Sometimes making art is as natural as breathing or sweating or speaking and you just need to figure out a way to bottle it. Sometimes making art is like trying to hold your mind in the shape of a mold while you pour plaster into it. Sometimes making art is like putting together a puzzle, and each piece you place gives you a clue to where every other piece needs to go. Sometimes making art is like producing a pearl, where something just rubs you the wrong way for too long so you try to wrap it up nicely and present it to the world. Sometimes making art is an accident and sometimes making art is a mistake. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s a burden and sometimes an escape.
The art of making games is chiefly defined by how incredibly long it takes. It’s a marathon, the kind that leaves your pants pissed and your nipples bleeding. It’s carving a new piece of a miniature ship and fitting it into place in a bottle every day, and each piece is its own work of art that is itself sometimes like this, sometimes like that. It’s such a vast task that each day it presents another aspect of itself, and you have to find another way to love it enough to keep working on it. Or to hate it enough. Or to have no other choice.
Sometimes making art is a job that you just have to go to every day, or a spouse that you wake up next to and that you go to sleep next to. It shapes how you engage with the world. Sometimes making art is a country that you travel to. Sometimes making art is a therapist, an architect, an accountant. Fictional lives bleed out into real lives. Fictional characters bleed out on fictional floors, and real tears are cried for them, and something slowly shifts inside, and we walk away different than we were before.
It’s not like we have a choice. We’d be making art whether we want to or not. Ancient peoples crafted pots to piss in, and they didn’t know that they were making future valuable antiques. People cave painted before they had a word for paint. We made art before we made artists. So why should this be so hard, or be so pressing? What shifted that made this easy and natural thing such a struggle, such an imperative?
Saying something specific is much harder than saying just anything. Maybe we’re searching for the right words to say the things that need to be said, and it’s really not certain whether those words have been invented yet. Maybe it’s just hard because it feels like time is running out, that we’re sinking, and that we need to make a monument so that someday we could be rediscovered. And I know now that art isn’t actually immortality, that even the longest-lasting work on Earth will probably die with our species sooner or later, hopefully later, probably sooner. What else can we do, but try to leave a death rattle that echoes as long as possible?
Sometimes making art is as natural as breathing. You cannot stop, until one day you must.