Michael Steffen

Caught Up in the Mechanics

I kind of feeling like I'm "caught up in the mechanics" of creating art, whereas I'd like to be focusing on the emotions, themes, and story ideas that I wish to convey. There's a potential danger of getting "caught up" when working in any medium, but I think Interactive Media presents a particular problem. How does one focus on developing new forms of content, when there seems to be a constant drive to come up with new technology. I really enjoyed the survey & history of interactive media that Scott presented in Seminar last semester, but even there I can't help but think that the focus was on technology, with the media serving more as a demo program.

I think our classes this semester hold a lot of promise for delving deeper into content creation, particularly Interactive Writing and Digital Game Seminar. More immediately, I am referring to the side projects that I continually feel compelled to work on. One is coding a game engine, the other is doing a 3D model of the great hall of a castle. While I do derive some enjoyment out of these, I think my predicament is that there's no real content-related goal to these projects. I think maybe I'm still thinking too much like a programmer, who needs to write their own code to demonstrate his abilities, but there you go--I too am stuck in the tech side. If I actually want to make a story-rich game, I'm not sure where to even begin.

Comments? Suggestions?