GDC: Game Developers Rant II

Obviously, last year was hard to top. But this year was good: there was crazy tension on stage, real emotion, some belly laughs, a good mix of folk: Chris Crawford, Seamus Blackley, Jane Pinkard, Frank Lantz and Jonathan Blow, joined by Robin Hunicke, Chris Hecker, Jason Della Rocca and the inimitable Eric Zimmerman rabble-rousing the panel and crowd.

The passion in the room was tangible...

Eric:
Welcome! We’re gonna begin with a few words from Jason Della Rocca.

JDR:
So this is a fun session. It’s really important to the IGDA. We deal with all sorts of issues to advance folk’ career, etc. Now, last year there was some disapproval with the rant approach, it seemed overly negative. Maybe we should not rant so much but maybe rave… [ ../..]

Eric:
If you hear things you agree/disagree with, join IGDA. It’s the vehicle we have for voicing our concerns, desires, fears, hatreds and what we love about games. Why are we here? Because we love games. We like to play games, we like to talk, make write about, publish games.

On the other hand we don’t work in a perfect world. There are things wrong with the industry, with games, with who’s making ‘em, how they’re being made. There are some very very fucked up things about the game industry.

Every year at the GDC there are always rumblings in the corridors, dissatisfactions here, resentments there. I wanted a session where the angry subtexts are brought out on the surface so we can work thru them. You’re gonna hear some rants tonight but it’s in the productive service of trying to make things better. We have an incredible panel for you, of firecrackers, hotheads, curmudgeons, some young turks.

Without further ado, let’s rant!

Frank Lantz:
Before I begin I am going to sublease one minute for my 5mins to a minirant from Robin Hunicke.

Robin Hunicke:
Ok so it’s very hard to make games. It’s easy to get depressed about this. I came here to see what was coming next. The name of this conference is “what’s next”. This year they’re gonna tell me, I’m going back to my desk, I’m going to know what to do, and it’s going to be easy! Right? Iwata-san. Totally inspiring. Can’t wait to see the Revolution happen. Went to see Will Wright. Love him! Love his process! So intimidated. But his stuff was so hard to think about. I lost some brain cells thinking about it, so I want to say thank you to ATI and the art institute for showing me what’s next in games: hawt chix! ?

You don’t get just one. You get sexy babes who can’t stop touching themselves. Coy babes! Lessssbian babes! Latexxxx babes. Studded babes. I wanna give you guys a huge shoutout because when I recruit the next generation of developers who are going to expand our market and reach out to women gamers, you showed me all I need is hawt chix. I can’t believe I never saw this already, it’s been right in front of me the whole time!!

Frank:
Alright so I’m going to rant about the “immersive fallacy”. A bear is going to attack and almost kill someone in my rant, so you’ve been warned. I think there is a widespread and largely unexamined belief in this community that computer games are evolving towards an infinitely detailed and utterly seamless simulation. That this is their destiny. To evolve to a star trek holodeck, a seamless simulation indistinguishable from real experience.

So what’s wrong with this? Why does the phrase ‘the player will be able to go anywhere and do anything’ sound like nails on a chalkboard to me? It’s based on a very naïve and unsophisticated understanding of how simulation, how representation works. You have a thing, a part of the world, and you have a simulation of that. There’s a gap in between, the gap is made up by all the differences, the way that this is not this.. the immersive fallacy is this idea that computer simulation allows us to close this gap and makes these things identical. But this gap is an essential part of how this representation works, this gap is where the magic happens.

Let’s say a bear is attacking a friend of yours and is about to kill him. The word ‘bear’ will warn your friend. The word ‘bear’ would not be better if it had teeth and could kill you! The same thing is true of the bear mask that the tribal priest puts on, or the bears on the wall of the cave, and of the game ‘Bear’. Statues wouldn’t be better if they could move. Model airplanes would not be better if they were the same size as airplanes! By the same token, if you think about it, the incredible sense of freedom created by GTA is created by carefully limiting the actions of the player.

