The Making of REDUCTION: The Alien Swarm Campaign

Breaking My Silence

For the past four years, I've been silent. For two reasons:

First, I started up Core Talent Games Ltd, with some compatriots. CTG attempted to put in action many of the ideas that emerged here in the Grassroots Gamemaster blog. But I knew, when I started, I had to stop this GRGM activism stuff (or this complaining, depending on your perspective) and become a doer. So I shut up and worked on CTG, as CEO.

Secondly, during Core Talent, I made Reduction: an addon campaign for the Valve game Alien Swarm.

The preview campaign for Reduction is now finished (to beta stage at least). Here's a trailer:



I did Reduction because I wanted to. But as I did it, it sort of dawned on me that I needed to do it as well.

So here's my story of The Making Of Reduction...

Where Is The Game Designer's Voice?

I feel that the game industry has lost its way.

It has, in particular, been seduced by that whole Faustian game-design-is-psychological-manipulation trend. It has been seduced by big business a lot - where the whole objective is to addict addict addict. Addict.

Not that I think addictive games are wrong, but I want them to earn my "addiction" - I want to feel like I am alive when I'm playing them. Alive. Engaged. Not staring vacantly, like a ghost, for hours into a PC before returning to the misery of daily life. Not taking off two minutes, as one rides the bus, to waste time until the next stop... No. I didn't want games to waste time. I wanted them to be like real experiences. Vivid experiences.

When you encounter a great work, it doesn't waste time. It gives you time. It straightens your soul, and permits you to walk more clearly through delaying or dangerous ground. You find in it clarity, bestowed then on you, allowing you to skip ahead - to teleport through all the dead shit. This is how it gives you time. It removes burden.

Now what do we have? Corporate-driven game development. That's basically it. Corporate-driven. But even stranger - when you've done what I've done - now, institutionally-driven games. That's right: I've been involved in or around games financed by major government bodies. Games to train people to deal with pandemic management and with mass casualty situations (US federal), to promote the mining industry (Canadian federal and provincial there). Stuff like that. It's such a strange place to wind up in: making games in conjunction with bureaucrats or near-bureaucrats.

(I mean, there are good intentions in those games - teaching; saving lives. But those people don't understand games. And they don't trust the creative process: it's too... free-spirited. It doesn't fill out reports in triplicate, and adhere to doctrine or top-down command. It is... dead. I soon realized, the only way we could teach them the power of games was to do something beyond their control, then show it to them nearly finished. THEN they would get it. But how to fund such a process?...)

Anyway...

On the one hand, with games as a service - often using these strange metrics pored over by the "PhDs" looking for behaviour analysis - you have this bizarre situation: a kind of silence. We have these pseudoscience analysts hooking up the measures to the audience - like electrodes to their brain - to get the metrics that somebody decided were important (ignoring that that is a creative decision); to gather the data pushed out the other end. Listening. Listening so intently to the audience. Does it have a heartbeat here? Is there a brainwave there?

Myopia.

No. The "doctor" is now listening too too closely to the "patient". Because if he, gasp, stepped back - stood back and looked at the larger picture - he'd see that his patient - that the audience; the player - was blue. Was dying.

He would see that the patient has been waiting. Waiting. For the game designer to say something.

Something.

Think of how Valve self-declares it is now in the games-as-a-service business; and that now the authors of its games are going to be (surprise!) the audience itself! The gamers. And now, it just wants to know: Audience, tell us: What game do you want us to make?

In the comments following, immediately:

"Half Life 3! Duh."

"What happened to Half Life 3?"

"Did they just abandon that?"

...Repeated over and over and over again.

The audience is waiting for you to speak, but you are lost trying to psychoanalyze them with statistics.

The audience is listening for our voice. But mostly it is silent.

Silent... Listening for the audience to tell us what our voice should say. Should be.

But they don't know what our voice should be. They, the audience, have no voice. Not from that deeper deeper reach. That is why they are the audience. They listen.

They don't tell us what story, what game, what experience they want, and then wait until we parrot it back to them.

No. They say, "Show me something new! Something I've never seen or heard, never imagined. Ever! Give me an experience that rings so true it makes the hairs raise up the back of my neck! Put a new thought or a new feeling in front of me, so hot to the touch it feels like a burning cinder in my flesh!"

Imagine that.

Do you know, in the past, artists were executed for their work? That's how seriously the Listeners can believe in the Authors.

(Have you ever heard of a government  wanting to execute a game designer? No. Why not? Don't worry about them... They have nothing to say.)

(Well... With the exception of the anti-violence crowd.)

When the Authors have fallen silent, the Listeners are mystified.

We wind up in perfect feedback loop of silence. Deathly.

Deathly because, to the audience, our Leadership - our Authorship - is the oxygen that they need. But we aren't speaking; we're just listening.

And so they are suffocating. Waiting for our oxygen.

The Audience is waiting for us to breathe our voice into them. So we can resuscitate their souls.

But we won't. We have surrendered our voice to the suits.

So I just decided to do a game. A game campaign actually. A project that was a very personal project for me. Through which I could entertain, could challenge, could speak.

That was how Reduction began.

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.

The Way Forward For The Lottery Ticket Videogame Company

I got a strong reaction to my most recent post here. It was over the "Lottery Ticket Game Company" (LGC). People like Sirlin asked me to sign them up. Others wondered what we could do to make LGC a reality.

I have taken the last few days to think this over. Hence this entry...

First let me acknowledge now is the time to take off the black hat I normally wear and put on my green hat - and scour the edge from my voice.

Here are some core elements I see over how to make the LGC come true. This is not meant to be definitive - I am only one person and have a design-bias, I acknowledge a broader understanding is needed. Anyway, let's get going...

Passionate Advocacy, Not Methodical Balance

Balance is something we do a lot of in game design. We act like the investigators that exist in Civil Law in our search for truthful design. When we determine the capabilities of, say, a unit, we methodically look at both sides, analyze, then make a judgement based on what we believe is the truth for our game design Obviously, we do this to make a game playable, and it is comfortable and familiar for us to do this when we consider how to move forward, creatively, in the game industry. However that practice cannot be used if the LGC is to succeed. We have to become passionate advocates, as in the search for truth used in Common Law.

Nobody knows the truth. With a methodical, balance-oriented perspective, we will always undermine good suggestions of a way forward because nothing anybody can suggest can be proven definitively right. Honestly, we should do some good old-fashioned *tabletop* roleplaying game sessions, because there we have to make a decision based on imperfect understanding. Put it this way: if the game industry is a band of adventurers stuck in a dungeon with dreary uninspiring games as its monster denizens, then we can argue forever about which door to take, and somebody will alway have a reason why we shouldn't go down this or that hallway, but it's only by taking a door that we'll get out of here.

Emphasis on Communicating ,Then Doing

Now, this said we come to the opposite extreme which is to not discuss process, just shut up and do. In disaster response they have a saying: a plan without action is a daydream, but action without a plan is a nightmare. One of the reasons we got stuck in our present creative crisis is because we painted ourselves in a corner - we didn't consciously choose a way to create games, we just passively let it evolve (i.e. started with the tiny dev team, then as requirements got larger simply tacked on more people until we wound up with lethargically huge teams, having giant supply tails and no agility to afford to do anything risky [lest the whole thing crash]).

