I've written a few manifestos for making games -- Radiator 1 had a short "PIES" manifesto, and these days I also work off a loose "games as culture" not-manifesto and a more recent "Gay VR" utopian manifesto. To me, a manifesto is a funny thing because you're trying to predict what you're going to make over the next few years, and people will easily be able to judge you for it. (Well, Robert, did you actually achieve Full Gay VR, or did all that stuff fizzle out? I guess we'll see!) In this way, I think a manifesto is like a weird paradoxical show of strength as well as vulnerability. It's a bit of a risk.
There is, of course, a long history of manifestos, and any time you write a manifesto you're also participating in that history. The most famous manifesto is, perhaps, the Communist Manifesto. In art, we have a Futurist manifesto, a Dada manifesto, a Surrealist manifesto... in film, I've always admired the Dogma 95 manifesto... and in technology, there's the Hacker Manifesto. Most of these manifestos try to distill a complex ideology into a page or two of bullet points and prescriptions, and that's part of the fun of it. Discard relativism to the wind, and let's shape the world to our vision!
In games, we've had a variety of visions. Older industry folks often like referencing the Chris Crawford GDC 1992 "Dragon" speech or the Bruce Sterling AGDC 2008 keynote... but here I'm going to try to confine my discussion to stuff that explicitly says it's a manifesto, because I think the label matters. Let's start, shall we?...