This is not to say that games that have detailed simulations in them can’t be great, but if you’re labouring under the illusion of the immersive fallacy, you’ll be layering simulation on top of simulation with the idea that a compelling experience will just emerge naturally out of this. Compelling experiences are carved out, made of gaps. We have bathrooms in our environments because it’s more realistic. One day someone will think eating and shitting should go into a game because there’s a bathroom to use. This is not a good idea.

Even if you could by some magic create this impossible perfect simulation world, where would you be? You’d need to stick a game in there. You’d need to make chess out of the simulation rocks in your world. It’s like going back to square one. I don’t wanna play chess again. I wanna play a game that has the dense simulation and chess combined. This requires a light touch. This requires respect for the gap. The gap is part of your toolset.

Eric:
Well, I didn't realize we’d get an education in theoretical game design here! Here’s Seamus, who works at CAA, although no one actually knows what he actually does.

Seamus Blackley:
This is Seamus, and he has no fucking job, you understand. I used to think I was pretty smart and could talk about abstract concepts. This is not going to be like that. One of my favourite comedians, Janene Garofolo, once said, “have you ever had sex and you just look up at the guy and you say, stop fucking me!” Well the title of my talk is “stop fucking us”.

You go to the Fairmont. You hang out, have a coupla 9 dollar beers. Pretend that you like the guys who screwed you 6 years ago at some other company. And you hear a whole bunch of people bitching and moaning about how their awesome games aren’t getting published by those jackass publishers who wouldn’t know a good game if it smacked them in the head. I used to really be into this.

Now all I can say is let’s just stop fucking ourselves and realise what’s happening here. We don’t HAVE a good business around most of the ideas we wanna make. We can’t go to guys like EA who, incidentally, are really smart - and present them a business case for some of these ideas. I made a decision about 2 years ago to wear a suit and tie every day. I guarantee you that you can feel the IQ flowing from your body down the tie. It’s all down to sacrifice. But I went there because I thought we might be able to hack into Hollywood a bit, help the game biz. In fact, Ted Price can give a talk at DiCE about finance, and I’m talking about off balancesheet financing. That was a great moment in my career but I’m not bitter about it.

But I’m trying to figure out how to make a biz out of this stuff. Look at Brokeback Mountain. It’s killing everything. Hollywood will just piss out money on these wonderful ideas… what they have figured out is how to build a business around the great ideas that make movies like westerns with gay cowboys. We can’t do this – why not? We don’t have an Oscars. We don’t have an academy. We haven’t created a business reason to make a fucked up indie film that makes everyone really uncomfortable yet. We need to figure out a way for there to be a business justification for everything we hear about in the Fairmont lobby, if we did that we’d triple the biz overnight.

Think about the sum: consider how you approach things. How your ideas relate to selling shit to people who will pay back the guys financing your game. How we’re going to make award shows and how we’ll support those shows and get People magazine to come along. You guys are the future, and it’s a beautiful future if you open your mind and actually think about business a bit more. Maybe even fucking read something about business a bit more, hey? Those poor fuckers giving you millions of bucks for an idea they’re not really sure about, their jobs are on the line. Think about that.

Jonathan Blow:
I'm not as angry as Seamus and I don’t have that many expletives, so I’ll pause and you guys can dub in some applause and stuff. This is not the real title in my talk: There’s Not Enough Innovation In Games! This is: “There’s Not Enough Innovation In Games!”

No really.. I’m going to talk about how people TALK about how there’s not enough innovation in games. By innovation I don’t mean story innovation. I mean game play innovation. So here’s a thought for you. What if innovation is like a fossil fuel in the sense that it’s a finite expendable resource? How many times can you think up wacky stuff that no one else has thought about? It can’t be infinite right?