Put it another way, we can't say "shut up and make your game demo". We don't want to shut up, we want to talk it out first. Every original game begins as a dialog in its early design doc and prototype phase. It's the most important part of making a new game, and we don't want to rush past it just to implement something in order to make it "look good" for people who know graphics but not gameplay.

(You could say, the above two points are an attempt to re-establish a balance between doing and contemplating.)

Using Imagination

Imagination is more important than knowledge. --- Albert Einstein

Communication leads to this: a visualization of a new game - not an actual game. It's more important we imagine a new game, early on, than build one. This is why I espouse the design document so much - because it forces people to consider the game in an unrealized state; floating around in stasis. It's a plan and like Eisenhower said, plans are worthless but planning is invaluable. The design doc isn't, unto itself, what we want - it's the imagination and formalized thought about the game that the design document and early prototypes provide a framework for. Working the game out in a fluid state will help us realize it better. But we don't sacrifice this imaginative work for the sake of getting something built in that shortsighted drive to just build something, anything, even if it's crap.

Actively Searching For Good Ideas

We abandon the way new games are currently found: publishers passively waiting for indie teams to come up with vertical slices, then just stage-gating them; or company heads sending down an order to a design team to make a "visionary new game". That will never produce anything other than a new version of an existing game, with maybe one or two gimmicks added. (You cannot order people to be visionary. If you believe so your view sits opposite thousands of years of historical evidence.)

The active part means we go out and engage prospects, cultivate talent and fund design and prototyping. Read on...

Suspension of Judgment & Iteration

In his book The Educated Imagination, the famous English prof Northrop Frye points out the mark of advanced intelligence is the ability to suspend judgment.

This means outside individuals or small teams will send in design documents or prototypes, and we will have evaluators who actively read or play them. We roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty considering raw ideas, even on paper. Yes, we will get a flood of design proposals (and honestly, we will probably be able to judge the typical one in just a few minutes), but there will be some that hit us as being worth going to a next stage.

Okay, yes, we are stage-gating here - but we are doing so on far different terms. We are stage-gating more on the criteria of creative development, and less on whether we see raw production getting done.

This also means we prototype in a spiral manner. We fund a "next draft" or a first prototype. At first we suspend judgment as much as possible, but as we go forward through each iteration we let ourselves judge more and more. The urge most of us have is to judge - it's easy to say "That sucks man!" Judging isn't the hard part - it's not judging that's really difficult, or balancing judgment with perceptive knowing (judging and perceiving are opposites). There's another term for this: thinking outside the box (though that phrase has lost its native power).

The Company Model

LGC is either a publisher or an intermediary between a studio/game designer and a publisher/distributor. It isn't a studio. What it does is package games and foster their development and production. This means a close relationship between free agent companies and publishers.

To get the product sold might mean doing digital distribution, but at this point that is a secondary concern. The company must take the "if you build it, they will come" attitude. The single most important thing it has to sell is refreshingly good games - which is to say that cutting the LGC idea down because it doesn't have the retailer or publisher relationships right now is an unfair criticism. Ultimately, LGC is an experiment.

I propose the following:
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Each game is its own company.
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Each game/company gets sold outright to the marketing entity (typically the publisher). This, I believe, is the basis for a clean deal, which makes the marketing entity comfortable (but see below).
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The company is built from a group of core developers brought together for the life of the game. The idea originator is one of the core developers.
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Typical core developers are: a lead game designer, a lead artist/art director, a lead engineer, a lead writer, a lead sound designer, a lead producer (etc), plus LGC itself.
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Who builds the game?: A group of outsourcer/free agent companies. The relationship of these entities to the core developers varies. For example, it may be that a lead engineer is also the principal of his (or her) own game programming company - in which case the entire game programming company might be part of the core developer team, scaling up as necessary to get work done. It depends on how the core developers want to run their own shows.
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LGC, having a design-intensive focus, would probably not try to push the technical boundaries as much - but this depends on the game design requirements. A design-driven project that can use a slightly older engine would be preferred over a technology-driven project.
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During early development, the core developers can work from their homes, coming into LGC's office a little later on to do early prototyping. When production starts, the core developers come to a temporary facility, set up for the duration of production. (If this means LGC buys one of those abandoned mining towns and transports everyone there for six months of hothouse creativity, hey, why not?)
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Compensation: LGC arranges the core developers to get a fee and a percent of gross. It doesn't get entangled with the subjective question of whether there is a net profit or not. We are here to make games, not game companies. The size of these compensations varies depending on the experience and clout of the core team member: a first-time game designer would probably get peanuts in a fee, but would have the hope of the gross return.

During prototyping, the fee paid to developers would typically be in lump-sums: 50% up front, 50% on delivery of the iteration. This removes time pressure from LGC as a funder: hey, if you want to take 3 years doing an iteration, do it - just remember, we aren't paying you by the hour.
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Content IP Ownership: The game company owns the content IP of the game, which means the marketing entity will ultimately own it (since each project is its own company and, as noted above, this project/company gets sold outright to the marketing entity). Remember though, you will get compensated in a clean fashion for success.

Furthemore, if the marketing entity spins this project off in any way (sequels, novelization, movie version, TV series, etc), a fee (in the form of a piece of the spin-off's budget, or an upfront amount), and possibly a percent of gross on said spin-off, is paid to the core developers. You (core developer) don't own the IP, but so what? You still get rewarded if it turns into a success, plus the spin-off deal is with *you*, not with some company that you may have been forced out of (or something like that). Plus you don't get bogged down in administering a company. (Now, again, nothing is to prevent you coming into the deal as a corporation rather than an individual, but that is your business. You might do business as yourself, but get paid through a numbered company.)
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Technology IP Ownership: Since we'll likely use a lot of middleware, tech IP ownership is less of an issue. What tech IP that is developed I believe should be owned by the engineering core-team member (which would probably be an independent company).
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Creative Control: As of this writing I would say that moral rights over the game developed through LGC should be retained by the core team. So even if the final game content is owned by the marketing entity, the game still only gets released in the version the core team wants it to be released in. In other words, I believe the core team should get"creative control" over the game project. (Of course, the marketing entity may want creative control - which would mean the core team-members waive their moral rights - so this depends on the individual deal and the clout of the core-team members.)
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Once the game is over, you take a break until the next one.

Active, Not Passive, Approach To Teams

Conventional gamedev wisdom today has a passive approach to "the team" that underlies any game company. First, the team is extremely important when deciding to buy into, or fund, a game company. Second, each company will have more or less the same team over its life (or I should say, team members are expected to stay there for years).

This is a passive view of team-building.

From a skill- and talent-based view, conventional gamedev is passive in that it lacks a casting element. It lacks that idea that each game should be built by people who are hand-picked because their skills and talents, their aesthetic sensibilities, their outlook and interests are what is needed. Instead, it just recycles the same people to do whatever games are in the pipeline. But the guy who did last year's horror game shooter might not be best suited for this year's WWII RTS title.

From an interpersonal standpoint conventional gamedev is passive because it does not look into these issues. People either get along together or they don't. If they don't get along some discussions will be had, but pretty much there ain't nothin' can be done about it, so ain't no point in investing in it.

We reject this notion. LGC will take a different approach to team-building: an active one.

Casting: Core teams will be custom-built for the project - they will be cast. If the tabled game is a horror shooter, the game writer and art directors will have a good sense of horror; the lead engineer know shooter tech, and so on. If the designer's next project is an RTS, a totally new team will be cast.

