Open Letter to Zero Punctuation

Yahtzee, your review of Silicon Knights' Too Human was pretty fun, except for one thing.

You said it "stinks of the auteur".

Please do a little research. There are parties out there who are actually trying to shift power in the industry out of the hands of the suits to those of the creators. Flippant remarks like yours damage our work.

If you did your research you'd realize that Silicon Knights is the antithesis of a place in which the "auteur" is supported. It is very much a groupthink company. That makes far more sense in hindsight. Only in a groupthink environment would nobody object to that crazy valkryie death sequence. After all, to criticize - to say "I don't think this works" - would inject dis-resolution and untidiness - those classic elements that groupthink environments cannot stand but creators thrive on. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. No one wants to get hammered down - so for me to not get hammered down I'm not going to mention that this Valkyrie sequence is just fucking stoooopid, I'm sorry!!!

A real auteur wants criticism. Not tolerates it - wants it. Wants good feedback. Wants to serve the project he's working on. Wants to look at things hard and is hard on himself. I think you're using the term "auteur" in its common connotation - that of somebody who wants attention in a pretentious manner. But that connotation is just a piece of emotional baggage. It's not reality. How do I know? All I have to do is show one good auteur and it collapses. I'm sure you can fill in that blank.

But here's the most telling sign it isn't an auteur game: Who's the auteur? D'uh... If it "stinks of the auteur" where is this auteur's name?

At the end of the day Too Human was a bad game. That's it.

There have been some good games made in the auteur manner. For example, Civilization and The Sims.

But the final irony, Yahtzee. You're an auteur.

More Blasphemy

Putting some more of my comments on Gamasutra up here before they get deleted. These ones on the tension between group and individual in game development...

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On a recent opinion by Raph Koster I said...

The thing I can't stand about Koster is his insistence on unifying the game industry into one giant homogenous monolithic singularity.

"We're building a lot of our worlds looking backward instead of looking at the world now."

"We have to change our definition of..."

"If you’re still reading 'Snow Crash,' you’re going in the wrong direction, because it's not 1992 anymore..."

What *we* need to do is shut the hell up and let individual designers free to do whatever it is they please. Leave the megalithic corporate-think to Microsoft or whatever. Game design is an art form, and it is the *Kiss of Death* to impose external criteria as if they are god-given-truth on creators.

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On Gamasutra's recent list of 20 "developers" to watch - in which they didn't name the creators, only the companies, I said...

Who are the actual developers - the human beings - who are worth watching? Where's the detective work on this? We need to be interested in this game designer, that programmer or this artist far more than this or that company. Companies are just shells that own stuff. Games are made by people. Who are the people?

Then I followed with another comment...

From what I can tell the list reads something like this...

1.) Kyle Gabler
2.) Joseph M. Tringali, Jeremiah Slaczka
3.) Frank Lantz
4.) Katsura Hashino, Shigenori Soejima
5.) Tom Fulp, John Baez, Dan Paladin
6.) Max Hoberman
7.) Tim Schafer
8.) Goichi Suda
9.) Randy Pitchford
10.) Vlad Ceraldi, Joel DeYoung, Ron Gilbert
11.) Steve Fawkner
12.) Akihiro Hino
13.) Mark Healey, Alex Evans
14.) Mare Sheppard, Raigan Burns
15.) Shinji Mikami, Atsushi Inaba
16.) Dylan Cuthbert, Kenkichi Shimooka
17.) Jenova Chen, Kellee Santiago
18.) Masato Maegawa
19.) Michael Booth
20.) Dave Gilbert

Chris Remo rebutted, telling me that game development is collaborative, and that it's too hard to pick out who these individual creators are. To this I responded...

True.

Also, a football team is made up of a lot of people - however, that doesn't stop us from learning and talking about star players like Bret Favre, Joe Montana, etc.

Also, a film is made by many people - however, that doesn't stop us learning about key creators like William Golding, Steven Spielberg, Francois Truffaut, Roman Polanski, etc.

Also, many people are needed to construct a building - however that doesn't stop us giving recognition to key designers like Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Libskind, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, etc.

(Shall I continue...?)

There is no excuse for the game industry to obstinately refuse to acknowledge and celebrate the talent of those individuals who have exceptional talent.

Watching the Game Industry Come To Its Senses

I commented on a story about outsourcing on Gamasutra. Basically, some big companies are starting to wake up to the fact that outsourcing makes sense. And not just for the sake of efficiency - for the sake of effectiveness.

