Five Lessons for Creatives I Learned from Video Games
This list could go on forever, which is a bonus lesson: art has so much wisdom to pass on to us, and art is always made by people just like you. So, today, there’s only five lessons to think about that come from the artistic medium of video games. These are creeds, philosophies, and proverbs that can help every creative get through their daily hardships and offer guidance.
You’re Supposed to Find Your Own Style.
Every fighting game has a colorful roster of characters. Mortal Kombat has the thunder god, Raiden, and Johnny Cage, a martial arts movie star. Super Smash Bros. features the emerald knight, Link, and the space armored bounty hunter, Samus Aran. Every licensed fighting game from Dragon Ball Fighter Z to MultiVersus has just as diverse a cast. While there are combat similarities between characters, especially those with similar height, sizes, or capabilities, each playable fighter is unique from the other.
Characters with long range attacks can be weaker on defense, just like a more swift and agile one. Big fighters may be slower but have greater defenses. Some are great for fending off high-range attacks or recovering from bombastic special moves. Like a game of chess, there is an infinite combination of moves a player can make at any second with their fighter. Gamers experiment with a fighting game’s roster selections, trying to find one or more characters who suit their play style, and even their personality, best. Such a discovery is one of the joys of the fighting game genre.
Finding your way through the world of creative freelancing is just like learning what kind of fighting gamer you are, what character matches best with you, then mastering their skillset, all while learning your opponents’ talents. But, contrary to what anyone tells you, there is no one “right” path to take on your journey. Yes, good advice is good advice. Still, like playing a fighting game, being a creative means you are supposed to find out what makes you, well, you.
Just as some players may find Cammy from Street Fighter to be the character they win the most often with while others find her totally unsuited for their form of gaming, what matters is how you get your work done. Whatever schedule, workflow, process, or sustainable style you use to get your work done on time, harmlessly, and with satisfaction is the way you are supposed to operate. Finding out what defines you as a creative freelancer is part of the craft and the job, regardless if the answers are different from others. Be proud of who you discover you always were.
You Gotta Get Out of That Locker Sometime (And That’s Okay).
Personal story: Alien: Isolation is the scariest video game I have ever played. Back in 2019, as a longtime fan of the Alien series, I wanted to try out this first-person survival horror title–challenge myself with a genre I had never played. While the game was a masterpiece, my playthrough was an agonizing experience of constant terror, both subtle and aggressive, as I played a series of cat-and-mouse games with the monstrous Xenomorph aboard the haunting Sevastopol space station.
One of the ways to evade the unkillable and nearly unstoppable alien is to hide away in the station’s many lockers. When inside one, you can only see outside the grate and you are almost completely safe. Nothing can harm you. But you also cannot get anything done. The game simply will not advance until you leave the comfort of that safe locker. If you go inside these compartments all the time, you will get most objectives done at a painfully slow, not to mention unfun, pace. Besides, nothing will make the Xenomorph stop hunting you, anyway.
When I realized this fact, I started playing the game a little bit braver, smarter, and, eventually, riskier. Yes, bumping into my hunter was scary, and watching myself get killed again and again by the thing got tedious. Yet, over time (though I never stopped jumping, screaming, clenching up) I started to become daring and got better at the game. I realized I had to keep moving, push on through, and learn from my mistakes, not hide in every locker I found for several minutes. Ultimately, I did not see my last interactions with the Xenomorph as cat-and-mouse games. I saw them as duels.
Whatever your metaphorical locker and Xenomorph may be, the hard lesson to learn as a creative freelancer is that the only way to succeed is to get out and face your fears head on. There will always be safe places to hide, rest, and re-center yourself, and they will work. Still, don’t let yourself be afraid forever, never giving yourself the chance to brave your terrors. Otherwise, you will never know what you are capable of.
You Don’t Need to be a Master Yet.
Open-world role playing (RPG) games, either PC massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) like Toontown Online or single-player titles like The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt, allow players to roam anywhere they want on their expansive maps. However, for a variety of reasons, game developers do not want players to enter certain areas just yet. One way to enforce this is to increase the difficulty in those guarded places. At the start of Toontown Online, you can stroll your toon down the streets to Donald’s Dreamland. Geralt of Rivia, the titular Witcher, can head to the Isles of Skellige as soon as low-leveled players have access to a sailboat. But both areas are filled with high-level enemies that can defeat the player almost instantly, and there are challenges inexperienced players cannot overcome.
Gamers have no choice but to stick to familiar, safer areas until later. Sometimes, they can return to those tougher places after leveling up and making their in-game avatars strong enough to battle those harsh foes. Other times, players can’t get to enticing, secret areas because they need some kind of key only earned by playing the game in the intended order of levels. Either way, once gamers return to these areas mighty enough to survive and without any barriers to stop them, the triumph feels glorious. Venturing further into the game, leveling up more, then returning to these once impossible areas that now are child’s play can be just as rewarding; even reflective.
I am sure I am like most creative freelancers in saying that, when I was young, I dreamed of becoming the next great legend in my field. I thought I had the chops to already be a protegee and master of my craft of writing and filmmaking. I could not wait to work amongst the greats. Then, reality came along, and my youthful aspirations gave way to hard, cold facts of being a creative worker. My writing was unorganized, juvenile, and impersonal. Instead of running my own film studio at 22, I embarrassed myself on a short film set by forgetting to charge my camera’s battery. I realized just how little I really knew about my creative goals, and thought I was not really cut out for this kind of work.