A corollary to casting is that the tables are turned in the normal "hiring" process. When we find a good design, we go looking for valuable core-team members we think will execute it well. This is called "packaging" in the movie biz. When talented, coveted core-team development people "sign on" to a project, their mere act of doing so advances the project's cause, and builds the new package. This seems similar to the way it's done now - talented individuals jump ship to form a new company. Here, though, the difference is you sign on to a project - a specific game - not a new company (with all the associated baggage that goes along with the long-term running of a company).

Interpersonal Issues: Gamers are good judges of technology, games and so forth - but they are lousy judges of people. They tend to be more comfortable with code than emotions - so their repertoire of team-building techniques tends to be limited. However, there are many "tools" available to build teams - open communication, personal coaching methodologies, group coaching sessions, and so on. Utilization of these techniques - which are well known outside game development - represents active effort to facilitate the smooth collaboration of teams. LGC will make use of these techniques. It won't just passively let teams succeed or fail without taking active measures to help them. It also won't just walk away from a great design idea if there isn't a team in place already to build it. Again, we will build these teams.

There is no reason why mature, professional adults should not be able to work together for limited periods on projects, then go their own way and reform into different teams elsewhere on different projects. This is done all the time in other industries - it can be done in the game industry as well.

Cultivation of Core Talent, Not Control of It

If this isn't clear yet, LGC uses a cultivation model, not a control one, with regard to the core talent it works with. Our initiative will seek to benefit from the gifts of talent, not to capture these talents and bend them to our desires.

The steps above illustrate this. Each game project begins with an active search for excellent designs done by individuals or small teams. When we find one we develop it in a communication- and imagination-intensive process early on, ramping up to prototyping. Each game is officially made by its core developers: you get your name on the box and prominently in the credits. We don't shackle you to any corporate body (studio, publisher, whatever). Our value isn't in being a big corporate institution - no, it's in our relationship with you, the core developers, and doing a simple, clean deal in this game, and in the next one, and the one after that. We compensate you so that you directly benefit if your game succeeds (not indirectly, through ownership of a company [which you may have tenuous control over] that in turn owns part your game [if it does]); we permit you to work on projects you want to; we allow you to build your own name as an individual, and so on.

But the main thing is, LGC would have a sense that it is important to discover core talent for its own sake - not talent which is subservient to whatever machine (company, studio, whatever) that it has to fit into.

There are two models an organization can work with: the machine model and the garden model. In the machine model, each person is a cog in a machine. It has a focus toward efficiency. Sometimes that's necessary. But it is not well suited to innovation. In a garden model, you create an environment with all the right ingredients, then plant the seeds - the growth produced is native to the system, not driven by external parts. The occupants are nurtured, not driven to conformity.

Let me make a distinction between the way LGC does it and the way it's normally done through an analogy: diamond mining. We want to find diamonds - and not wimpy engagement ring ones; massive, beautiful ones...

In South Africa, years ago, a manager of a diamond company was standing in a mining pit when he saw a glint on the dirt wall. Using a pen knife he picked out a diamond so large he couldn't wrap his fingers around it. This incredible discovery was named the Cullinan, and eventually was cut into the Crown Jewels of the English Monarchy. It was found in a time diamonds were sought for painstakingly... by hand, with rolled-up sleeves. Today diamonds are scooped up en mass, by big machines that dump the "diamond ore" into crushers. The ore is systematically pulverized down to uniform gravel, and this is then conveyor-belted through a machine that is able to automatically extract the diamond bits from the rock. This system is very efficient at making the thousands of engagement rings that form most of the market for diamonds. However, if a once-in-a-lifetime diamond like the Cullinan goes through this process, it is destroyed.

An obsession with efficiency can damage the very prize it seeks. In game development we don't crush talent in the compulsive search for efficiency - we focus, rather, on being effective.

How To Fund This

A radically new way of doing things, such building a game in the LGC manner, usually only occurs when a situation has gotten so desperately bad it must change. But since the big publishers are already comfortably fat, the LGC would need some kind of an angel or benefactor to occur, and likely would have to be done in an experimental manner.

There might be one or two parties out there willing to fund it. We'll see.

Engagement, Not Fear

The last thing I want to mention is this: LGC is an undertaking, an experiment that requires courage.

It takes courage to "throw open the flood gates" and take in new prospects who, by the hundreds (maybe thousands) pitch you their designs. Hey, there are a lot of psychos out there, right?

It takes courage to work with a new, untested and possibly unusual talent - somebody who has not been vetted in the conventional sense. Especially if the person seems intense, possibly difficult or angry.

This courage part is critical.

All I can say is this: people very often turn out to be what we will them to be. In a strange, illogical way, they respond to it. If we treat them, however subtly, as forlorn losers or potential psychos, sometimes this fatalism has a habit of turning them into that very thing we are afraid of. If, however, we engage them directly - even if we are rejecting their submissions - with dignity and honest feedback, this has a way of resetting their expectations of life; of letting them resolve whatever crazy notions of glory they had and get on with what they can really do with their lives.

With talent that seems angry or bitter, I will also say this. We really have ourselves to blame for this creative crisis. History has shown that creative genius has an intensity, a difficulty, and often an anger: Orson Welles, Van Gough, Picasso, Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Einstein, the Sex Pistols... I could go on and on. Rollo May, in his landmark study on creativity, The Courage To Create, gave a word to the central driving force of an artist's creativity: rage. Not inquisitiveness; not friendly upbeatness; not sociability; not cooperativeness; not outgoing personality; not charm; not professionalism. Rage. Now, he meant it not so much in a conventional sense, but as a creative fire. There is a direct connection between intense passion and creative brilliance. William Faulkner said, "The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him..." As much as we decry that kind of unbridled fire, you need it if you want to be a first-rate creative power. Think of the seventh samurai (played by Toshiro Mifune), in Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. He symbolizes that unbridled - and yes, a little arrogant and foolish - drive to win. He does learn humility at the end - but, the lesson is the venture needs that degree of fire. In today's corporatized, sterilized game industry those types are shunned. But we want that fire. Those are the kind of designers we're looking for.

There are some who reject this idea that intense creativity is accompanied by intense feeling, but they do so for selfish reasons. They want the innovative new things to appear, but they don't want to have to weather the creators of these new things (or recognize them as such - which would also mean compensating them accordingly). They believe, wishfully, that innovation can also come from mild-mannered, nice and mellow people - people, perhaps, who are content to just be employees; people whom they can send a memo to (Memo: Innovate new ideas; have them on my desk by Monday), and have this problem magically fixed. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. Unfortunately, history simply doesn't bear this out. Creative people and the truly creative process are marked by intensity.

What we wind up with, oftentimes, is watered-down innovation. We live in a world where every movie, TV show, rock band, videogame and so forth looks like every other of the same genre. We have let the standard slip that far - partly because we are afraid to engage those scary, intense, creative people. That's natural; after all, intense passionate people are scary - as is the stuff they make. It demands a lot. Roger Ebert recounts routinely recommending people go see this or that beautiful, artful, brilliant film, but that the crowds generally didn't - that in the end, many ordinary people are more comfortable eating burgers and fries than French cuisine. This seems to have lead to our world now: a place where the core chefs are only skilled in how to make burgers and fries (metaphorically speaking). So if you want to know, ultimately why we are in a creative crisis in the game industry, it's partly because we are so damned scared of our creators.

Of course, that said there has to be realism; there has to be balance. And there sure has hell has to be a respect for the payer of the bills.

