Whatever It Takes
Err, hi.
Finally got enough of a break from my fantastic yet all-encompassing education at Full Sail to actually come back to this site and post something. I can only hope that once I’m actually working I’ll be able put interesting progress updates here, but for the next year or so I’ll just have to write whenever I can. For the record, I’ve also created a Tumblr for bits of writing that don’t really belong anywhere else.
That being said, let’s talk about selfish creativity for a minute.
Kotaku’s AJ Glasser wrote an excellent piece this week that made me think about the motivations for creating a game. The gist of her article was that Modern Warfare 2’s complete lack of female characters gave the entire game a sexist slant. This may be true (indeed, after reading her article the entire game just kinda weirds me out, as though it takes place in an alternate dimension where women don’t exist and men reproduce asexually), but I found myself continually coming around to the question of why it was made that way in the first place. Naturally, anyone could come up with an answer for that one. Infinity Ward’s explanation would most likely invoke political correctness and the distastefulness of women getting shot, Heather Chaplin might imply that Infinity Ward are a bunch of macho adolescents (which is neither here nor there), anyone at Activision’s marketing department would tell you that’s what sells to the 18-35 male demographic, and anyone actually in that demographic probably hasn’t even thought about this.
There’s a real discrepancy here. We no longer have the right to claim that video games are a “young industry” to sidestep doubt regarding our motivations. This industry is more than 35 years old. When film was 35, Griffith and Murnau had already produced the first artistically relevant examples of the craft, and film had officially grown beyond the realm of idle distraction into true art. So what’s different now? I’ve heard the argument that the staggering complexity of modern video game production is beyond our ability to effectively control, hence a multitude of development strategies (waterfall, XP, scrum, etc.) and the recent tendency for AAA dev teams to balloon up to 400 members. It could just as easily be claimed that the conveniences of the 21st century have made us reluctant to sacrifice our comfort and peace of mind to the insatiable demands of passion projects that consume their creators even as they neglect their health and their relationships just to see the ravenous beast to completion. To the first, there is enough contrary evidence of small teams succeeding where large teams have failed to halt that train of thought at the station. To the second, solo developers like Daisuke Amaya and Hiroshi Iuchi do this all the time. Yes, I know we all work long hours, but more often it’s for the sake of producing excellent work, not because the great fiery beast of our idea preys upon our dreams until we finally manage to exorcise it and duplicate it across a million discs.
The problem lies not with development strategies, but with the realities of business. Films were made to be dramatic works; like theater, the objective was to create something that viewers would enjoy and appreciate further with repeated viewing. Money was the objective, but the business model was such that the techniques that made the most money – subtlety and emotional veracity that brought audiences back week after week – were also the most creatively profound. Games are not made to be games, they’re made to be products. Get it in a customer’s hands, make your sixty bucks, the end. This is why we have so few passion projects. You only really have to give the people what they want, and if they want something utterly ridiculous, just give them that and you’ll make bank. So what’s the solution? Well, all you really have to do is stop caring about your audience.
“BWAH?!” you say, as your monocle pops out and falls into your tea. Certainly I’m not suggesting that everyone has to do this all the time, because then there’d be no way to stay in business. But think about what happens when developers get to build the games they like, rather than what the market wants. Hideo Kojima deliberately alienated the most obsessive portion of his fanbase with the hostile postmodernism of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty just so he could make MGS3: Snake Eater free of expectations. He did whatever he wanted to while making that game, and it’s a masterpiece (for a compelling theory that MGS4, in turn, was a premeditated attempt to put the whole franchise out of its misery, I will direct you to Tim Rogers). Think about all the love that Fumito Ueda’s games get. That man couldn’t give a rat’s ass whether millions of people bought Shadow of the Colossus, but there it is, Greatest Hits label and all, popping up in every game design discussion on the Internet. That game has become the Godwin’s Law* of video games, and not for a moment did Ueda ever stop and wonder if anyone would actually like it. Daisuke Amaya spent five years of his life building Cave Story from scratch in DirectX, and the readme.txt for the final release is one line: explore the caves until you get to the end. It’s almost unbearably humble, but here’s the truth of it: he didn’t make that game for you, he made it for himself. It doesn’t need a readme, because if you’ve downloaded a copy you’re already speaking Amaya’s language.
Now that I’ve written that paragraph, I wonder if this is something Japanese developers are more likely to do. Some Russian studios make a point of doing this – have you even played Pathologic? – but off the top of my head I can certainly cite more examples from Japan than I can from other countries. Perhaps it’s because their culture demands a strong self-identification with one’s work? Well, there’s your homework for next time!
