Embed With Games by Cara Ellison

Author:Cara Ellison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

Brendon’s bookshelves

I guess I’m in love with Brendon’s bookshelves. There’s such a huge variety of stuff there. Not just science fiction and pulp, but instruction manuals, The Grammar of Architecture, a book on the history of Chinese and Japanese civilisations, a whole host of Prima strategy guides, Michael Chabon, C# manual next to Mark Twain.

I love personal libraries because it is like opening up someone’s brain and having a look inside. These pictures are the inside of Brendon’s brain. And it has a lot of stuff going on.

Love Something

‘Why are games special?’ I ask Brendon. ‘Are they special?’

‘For me it’s not about where videogames are right now,’ he says, reclining further into the Glitch City couch. ‘More like what we could do with videogames. We play these games right now and they do things, but it’s that feeling … We are at that stage in film where you just see the train coming towards you and people are freaking out because they think they’re going to be run over by the train. Just thinking about where we’re going to be in twenty years – games are going to be freaking crazy. There’s something about that that is really exciting.’

Part of me wonders that if film were easier to get into would games lose Brendon completely. Actually, I know we wouldn’t. His bookshelves are full of Prima guides and C# manuals – he’s the Tarantino of videogames. But he tells me that if it were easier to live as a film director he might have done more of it.

‘I like being able to pay for my roof,’ Brendon says. ‘I really want to do videogames, and I am really interested in doing film stuff. But I couldn’t ever figure out how to make a living doing film and video projects. I was pretty confident about the games: you make a game and then you sell it directly to people, it’s digital. But with film I felt with some practice I could eventually make something good, but there wasn’t any direct way to sell it. Like, do I sell it to a studio, do I put it on YouTube? How does this work? I had no idea.’

Perhaps there are some ways in which games are winning – that is, our young auteurs. They have a way to sell their work directly to the people who want it. They hold the sweat of their own brow.

‘It is okay to make a living off what you’re making,’ Brendon says, assuredly. ‘There are some developers out there who think it dilutes the art, making people pay money for your thing, or doing some sort of financial transaction for your art.

‘And if you’re an artist and I like your work, I want you to continue making your work. And you’re not going to be able to do that if you don’t have some attempt at asking for something. It’s nothing to be ashamed of: to be able to put food in your mouth and pay for your rent.

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