The Lottery Ticket Videogame Company will engage these folks. It won't just play doormat to them, mind you... but it will engage them with clear eyes and a clean, firm demeanour. Why? Because it wants what they have: the best damn game design ideas on the planet.

Some Posts About My Posts

There has been some talk about posts I did you might find interesting...

A Debate on the Future of Game Dev...

Most recently, Sirlin seems to have discovered my blog and did a post about it. In the comments, they get into an interesting debate about this stuff. After getting hammered routinely on IGDA's board it's refreshing to hear this.

Programming: Does It Help or Hinder Design

I made a comment on programming versus design over at an AI site, and the blogmaster spun it out into a full blog entry. Read it here...

The Vaunted Game Design Job "Description"

Someone a while ago did a posting on one of my earlier entries. Check it out here...

The Stifling Atmosphere of Game Development

My latest comment on Gamasutra - in response to responses where there is the view promoting the typical notion that all things in game development should be standardized (what a mouthful...).

I got an idea. How about trying to make the game industry less like a bureaucracy and more like an entertainment industry? One of the first things to do is stop being afraid that a person might not be a cog in your machine - looking, walking, talking and thinking like everyone else - and start being willing to look at their quality as a potential creator and take some chances on the unusual.

You want to know why all games look, smell, act, feel the same? Partly its because of the cult-like nature of game companies - with their focus on homogenized sameness.

Of course, if we did let go of the homogeneity thing, that would probably mean that (gasp) the game designers would demand their individual contributions be recognized - complete with their name on the box, a demand of a more substantial compensation, the ability to move from project to project as they (as opposed to their corporate masters) saw fit, and so forth.

The Lottery Ticket Videogame Company

I win the lottery and get to finance a videogame?

The first thing I do is take the "defined IP" and throw it in the garbage. It is bass-ackwards for the money man to start with the concept and then hire the people to fit the concept. That's like top-down command - the generals in their pyjamas and slippers in the chateaus, separated from reality, while the grunts are in the trenches on the frontlines. The best you'll get is mediocre shit that only knows how to play the game of game dev. (Hey, Thomas Edison, I want to hire you to be the inventor. What's that, you wanna make some thing called a "light bulb". Who the hell wants that? Put it away because I've already got some defined IP here.)

The next thing I do is throw it open. Do a game *project*. Pitch me baby! Whaddaygot that's worth doin'?

No don't like it. Got anything else?

No, don't like it. Got anything else?

Yah, okay that's it. Let's take a look at that one.

This way I haven't hired some mediocre fuck who just looks at game dev as if it's a job - like engineering or accounting. I have his whole body, mind and soul. He's a true believer. It's *his* game we're making.

Now, since it's *his* game we're making, I'm gonna make a deal to reflect that. (Why? Simple. I want to make money. You don't make money making shit. You get what you pay for.)

First off, this game is its own company. The actual games is going to be sold by a separate marketing company (the marketing entity - let's call it the publisher), but it (the game) lives and dies as its own company. It's own venture.

Next, we talk and make a good deal, one that he feels is fair - not one I'm going to put on the table, take-it-or-leave-it. Why? Because I don't want the bullshit you might give me just to work-to-rule. I want your [b]best stuff[/b]. I want your A-game! I never spout bullshit like "Wanted: A designer with passion to take games to the next level; compensation = a fucking salary"! That's horseshit, we all know it. Only mediocre designers like that kind of deal (because they suck). The only way the powers-that-be get away with it is because game designers, for all their talent, have no guts to stand up for themselves and take what is theirs. So the good ones sneak around and hide. I know that. And it's true for you, too. I know you have dreams tucked away in your little designers notebooks there. Dreams you sneak around in the dark with, and hope one day to get made. Dreams you know will absolutely rule, that you are saving for that day, years from now, when you think you might somehow get the energy and contacts to finally *finally* make a game company to go into production (the rigmarole of making a company being a process we both know is an incredibly inefficient hazing ritual designed by the cynical overly analytical types that crush the life out of gamedev - which is precisely why filmmakers don't waste a lot of time managing companies [they have other things to do...]). So to get at these dreams I'm going to cut to the fucking chase and allow you to jump the queue. But I know I'm gonna have to do two things to get that: 1.) listen to and be open to these concepts; 2.) compensate you for them in a way that my risk (burn rate) is minimal, but you get compensated *if* they turn out profitable.

I've already established a willingness to listen, so how do I compensate you?

First, you get average-to-low fee up front (preferably low). You wanna work in something you believe in, you have to take equity, which means taking on risk. (Well, okay... If you're a veteran, or your idea is good [or part of a franchise maybe], you get a pretty substantial fee up front.)

Now, if it sells well, you get a piece or a fee paid for anything that spins off from this concept. You get a fee piece of the budget to any sequels, if it gets turned into a film, TV show, comic book, novelization, training application. You name it. That's what you get. It's fair. So give me your A-game.

Either that, or we give you a piece of the gross sales of the game (though you'd truly need to be a veteran for that). Remember: I'm not fucking around. I'm not interested in you being yes-man to the piece of shit game we've assigned you - I'm asking what you think. It's your chance. (If you hand me anything tired - like an old genre game but with a few extra doo-dads - you're fucking gone. So be passionate and aim high.)

(Hell, if you - personally - have an agent, I'll work with them too. But just remember... Your A game!... I want it. I am not prepared to *actually believe* - like so many suits do - that my own shit smells like roses. So don't dick me around.)

Next, I have only 1 or 2 designers and we prototype. Like for maybe 6 months to a year. Wow! Think of my burn rate! Two people! Do I even need an office to do this? I doubt it. Come over to my apartment dude. Let's make this bitch. I hire high school or university students for some playtest sessions. We're talkin' small flash games or even a tabletop version. I get at the fun. The programmers and analytical types are leery of this: you can't test framerates or polys with a tabletop. Fuck it. I'm interested in the fun factor! If I capture it here, I know I'll be able to duplicate it in the electronic version.

Six months to a year later, I have a prototype, plus a fully-fleshed out design doc. Now I cast to build it.

Of course if six months to a year later we have a piece of poo - the prototype just didn't turn out - well, it gets canned. But not a huge loss since we didn't ramp fully up anyway.

I go to outsourcers to build this bugger into a real finished game. Not offshorers - outsourcers (there's a difference). Gimme your portfolio? This is the IP we have developed, what is your work like? Does your work fit this project? How does your style fit the concept? Don't worry about fuckin' job stability. If you want fucking job stability, what are you doing in the entertainment industry (that's what games are part of) - become an accountant; I don't want you here: get out of my office. I want aggressiveness and passion. If you are hot, I'm willing to cut a deal like I did with the above parties. You manage your outsourcing company, you provide me with the stuff you agree to, you take care of your own internal shit (I don't wanna see it), and get it to me more or less on time (I'm not as much of a stickler on deadlines because my burn rate is next to zilch [my whole game company runs out of a tiny little office]; and I am WAY more concerned with quality than schedules).

How do I cast these suppliers? I trust the magic new thing called - wait for it - intuition! Intuition and perception! Things that analytical types distrust (because they can't be measured with numbers) but which lead to truly amazing new discoveries (and not tediously boring shit which is what analytical types make because they are bean-counters). I don't give a shit about experience. What I want is talent.

