Dopass.com

I'm a regular reader of Game Politics, a blog focusing specifically on the political and social issues surrounding the game industry. It's a great site and I've used it as the source inspiration for many of my blogs here on game related censorship issues. Today, Game Politics actually pointed me to this blog by Newsweek's N'Gai Croal. Here, Mr. Croal discusses the dangers of the common game myth/stereotype "games are just for kids." It's a great write up that succinctly points out the issue and its downside, but it includes an interesting quote that I wanted to use as a spring board. It's in reference to the removal of the Super Columbine Massacre RPG from the Slamdance Film Festival. Here's the quote:

Slamdance's cowardice, then, is of a piece with the controversies that greeted the "Hot Coffee" mod in Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as well as the company's more recent title, Bully. Simply put, the average person believes that videogames are solely intended for kids; that the content of all games is suitable for kids; and if it isn't, it darned well should be, even if it has an M-rating. This creates a double-edged sword for game creators and publishers. Because videogames have the revenues of Hollywood's box office but a cultural (in)visibility that's much more similar to that of comic books, creators can work freely, in relative obscurity compared to artists in other fields, while still earning a good deal of money. That is, until a game is perceived to have crossed a line or pushed a hot button, at which point, all hell breaks loose. This is a recipe for the continued infantilizing of a young medium whose potential, for all of the compelling works already released, still remains largely untapped.

I've emphasized the sentence in the quote that I found most interesting. It fascinates me that in one breath we can be discussing how games are hamstrung by the preconception that they are only for children and then seamless segue to the idea that game's obscurity allows us game creators to be free. I'm here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth...

I had the distinct pleasure, recently, to watch the premier episode of Dexter on Showtime. Wow. It's pretty edgy and pretty damned interesting. And totally not game appropriate at all. There's no way I Could make a Dexter game without finding myself staring down the barrel of a Jack Thompson lawsuit and an army of moral crusaders, at his back with their torches and pitchforks.

You know why I mention that? Dexter was a comic book. In this regard, N'Gai is right - comic authors do (now a days) enjoy a lot more freedom to create than say, a network TV writer does. The thing he forgets is that Comics had to fight long and hard to get there, and even when they did, what happened?

Those titles that had "outside of the medium" appeal, such as Dexter, bring some modicum of success to their creators, the rest either work for the big publishers on vanilla by the numbers books (spandex, tights, capes, heroes that won't stay dead, etc.), or they toil away in obscurity, praying they can make enough hand-selling their graphic novel at comic con to actually pay rent this month.

As a game creator, I don't even have that. The indie scene is a very good thing for our industry, but is it a viable outlet for those of us that can't afford to forego regular salaries? Not without a lot of people working with you to support you and your vision. I suppose that's ok, after all games are a team effort now a days, but that means that the reality of our industry means you don't have the freedom to create whatever you want. Even working "off the grid," you're going to need a lot of help. The more people involved in a project, the more dilute the vision (This is true of all creative works, don't think I'm bitching about games specifically here)... The less pure your creation is.

On the other hand, let's look at movies, music, books and art, shall we? An inspired visionary with a handicam can make a movie alone; a musician - even an orchestral composer - can accommodate the lack of fellow musicians working with her by using software tools, authors almost always work alone and artists? Would the phrase "I burn for my art" mean anything if art was usually a team effort?

Almost all of the incredible works of art (no matter the medium) from past centuries have been the work of individuals. There are some exceptions, buildings and statues and the like, but really individuals were responsible for damned near every Great Work of art the world knows... Now, can you name me 10 Great Games from the last decade that were made by individuals? 10 games that everyone knows and plays?

I can't think of one. I know of a lot of great indie games, but I go looking for them. Even the truly brilliant ones wither and die in obscurity with nary a yawn from the world, more often than not.

So, I guess I disagree with Mr. Croal. I don't feel like I have any sort of freedom as a game creator at all.

Or rather, I should say - within the boundaries defined by my paymasters, I have a LOT of freedom... but those boundaries tend to be narrowly and rigidly defined.

