Essays
By Sai Mangipudi
Why I want to be a Game Developer
In order to fully explain my obsession with game development, I have to go back many many years to when I was a child. To set the scene, I was around 8-9 years old, and I would spend hours just observing the world I was in and trying to use that to find out what I liked and what I did not like.
Obviously, the first person I observed was my father. My father was, at that point, already the coolest man alive. However, what I noticed when I observed my father was that he would be hunched over a laptop at all times, typing in some unnatural language. Every once in a while, he would press a button on the right of the keyboard called “Enter”, and suddenly a magic black box would pop up on the screen. This box would simply display various numbers and letters, but to me that was magic. What my father did as a software developer was purely magical. The ability to summon black rectangles with green text was nothing short of sorcery. I remember looking through his files to find his old Hogwarts invitation letter.
Aside from the wizardry, my father and I shared a profound love for stories. Since my mother practically grew up in a library, many dinners would simply consist of my father and I pestering her for a story. Throughout my life, I have been searching for a way to combine the mysterious black box with the magic of storytelling. Much to my surprise and joy, that is exactly what game development is.
I would like to be a game developer so that I can pass on the magic of my childhood to anyone who would like to play my games.
The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt and the Realism of Fantasy
Few games have truly captured the experience of Role Playing as The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. The massive open-world RPG quickly became known as one of the greatest games ever made, boasting a 92% on Metacritic and 9.3/10 on IGN. While many of these sites simply claim that the game is good, very few actually detail why.
At first, the average player might believe that it is the mechanical aspect of the game that makes it so widely appreciated. However, this is untrue. Mechanically speaking, the Witcher 3 is no marvel. Oftentimes, the combat can feel either too exhaustive and complicated or too simple. Many enemies can simply be killed by the well revered “slash-and-barrel-roll-away”. In my playthrough, I barely had any good armor or weapons and simply dodged away to win. Even the animation is not perfect, with a variety of bugs present throughout. On top of that, the character models are often reused at various places, making it seem that a good chunk of the population is the same person wearing different clothes and speaking with different voices. Upon further inspection, the mechanics of Witcher 3-aside from the greatest minigame of all time: Gwent-are nothing to be awestruck by. Instead, the true beauty of The Witcher 3 comes from the stories it tells.
Originally based on the Witcher series of books by Andrej Sapkowski, the Witcher games sought to continue the storytelling methods of their source material by sticking to the concept of “realism in fantasy”. In his books Sapkowski uses fantasy elements like vampires, monsters, fairies, and fictional lands to tell very real stories. The books commonly told stories of love, loss, hardship, and betrayal, thereby exploring the concept of "morally grey". In the books, Geralt-our protagonist-was not a hero, but a simple creature trying to find peace and joy, leading him to make some unethical decisions in the name of achieving peace. The game took this concept and ran with it, creating a masterpiece of a game that challenges almost every common belief.
The Witcher 3 tells difficult stories, like the story of an abusive and alcoholic father, whose wife and child ran away from him, and who wants nothing more than to be forgiven and to prove that he has changed. The story of the Bloody Baron (the story I mentioned earlier) is heralded as one of the best stories ever told in video games, because we see that there is no one in the story that is truly evil. While the baron’s wife and daughter were completely justified with running away, we empathize with the baron and his quest to seek redemption. This and many other stories that fill the main quests and even the small side quests are what make The Witcher 3 the masterpiece that it is.
By teaching us empathy, the Witcher 3 makes the most fantastical elements of its story feel honest, real, and, most importantly, human.