What does my company look like? You're right: it's a fucking zoo! All the little scaredy-dweebs who just want to remake D&D or want to make efficient coding processes (instead of effective games) are scared shitless by the creative energy here; but that's okay because they are deadwood and I want them out of my eyesight. My place is a beautiful, low-burn-rate zoo. (Can't say this is what it looks like in the offices of my outsourcers. Maybe the coding outsourcer's place is a friggin' zen garden of quietude - though more likely it's the office of Epic Games, id software or some other middleware provider. But they run their show the way they want to, I run mine the way I want to.) And my zoo is just bursting with creative energy, and - working in conjunction with my outsourcers - turns out something so amazingly new and inspiring you can't help but stare at it in wonder.

When it's over, all the parties go their own way for a break. Some go on to different games - done in this manner again, moving at their (the creators') pace. (Imagine that!) Again - this isn't a gawdamn factory! It's a creative hothouse! A studio, by the actual definition of the word. But we know who we are now. We have worked with each other. I can call them up again, if I find a project that fits them. We are making a game dev community. Which is far more important than a mere company. A community! One that is open, where people feel they can continually bring their A-game out in the open. Where they can try to sell their A-game, instead of sneaking around in the shadows while they eek out a living developing stuff from unoriginal shit concepts that bean-counting executives think are cool but really are garbage.

My marketing company sells the output of this one-project-game-company. And I then the time comes for me to say, "I'm lookin' to do another game! Hey world, show me what ya got!"

And that's how I do it if I win the lottery ticket.

...Or meet a visionary.

Why Game Connection Is Wrong

You know about Game Connection? You pay a few thousand bucks and you get a serious meeting with a game publisher at GDC.

It is wrong - bad, evil, corrupt.

How shall I explain?...

You know those classified ads you might see for actors, or book writers or whatever, where the person would go in and the agent would look at them and then say, "You know what? I think you have talent. I think you're special. I don't see people like you come in every day. So I'm gonna represent you. However, I need you to pay a fee to me to rep you? This is to cover photos, expenses [blah blah blah]."

You know what places like the Actors Guild or the Writers Guild would say about those joints. They're a rip off! Why? Because anyone who believes you really have a chance will take a percentage of what you make (traditionally that's 10 percent). If they ask for ANYTHING up front, it's a rip off! Because they are selling you out. They're using you.

Well, here is this Game Connection thing, and it acts just like that... Just like the proverbial crooked agent - taking the money of the naive who flock like the proverbial chickens to the slaughter.

Get real Game Connection. If you want to facilitate the bringing of new properties to publishers BECOME A FUCKING AGENT and have some balls! Stop selling out from Second One.

(Or am I asking too much from people in games in general? That they believe in something other than power, technology and money - selling games with the attitude of a drug pusher. That they be something other than amoral in a headlong race to the bottom?)

Tell It Like It Is, Jonathan

More polite than myself, but Jonathan Blow at the Montreal International Game Summit delivers the same basic message.

Refreshing.

Facing A Small Little Evil

James P Carse, the theologian and author, once described evil as the need to silence another utterly.

I have argued for individual game designers to be seen and granted direct rights. Their name on the box; the ability to ultimately earn gross revenues (which can only be earned with individual recognition); the creative freedom to move from project to project (instead of being treated as a cog in a game development machine - a process which, by the way, ensures nothing but formula will be made).

In response to vocally fighting for these rights, the folks who gather around the IGDA forums - well, some of them at least - have descended to hurtling their rotten shit at me. And some admins have deleted all my posts (thank God I saved a few to repost here).

It is their shit, but they can't stand smelling it, so they accuse others of being responsible for it. In this case, this shit is the awful implications of having to stand apart as an individual creator and make a name for oneself. A lot of people who believe that work alone can take you to the top - that talent should be removed from the equation - must look at this and be utterly terrified. The idea that the industry might change such that some unknown game designer might appear out of nowhere with a design doc a thousand times better than anything they had done would probably keep them awake at night.

They stand behind excuses like the game industry is too collaborative, it can't work that way, you can't tell from a design document if it will make a good game (a load of shit if I ever heard one), etcetera, etcetera. Well, the film industry has always been that collaborative, and yet film did develop an auteur concept - a development that lead movies out of the swamp of Saturday afternoon pulp culture to the heights of actual, mainstream art. Another excuse: experience is everything. I remember one man telling the anecdote of how he had been working 20 years in a company, but then some new guy with only 5 years of experience was promoted over him. The listener asked the complainer to be honest: you don't have 20 years of experience; what you really have is 2 years multiplied 10 times over.

To Ogre and the rest at the IGDA. You can crush a few postings, but you can't destroy an idea. You can't crush a spirit.

And now, to reinforce your position, as it emerges that design is an art in and of itself, because you have chosen your stance - that it is just like any other labor - you will have to repeatedly crush this idea over and over and over again.

Then one day you will wake up and realize that you were on the wrong side of history. One day that game designer will appear and sell that design document and suddenly the entire industry will come apart. That rotten house you've built will crumble.

How do I know this will happen? It already has. Read up on the history of the studio system in the movie business. The companies originally had the power, but slowly it became apparent the individual creators were far more valuable than the entities that employed them. They simply voted with their feet.

I do not envy you.

The Value of a Game Designer...

People, I can see, keep thinking that the issue is to develop independence for a company. That is where I disagree. I think independence is fine, but I want it all the way. I want independence for an actual game designer, not just a company. Independence for the leads.

Honestly, the way I talk is more publisher-friendly than people think. To me, the game company is just a vehicle to make a game.

So far as owning IP, in the current model a development company owns the IP. But what about the value of a name? What exactly is a company? You build this company and you own the IP through the company. What if you want to leave the company? What if you get into an argument with your partner because you want to make Game X and he wants to make Game Y, so your company breaks up? What if the company boxes itself into making only zombie horror games (for example)? Say you leave it, but you own 20% of it, but 5 years later somebody takes control of it and sells its IP to a publisher for a dollar? Then where are you?

See, being part-owner of a company can become a prison if you want to follow your creativity to its farthest ends. You get typecast. You get stuck doing all this company management gobbledygook that is secondary to what you really need to be doing - which is your creative work.

The only entity I know that can really, soundly and stably, own something is a person. That means a name. See, all I want to do is give my own name value. How? Submitting design documents to a game publisher, have us build a temporary company for the duration of production (with other key leads who are just as important as the designer - using the core team/outsourcing model), making the game, letting the publisher get it out there, and then letting myself build a name. And getting that damn name on the box!

And, honestly, the ultimate objective here isn't to own the IP - it's to build a name so valuable that it can command a share of the gross revenues. Or, if the core designer is a newbie, he can command just a basic going-rate up front fee, but, if the game becomes a hit, a piece of the budget for each sequel, a piece of the budget of any movie version, a fee if it gets turned into a novel, and so on. So if Game Designer Bob, Lead Programmer Frank, Art Director Jay, Lead Audio Designer Sam together make a game - a game that is built using their outsourcing companies - at the end of the day Bob, Frank, Jay and Sam get a split of the gross revenue and a piece of the budget for any sequels, and other ancillary spin-offs. And they get their names on the box!

I mean, if you, as a person, are getting a piece of gross revenue, that is stable income (as long as the game sells; as long as its sequels sell; as long as it lives as a franchise).

