“Whoever is Educated by Anxiety is Educated by Possibility” A Study of Creativity in Game Development

Abstract

The video game industry is in the forefront of technology development, which is also the case of the game industry developers. Their work requires a high level of creativity as well as technological savvy. However, working in small start-up companies also includes a great deal of worrying and even anxiety, and we know little about how these feelings influence creativity. We investigate this research question, how do top video game developers exploit worry and anxiety in their creative process? Our empirical approach was a qualitative exploratory study of six video game companies and start-ups. To develop our argument, we build on the concept of anxiety, as developed by Kierkegaard and May. Our conclusion is that the particular existential situation of game developer start-ups, which are characterized by uncertainty and strong financial pressures, triggers worry and anxiety. We show in detail, somewhat surprisingly, how game developers were able to exploit even anxiety to devise creative technical solutions.