Are we going to run out of innovation? So .. why do we.. feel like games need game play innovation in order to be good? Innovation acts like a shiny thing that distracts us from the fact that most games at the core .. just.. aren’t very good. If you’re old and you’ve played lots of games, every game is the same thing and just not very interesting. How important is it that you kill the Nazis and get the blue card key? It’s not.

As with exploiting the oil sands, there’ll be technical achievement that’ll open up things we can exploit. Holo displays, NPCs that can pathfind and not get stuck in your way. But before we run out of stuff, we need to create a sustainable model of gameplay. Stories don’t need wacky innovation. Nor do paintings, nor songs. We need to speak to the human condition. We need to make games that people care about so much that people can’t not play them.

One other thing about innovation is that it’s really hard and risky and sometimes your innovation sucks. But we can make important games even by copying existing games. Here’s one. Ultima IV. I played tons of it. It had all the trappings of usual RPGs. But you couldn’t win the game just by raising those stats. It had other stats that .. this affected me so much that I can quote them. Honor. Sacrifice. Spirituality. Humility. .. those stats.
At the end of the game you meet the boss who asks you questions about these coded morals. I played this on a Commodore 64.

[…] Despite ultima iv being immensely popular, no one has done this since. Peter Molyneux tried with Fable and Black & White for moral games. The problem with Black & White is that you only have one parameter. A sliding scale between good and evil. That’s not an improvement. I’m not saying all games should be able morality I’m just saying it’s a good example of making games more meaningful to people. Maybe we need to become fossil fuel for the next generation to come along and show us how it’s done.

[discussion example of IGF entry "everyday shooter"’s sources]

This guy was so sincere. He put together feelings from other games. If you’re straightforwardly copying someone else’s mechanics, you can at least do this. If we’re going to try to be relevant and speak to the human condition and the world at large, we could do worse than to start right there.

Eric:
Chris Crawford is a curmudgeon. Fasten your seatbelts.

Chris Crawford:
I’m a bit nervous here. I don’t have a rant to give you here. A rant presumes that there’s something to rant about, that’s there’s something wrong that needs to be righted. I have to tell ya, there’s nothing better that can be done because the games industry is d.e.a.d.

Now when I say dead, I don’t mean totally dead, I mean brain dead. The product is going out the door, money is coming in. But what’s up here? Nothing. There’s no creativity. There’s no creative life in this industry at all. It’s just a dead creature. We put food in, shit comes out.

So it’s kinda like… EA really isn’t very diff from Proctor and Gamble. Put something in a box, sell the box. Write new and improved on it. Sell the box. That’s all they ever do. This panel is like a group of doctors standing around the bed of a brain-dead patient all talking about what we can do to restore her to life and vivacity, and I’m here to say there’s just green goo inside the skull.

So I can only offer two thoughts. The most charitable thing is.. rest in peace. The second I’ll just mention that I’m going down the corridor to the maternity room where there’s an infant that has a better future than the games business and it’s called interactive storytelling.

[audience: collective intake of breath]

Jane Pinkard:
Ok. What impressed me is that I thought I was gonna do the subversive rant, but everyone’s had the same idea. Maybe after all we are all on the same wavelength. There’s a lot of things that are wrong. Why do we still have sessions in 2006 about attracting women to game development?? Why is that still an issue?

Why don’t we have a Sundance? What is it about game journalism’s state today? But ultimately I really love games and I know you all do to. Every rant should have an action. What’s the point of us sitting around and talking about what’s wrong if we don’t’ go do it?

So on journalism, it bothers me that PR is in control of everything. I don’t wanna talk to someone’s public face. We get this single, monolithic view about what the game’s about. When’s the last time you saw an interview with an artist? David Jaffe is the face of GoW but he knows he’s not the face. He said, look there are all these other people? But Sony decided he was the Face. That’s limiting. We need more permeable membranes between gamers and game dev, more access.

No more ranting! Let’s go do stuff. For every problem that you see go out there and do something about it. The internet is full of rants, don’t just write about it! Who cares! Read any games forum and you see the same things year after year after year. No innovation. We need this, we need that. It's about what you DO that counts.

