The beginning of December. It is still raining outside and it seems to have barely got light, even though it’s noon. Rachel and I face a long winter of dark country evenings alone in the house now the children have all left. I imagine that we are on a ship, crossing a cold, northern ocean. The voyage will take weeks. We have a lot of time on our hands. I sit in my cabin and dream of the things we can do when we arrive in the spring. I also reflect on things that have happened.
For a while I’ve wanted to write about these things, big events like births and deaths, but also other places and experiences that have been important to me.
In the afternoon we sat in the sun outside Small Bar on King Street in Bristol and drank beer with Tony. It was July 9th 2015. Earlier that day we had decided to end it. Our lawyers suggested we speak to a friendly corporate liquidator first, just to be sure it was the right decision. We spoke with him and decided it was. So, we sat in the sun and drank, toasting our decision. There was to be weeks of unpleasantness to get through, but for a couple of hours that afternoon I enjoyed the feeling of it being over. A bit like bunking school. You know there will be all sorts of repercussions, that it is just a respite, but you enjoy it all the same.
That was the end of seven years of creating work and building a games company. One game we created, 2.8 Hours Later, became a hit product. This ‘cross city, zombie chase game’ had around 22,000 players each year, who generated almost £900,000 in ticket revenue. Despite our best efforts we could never make money from the game; it was simply too expensive to stage. I don’t want to write about all that now. I might do so in the future, it’s pretty interesting if you are into street games or playable experiences.
What I do want to write about is a kind of recovery and an investigation of why I make the work I do. I want to answer the question ‘why am I creative’, and what that even means. The final years of the company were highly stressful, not only the constant anxiety about money but the stress of doing something no one else had done and not knowing if the decisions we made, almost blindly, would work out. I think we were lucky not to have got anyone killed. It felt like I was riding a runaway train. The only way to get off was to crash it, but the debris of the impact crashed through my life, as well as the lives of people the company owed money to, with painful effects on my family and myself. There were threatening phone calls, my marriage faltered and our eldest son was admitted to a psychiatric hospital suffering from psychosis. We fell further into debt.
Looking back now, I guess I was mildly traumatised by the experience, but I suppressed my feelings just to get through. I took a straight job to generate regular income and tried to fix things. I concentrated on my family and job, and even managed to take the family on a holiday. The first one in years. I felt numb. In time, things settled down but as they did I became aware of an emptiness. Running a company was all consuming, but also working in a creative partnership had negative effects, as well as positives. Having another person who shares your vision, shares your creative response to the world, is a joy and a massive boost. You validate ideas really quickly, and dividing workload really powers productivity and output. We made unique work we’d never have made individually. But it comes with the danger of losing a sense of your creative self. When I walked away from that partnership, I wasn’t sure who I was. The company and the partnership had come to define me creatively, and the circumstances of the company’s end made me feel ashamed of the legacy.
Two friends helped me deal with this loss of direction. A friend from childhood, Dominic, slowly got me back into paddling kayaks, the physicality of which is really beneficial to my mental health. Then Ruth, an old Bristol collaborator, invited me to apply with her to stage a remix of one of my games from years before, Moosehunt. We were commissioned, so the summer of 2018 I spent my spare time in our sweltering spare bedroom, building a web app for the new game to stage at the Lakes Alive Festival in the Lake District. We called it Wolves. It went well, and we were commissioned again the following year. I was back making work.
What I want to do now is to try to understand the sort of work I want to make, why I want to make that but also account for it in a way that invests it with some sort of legitimacy. New work is rarely self-evidently credible, especially work that has highly novel modes of engagement. 2.8 Hours Later had little credibility amongst cultural gatekeepers. That never really bothered us; we had plenty of paying participants and a method for staging it that required no patronage. In fact, the lack of endorsement by the cultural establishment was a badge of honour. However, that type of defiance is tiring and makes the creation of a legacy problematic. There are (or were) 12500 fan videos of the game on Youtube, and the memories of the 80,000 players who took part over the years count for something, but no reviews by critics, or awards, exhibition catalogues, or even a text. After seven years of hard work all we had to show for it was a chapter in Jane Mcgonigal’s book ‘Reality is Broken’.
You might wonder why this is a problem. If I never sought official approval, why complain that it was never given? And surely, goes the argument (which I have a lot of time for), creativity is its own reward, you make work for your own satisfaction, not for the approval of others. I suppose some of it is to do with reputation, but it’s also about money. Raising funding for significant new work is difficult without legacy or reputation and, these days, you need cash to build an audience. Finally, I believe the type of work I and others make, these participatory experiences, are valid (and vital) cultural artefacts and deserve to be acknowledged and supported as such. These forms have the potential to contribute to changing the shape of feelings* required for us to meet the challenges facing humankind.
First of all, I will write about experiences I have been through. They are out of the ordinary. Each opened up a fissure in everyday life that let me glimpse something else. Understanding what that might be is one of my goals for this writing. I create participatory work, often games, and this means that I am really focused on experience design, rather than the text or other conventional accounts of form. These posts cover my approach to creating immersive work, and the reasons I do it. I see myself as an artist and I think if that means anything, it implies an emotional response to the world and articulation of that through the art form. My work provides opportunities for self-realisation: moments, sometimes challenging, where participants experience agency and I hope aspects of self-actualisation. Some of the highly personal posts here describe times when I have experienced these things, and which have made me. I don’t offer them with the aim of self-aggrandisement, or to make myself the hero, rather I hope they inspire the reader to seek out their own experiences, to go beyond their comfort zone, to live with imagination.
The first three of the experiences can be found in the Experience category here
*I’m currently reading ‘The Feeling Of What Happens’ by Antonio Damasio
Leave a Reply