My comment?:

Needless to say I've been hammering this message a long time.

Outsourcing is the rule - not the exception. You would never consider having a doctor on staff in case your employees got sick; or a lawyer for all your legal needs; or a plumber if your building broke down.

The most important thing about outsourcing is that the focus shifts from production to creative - as it should. We have to stop letting production questions get in the way of trying out new creative ideas. The attitude should be we can always "crew up" to make it - no matter how risky the new design seems.

Quick Post, Before They Delete It...

I posted a response to a story hailing the Utopian future of "scientific" game design. This kind of stuff makes my guts churn.

Posting my comment here before it gets deleted:

"Video game design is evolving from a barely understood activity done by genius designers driven by their gut feelings, to a craft with shared techniques and methodologies."

Yes... This is the very reason why we are in the midst of a creative crisis in games - why games are rehashed, commoditized and "deadly" (qv. "deadly theater"). Because of this drive to exclude the individual and at times irrational creative genius element in favor of something systematized, "scientific" and rational - but also ultimately lifeless.

Hammering the Effectiveness Message, Again

Effectiveness is more important than efficiency in the entertainment industry.

Take Apocalypse Now. Its making was a chaotic mess. But what they made was a good film.

True the aesthetic delivery needs to have efficiency. Apocalypse Now had tight cutting and dialog when it needed it. In a game, you need a certain framerate and so forth. But that's a different thing. That too ultimately falls under the category of effectivness - a quality of the final product. How we get to that effective destination need not be efficient - and should not be, if we sacrifice effectiveness to get there more efficiently. The whole raison d'etre of prototyping is to embrace the mess. To experiment. To try things out. To go by circuitous routes. In order to reach a destination: to build a better product.

I reinforced this at a recent comment on a story on Gamasutra about the Agile Methodology (which I've worked within)... Remember that what you're making is more important than the process by which you make it. If you arrive at a place where, for whatever reason, some people are doing nothing or waiting for others, you may very well need to be there.

Again, game development needs to be treated as an entertainment industry devoted to creating projects - not as a conventional operating business, focused on maximizing efficiency. Efficiency isn't the aim - effectiveness is. You can efficiently make a piece of garbage (it happens all the time).

Load Tubes One and Two!

Okay, I've had enough of this silence bit. So many people complained that I was all talk, so I put away the black hat and put out a real first-stab at a real high-level business design. I've gotten some real, serious feedback, some offline interest, and a few of us are mucking about on our own time looking at that.

Then I shut up.

But my blog seems to have gone blahhh...

So let's light up some targets again!

Here are a couple comments I made on Gamasutra recently...

On Simon Parkin's examination of numeric rating systems for game reviews:

Think of all those great works in other media - films, novels, music, etc - that were trashed, ignored or otherwise misunderstood when first released but, after time, were "rediscovered" and then went on to become masterpieces and extreme commercial success.

Once again, I have to say we need to pry the reins of creative-decision-making in game development out of the hands of the short-sighted beancounters.

(Note: Somebody later commented against me, mistakenly believing I was criticizing the author. Actually Parkin and I were in agreement.)

On Will Wright's optimistic view of games being accepted as a form of expression:

"We are a couple years away from being respected as a form of expression, but it's not a battle we need to fight. We'll win anyway."

Yeah right... Kind've like the Civilization model of R&D: just keep pumping "research points" into a new tech (which, somehow you know is coming even before it's been invented), passively, and sooner or later the new tech just pops out of nowhere.

Guess what?: in the real world radical discoveries don't happen that way. They are far from inevitable... They come from unexpected directions, by people often looking for totally different things. They meet great resistance.

The reality is new advancements don't just magically happen. Anymore than in cinema the auteur system - and with it respect for the medium of film - appeared. The auteur system which brought respect to film occurred because of an act of government to break the monopoly of film studios. Similar accomplishments require great work.

I wonder if Mr Wright would speak so free and easy if he were a just-starting-out designer today. Without the immense power his name carries. Let's say Sim City had never been invented - and thus the entire genre of Sim-like games didn't exist. And he went as a lone designer (much as he did back in the late 80s) with the proposal for such a radically new design. If he didn't have all the firepower of a working 3D demo behind him - which is de rigeur today - would he have gotten anywhere? Or would some suit at a publisher say "How quaint? However, we're trying to fill out our roster of military shooters, so we'll take a pass..."