So I have a project for all of you. You think about your number one bitch. Your number one beef with the industry or your job. And tomorrow.. no,, Saturday.. hahah.. do something about it! Do something positive, make something produce something, create something, otherwise we’re sitting around talking about this forever. It’s about pushing things out to everyone else. That’s what counts.

Also.. Eric says we have a bit of time left over. I wanna see if Chris Hecker.. ?

Chris Hecker:
You guys couldn’t fill up the time? Now you want me to do something about it??

Heckler: how often do developers get MORE TIME!

Eric:
Let’s take Jane’s comment seriously. If we’re gonna do something, and not just talk about it, even though talking is a good first step – can you guys offer advice out there?

Chris Crawford:
Go off into the mountains for 14 years and develop interactive storytelling.

Audience: wow.

Jane:
A lot of people brought up the action in their rants. Seamus said, think about the money aspect.  Maybe don’t think too hard..

Seamus:
It’s ok, I can’t think too hard anyway.

Heckler: why is interactive storytelling different? Why are games dead?

Chris Crawford:
Games are about things, Interactive Storytelling is about people.

Heckler: we’re things!!

Chris Crawford:
Yes. YOU ARE.

Chris Hecker:
So. Basically the way the award ceremony from last night works is: they tell you you won, then they ask for a whole bunch of personal photos for a crap ass video montage. So I made this instead. I’m fairly well known for my community contribution stuff, but I’m really famous for my non ability to shut up. So I was going to rant. I was trying to fig out what I was going to rant about. One of the first things was patents. I was gonna say, well.. if we’re not careful they’ll be the end of the industry – but I realise that the people in the audience are actually very intelligent here and only stupid people think that patents is a good idea, so that’d be a waste of time.

So then I thought I’d rant about innovation, so I thought I’d take comic books,.. how doing things over and over and over and over again puts you into a rut. Like comic books. So comic books are really interesting to talk about: and film: there are two interesting things about comics and films…

Seamus:
This is like an example of nested loops

Chris Hecker:
omg Seamus remembers how to pro-gram!

[laughter]

Chris Hecker:
OK so.. why are games and films . I mean comics and films interesting to talk about with respect to games, they’re the art forms that have come around in the recent history.. we know what they did. Film was the most important medium of the 20th century. Comics started to be important and then failed. Why? They just did the same thing. They found something easy: superheroes in bright costumes and they just did it. More and over and over and all of a sudden they weren’t stocked anywhere. In the 50s they were in any store you walked into. Now they’re in stores with men in the back playing games involving dice.

You really wanna be happy at an award ceremony, so I realised I didn’t wanna rant, I wanted to rave. Games are really totally amazing. How often do you get to be there at the start of an art form? Once every 100 years?

Games are different  from other art forms: they’re interactive! There is feedback! No other art has this. I don’t care whether you call it games or storytelling, it’s all the same in my mind. Games will allow us to be affected emotionally unlike any other medium in the history of mankind. Power Fantasy is not the only tool in our toolbox! You can play some games right now that show hope. Interactivity is important and can be more so if we do the right thing. Games are really cool, and that’s my rant.

Justin Hall: Chris Crawford: what happened to so embitter you?

Chris Crawford:
When you guys can do people stuff, do it. You can’t do it.

Audience: huh?

Q: yeah I wanna address that point. I’m trying to be an early adopter and that. Why do we have to split hairs about terminologies? I think you just alienated a bunch of people here?

Chris Hecker:
WHO CARES? Let’s not talk about who’s arguing about semantics.

Frank:
Interactivity is not all the same thing. Games are not computer media. Video games and computer games are not…

Chris Crawford:
Comic books, cartoons, games, that appeals to one market. Interactive storytelling, movies, appeals to a different market. A graphic novel is a comic book trying to get some respect.

Q: Cheesy award ceremonies. That important? Why?
Heckler: it’s just masturbation!

