While working on a much larger piece about subversive game design, a thought occurred to me that I felt didn’t quite fit in to that argument, but that’s worth its own blog post.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about adding ethical dilemmas to games. Many games endeavor to do so, but the results are almost always disappointing. Non-linearity and branching plots are a constant problem in game design; for games with a story, such as RPGs, it’s important for the player to feel like his character is a real part of the game world, and that his actions have consequences. However, since standard game design techniques require everything to be planned out and scripted at least to some extent by the designer, any decision allowed to the player that has real consequences, results in a multiplication of effort on the part of the developer.
Thus, most games handle ethical choices in one of two ways - in the first version, the game world itself diverges only briefly from the core storyline, so that in the long run, the player’s actions do not really have consequences (except perhaps on the player herself, such as gaining different skills depending on whether she decides to be “good” or “evil”). In the second, the consequences of decisions are deferred until the ending of the game, whereupon the player is given a different final challenge and/or victory cut-scene depending on her choices.
Both of these design strategies lead to very shallow, heavy-handed A or B choices with predictable and/or trivial consequences. As a result, rather than teaching the player anything about real-world ethics, these games only help perpetuate the childish notion that morality is generally self-evident. Furthermore, since the consequences tend to be immediate, obvious and reversible, players are not really encouraged to think carefully about these decisions before making them.
It seems to me, though, that there is an interesting game design opportunity presented by the popularity of MMOs. In MMOs, new content is added on a regular basis - additionally, old content is sometimes, though more rarely, phased out or modified, usually for reasons of balance. Here, then, is a real opportunity to periodically present players with opportunities to make real choices, and make the consequences of those choices both significant and permanent; perhaps not on the individual level, since it would be impossible to customize an add-on for each individual user’s decisions, but rather in the aggregate. If each add-on features one or more quests that each have multiple possible resolutions, then the developer could consider the proportion of players choosing each option when deciding what to do in the next add-on.
As an example, imagine there is a quest involving three conflicting parties; an iron-fisted King, a tribe of orcish barbarians in the mountains, and a rebel Duke. The King has stolen a religious artifact from the orcs in order to harness its power to put down the Duke’s rebellion. As a result, the orcs have been raiding villages, looking for their artifact.
Players might choose to “solve” the quest by going into the mountains and killing the leader of the orcs, or they might instead break into the king’s castle to steal back the artifact and return it to the orcs, thus convincing them to stop their attacks.
If the majority of the players choose to kill the orcish leader, the next expansion might have the orc area removed (as they have fled), and martial law instituted in the cities, as the King has put down the rebellion. Meanwhile, the Duke has fled into the forest with his men, and continues the fight as a band of outlaws. There is a new “outlaw camp” area, and a new “brigand” player class. The next quest might involve the abduction of the princess by the outlaws, or some such thing.
If the majority choose to return the artifact to the orcs, then the Duke’s rebellion is a success, and an uneasy peace is made with the orcs. The orcs in the mountains are no longer automatically hostile to players, and their stronghold has shops available to the players. Orc becomes a player-character race, and orcish citizens begin to be seen in the human cities. On the downside, racial tensions ensue, and a new prison opens up (a new area to explore), where many of the prisoners are orcs, who tend to get themselves in trouble due to their short tempers and the hostility of some humans towards them. Perhaps the quest for this add-on involves a prison riot or jailbreak.
In this way, because only the branch chosen needs to be created by the developers, players’ choices can have realistic consequences - realistic in the sense that they are both permanent and not completely foreseeable by the players. Once the players have collectively chosen which option they prefer, the game world will change based on that choice. Several years and many choices later, the mood of the game may have changed dramatically, and players would only be able to speculate what their game might look like if they had, for instance, opted to help the humans’ lumbering operation instead of siding with the elves in protecting their forest.
