You've All Done Very Well! : DAW

Rowan at I Have Touched The Sky was musing recently on a perceived trend towards "meanness" among those who write about games, whether professionally or out of a supposed love for the medium. He bounced off a very good piece by Bhelgast , who was in turn reacting to a fascinating and thought-provoking interview with an anonymous "game developer in his forties".

There are some great quotes in that interview:

"Why do so many of the people who consume the things you make seem to hate the things they consume?"

I wonder that every day as listen to people in map or global or general chat complaining they're bored, that the game they're playing sucks or that some other game does everything so much better. I'm aware of the psychological pressures that mean some people really do feel trapped and without agency in the games they can't stop playing, while others crave attention and will do and say whatever they have to just to get it, but still...

"Most game journalists are lefties and a big percentage of the audience is right-libertarian."

Now, I have no way of knowing if that's statistically accurate but it certainly feels true. I wonder if it also applies to game devs and players? You might like to think that a huge, mass-market entertainment genre like gaming would attract a representative spread of aficionados from across the culture but:

"...look what our games are about. Killing each other. This is not a coincidence. We have the audience we deserve..."

Killing each other in the case of PvP games; killing AI-controlled semblances of each other, in industrial slaughterhouse quantities, if it's PvE. Either way it's surely going to have a significant effect on who's likely to want to play. Eldariel at StarShadow praises ESO, as others have before, for the way its quests can "...make you think about your choices and look past the obvious". Games that encourage or mandate that kind of "moral choice" always garner positive attention for doing so but the decision nearly always comes down to the same thing: "who do I kill?".

"The loudest, least reasonable voice dominates, and it seems distressingly possible that the loudest, least reasonable voice basically is our audience, writ large".

The squeakiest wheel gets the most grease, too. When you combine the above fear with the anonymous dev's earlier contention that "Most of the people I know in the industry, the higher up people, do not engage with videogame commentary at all" you begin to get a picture of a bunker mentality, through whose psychic walls only the loudest, most insistent cries have any chance of penetrating. Is it any wonder the quiet majority often ends up feeling unheard and, quietly, moves on?

The parts of the interview that revolve around presentation and perception mostly confirm things I already thought I knew or had heard about from other sources. Some of the detail is new, though, and disturbing. I hadn't realized that game devs had to be 'handled' by PR people during public interactions, much like screen actors or members of a boy band. I certainly had no idea, for example, that a games journalist doing a phone interview with a games dev could expect to have "a PR person on the line during [the] entire conversation", who would then call back later and request elisions and alterations.

As for the involvement, or even the existence of "videogame consultancies", well that was a completely new concept to me.

"Consultancies are mostly staffed with former game journalists, and so these men and women are being asked to come in and offer their expertise on what they think isn't working"

They appear to be something like flying squads of critics-for-hire, brought in to critique games in progress on the fly, submit a report to upper management and then vanish. It's not as if video games aren't hard enough to make already, just from a technical standpoint, without having the extra pressure of critical hired guns peering over your shoulder. I'm sure everyone does their best work that way...

There was another recent interview, much more lighthearted but also quite fascinating in some of the things it revealed about the process, in which three Daybreak longtimers looked back on mistakes they and others had made while working on the Everquest franchise. One idea they came up with, involving a zone with a timer that would be affected by player actions that would cause the zone to change dynamically, has been nine years in development and still hasn't made it to the Live game because, as Alan VanCouvering says, “It’s a lot of effort and we still haven’t figured out how to script all that”.

Something we probably all know but rarely acknowledge is that getting these things to run at all is a major achievement. Take an apparently simple concept like storytelling, for example. Many of us in this part of the blogging community, which is almost certainly one of the more thoughtful and positively-oriented corners of the wider gaming media web, have frequently criticized MMOs for their inadequate and unconvincing attempts to tell stories. I know I have.

The anonymous dev once worked on a proposed multi-player co-op game, something not even close to the scale of complexity of interactions between players that would be taken for granted in an MMO. It never got out of the studio. They couldn't even solve the problem of quest-sharing:

"It was all very dissatisfying, and illustrated to me and a lot of other people on the team how difficult it is even to pull off the simplest little thing in a multiplayer game that tries to include story".

He goes on to conclude that

"Games are impossibly complicated. I wish more gamers understood that".

It's a sentiment with which I can do nothing more than agree completely. I also think he's on the money with this final, philosophical apercu:

"Everything games are going through right now... is about this false struggle for authenticity and legitimacy....nobody wants innovation and creativity. Look at the sales of games that are genuinely interesting and innovative. Very few people buy them. Certainly not enough to fund an industry...Someone's not telling the truth about what they really like or what they really want".

Amen to that. 

Rowan's reaction to Bhelgast's piece and the original interview that provoked it was to announce the return of Developer's Appreciation Week. Several bloggers have picked up that ball and run with it, including Healing The Masses, The Mystical Mesmer, Harbinger Zero, GamingSF, Casual Agro and MMOQuests.

I've never been entirely comfortable with treating game developers as though they were analogous to rock or movie stars. The entire enterprise is far too collaborative to support that kind of adulation and idolatry and anyway I'm of an age when it just feels weird.

That's no reason to hold back from showing genuine and heartfelt appreciation for the countless hours of hard work, dedication, determination, imagination and creativity that just has to happen, day after day, year after year, simply to bring to life these amazing, magical, imaginary worlds in which we all spend so much of our time.

So, to all the developers, designers, artists, producers, coders, creators, technicians, managers and communicators of every kind, thank you! Keep on doing that thing you do and don't take it to heart when we take it apart. In this little corner of the blogosphere, at least, we only do it because we care.

I'll leave you with this. I think it sums up how I feel rather appropriately:

 









.