Seamus:
And that’s bad for you? Well that’s fine. Hehe. No. The ceremonies.. that “Hollywood horseshit” is critical to a business system. It gets the word out. It builds a biz around things you’d never otherwise try. You get celebs going to see Brokeback Mountain, a film that OTHERWISE would have totally offended a bunch of red states.. but now they go see it.

Eric:
It’s chicken and egg. If the games don’t exist to give awards to…

Robin:
The other part is educating our users. We talk about educating them with glamour and stars, but also we need the educational system. We need art expression and appreciation .. let’s educate the people who are buying our games about the process we go through.

Q: You’re talking about videogames.. and computer games. Now we have games occurring between people in the real world. Why don’t we just call it..

Chris Hecker:
Oh god, no more semantics!

Frank:
Yeah. We’ll look back at this and see it as an artifact. Computer games being locked into a screen that you huddle in front of is going to change.

Seamus:
I believe that if you’re a member of our industry you should stand up and take it and say you make games. You shouldn’t wuss out and say you make interactive entertainment.

Eric:
I’m going to observe and send it to this panel. Last year’s folk were angrier. This year.. we’ve got a spirited setup, but it seems we’re angry at apathy more than external conditions?

Chris Hecker:
This is true in the real world too. Liberal people who spend time making fun of how George Bush gets words wrong diffuse their energy to accomplish anything.

Eric:
Is there change going on?

Robin:
I had a really hard time trying to figure out how to rant about this cheesecake bullshit out on the hallway. […] We have to push forward.

Q: I’d like to quickly ask.. what is this penis envy that we have with every other popular form of media. I’ve heard a lot of folk talk about emotional content. Bleh. What happened to challenge in games? This brain age game has taken over Japan. What is wrong with making games like this? Why can’t we just have fun instead of talking about emotion all the time?
Vince (running  past and shouting): We’re defined by our tools! We’re people too!

Chris Crawford:
Do the calculation. the $ that goes towards social human entertainment and asocial human entertainment. The vast majority of Hollywood’s output is about interpersonal relationships, as are novels, magazines.. we got $100bn spent on social entertainment, and $10bn spent on asocial entertainment.

Jonathan:
I agree with Vince who’s rude and funny and I don’t really know him, but yes we are partially defined by our tools. What we do right now.. games are big. A huge possibility space. At one end, brain age. At the other end, super emotional stuff. Are we going to encapsulate that whole space or not? The future of humanity depends on what we do!

Q: someone said why can’t we just focus on fun. But isn’t there more than Just Fun?

Chris Hecker:
Yeah. There is.

Q: When are we going to start advertising to folk who read Vanity Fair or The Economist?

Chris Hecker:
They’d put them in in a second if those ads paid back…

Seamus :
Yeah I’m down with Vince too. The apathy that we’re not legit yet, or penis envy about other mediums… if we can get that emotional response out of Bejeweled or Tetris .. we own the future and it’s ours not to fuck up.

Comments

[Cris Rose]

Wow, what a good read, i wish i'd been there. There's so much good stuff being discussed, and they're right too. It reminded me of Just A Minute or Have I Got News For You lol.

I am a very creative person, and i love gaming. I grew up on Doom and Quake, but over the last few years i've felt a bit lost.

I only play games to really releave some pressure now, shoot some things, drive too fast. I get a sense of achievement, but i never feel challenged or puzzled or, well, satisfied.

I'm so keen to move onto the next thing, i loved Black and White, but it's not on the PS2, PSP or Xbox consoles that i have and PCs aren't in my life anymore for gaming. Too much hastle.

I want to get Me And My Katamari and Loco Roco for the PSP. They're happy, they're quirky, they giggle at you and make you feel like you're in a fantasy. Ultra-realism is cool, but real life is what i'm escaping from.

I want to be Entertained. I don't feel games today have the depth, and were it not for the PS3 coming in November (which i will buy) i think i would have gone off games all together within the next 18 months. Christ, i might even take up... reading?!?!