It’s not a perfect solution, as the players who make the less popular choice will find themselves in a future they are not responsible for… but many real-world decisions, such as voting, and environmental responsibility have their effects felt in the aggregate, rather than on an individual basis. Indeed, if an MMO were to implement such a system, we might even see player-vs.-player conflict resulting, as players who have already made their choice might attempt to influence others, either through argument, or physical means, such as coming to the defense of the orcish leader. It’s impossible to know how well it would work without trying it, but I think it would be an interesting experiment, at least.
It’s now been about a year and a half since I joined the indie game development community and began seriously working on my own games. I’ve learned a lot, since then, and also undergone several minor revolutions in terms of my ideas about how I fit into the community. It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve finally started to feel like I have a long-term plan. That being the case, I think it’s a useful exercise to create a mission statement for myself (or, rather, for the organization that is Bene Factum, on the off chance that it ever consists of more people than just me).
Here’s a first draft. Feedback welcome, not so much in terms of the mission itself, as that’s personal, but in terms of anything that needs clarification or greater precision.
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Bene Factum is an organization dedicated to promoting independently-developed games - digital and otherwise - and to encouraging positive approaches to game design and development. The eventual goal is to encourage independent game developers to focus on craftsmanship and simplicity, to present themselves as an ethical, community-focused alternative to large game studios, and to emphasize their differences from the large studios, rather than attempting imitate them.
Bene Factum’s role within the game development community is twofold. First and foremost, Bene Factum is a commercial entity, providing consulting and freelance services to independent game developers, including art, graphic design, writing and game design consulting. Secondly, Bene Factum is itself an independent game development studio, though its emphasis in that area is not commercial profit, but rather experimentation and an effort to change the attitudes of both game developers and consumers.
The attitudes and policies Bene Factum would like to encourage within the indie community are as follows:
A recent thread on IndieGamer brought up the subject of addiction in games. The original poster linked to several articles on the subject, which discussed both how to create addictive gameplay by using constant small rewards, and also the ethical issues that have been raised, now that the very most addictive games, such as MMORPGs have begun to have increasingly documented detrimental effects - including death - in their heaviest users.
For some reason all these articles focus on the idea of achievements and item collecting, but neglect what I consider to be an equally-important aspect to making a game addictive: granularity/stopping points.
When stepping away from something, we naturally want to stop at a convenient lull in the experience. If I’m working on a piece of art, I’ll usually stop after finishing some object or area of the canvas. If I’m reading a book, it’ll preferably be at the end of a chapter, but if the chapters are too long, I’ll instinctively try to find a place where the end of a paragraph and the end of a page coincide, so I can start at the top of the next page when I come back to it. If I need to pause a rented movie for whatever reason, I’ll wait until right after a particularly important scene.
I think most, if not all, people play video games the same way. The easiest games to put down are ones divided into levels (or larger levels, divided into smaller waypoints), which take maybe 10 or 20 minutes to play. The decision whether or not to continue playing is thus broken into finite, significant, but manageable chunks. If there’s something else we need to do, eventually we will decide that we don’t want to commit to another 10-20 minutes, and it’s easy to put it down because we feel we’ve reached the end of a chapter in the story, and the game is giving us permission to stop there and come back later.
If you want people to stay glued to your game, rather than playing in such increments, there are two things you can do. One is to make the “chapters” longer, but this is a questionable strategy, as people will be less likely to come back to your game at all if they know they’re committing to an hour or more before they reach a good stopping point.
A much better, and more common strategy, is to make the gameplay either continuous, or make the bites so small that it’s always possible to play “just one more round.” This can be likened to the potato chip/candy phenomenon - no matter how full, guilty or nauseated the eater is feeling, they always find themselves reaching for just one more chip or gummi bear, since the commitment each time is so small. You can observe that the phenomenon decreases with something slightly larger, like a cookie, and disappears almost entirely with something on the scale of a cupcake.