Look to other media, even. If Philip K. Dick had even the tiniest bit of concern for attracting an audience, he most certainly would not have written A Scanner Darkly. I have a profound loathing for the work of Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce, and I’m sure if you had told them that they wouldn’t have cared in the slightest. My good friend and fellow game design nerd Lynette “Rampant Bicycle” Terrill pointed out that this may very well be the Big Secret of great artists and creators: just build whatever makes sense to you and someone else, somewhere, is bound to like it. In that respect, I feel as though I’m on the right track. I’m oblivious to the idea of having an audience. The only thing I know is that I want to make things because I want them to exist, and I trust enough in the diversity of the human race that there will be people in the world who like what I’ve made.
* I propose a new video game equivalent to Godwin’s Law: “As an online game design discussion grows longer, the probability of a reference involving Shadow of the Colossus approaches 1.”
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There are plenty of passion products in modern gaming, and not just from Japan. On the high-budget side, Brutal Legend comes to mind. For sheer, unadulterated madness, there’s Dwarf Fortress.
sinfony said this on December 16th, 2009 at 6:07 PM
Brutal Legend certainly qualifies, but it’s an anomaly in the AAA industry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used Cave Story as an example, since it’s an indie title and that’s kinda how indie game development works. Dwarf Fortress is the same way. In any case, the point is that the industry as a whole sells products, not experiences, and temporarily abandoning that philosophy – like in Hollywood, “one for the accountant, one for the Oscar” – is the surest route to creatively substantial games.
George said this on December 16th, 2009 at 6:58 PM
This is pretty much how I design a game.
Maher said this on December 16th, 2009 at 11:39 PM
“One for the accountant, one for the Oscar” only works because Oscar wins translate directly into more money. All the people involved in winning an Oscar can slap that on the resume, which means they can get a ton of money to make “Licensed Property IV: The Quickening.” Studios can slap “Winner of 28 Academy Awards” on the DVD box, which means big money for not a lot of investment.
Not so with games. Most of the audience doesn’t know or care who makes their game. There’s no equivalent to the Academy handing out awards that, while generally nonsense, are widely recognized as indicating a certain baseline level of quality: “you will look discerning if you put this movie on your shelf.”
Back catalog is also huge. Copyright lasts basically forever; if you’ve got a property, you can sell it and sell it and sell it. Only recently, though, has the process of re-releasing older games to a wide audience become viable. It becomes easier to justify the cost of a risky product like, say, Mirror’s Edge when you have the ability to keep selling that for years to come.
sinfony said this on December 17th, 2009 at 3:44 AM
Excellent discussion material. For sake of provoking consideration I’ll likely be overstating my points a bit to pull in the other direction. Rest assured it’s only because I think there’s some relevant and useful truth somewhere in the middle of these things.
Though we can point to a few big name producers that have followed their convictions and done really well (in most such cases, after a lifetime career of building their way up from fundamentals, and probably their share of projects where they were taking orders or chasing trends), what we’re not seeing to cite are the millions upon millions of people following their convictions that aren’t getting any traction or visibility.
Stephen Pinker, in The Stuff of Thought, wrote that “…Fodor correctly notes that history has often vindicated unconventional ideas- after all, they laughed at Christopher Columbus and Thomas Edison. The problem is they laughed at Manny Schwartz, too. What, you’ve never heard of Manny Schwartz? He was the originator and chief defender of the theory of Continental Drip: that the southern continents are pointy at the bottom because they dribbled downward as they cooled from a molten state. The point is that they were right to laugh at many Schwartz.”
Any given day of the year, there are tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of “selfishly creative” guided projects. Check out DeviantArt, or the iPhone App Store, or any flash portal. Dig around until you see projects that aren’t just the top 25 Featured, and that’s where you’ll find (lots and lots of) selfishly creative projects.
“When film was 35, Griffith and Murnau had already produced the first artistically relevant examples of the craft, and film had officially grown beyond the realm of idle distraction into true art. So what’s different now?” – Do you not accept Portal, Braid, Cave Story, Panzer Dragoon Saga, GTA4, Oblivion, Shadow of the Colossus as “artistically relevant examples of the craft?” Some of those are even the same titles that you cited as examples – what are you looking for? Surely, the appearance of artistically relevant examples of the craft didn’t cause any immediate disappearance of crap, any more than the evolution of humans killed off chimpanzees, or any more than The Godfather and Star Wars coming out in the 1970’s prevented Michael Bay from making Transformers 2.
