the little games

why every artist who lasts learns to fool themselves

Will Wright designs video games.

Some were popular, like SimCity. Some weren’t. Does anyone remember SimCopter?

Success or failure, Wright keeps making games. According to this profile, he’s been working on his latest, Proxi, since 2015, with no release in sight.

Wright has reinvented video games as an art form several times. He’s made fortunes for himself and many others through his singular creative efforts. That said, even the most gung-ho investor eventually begins to doubt, and his are long gone. As of now, Wright has laid off most of his team and is continuing work toward a playable demo with an unpaid skeleton crew. I truly wonder what goes through his mind at times like this.

Reading about Wright’s struggle to do the impossible yet again, I couldn’t help but think of Megalopolis. It’s a shame Francis Ford Coppola lost his fortune making a mega-flop, as documented in a recent documentary, but if he’d been the type to walk away from a troubled project, he would never have completed Apocalypse Now or The Godfather.

Is it self-trust? Recklessness? Whatever that mysterious quality might be, completing a long-term, self-directed project like a book can be impossible without it. I’ve seen this in many aspiring authors throughout my career as editor, collaborator, and agent: They’re tremendously excited at the idea of having written a successful book, but they’re constantly searching for reasons to bail before getting in too deep.

You don’t need to bankrupt yourself like Coppola, but success as an artist demands steady effort in the absence of certainty, of external validation. You never know whether the next piece will land until you launch it. At least video games have the option of releasing a beta version. With a traditionally published book, you have to get comfortable with the possibility of failure.

I hesitate to call this creative quality indifference, although there’s an element of nihilism to the necessary mindset. Any artist cares about audience reception, since art is, at heart, communication. But creators with longevity seem to approach the challenge differently. Maybe it’s that they’ve gotten really good at tricking themselves into thinking they don’t care about the outcome when, well, of course they do.

So much of the creative game comes down to the little games we play with ourselves. Pretending we don’t care about other people’s opinions. Vigorously embracing an abstract ideal: If it works for me, I’ve pleased the Muse and that’s the only thing that matters!

Again, though, of course it’s not.

Bowie learned to play this game with himself because hard experience taught him that doing the opposite—trying to please your imagined audience—guaranteed failure: “Fashion, turn to the left.” That’s why he never repeated himself. Never solved the same problem in the same way. Only risking failure offered him the possibility of success.

It’s a game we all have to learn to play if we hope to make it to pub day.