Many Flash games take this model. I played a beta version (no public release yet) of an addictive little shooter called Bullet Time the other day; instead of featuring levels and a win condition, the game was merely about surviving as long as possible. Of course, it offered degrees of achievement for surviving 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, and so on… With games rarely lasting more than a minute, the temptation to give it one more try is very hard to resist, no matter how many “one more tries” you’ve already given it.
You can combine the two versions of the strategy, of course. The Civilization series is a good example. Games of Civilization (or its sequels) generally take so long that few gamers will play all the way through in a single session - thus, the primary stopping point is rarely reached. However, the game is broken into a series of turns, which usually do not take very long to play. Thus, the player is constantly tempted to play “one more turn” before saving and quitting. This is compounded later in the game by the fact that with so many cities and units present, there is almost always one that is on the verge of something exciting - one turn away from capturing an enemy city, one turn away from finishing a World Wonder, one turn away from a scientific discovery, one turn away from finishing the last unit needed to fill a transport ship and send it off to war…
I’m not an MMORPG player myself, but from what I’ve heard, they also employ a mixed strategy in this way; the everyday grinding of monsters is a continuous experience, with the time commitment to seek out and kill one more foe being very small, and thus difficult to escape from. Meanwhile, raids are apparently a very large time commitment, and impossible to put down partway through - especially since there are other real human beings counting on you.
In a way, this form of addictive gameplay is more insidious than the achievement/reward system, though of course the two effects are hardly mutually exclusive. The latter, at least, gives the players something they enjoy - what’s good for the developer is also good for the players, at least in moderation. However, decisions about stopping points are a bit trickier, ethically. As a player, I appreciate games that give me a convenient way of sitting down for what I know will be a finite and predictable amount of time. As a developer, on the other hand, I would love nothing more than to suck a player in, and have them spend much more time playing my game than they had intended. Even disregarding the problems associated with real addiction, there’s something a little bit shady about giving people something that’s less good for them as a consumer because there’s an advantage to you as the provider.
Of course, in talking about games, players usually use “addictive” as a positive descriptor. At least on the surface, it appears that game addiction is a consensual relationship. The armchair psychologist in me wonders if this is really the case though, or whether it’s actually a perfect example of post hoc rationalization: “I sat down to play this game for 15 minutes and ended up spending two hours instead. Therefore, the game must be really fun.” Is fun something that is determined by the player’s emotional state while engaged in the game, or by their tendency to play for long periods of time and/or come back for more? The two don’t necessarily go together, especially when coupled with a personality type that is prone to procrastination and feelings of guilt for doing so.
Those especially interested in the whole issue of game addiction may be interested to know that there is a 122-page thesis on the subject. I don’t know if I’ll have time to read the whole thing, but I’m definitely tempted to try.
NOTE: Apologies for the long delay since the last blog post. I am in the middle of a move and only just got the internet hooked up. Posts should be more regular from here on in.
Last time, we talked about type families. Now, we’ll talk about sticking within one family, but using multiple faces. Different families are differentiated by the overall geometry of the letterforms, while the individual faces within a family are typically differentiated by four different characteristics:
Common characteristics of typefaces
Weight: The weight of a typeface depends on the thickness of its strokes. Even novice users of word processors are familiar with the idea of bold type, but some type families contain many more weights than just regular and bold. Common appellations for weights include: light, regular (or roman), semibold, bold, extra bold, black and extra black. Note that every type family has its own intrinsic weight, and, for instance, the bold weight of one family may actually have thinner strokes than the regular weight of another.
Style: Generally, type families have two styles, roman and italic. Italic type is based on a form of handwriting developed by Italian scribes for writing in small logbooks - the inclined axis of the characters allows narrower spacing, thus allowing more words to be squeezed onto a single line. Nowadays, the function of italic type is very different; it is used for emphasis, or in various typographic conventions, such as setting foreign words, new terms, or the name of an article or poem.