I've been pushing for studios to take up the challenge of doing a persistent online game on consoles, handhelds and PCs (at the same time), for 6 or 7 years, now. Every studio has said no for various reasons ranging from "We don't like online games" to "No one plays them." Every night, I come home and play online games on the Xbox, MMOs on the PC, and Wi-Fi enabled games on my DS. There's No good reason not to do a persistent online game that would work for them all... but it's totally verboten, at least in the half a dozen studios I've worked at (disclaimer: my current place of work might be an exception, I've never brought it up to be honest).

We're trapped in our boxes, unable to escape. You see, from the outside looking in, we might seem like this obscure little sect of the world that no one knows or cares about, but the reality is that our industry makes more money than god and that money is controlled by very conservative, very normal, business people who feel that putting money into games at all is a massive risk, let alone going a step further to innovate or try something new.

I've never worked in an industry as moribund as this one (and I worked at a college!). N'Gai is right - the fact that everyone (including those money people I mentioned earlier) thinks games are for kids does hold us back, but it's not the only thing.

We're victims to our own success. Everything we do has to be at least as successful as what was good last year - which to many means "we must include the features, themes and gameplay of last year's hit" - or the industry slips back and money gets lost. Since we work in obscurity, as Mr. Croal points out, there's no outside pressure for us to innovate, no one out there championing our artistic merit. Seems like a little thing, but the reality is that this means there's no one out there to free us from our own stodgy chains, from the conservative yoke placed on us by the pressures to succeed and bring continued success to the industry.

See the irony there? The very obscurity that N'Gai thinks frees us to make what we want actually holds us back... and it does so more effectively than anything else ever will. After all, the box we're trapped in is lined with the money we made while building it, who can risk stepping out of that box when it might mean giving up all that cash?

We all gotta eat. We all gotta pay the bills.

So, more often than not, that means we all gotta suck it up and make "shooty-shoot the third person action game" 17, again.

It's what gamers buy. Of course, it's also the only stuff out there, so how could they buy anything else?

The chains that bind us inside this box aren't metal, they're an incredibly effective feedback loop: Game A sells, Games B-Z do not. Next year, games B-F emulate game A and games A-D do well while the rest do not. The year after that, games E-M emulate games A-D and so on, until eventually declinations of that original Game A are all you have.

People mistakenly think that what makes the Wii great is how anyone can pick it up and play -- how it makes games accessible to everyone -- but you know what? I think that's crap. I think the Wii's greatness comes from the fact that most of the crappy "me too games" haven't made it to the Wii yet. The UI is so different that it forced developers to find new gameplay to suit it and a whole slew of people who didn't want to play the same old third person action game came flocking to the platform as a result... How much do you want to bet that next year, we see a million clones of the games that released this year?

I mean, why wouldn't we just fall back into the same pattern? There's money at stake!

I'd love to tell you that there's a team out there working on a great space MMO, or a modern role-playing game that wasn't a thug simulator, but I can't - because space MMOs don't sell and thug simulators are the only modern role playing games that haven't failed yet.

I'd love to tell you that I'm working on my own master opus, code named "Derelict," but every time I've even so much as suggested it, I've been laughed out of the pitch session because it's unlike every other crappy action game out there and thus will never be made, unless I sacrifice the very thing that makes it my master opus.

The part of that actually hurts - the part where I actually burn for my art - is that I pick the edgy and independent studios that seem to take risks, when I look for a job. I do this, hoping that it means I'll get the chance to do something actually new and innovative, but I'm let down more often than not. Auto Assault was probably the most disappointing of those, to be honest. At the start of the project it seemed like it would finally be the new, edgy and risk taking game that I was looking for, but at the end of the day, it was Diablo meets Wow meets Mad Max... only without actually getting out of your car. Instead of being new and exciting, it slowly became a series of compromises designed to make it more like the games of the past.

There is some hope though, especially in the online space. This is a new space, not so "well Defined" (that's what they call "locked into the paradigm" in the industry) as the console (read: action) game space and so it affords companies such as the one I'm at now the chance to do something different.

With AA, the folks that controlled the paradigm got scared and went conservative, anyway. My hope is we don't do that here, and so far I haven't been disappointed. That's a first in the 12+ years that I've done this job. Here's to hoping it holds out...

..I'm sort of sick of working on shooty-shoot.

- Snipehunter