I know one guy who designed a game for Avalon Hill years back. As you know, Avalon Hill's library was sold to Hasbro at fire sale prices. Hasbro recently released a remake of his game - same game, better components (plastic pieces and so on) - under the "Avalon Hill" name (that's all AH is now: a brand; a *name*). I asked him if he got a piece for that. He glumly said he didn't. But it was his game! He designed it! It was good enough that it was remade - but he got nothing for that. That's wrong.

I'm not saying any noob developer is going to get a piece of gross revenue. But I *will* say that as long as developers are effectively rendered anonymous they will *never* get that. They will be slaves.

So maybe you don't think a name is worth anything. I do. I just want the industry to give the individuals a chance to build their names.



(This post from a flame war I've been in at IGDA...)

The Catalog of Excuses

- or -

Why You Cannot Be An Independent Game Designer

Here are the "reasons" the game industry tells you why a game design document cannot be written by an independent, free agent designer and then sold as such...

You Become A Utility, And Your Value Becomes Diminished Significantly
This excuse is exactly what the principle of Silicon Knights, Dennis Dyack, said recently. According to Dyack, if you become a free agent game designer, you become reduced to "a commodity".

This one makes me laugh. It reminds me of the old-school industrial executives who implemented the Workers Compensations Acts we see in various countries, ostensibly to "protect employees" after suffering workplace injuries: these acts were made mainly to prevent workers from suing their employers.

Pray tell, Mr Dyack, are your internal designers not already commodities? Or do they work purely for charity?

The fact is, at some level, we are all commodities. We are all objectified at some point or time. When you get into many professions - indeed many facets of life - the question of when one is objectified and when not is complex. But you can't just paint it black and flush it down the toilet. Any great artist, for example, makes a work that is transparent in its execution and speaks from their non-objectified humanity - and yet executes it as an object-like creator: like a machine (i.e. using skill, knowing tools, code or grammar or math, calculating effects, manipulating light, color or mood, and so on). Martin Buber wrote an entire book on this, I and Thou.

Personally, if I'm going to be a commodity (i.e. a worker getting paid to produce x-number of pages having y-quality in the form of a design document), I would rather prefer to be in control of my own destiny thank you. I appreciate your concern for me Mr Dyack, but you can let me off my leash now. (I think the statement says more about your fear I may discover my own freedom - and, God forbid, not be your peon any more - than your concern I may [gasp] be objectified.)

Ideas Are A Dime A Dozen
There is legitimacy behind this excuse, but more than likely it is a cover for fear or laziness.

Legitimately, many gamedev professionals are confronted by bug-eyed, enthusiastic noobs who like to play a lot of games but have no idea what it takes to make a realistic piece of software. That is when this reason is not an excuse.

However, this said if you are in any entertainment business - like the game one - you know your lifeblood is hit-based. A "hit" is not the middle of the bell-curve - it is an outlier: that little one in a million thingy at the far end of the graph. (See I know what an outlier is because I'm a game designer and know a lot about probability.)

Now, since you need hits to survive, your job is to find them - meaning your job is to find outliers. Therefore, your job is to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, and actually sift through those thousands of dime-a-dozen ideas actually looking for the one that is a diamond. This may seem like too much work, and it may hurt your little brain and make you sweat, but really it is done in other industries all the time. Time to get your hands dirty.

A corollary to this excuse is as follows: If a person with a professional and realistic demeanour - a person who speaks clearly, writes well and so forth - tells you they have a great idea for a game, and it is written up in a well-crafted and -organized design document - you are incompetent if you have not made a process to vet that idea/design.

A Design Document Does Not Tell Us You Can Execute
Actually, a design document can anticipate many gameplay and development issues that may arise. So you can't really stand behind this excuse. If it is written well, by and large you may assume its author can indeed execute.

And if the concern is that by looking at a designer who is not attached at the hip to a team, that too is not an issue. Hiring teams, finding middleware is not an issue. Just buy out the designer, take away control (though reward him handsomely, offer him a job, and reward him for any sequels you will make), and you will not need to worry about execution. You can build the company that needs to execute the game. What's important is whether the design works or not.

We Don't Believe In The Genius Game Designer
This one is widespread, but it was recently stated by Alex Seropian. It's hard to criticize Mr Seropian - after all, Wideload Games has done us all great help by introducing into game development the core-team/outsourcing model familiar to film production (which, thankfully, gets us away from the bloated 100-person internal game development studio model... and all its problems [cough - sequels - cough cough]).

However, I just have to ask Mr Seropian where he gets his information from? How does he know that genius does not exist? Has he done an exhaustive survey? Has God reported this to him - presumably in a white light vision: "Alex, rest assured - there are no game design geniuses, so you aren't missing anything..." I would point out that much of the Western world is founded on the premise that genius exists, and the acts of those geniuses spanning back centuries. I'm not claiming I am a genius, but for God's sake... don't you think it's worth it to figure out if that assumption is true before making such a shotgun claim? How, indeed, do you know what you're missing?

This is particularly ironic when we learn that Sid Meier wrote Civilization essentially as a lone genius game designer - which has come out recently: "Meier remained remarkably private about Civilization during the early development process. 'He rarely let anyone else play the games until he thought they were pretty solid,' says [Bruce] Shelley. For months, [assistant designer] Shelley was the only person allowed to see prototypes of Civilization in action. Other MicroProse employees commonly visited Shelley's office to bug him about the duo's current project, pestering him not to be stingy with the latest Sid Meier masterpiece; they were anxious to try it out themselves."

Someone should have informed Sid that he was not allowed to be a game design genius. (Thank God they didn't.)

I suspect that what this excuse really amounts to is the following insecurity one may imagine in the form of soliloquy: "I have laid awake at night and realized that when I took the full stock of myself as a game designer, I saw competence, experience, some talent for making things fairly fun - but I did not really see a truly truly deep vision for what a game could be. So when I hear of others who claim to have such a vision - who claim to possess it and badger me about looking at it - it frightens me. I don't like to be frightened, so instead of facing that fear I will refute their claim and live happily in the bliss of my ignorance. Besides, they're only games after all..."

Man, Don't Talk About It - Just Do It
Well... First, we aren't all programmers (though it's invaluable to know at least the basics of programming). And even if we were, having a programming mentality might actually impinge our ability to come up with something original (like, say, a game that explores a complex facet of human life [something a generalist designer would focus on], rather than a challenging series of puzzles or something technology-driven [what a programmer would be drawn to]...).

Second, this is just a circular argument. A person stands up and says "we can do things better". Your response is "man, just do it the way it's always been done". It's pointless. It would be better for you to simply not say anything, because there are enough dismissive spirits out there that have moss growing on them. Get outta my way, man! I have a vision for a design but no interest in:

• Programming it all on my own (again, I'm not a programmer);
• Trying to convince a group of indie developers - typically a cluster of post-adolescents - to work for free for a year or more to build the proverbial "vertical slice" of a game to pitch to publishers. If the design vision survives such a hazing I would be surprised. Not to say a design shouldn't change as it undergoes prototyping, but the indie-team vertical slicing process - with too many chiefs not enough braves - can take an idea for a new bicycle and transmute it into a "canoe with wheels" pretty damn quick.

In the end, you say a game design cannot stem from an individually-developed concept and I say it can. So we disagree. But I have the stronger position. Why? People who say something cannot be done without really investigating it are usually proved wrong. History has shown that.

If you drop off a design document, you've only done 5% of the design work involved in making that idea a good game, and it's the easy 5%
This excuse comes from one of the comments to this very blog entry. What's ironic about it is that the commenter is oblivious to the limitation of their own understanding of brilliance or genius.

