Josh Sawyer: games should draw artistic inspiration from anywhere

Videogames make us feel things—like how cool it is to be a cowboy—or think about things, and that is the point Josh Sawyer makes in a recent YouTube video about the role of artistic inspiration in design. Sawyer says artistic inspiration is a constant throughout the process and calls the "heart of the design process" getting a person to think or feel something about something—not just whether they are having fun.

Because players often spend far more time with a game than they would with a film, teams must constantly reevaluate whether major moments and the moment-to-moment systems together achieve the intended experience. That can mean adding looping reloads and hammer-fanning animations to Fallout: New Vegas to realize its "really cowboy" player fantasy, or repeatedly asking whether a choice in Pentiment that can lead to an execution is producing the intended emotional effect.

josh sawyer, video games, artistic inspiration, game design, player fantasy, fallout, pentiment, youtube, reloads, emotional effect