Pre-fab Game Design
I remember clearly when I first discovered computer games. The romance, awe, and mystique of the experience has never left me. There is something about their conjuring of fantastic worlds, combined with the hum of the underlying technology, that creates a potent, unique magic.
Or it did. It has been a long time since I played a game that spoke to me, lifted me, or moved me. In the early years of the industry, every second game I played did that. Why is this?
There is something missing from most modern games. I have written a lot about this, and spent a long time trying to understand it. The last time I visited a computer games store (as opposed to a general tech store of which there are many here in the US), I was struck by the fact that the shelves were filled with hundreds of titles, but only four or five different games. Everyone is copying everyone else, and very few game-makers seem to be coming up with anything new, novel, or - and this is the clincher - inspired. The industry is eating itself.
There are many reasons for this, but the biggest one is that games are now made for money first and last. Developers are told what sort of game to make, who to make it for, and how long they have to make it. Market forces dominate every area of game development, from inception to box art. If the marketing department doesn’t nod their head to a title, it doesn’t get made. They have final say over every aspect of modern games.
That means the good idea is often avoided, because it is a bad idea from a business point of view. New ideas are inherently risky, being unproven. Far better to back what has already shown itself as successful in the market place. You can’t really blame businesses for wanting to make money, but putting money first in a creative industry is eventually bad business. Money is a lousy bottom line. Witness the current downfall of the music industry.
I’ve listened to and considered the arguments and statements of “fact” from the games industry bean counters (some of whom were my bosses) for years:
Games companies are businesses, they are there to make money. The stories of impassioned developers who failed because of bad business sense are proverbial… yadda yadda yadda.
And you know what? I’m sick of it. The gamer in me, hell, the human in me, is getting really pissed off. I’ve swallowed enough of the money-loving bile dished out by some producers, suits, and business heads to make myself nauseous. If their ham-fisted approach produced better games, I’d keep listening. But I’ve seen the results of their methodology on the games store walls and in my own development career. I’m calling shenanigans.
Games are art. I don’t mean that they are necessarily high art like Michaelangelo or Bach, but their production is primarily a creative undertaking. People pick them up and play them for fun. Sometimes the fun they offer is simple, pure, and arcade. Sometimes they are narrative journeys. In rare instances they bring deeper experiences akin to great books and movies. But they are not about money for those who enjoy them, so making games all about money for those who create them puts the process at odds with the content. The result is highly polished mediocrity.
Now I’m not against marketing. Clever marketing by people who understand what they are selling is almost essential for the success of a title. But marketing has no idea about what makes good art. Money concern is inherently blind to originality. It can only sell what is already there, it can’t bring anything new out, or even recognize originality when it sees it. It can’t create. Marketing is a facilitator; it should never be running the show.
The effect of all this on game design is bad. The majority of games are now modular and pre-fabricated i.e. they are collections of separate but related pre-existing ideas. Games are no longer designed from the bottom up, but from the top down. They do not begin with ideas. Pre-existing ideas are built together, given a new coat of paint, and sanded down to fill demographic, marketing, product placement opportunities. And that is what they feel like to play.
Rarely does a game appear outside of Asia that is an exception to this (Asia, the Japanese industry in particular, seems to be working extremely hard to push the creative envelope in games design). Designers are becoming less sources of new ideas, and more tradesmen of known game mechanics and how to apply them. They are now more like technicians than real designers.
It’s easy to complain about something, but far harder to offer an alternative. I’m a designer. What have I done to go against the monolithic mediocrity plaguing the industry? Not much, but I’m fighting against the machine every day, and others are too. As I’ve said before, I’m convinced the most exciting changes will come from independents outside of the main industry.
posted by monty · at 3:08 pm · filed under Raves