Genius is not a brute force quality. You cannot measure it by how much suffering it undergoes to get something done. No. You measure it for what it does. In fact, if it does it effortlessly, then it is all the more brilliant.

Let me put it another way. If you are hunting and going to shoot a dinosaur with a rifle, maybe 1% of the energy involved will be that expended by your body to hold and aim the rifle at the target. The other 99% will be from the shell as it explodes and sends the bullet forward with enough kinetic energy to make the kill. This said, a cynic with limited imagination would conclude that the energy spent to actually aim the rifle is really insignificant since, if you measure it, it's minuscule compared to the energy needed to kill the dinosaur. Well... it may be a small proportion to a bean counter, but it is in how that small proportion is spent that makes the difference between a year's supply of dino steaks and just firing off into space.

Translation: A cynic knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

If you cannot understand why the initial spark of a concept and the first blueprints that will set the direction of a venture true are so incredibly crucial... well... I think nothing I can say will help you see.

The Average Publisher Gets Far Too Many Submissions
A variant on the Ideas Are A Dime A Dozen excuse, above. All you are telling me here is that it would be too hard. That if you actually "let the floodgates open" - if you actually accepted submissions of independent design documents from lone designers (or small teams) - there would be too many to go through.

Because you can't let the proverbial floodgates open, you use the arbitrary excluder of forcing design submissions to be advanced to the form of a vertical slice (which I have written on elsewhere). Again, an arbitrary hurdle thrown up not to find better designs, but merely to "cull the herd" of incoming ideas that come your way.

Well... You make money. In the film industry they have an entire system in place to get a screenplay from a lone writer's desk all the way to a finished piece of celluloid. There are agents, there are the readers of studios, often screenplays are adapted from novels, plays, magazine articles and so forth. All of these things are vetting mechanisms that don't require the screenwriter go out and shoot the first 30 minutes of his science-fiction action movie. I'm sure you can come up with something equal to that.

How Would You Feel If You Made A Game Company And Then Some Outsider Asked You To Look At A Design?
During a long, brawl of an IGDA thread someone asked me this (to paraphrase): How would you feel if you made a game company but then some guy from outside approached and asked if you would take a look at his game idea?

My answer is simple: If that guy has a better design than anyone inside my company I would feel grateful and lucky.

(What is normally said is any game company already has a roster of ideas it wants to make, so won't consider an outsider's. It's a non-reason, but a popular non-reason.)

However, I don't propose game designers pitch designs to game companies anyway. Instead, I propose that design agents appear, these agents package independent designs, sell them to funders, and that a company be built around said greenlit game design; a company that will later be sold lock-stock-and-barrel to a marketing entity (probably a publisher) - less (hefty) fees for the designer and (outsourced) developers, and fees to exercise ancillary rights and so on (should the design be turned into a sequel, movie, T-shirts, etc).

Design Is A Team Process
So what? Film is also a team process; a helluva lot more so than games. (Ever been on a cold location on the 14th hour of production? With a dangerous stunt about to be executed? That makes game development "collaboration" look like kindergarten my friend.) And yet screenwriters are able to independently sell screenplays. Screenplays which are shaped by other creators - the director, actors, art director, cinematographer, etc - to ultimately make the final film. And yet filmmakers are not tied together in the arbitrary collectivist team - stuck together for years making the same games over and over; and the leads get their names on the box.

Certainly there is nothing to say that a design document, once drawn up and sold, could not then be altered as the other important parties - art director, producer, lead programmer and so on - become involved.

Get over yourself. You're just scared.

You Need To Work Up From Within A Company
As in, if you want to be a game designer you need to get work with an existing game company, work there for a few years to get yourself established, and then propose a game.

This excuse diverts attention away from the matter at hand - the actual game design you wish to propose - and focuses it on you, the designer. It assumes, basically, that the purpose of a game design is to be a stepping stone for a person to become a game designer - rather than to be realized for its own sake.

This excuse has a careerist outlook and is ultimately cynical and rigid. Holders of this position cannot comprehend that a game design might need to be executed (and then turned into a game) - let alone that it could, say, actually change people's lives. To do so would require them to open their minds too much. No. Game design is just a means to power, money and fame. Sad.

If you or I are struck by a vision to make a really revolutionary game, trying to fit said vision inside this careerist box is going to be painful. Since this view's proponent automatically assumes designs in and of themselves are worth little (it's the designer that counts), you will have to let your design gather dust on a shelf for years while you build up credentials. And then, when you finally have time to revisit your design, everything may have changed. The timeliness of it may have passed (your design may have contained genuine commentary on current events, for example); your passion for it may have faded; the company you chose to work for now may be "looking for" a certain type of game that your design does not fit... Any number of things.

David Mamet said (to paraphrase) the ruination of many writers is that they think of themselves as writers. Then he draws a comparison to being a chairmaker. When you are a chairmaker, you don't sit around naval-gazing and thinking "Wow, I'm a chairmaker." No. You make chairs. If the chairs get better then you, by inference, are a better chairmaker. But the point is to focus on the chairs, not on yourself.

If you are a game designer you write designs. Designs to get made. What you need to focus on is those designs. This is precisely what book authors do, what filmmakers do, what architects do - they focus on the product. Yes, there are career elements (like you'll need to get work to support yourself while you write your design), but there is never a rule set by God in stone that young upstarts must serve x-number of years before they are allowed to reveal the work they have done. If there is, it needs to be torn down because it's destructive and it throws up barriers to the real prize - which is finding original design concepts, writing them, getting them made and in front of players.

You're Just Bitter
An ad hominem cop-out. Address my points, if you can - don't throw mud at me, personally.

And let's say I am bitter. So what? You know there was a time African Americans felt bitter (or internalized that bitterness to crippling depression) because the population at large simply assumed they were sub-human property. They wanted to be let out of the mental cage those with power had put them into, so as to gain their freedom. Would you dismiss their claims with a flippant "You're just bitter" remark? Look at the issues, not the mood of the speaker.

That is an extreme example - and I'm not saying that I'm a slave - but on the other hand, when you go to the trouble to write a damn good design, but nobody will (seriously) look at it - not because it's bad, but just because, arbitrarily it isn't done that way - you start to feel the air leave your lungs; you start to feel yourself suffocate. Like that character at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, who sees the world falling apart around him but, more so, the blindness of others to the threat. Archibald MacLeish said the duty of a poet is speak their poem before it rises as a cry in the throat. He acknowledges a great truth: that the passion and vision of a (potential) creator, if disowned or imprisoned, will turn inward and rip its owner apart. Why would the same not be true of game designers? Is it not a creative occupation? If it is, will its creators not begin to feel their voices rise into a bitter cry when their destinies are effectively controlled by cynical bean-counters who couldn't give a damn about getting something out there that needs to be gotten out, but only in cranking out formula?

This Argument Is The Toilet
Over on IGDA I got into an argument about this and felt the wrath of many being dumped on me. But I stuck it out. Someone asked why the thread hadn't been locked. The admin said it hadn't because every discussion place needs somewhere to dump its shit, then declared that this thread is a toilet.

Okay, it is a toilet. But it's through the absolute shit of life you sometimes need to go.

