The short answer to the title question is that there’s money in it for you. Eventually.
I spend a non-trivial part of my time working on various things for Gamedev NL. A lot of the work is event planning, member outreach, and relationship building. I’ve particularly focused on trying to build relationships with the other artistic organizations in the province like NIFCO, SJIWFF, VANL-CARFAC, MusicNL, WANL, and Eastern Edge.
Maybe you didn’t notice the “other” in the above sentence, but it’s a key piece of the puzzle for me. Games are art. Games need artists, on multiple levels and in multiple senses.
Artists create the components of the experience, of course. What would a game like Horizon: Zero Dawn be without the incredible 3D models, textures, and lighting work done by its artists? What would the Homeworld games be without their signature epic soundtracks? What would the Uncharted series be without the excellent physical and voice performances that define its key characters?
They would be, at minimum, less than they are, to my mind. Games need artists who can make them more.
But there’s more to the story than the individual creations that live within a game. Artists bring diverse and often novel perspectives to the craft of interactive media. Game Design itself is an art form, and like all art forms it needs cross-pollination with other forms and with other ideas in order to reach its full potential. A good game studio, like any good artistic organization, has far more ideas percolating than time to implement them. What emerges from this process, in the best cases, reflects the vision of many people pulling in one direction.
And in the worst cases, it leads to stories where people are hurt and excluded by the industry. There need to be more organizations that can show better ways to operate. This is a thing many artists are good at – showing empathy, working out conflict within the work itself, engaging with complexity rather than shying away or reducing it out of fear of appearing foolish or incompetent.
And there’s money in it. People say that you shouldn’t go into games for the money, but the intrinsic comparison there is to “safe” commercial development. Game development is a risky business in the same way all media production is risky, but the industry already makes a ton of money and it’s still growing.
That growth means game development both needs and feeds artistic ecosystems around the world. Building a thriving interactive media sector means there are even more places to ply your skills and build the things you want to build, and your presence is a net good for game developers. They want you to succeed, because they want to feast on your delicious creativity.
I mean be inspired by. Inspired by your delicious creativity. Yes.
My background is relatively eccentric; I have a lot of years as an actor alongside a lot of years as a programmer, with a lot of writing and a non-trivial amount of drawing thrown in to boot. Games, like films, make sense to me on a visceral level in communities rich in creative folks. It’s still a relatively young medium. I can’t wait to see where it goes. And I hope to see it grow here at home.