Street Photography and Making Games
How photography can help game design
Personal Note #1
A few years ago I was going through a time of heavy changes and quite a lot of mental challenges. So, like any responsible adult does, I’ve decided to invest one month of pay into something new. Well, partially new. I bought a camera.
I was at an event in London and they were showing this beautiful Fujifilm mirrorless camera, and as soon as I picked it up and started playing with it I got down the memory lane of me as a teenager, using my dad’s reflex to take photos around and experiment with film, aperture and exposure.
I had a few digitals before, but never got into the DSLR. Way too clunky for my free style of taking photos on the go. The compacts on the other hand, were never satisfying enough to me; a phone is already good enough to snap stuff around without thinking. This one, a beautiful mirrorless with fixed optic and old style controls seemed to me exactly what I was looking for.
Inspired by photographers like Helen Levitt, Saul Leiter and Vivian Maier, and counting on some first experiments made with my iPhone, I decided my style would have been that of street photography. I am fascinated by life on the street, I’m extremely curious and I like to observe people. So I took my new little jewel and brought it to walks around London.
And after a while I started to notice changes. Changes in my way to look at things, changes that quickly bled in my game design practice. So, I want to take some time to tell you in how many unexpected ways pursuing photography a little more seriously has helped my game design.
Details
Obviously the first way photography can help you as a game designer is a better eye for detail. More attention about what happens around you and more awareness really make the difference when you are looking for inspiration, but also train your brain to spot anything that is off, to understand harmony and to get how much details are important. It might sound so naive these days but I feel what Dorothea Lange has said about photography is so true:
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
And that has implications. Which brings me to another little obsession I have about games. Which is that in many ways making games is for me about creating little words with hidden things for someone else to discover (if you find echoes of Calvino, here, props to you, I’ll talk about that some other time). Now, photography is all about finding hidden things that are in the open. Saul Leiter himself:
Here are the things that are out in the open, and then there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe.
So, I guess that’s a great take away and teaching. Learning how to look at things, how to see details and how to find hidden things is a great skill for a game designer. You need that special sensitivity.
Looking at system design
A big part of game design is about learning to think in systems and remap those systems to the metaphors we want to use in order to get people feel certain emotions. Doris Rusch explores how this works in a poignant way in her book Making Deep Games (which has become foundational to my practice and I cannot recommend it enough).
What game designer Marina Díez has recently expressed through this tweet might seem like a completely different approach but it actually contains what game design as system design is all about: observing, empathising and understanding.
Now, how can photography possibly help with this? I feel like street photography, in particular, has a lot to do with figuring out complex systems and certainly helps a lot in developing empathy and in understanding human behaviour.
When you are hitting the streets looking for a nice scene or composition one element is essential and it is trying to predict what happens next. Many good street photos are captures of a moment where everything magically seems to fall in the right place. But to get to that you cannot just count on luck. You have to observe a system in motion and try to think about how that will develop. There are countless times where you run to a place just because you know something is bound to happen there. It can be about action, composition, geometry, colours. But you have to forecast that so you can be in the right place, ready to take your shot.
In order to get to this magical ability of reading the future, well, you need to start constantly asking questions about the people you have around and their stories (this is important for ethical reasons as well). Who are the people around you? What are they doing? Constantly imagining what people are up to is an incredible exercise in understanding human behavior.
Ethics and responsibility
There’s also another element, which has ethical repercussions. And it’s about how do you want to take the shot. Are people just part of the environment and become almost like props? Or are you focussing on their emotions? And if so, will you shoot candid or ask for permission? Thinking about all this, committing not to make people uncomfortable and always asking yourself if it feels right to take the shot or if you are invading is to me fundamental. But that also made me think as my game design practice, especially when I want to talk, through my games, about emotions, feelings, difficult subjects. What is my responsibility as a designer? How am I portraiting things?
Because see, photography to a superficial eye might seem just documenting ssomething that’s real, that is actually happening. But actually everything in a shot is staged by you. You, behind the camera, are the one deciding how things will look, what do you want to tell and how. And that’s a responsibility. The same you have as a game designer in creating a space that tells people something. Something inevitably biased but nevertheless your point ov view on a certain topic.
Photography is about how you see the world. It’s about what you find interesting, attractive, funny, repulsive, disgusting. It’s about framing an emotion for other people to see. And through the subject you can see the way a photographer thinks and feels.
Personal note #2
In this times of lockdown, street photography is one of the things I am missing the most. I tried doing photowalks at home but it’s just not the same. I miss the vibrance of the city, the life, the small stories you can witness just by walking around. I miss the colors of the markets, the contrasts at dusk, the rain, the reflections, the windows, the spaces. I also miss photowalking with friends because then you really understand how differently we see and perceive things and that is absolutely beautiful.
I know how much pressing my yellow soft release button has helped my creativity and my sanity and I can’t wait to get back to all of it. It will be like meeting an old friend again. Just with a very shallow depth of field (that’s my style, after all).
PS: All the photos are mine, and if you’re interested in seeing more, you can follow me on Instagram.
