else to?”

If you can’t get excited about your work, how can you expect anyone else to?

This is advice I’d received in college (as I pursued an English Literature degree), but never really processed. Well, I guess I processed it, but in a way that I don’t think the advice intended.

In college, I took this advice to mean that everything I create should be so different and so creative that its novelty alone would inspire passion in both me and the audience. I reasoned that it’s easy to get excited about my work when the work itself is so…out there. And this worked…for me. For the audience? Not always. I was passionate, sure, but I was passionate for an idea that was difficult for an audience to care about. In other words, my passion was not contagious. The audience had no reason to engage with it.

Rather, the advice means something else, I think. It means that a creator should not avoid convention; a creator should instead be able to get excited about conventions and genre tropes. A creator should understand why conventions and genre tropes work and should use their creativity not to avoid conventions but to accept them for what they are and to build something special with them.

The novelist in the Reno 911 skit immediately deflated when asked to defend his work. He collapsed amid accusations of trite storytelling. Instead, he should have embraced the accusations. He should have defended his creative choices and his role in writing a novel that fits within expected genre tropes.

I think about this often when designing games. Sometimes I worry about “creating yet another platformer” or “creating yet another game with a humanoid player character.” And so I have to remind myself that platformers are great, that humanoid characters are great. The sign of a creative game maker with eyes toward a legacy isn’t about creating something brand new from nothing, but is about something so much harder and ultimately more worthy of praise: creating something brand new from something. Because with “something” comes expectations and opinions, and navigating those expectations and opinions to emerge on the other side with a product people love, now that’s something to get excited about.