It's telling to call this debate a toilet. It acknowledges the darkness of feelings some have around this topic. I often wonder why, when I repeatedly call for the liberation of game designers - for a world where a game designer gets to have his name on the box (even if he isn't a Sid Meier); where he gets to sell a design and earn money for it and for its sequels and its spin-offs - that people dump shit on me. However, looking over history and psychology it's really not such a surprise. If you smash the master's house and set the slaves free, the slaves might often hate you more than love you. You offer them freedom, but freedom - as Erich Fromm tells us - is damn terrifying. So terrifying, people may set upon the liberator rather than face the frightening unknown freedom offers.

That's the toilet: that terrifying unknown.

I call for the freedom of game designers. The freedom for them to work and be known as individuals, their name always on the box. To be able to work out a design on their own, get an agent on their own to package and sell said design directly to a publisher (not as part of a game company), and to follow their creativity to its ends (instead of seeing themselves as merely a part of a larger herd known as a "team" or a "game company", always serving the top-down command of some high-up financial executive who knows little if anything about games). And I get shit on for doing so.

The toilet is there. But it's your toilet, not mine. If this world comes into being, you now must face the possibility that maybe you don't have the talent to be the game designer. That the bar may raise so high that games of today become laughably stupid to gamers ten years from now - much the way we chuckle at old films that, in their time, were viewed as high art.

It's your toilet. To stare into that shit - into that monster. To look into its teeth. If this world comes true, you know that simply serving time and building up seniority and "experience" will not disguise your mediocre talent from the world and let you design the game you dream to. Is your design talent mediocre? I have no idea. Is it scary to think it might be? Absolutely. But it's a fear that must be faced.

I think that people sense I believe very strongly in my own talent. Otherwise why would I so vehemently insist over and over again that we get the ability to open up the game and let individuals sell designs. Obviously I have designs I want to sell and I believe they are damn good. Recognizing the basic violence in the impulse of mimetic desire, I know this will draw hatred onto me. That others may perceive in me something they do not have, and will hate me for that. The dynamic of mimetic desire has been that forever. That's why I am adamant that I must remain anonymous. I don't want to become a scapegoat (which, in terms of my professional life, would amount to being blacklisted and effectively forbidden from working in game design - it may be a confining labyrinth, but I have to make a living).

Yes, I seek to free up the playing field for myself. But if one person frees it, it will become free for all of us.

All that has to happen is one person sell a design document independently. Once that happens, the whole structure will crumble and reform itself. You're a game designer (I assume). You must then know something of probability. What do you think the probability is that a designer will sell a design document as a free agent in the next, say, two to five years? Ten percent perhaps? And then in the years after that? You must know that if you keep rolling a ten-sided die over and over again, you will eventually roll a "1". It will happen. It's just a matter of time.

I think maybe you can see where I'm going. It's inevitable. Some day someone will do this. There are already sites like gameinvestors.com that are appearing for this very reason. Someone will sell a design alone, and then designers will become free agents and the crusted framework of game companies will come apart at the seams - the entire way games are made permanently altered. All it takes is one person to sell one design document and that will happen. Sooner or later that will happen. And deep down you know it. Then, no longer having the comfort of melding into a team of buddies and building up experience you will have to face the reality of your own talent as a designer.

Do you have what it takes?

That's the toilet. It's your fear. Face it.

Why The "Vertical Slice" Is Bad

I have heard that typical comment by publishers, "Hey make a demo if you want us to consider a new game idea."

Unfortunately, it serves the opposite effect. It hinders innovation. Not only that, it is needlessly harmful to young developers who need to be told that their game idea is not going to fly.

What would facilitate innovation is to begin talking at a much earlier stage - say with a written document - rather than waiting until an idea or design gets crystallized into something that just won't work or was never wanted to begin with.

You don't turn an architect away if they only have a blueprint, saying "How come you haven't actually built 20 per cent of your building for me to make a decision". No. You look at the actual blueprint, and any physical mock-ups, and then you say "yes" (to a next round of design) or (more likely) "no" - allowing the architect to go back to the blueprint, abandon the project, or (if yes) get onto the business of doing the remaining blueprints and hiring a construction company, interior designer, landscaper (etc) to get it made in a rational manner.

If you require people to make the infamous "vertical slice" of a game, what kind of an effect is that going to have on their design?

First, it is wasteful. It's one thing to get a "no" after a written document; but to, say, spend five years making (for example) a pirate game demo on your own then having a publisher say "Sorry, we already have a pirate game in the works" - thereby dismissing your product without even considering it - is just stupid. I mean, if you are going to apply for university, do you move to the university before sending in an application?

Second, it forces a demo team to use existing game technology. However, their concept may require new technology.

Third, if they are getting a team together to do a vertical slice the original concept now goes through a hazing process: it has to be sold to a crew of programmers, artists and so on, who want to work on it, who will want to change it, and certainly certainly are NOT going to spend a year or more making a demo for free on something really risky (translation: unless your concept already looks like an existing game out there [maybe with one extra doodad added to it], they probably won't get involved).

Fourth, making a demo is not a test of game design - it's a test of productions skills. Very often investors in games ask, "Can this company produce this game?" That should not be a question anywhere on the radar. Does a producer ask, "Can this screenwriter use a camera?" No. Does a corporate president or a mayor ask "Can this architect operate a crane?" No. The focus needs to be on design.

Fifth, by giving investors/publishers demos, they begin to think that game design somehow starts with the demo - that it magically appears out of nowhere. Translation: we make them stupid and lazy, because they don't have to hurt their brains trying to actually *imagine* something that is in a polymorphic state (such as a written design doc). We also make it seem that the innovation process is more akin to shopping than to what it really is. Innovation is not done with a shopping mentality - being presented with wares and then saying yes or no, picking and choosing among them. It necessarily requires imagination and visualization of its participants, and giving a demo skewers that. It makes the process and the publishers stupid. In the film industry, the producers (and stars and others who can greenlight a project) know that innovation doesn't start only after the cameras begin to roll - it starts at the very beginning: in the brain of the screenwriter. So they work directly with the screenwriter to get the script done right.

Sixth, no project should get ultimate funding to be made without a prototype first being made. That's what the demo is supposed to be - a prototype. However a far more effective way to do this is with what in other fields is a simple iterative R&D process. It simply makes more sense to expose concepts at an earlier stage, with a simpler prototype, like a tabletop or a design document. Eventually, you *will* make a vertical slice - but that should be done in tandem with a producer/publisher, not in some guessing-game process where the indie team has shot off on some direction and blindly hopes that what is made as an actual physical piece of code coincides with what a publisher wants.

In the end, the requirement for a working demo as a "price of entry" is just a cynical hazing ritual. It only occurs, sadly, because most game developers are quixotic and masochistic young men who almost fall over themselves to allow game publishers to utterly exploit them in a bug-eyed quest to become "paid to make games". (I have been paid to make games. Believe me, after you cross that line you usually start to notice that games are not really that much fun anymore - it is now a job.) Sadly, young men have a penchant for destroying themselves just to please their elders - they did it by the millions in World War One and they do it in their headlong quest to make publishers into passive wait-and-see types. The vertical slice does not make for a better game project - all it does is reinforce a culture of mindless action and sado-masochism over open communication (written or otherwise), a spirit of true innovation, and a sense of respect for others. Using a simpler means - like an early design doc or a very very early prototype (even tabletop) - to screen out projects that won't work, and accelerate ones that will, is a way to strengthen the innovation process, and reduce harm to the many whose game ideas will not fly.