“The problem lies not with development strategies, but with the realities of business. Films were made to be dramatic works; like theater, the objective was to create something that viewers would enjoy and appreciate further with repeated viewing.” Films are products, as books are products, as videogames are too, except that the freeware indie videogame scene has been a bigger fraction of our history than YouTube has been for film making. To the note of “repeated viewing” of films: if anything, the dynamic nature of videogames makes replay a higher commercial prerogative and user accordance, whether we’re talking about arcade Tetris, multiplayer Modern Combat 2, or World of Warcraft.
“Fumito Ueda… couldn’t give a rat’s ass whether millions of people bought Shadow of the Colossus, but there it is, Greatest Hits label and all, popping up in every game design discussion on the Internet.” Something that I learned from wrestling is that some of the very best wrestlers are cocky, but that most people who are cocky aren’t very good wrestlers. Fumito Ueda is an extraordinarily talented designer, and like anyone talented (software engineers being no exception), there’s a wider range of personality type people that will tolerate from him. He isn’t on staff for the sake of PR (like, say, Will Wright or Peter Moore). Perhaps he’s indifferent because he’s the sort of artist who protects himself from outside pressures to repeat himself by walling against public feedback, lest he wind up making military FPS games for 7 years like the commercially acclaimed team at Infinity Ward (6 as IW, 7+ including their 2015 time on MOHAA).
“Perhaps it’s because their culture demands a strong self-identification with one’s work?” Completely the opposite, actually. American small talk begins with, “So what do you do?” The volatility of our marketplace has those that stay afloat make sure they get credit for their work. Activision was founded, in part, because some Atari guys got angry about not being allowed to be credited with their work (and many of those videogames were one person projects).
Are we to suppose that the texture artist working on Wii Sports was strongly self-identifying with his work? Or that the 3D modeler on the Metal Gear Solid team saw his identity in yet another hallway filled with nondescript metal and wires? I think it’s a selfless lack of strong self-identification with work (possibly even to the extent of identification with a boss’s/team’s work) we have to thank for everyone on the team aligning their work with the vision of Shigeru Miyamoto or Keita Takahashi. Here the notions of equality and democratization (which don’t get me wrong, surely have their places in law and politics) mean everyone’s pushing their own self-interested ideas into the same funnel until what sometimes gets pooped out is a product of committee thinking mixing various superficial representations at the risk of losing any of their individually underlying themes or meanings.
Philip K Dick was an established science fiction author by the time he wrote A Scanner Darkly, and his entire life was messed up by drugs (he claims it was the first book he wrote entirely without amphetamines, and that the story was adaptation of things he witnessed as drugs destroyed the lives of his friends). From the Wikipedia entry on the book:
“Upon its publication in 1977, A Scanner Darkly was hailed by ALA Booklist as ‘his best yet!’ Brian Aldiss lauded it as ‘the best book of the year,’ while Robert Silverberg praised the novel’s ‘demonic intensity’ and deemed it ‘a masterpiece of sorts.’ ”
“I’m oblivious to the idea of having an audience.” – having mixed success in commercializing my artistic undertakings, I would suggest that when it comes to difficulty tuning and addressing usability issues, it’s useful to remember that someone may play the game that isn’t you.
“The only thing I know is that I want to make things because I want them to exist…” This is cited by the id Software guys on why they made Wolfenstein 3D and Doom – they just made the videogames that they wanted to play. There’s certainly success stories and value in listening to this direction, but it can be a dangerous trap if we’re not careful since there’s a tendency to unconditionally fall in love with things we give birth to, overlooking what others may see as flaws (that they won’t have the heart to tell us).
This also worries me as a major cause of the videogame industry being an echo chamber of shooting aliens and blowing up zombies (or shooting and blowing up alien/zombie nazis), because the people that liked playing what videogames were 15-25 years ago grew up and (I’m guilty of this too) we want to make the things we’re interested in, which selectively are a lot of the same things.
“…I trust enough in the diversity of the human race that there will be people in the world who like what I’ve made.” The internet is very good at this, provided you’re still making a concerted effort (and maybe the occasional cross-promotional or targeted advertising effort) to raise visibility to the point that the project will wind up in front of the people that will enjoy it.
Thanks for the link!
Chris
Chris DeLeon said this on December 18th, 2009 at 2:45 PM
Aww, George… I can’t wait till you actually make a game. the anticipation’s killing me… I will go out and buy a system just to play it
Jenna said this on January 4th, 2010 at 7:53 PM