Technically speaking, only serif families have true italics, as the changes involved in making an italic typeface go far beyond simply inclining the letters. Properly, angled sans serif type should be called oblique, although many sans serif fonts use the term italic instead.
Set: The set of a typeface has to do with the width of the characters. In most cases, it is intrinsic to the whole type family, but some (generally more professional) fonts include multiple sets of the same family. Although the terms “narrow” and “wide” are sometimes seen, the more common designations are condensed, semi-condensed, (regular), semi-extended and extended.
Size: Many people today would not consider different sizes of type to count as different typefaces. However, if we go back to the origins of type, when letters were produced by the impression of metal sorts on a page, each size of type required its own set of sorts. Additionally, I find it useful to consider size in the same category as weight, style and set, as it’s used in a similar way, to create information hierarchy.
Type size is typically measured in points. Twelve points make a pica, and there are six picas in an inch. Thus, there are 72 points in an inch. It is not a coincidence that standard screen resolution is also 72 pixels per inch - when setting type for on-screen use, one point is equivalent to one pixel, not counting anti-aliasing. However, note that the size of type is can be misleading, as the size specified is the height of the bounding box for all the characters in the typeface - that is, from the highest point on the highest character to the lowest point on the lowest character. Thus, 12 pt. type of one family may look radically different in size from 12 pt. type in another family. This is especially true in the case of script typefaces, which often have long, curly ascenders and descenders.
One word of warning: most word processing and design programs have the ability to create “fake bold” and “fake italic” type, taking the regular weight and/or style of the typeface, and algorithmically thickening and/or skewing the strokes. Even in the best cases, these effects are uglier and harder to read than properly designed weights and styles and, at worst, are completely inappropriate for some typefaces. I recommend never using these effects, unless absolutely necessary - if you need bold or italic type, make sure you’re using a family that contains bold and italic faces.
The most normal face in most families is regular weight, roman, 10- or 11-pt. type. The further you deviate from this, the more extreme the effect, and the more sparingly it should be used. You should never, for instance, set a whole paragraph in a condensed, extra bold, italic face. Extreme deviations are best used for purposes of information hierarchy - for instance, if your paragraphs are set in roman, semi-extended, 10-pt. type, you might set your headers in condensed, bold, 14-pt. type, and your captions in light, italic, semi-condensed 10-pt. type. Here’s how that would look:
More subtle variations can be used even within running text, however. Bold and/or italics are often used to emphasize single words or phrases; this should be done sparingly, however, as the presence of many such words on a page is distracting to the eye. Semi-condensed type can be used to help solve excessive hyphenation and ragged edges in narrow measures. Small variations in set and/or weight (e.g. light, regular and semibold) can be used to even out the overall visual weight (often referred to as “color”) of several passages on the same page, if it’s necessary to set them in different sizes and/or with different line spacing. These latter two examples will be discussed in more detail in the next section of the tutorial, as I begin to discuss leading, tracking and measure.
As a designer, I feel one of my strengths is typography. It’s also one of the most under-appreciated aspects of graphic design, at least by non-designers.
There are few reasons for this. For one thing, a large portion of the work is now done automatically by computers, to the point that anyone with a copy of Microsoft Word and a keyboard can create something resembling a reasonably typeset page, provided they don’t go too crazy. For another, typography is something most people only notice when it’s bad. As Beatrice Warde stated in her famous essay The Crystal Goblet, the function of type is not usually be ornamental, but to make the passage of words from the page to the mind of the reader as easy as possible. Unless you’re specifically looking at the type, rather than the words, you’ll only notice the type when it’s distracting.
The way most people set type is to pick whatever font looks good to them from a drop-down menu, and then start hammering away at the keyboard, possibly using bold, italic or underlined words for emphasis here and there. Truth be told, for simple documents, that’s often good enough, provided one doesn’t overuse the aforementioned emphases, stays away from monstrosities like Comic Sans, doesn’t type in all caps, and doesn’t employ justified text in narrow measures.