But we all need to forget that negative self-talk! The fact is we are not meant to be so great immediately. We have to work, learn, practice, experience, and gain more knowledge before we can get to those tougher areas of life–of the open-world map. Otherwise, we would not have survived. Everyone moves at their own speed, but they always must train to become stronger. Mastery takes time, and as you keep moving forward in your craft, you will look back on these present terrible challenges as nothing more than a day’s work.
The World Is Unfair (And That’s Okay).
Perhaps the greatest lesson video games give to players is that the world is just unfair. Antagonistic. Brutal. The Dark Souls series is infamous for its insane level of difficulty. Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian, works by the game director and designer Fumito Ueda, have been characterized as being almost deliberately frustrating. In my own childhood, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask seemed to audibly laugh at my feeble attempts to solve its dark world made up of timed-puzzles, riddles, scavenger hunts, tricks, memorization, and convoluted keys. Even kid-friendly platformers like Mega Man can make disheartened players squeeze their controllers in anger before throwing them down with curses.
When I was younger, I would get afraid of games. Not because what lay within them was scary, but because I did not want to face the humiliation of getting excited for a game only to face failure again and again. I would characterize certain games as being unfair or a bully. In retrospect, this fear and sense of antagonism was a magnificent lesson. In the safe space of pixelated dreams on my TV screen, I learned that life, like a video game, could be designed to be against me. Life can thwart me, feel obstinate, frustrating, and impossible. Thanks to the video games of my youth, I already understood these feelings of being helpless, oppressed, and powerless.
As I got older, my suffering–in real life and video games–made me learn a few tricks about both realms. I realized that no matter how hard a game may be, it is only a game designed with the intention of being beat. The trick is learning the method. The media stopped scarring me because experience taught me I could face these challenges. This serenity let me try all kinds of games at last, and made them way more fun. Some games I still cannot beat, but I know now that such defeat is okay–there’s always tomorrow, too.
Life is pain, and anyone saying otherwise has never been a creative freelancer. Struggling is part of the game, and the only way to survive this job is to keep working. By doing so, you will become more familiar with this often unforgiving industry and learn how to overcome its obstacles. You will become prepared for failures and build from them, not run away from your craft. Life as a creative freelancer is not designed for you to win like a video game is, but you can still play with the guts of a veteran gamer.
There is Success.
I love this quote about video games from the comedian Dara Ó Briain: “You can be bad at playing a video game and the video game will punish you and deny you access to the rest of the video game.” Another personal story: never did I know this statement to be more true than when, as a kid, I played the Ansem-Riku boss battle in Kingdom Hearts on the PlayStation 2.
Oh, yes, now I can beat this boss with little effort and have done so before. Now I can see the foe as nothing more than programmable actions I am supposed to outmaneuver. But as a child who fell deeply in love with this JRPG–as a boy who was still afraid of tough games due to not truly understanding their mechanics–the Ansem-Riku duel quickly became a bane of my childhood.
This battle takes place near the end of the game, and I thought I had proved my mettle by then. Ansem-Riku was waiting to prove me wrong, even laughed at me when he blocked one of my sword strikes. I could not figure out how to keep fighting, stay alive, or survive his increasingly crazy attacks. Nothing worked. Day after day, I would try to win this duel after school and would always lose. I could not play my favorite game anymore except this awful part. I was stuck. Rejected.
The walk to the duel’s arena became a horrible ritual. The nastiest part was the game developers of this original PS2 version did not include a skip cutscene feature, and the in-game cinematic before the fight was long. Losing the fight means you have to watch this unskippable cutscene all over again. I can still recite this infamous moment.
Eventually, one random day after school, I thought about how the battle had been playing out, got a hunch I could beat Ansem-Riku, and I did. I screamed a cheer, ran around my living room like a victorious maniac, and hugged my mom, saying, “I did it, I really beat the boss!” Then I beat the rest of the game without much difficulty, and I remain a fan of the Kingdom Hearts series to this day. I learned that even the most sublime of challenges can be defeated.
You don’t need me to tell you that being a creative freelancer feels like waiting for a light that never comes. You dig deeper and deeper into your mountain of work, venture further into the darkness of many doubts, financial struggles, and existential anxieties. You work and work and there is no moment of triumph; no reflection on a past achievement; no sense that anything you did mattered.
But there is hope for success. Maybe there is a need for a new strategy, new resources, a break, or something else, but you can succeed as a creative freelancer. You can realize your dream to work professionally in your craft. You are allowed to fail, and fail once more, and be angry and hopeless. Yet, for your own sake, do not despair for too long. Use what you have and what you have learned through your hardships and find a way to keep going. Never forget there is victory waiting for you at the end of your battles, even if it ends up looking different than you envisioned. Don’t give up on yourself.
For more pearls of wisdom across the arts, stick around with OBA, and see how taking a look at the world around you can bring you to the place you have always wanted to be.
For more insights and inspiration across the arts, subscribe to OBA’s free weekly newsletter. We share stories that make a difference and teach you how to tell them.
Have a story or experience to share? OBA is looking for collaborators! Click here to sign up to write with us.