One wonders.

Clarifications On The Lottery Ticket Videogame Company

After discussions over on Sirlin's site over the Lottery Ticket Videogame Company, here are some clarifications and comments on LGC...

What Is Prototyping in LGC-Terms?
There was confusion over this. Prototyping may be done on electronic, tabletop or another form. It depends on the projected game. The reason why I mention tabletop a lot is because it is a way to rapidly test radically new ideas with little expense. If your game depends on a new type of sandbox play, then a fast tabletop makes sense. If your game depends on narrative design and character development, then good ol' roleplaying makes sense. If you're game revolves around a new kind of UI or physics modelling, then some kind of electronic prototype makes sense. Again, LGC is about cultivation, not control - so what matters is what the talent thinks the prototype needs to be for the specific project.

Admission of my "Talky" Manner
Some are bothered by my talky manner. Okay, I don't speak like a suit. However, I will remind you that the game industry is an entertainment industry. We ain't making business apps here - we're making compelling experiences. We're making fun. Fun is a human language.

Finally, the Meat: Just What The Hell LGC Is...
This question is what has dogged me this past few weeks. People kept asking what is the LGC? Is it a publisher?, is it a game developer?, is it a studio?

Yesterday, it hit me what it was. The problem is, we're looking at LGC in status quo terms. That's the wrong way to look at it.

What I know now is this: I don't know exactly what LGC is!

But I do know it will be unlike anything there is right now!

I know it is close to an agency - in that it directly looks for and cultivates talent - but I also know that unlike a traditional game industry agency, it doesn't kowtow to the mammoth publishers. So it could be an agency-distributor, or a packaging agency - depending on a new wave of digital distribution (Steam would be perfect) while simultaneously cultivating talent and marketing its new releases. You are free to jump in here as well. That's the cool thing about doing things that are new. They're new!

I think LGC could be a game-version of United Artists. In game-equivalent terms that would make it a publisher that maintains a low overhead, focuses on building a libray (see below), and gives a great deal of creative latitude to its talent.

The United Artist's analogy might not bode well for some movie industry vets because UA became a shell after Heaven's Gate. However, UA still developed a huge library - including the James Bond and Rocky franchises. (Besides, Heaven's Gate was more a perceived disaster than an actual one. According to a studio exec at UA they were capable of absorbing its losses, but Transamerica looked at Heaven's Gate as an excuse to dump the whole adventure of giving artists creative control.) Anyway, the "pendulum" is a myth - in life things never just repeat because time moves forward and we learn from the past; and the lesson of Heaven's Gate is exactly why LGC focuses on low-burn prototyping - to minimize risk. What we do know is that here and now in the game industry, designers are crying to get their A-material out of the closet!

Finally, LGC depends on something very important: it's library. Libraries are not things that game publishers care to develop - after a few years (if not a few months) they put their games into the bargain bin. I can understand this if games are valued mainly as technology - and the period of 1990 to about 2004 saw huge leaps of tech. But I don't get why they would do that anymore.

If you decide the value of games comes from their intangible gameplay, narrative design, emotional experience, or something other than their polygon count, you would never undercut the development of a long-term library by dropping older titles in the bargain bin. This is especially true now that high quality graphics are starting to be commonplace.

To put it simply: the LGC believes that the intangible creative design factor is going to make the difference, which is why it will invest in unusual ideas and unorthodox talent. Now, given this, we know that unusual concepts and creators in other art forms often take time to mature. There are many examples of things which, at the time of their release, didn't do that well, but years later went on to be huge hits. David Bowie's song "Heroes", Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, Orson Wells' Citizen Kane. All cult-classics. The Herman Miller office chair, in a totally different field, is another example - a product every focus group said was ugly, yet went on to - eventually - become a huge seller (the Herman Miller company decided to ignore the focus groups - see Malcolm Gladwell's Blink for the story).

It's the same thing with games. We need to hold out for the cult-classic. We need to develop a library and not undercut it, holding on to titles that, perhaps misunderstood when first released, can eventually go on to be understood (when the audience catches up) and sell very well in later years. Yes, two years is a long time (to some) in the game industry - but to the larger scope of humanity, to the mainstream audience, two years is nothing. Certainly you have rented movies more than two years old. Think about it.

Anyway, the timing is ripe for a venture like LGC to happen. The creative impulse of unique designers in the game industry is simply too strong to be held to a strictly corporate mindset any longer.