Over the next weeks or months, I plan to post a series of typographical articles to this blog, with information that will help amateurs create slicker documents, be they web pages, CVs, instruction screens for games, or what have you. To start with, though, and to scratch the surface of the depth that the field of typography has, I’d like to offer a brief list of topics that I’d like to cover in the first few articles, and summaries of each. As I write the articles, I will convert the headings into links to the corresponding articles.
Typeface Selection
Spacing
Information Hierarchy
When I’m approached by developers to do art for a game, one of the first questions I ask is how they want me to work, since I’m a generalist at most things, including art, and work in a variety of media. Many developers aren’t quite sure what the difference is between the methods of working, either because it’s their first time hiring an artist, or because their previous freelancers were specialists in one method.
Pixel art is the most precise of the three. It involves deliberately choosing the color of every single pixel. All the old 8-bit games used pixel art because they had no choice, due to the limited palette. People still use it when they want either a retro, or an ultra-crisp look. It’s best used for sprites and tilesets, especially when you either want them really tiny, or else to have swappable palettes. E.g. this super hero only uses 11 colors, so if you want the player to be able to customize his skin and clothing colors, that’s very easy to do at runtime.
Usually pixel art is used for small things, but of course you see some people doing bigger pieces.
Large pixel art pieces are of course very time-consuming and expensive.
Digital painting, as you’d imagine, is much like regular painting, just done digitally, usually in Photoshop. It’s often confused with pixel art by non-artists, who don’t realize that even large pixel art pieces literally involve placing most pixels one-by-one, working at a very high magnification. With digital painting, on the other hand, you use larger, softer brushes and sketch out large parts of the image first before adding detail. Everything ends up softer, the palette is unrestricted, but there’s less usually less fine detail.
Of course, Photoshop being what it is, a knowledgeable user can exploit its capabilities to “cheat” a lot, like I did on this guy’s hair and the water. If you read the art tutorial posts here on my blog, you’ll see some of the techniques I use to avoid doing stuff by hand and thus save my clients money.
Vector art, on the other hand, is done in Adobe Illustrator or similar programs, not Photoshop. In a vector, the image data is contained as a bunch of vertices with mathematically defined curves (called Bezier curves) connecting them. As such, you tend to get either large solid areas of color (sort of like some less detailed pixel art) or smooth gradients. Vector art is quite often crisp and cartoony, with clean edges and not much detail.
One advantage of vector art is that, because the image data is held in mathematical terms rather than pixels, it doesn’t have a size. When you “rasterize” the image, i.e. convert it into a raster, or pixel-based form, you can set the size and resolution to be whatever you want, with no loss of sharpness, as a Bezier curve is smooth and continuous at all scales.
People have often wondered why artists continue to write, or paint, or engage in any other creative endeavor, when there have already been far more books published, paintings painted, etc., than one could possibly consume in a lifetime. Isn’t that a bit like continuing heap food on the dinner table when all the guests have already declared themselves too full to eat another bite?
The answer to that question is also one of the secrets of good design.
Newcomers to any form of art or design often make the mistake of looking at their work and asking “What can I add to make it better?”More often, the question they should be asking is “What should I take away?”
For the recipient, what matters is not the volume of information contained in a piece, but rather its density - how much fun, pleasure, knowledge or inspiration they can extract per second that they spend in contact with your work. To understand this, refer back to the original question: there is always more out there. If you were stuck on an airplane with only one thing to read, perhaps you would prefer a decent novel to a great short story, but for most of our lives, especially in these days of the Internet, art and information are like an all-you-can-eat buffet, and the goal is not to find the most filling items, since getting full is inevitable, but rather to taste as many of the most delicious items as possible before that saturation point is reached.
What this means is that although you can improve your piece by adding to it - provided what you’re adding is better than the average quality of the piece so far - often subtraction is the better solution. This doesn’t always mean you have to take things out, though certainly trimming the fat is one way to improve a piece. The best thing you can do is to find ways to combine elements and make each detail serve multiple purposes.
In writing, this is what they mean by “show, don’t tell.” Convey your message through nuance, rather than spelling it out. It’s also why wordplay, connotation and nuance are so important to a professional copywriter, particularly with things like slogans and taglines - if you can use one word to say two things, that makes a big difference when the piece in question is only five words long.
In visual art, it can be layers of symbolism, composition, the use of colours, and so on.
These are old art forms, though, so these ideas of density and “less is more” are very familiar to any experienced professional. However, it’s overlooked all too often when it comes to game design, which is, all things considered, a very young field. Particularly in the world of digital gaming, the popular belief - both in terms of technology and game content - seems to be that more is more. Every AAA game nowadays has to be 3D and implement the latest graphical effects, has to have sprawling levels and tons of different items and enemies, multiple gameplay mechanics (nothing is ever just an action game, or just a puzzle game, or just an RPG anymore), and so on. Every platform that comes out has to have a more complicated controller than the last, and even the simpler games use most the buttons just because they’re there.
Nintendo seems to be the first to realize the wrong-headedness of the industry, and has started to come back the other way with the Wii. Love it or hate it, you have to realize they’re on to something. Likewise, the casual games industry for PC, for all its faults, does at least understand the merits of simple game with a single set of mechanics.
It’s not that games are getting worse with time, it’s that early titles were forced to keep things simple and try to focus on tight gameplay (though many failed miserably, of course), simply because the technology wasn’t there to do anything more elaborate. It can be likened to writing a story on a napkin - you could write something great or something terrible, but at least the space constraints mean that you don’t risk taking what should have been a sentence and turning it into a novel.
This focus on the core mechanics is what modern game designers need to get back to. Look at great games from previous decades, like Lode Runner, Super Mario Bros. and Doom, and the bottom-up approach these games took to level and monster design. In these games, the player has a very limited range of powers and the enemies are likewise more like variations on a theme than completely different entities - in Mario, for instance, the Koopa is essentially a Goomba that leaves a shell behind when killed. Buzzy Beetle is a Koopa immune to fireballs. Spiny is a Koopa immune to being jumped on. Terrain and power-ups are similarly limited. The level design is based around the interplay between the player’s finite abilities and this small range of assets and challenges, presented in different combinations. And that’s enough - the original Super Mario Bros. has 32 levels, but manages not to be repetitive, because the designers were forced to be creative with what they were given. The resulting game is simple but dense, in the sense that every ounce of potential has been squeezed out of these simple building blocks.
By contrast, modern games seem to be designed top-down, with concepts being created for the main enemies and challenges the player is to face, and then the main character’s and secondary enemies’ abilities being filled in after the fact, in order to lead the player through this story. The result is very often a sprawling, sloppy work with a lot of unnecessary distractions, and infrequently-used features.
Although I’m sure it’s possible to design a successful game from the top down, it would require a great deal of restraint, something the industry is not yet mature enough to be capable of. Until that time comes, major game companies would do well to study the successes of their historical predecessors (as well as such indie titles as World of Goo) and get back to their mechanics-first roots.
As far as I can tell from a Google search, the word “tachygenesis” is only used in science, to describe the sudden appearance of an organ in the evolutionary history of an organism. However, it’s the best word I could come up with for a certain type of event, which appears in any creative field you can think of. Those with a good grasp of English etymology already know what I’m talking about, I’m sure, but for everyone else, “tachy-” means speed, and “genesis,” creation, so I’m describing acts of creation with extraordinarily tight deadlines. These are often group activities, often with the structure of a competition, but not taken particularly seriously. Some examples include:
National Novel Writing Month SpeedIF (Interactive Fiction) The 48-Hour Film Project Ludum Dare Seven Day Roguelikes 24-Hour Comics (Leave a comment with other examples and I’ll add them here)
Having participated in National Novel Writing Month twice, and SpeedIF once, I’m now planning on entering Ludum Dare this weekend. The principle is straightforward - a theme is announced at the last minute, having been chosen by participants’ votes over the days leading up to the competition. Participants then have 48 hours to produce a finished computer game based on the theme, including all sound, artwork and code. So far, “Advancing Wall of Doom” is leading the pack for this year’s theme, but several rounds of voting remain.
One question often asked of participants in these challenges, particularly by non-participants, is “why do you do it?” They’re often gruelling and stressful, the rewards - if any - are rarely substantial, and the completed pieces, having been done under such time constraints, are almost never going to be of sufficient quality to market, or even display in one’s portfolio. In fact, it seems like a lot of effort - and a lot of strain on the system - for no payoff whatsoever. The 48-hour versions of these events are usually done over the course of a weekend, to allow people with regular full-time jobs to participate, but why would anyone voluntarily spend their weekend working feverishly to meet a Sunday deadline, only to go back to their job the next morning?
I can think of several reasons. The most obvious one is the age-old “because it’s there” principle, as coined by George Mallory. Once one person comes up with the idea of starting one of these events, others get on board because it sounds like a challenge, and it’s human nature to step up to challenges. I think there’s more to it than that, however.
Many people have the inclination to create something, but constantly put off actually doing so, until they’re provided with some excuse to convince themselves to get going. There’s always a battle between the higher mind and its desire to excel, and more deeply-rooted tendencies towards self-doubt, laziness and pessimism. Part of the problem is that sincere efforts to create something great tend to be time consuming, and the first few attempts almost always fail. On the other hand, shooting for mediocrity on one’s first attempt is hardly inspiring. The existence of a competition of this sort relieves both burdens at once - the time commitment is finite, and the burden of producing something of quality is relieved by the built-in excuse of having made it under a tight deadline.
A related psychological issue is that of fussiness and perfectionism. Many people, great artists and amateurs alike, are forever hindered by their inability to leave well enough alone. I once read an amusing anecdote about a conversation between James Joyce and one of his friends - the friend comes in and finds Joyce slumped over his desk, despondent:
Friend: James, what’s wrong? Is the writing not going well? James: No, not well. Friend: Well, how much have you written today? James: Seven words. Friend: But James, that’s good, for you anyway! James: *sigh* Yes, but I don’t know what order they go in!
I think one of the most important aspects of these events is that they force one to reign in this inner demon and simply get something done. Of course, the ability to be self-critical is crucial to being a good artist, but the inner critic can be a bossy little fellow if allowed too much liberty. At times, it’s necessary to remind him (or her) who is the master, and who is the servant.
Finally, it’s a way to experiment and gain experience. Although the finished product is rarely going to be something of great worth in and of itself, there will be aspects that work, and aspects that don’t. Because it’s understood from the start that no masterpiece is to be expected, the creator is free to focus on the positive aspects of the piece, and use them for inspiration for future, more serious projects, without feeling bad about the mistakes that were made.
Even though I can count on one hand the number of people who’ve read either of the two 50,000 word manuscripts I produced for National Novel Writing Month - I haven’t even reread them in their entirety myself - I think having produced them has made me a better and more confident writer, and given me ideas to use not only in writing, but other artistic endeavors as well. I hope that Ludum Dare will be similar in that regard.
If you’re one of the people who says, “I’ve always wanted to do X,” then look around for an event of this type in whatever field it is that you’re thinking about. Chances are that one exists, and it’s a great way to give yourself a kickstart, and gain both the motivation and experience to try a more serious project afterwards.
EDIT: Fiona from Myrmidon Process has a good point in her comment. I don’t know how I overlooked the social aspect of these events, but it’s definitely a biggie as well. They’re great for networking, sharing ideas, and getting moral support and encouragement from others!