I hope this "wavelength" everyone was on in that room spreads and shows EA and SCEE that we want to engage our brains, not just our trigger fingers.

[Kim]

Cris: They are being shown. It's worth noting that two of the seven people (CHecker, RobinH) work for EA! Get inside the belly of the beast and affect change from within!

[Will Maiden]

Great read. I loved rant last year (courtesy of here) and this year didnt disappoint either. I hope stuff comes of this, the talk about all talk no trousers is very true, the world and his mother has been hating EA for years but no one's doing anything about any of this.

Thanks Alice :)

[bob]

"Q: someone said why can’t we just focus on fun. But isn’t there more than Just Fun?"
The most important question anyone could have asked. Amazing that it took this long for someone to actually ask it, especially since that seems to be the big idea that everyone was hinting at. I have hope for the industry.

Kim: Is that realistic? (I'm uncertain of this, myself.) After all, one doesn't join General Motors in the hopes of getting them to make bicycles (or electric cars, for that matter). I fear that too much is invested in the current product and way of doing things for a few (or even many) individuals to have any impact.

Glad to see the discussions and I'm grateful that they've been made accessible here.

[michael]

The problem is that videogames are looked at as still rather silly and stupid to some...not something that is a true media like movie and radio...because despite the very powerful hardware availible corporate executives still think shooting zombies and aliens in franchise after franchise is the way to go without little substance, that is why quake 4 and Halo 2 paly similar. Where are the plots in games, the creativeness, the humanity, the complexity that can go in!!! I play perfect dark zero and wow at the graphics and clarity but it just a FPS shooter that has no character development and little substance ...nothing as complex as a movie or a book. These people are businessman not gameplayers so what do they know. When Nintendo had the seal of quality there was high quality but now.... I don't know. No one is willing to up the ante in this industry to make it like hollywood or a classic book or painting. There is no artistry, no inspiration, no orginality, so uninspired shooting aliens and zombie near total mindlessness is what we get from companies like EA.

With painting you have picasso, in music you have mozart, in books you have H.G Wells and Tom Clancy, in theatre there was shakesphere, and in Movies you have charlie chaplan, ridley scoot and james cameroon. Even you have some great games like Castlevania SOTN and resident evil 4, because they are japanese and the Japanese put vastly more inspiration, care, time and focus in their games they lousy american game developers. what I am saying outside of some japanese people (like the guy who created mario) there is no mozart or picasso or great of the gaming world and with all this corporate rush to keep games the same always is killing the rise of any videogame developing genius.This industry is a fringe industry because there is no greatness in anybody to show off its potential...you are all a bunch of tie wearing boys who think you can make lexus payments by releasing better looking versions of the same uninspired, unorgininal crap over and over agian.

[Robert 'Groby' Blum]

To anonymous: Right, the gaming world doesn''t have a Mozart. It happens to have Miamoto-san, Will Wright, Sid Meier... Next strawman please? For your info - almost none of us are worried about Lexus payments. We work on games because we love games. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make them better. What have you done to advance games?

In general: Yawn. Seamus is the only one who gets it. It's not that nobody wants to make better games. It's the fact that there is no business model to do it. I'm thinking Nintendo has an ace or two up their sleeves to change that - but we'll probably have to wait for E3 before we know more.

The comic book analogy really applies to videogames. I think Nintendo senses this and they are trying to expand the definition of 'videogame.'

Also I thought the Ultima IV example was very telling. There are so many other ways out there to play games and to interact with them, but it seems like things have gotten stale.

Stale to the point of games becoming a commodity which was also touched on.

[Joe]

I still think people just aren't getting it...

Games have qualities that make them games that are just not comparable to other industries, now from an economic and business standpoint growing the market seems to be the only concern but I think people aren't getting that: Gaming is just not "for everyone" experience, as much as people would like it to be. Many games require large investments of time, take Final fantasy X for instance... at least 30 hours "playing" through the game. Or what about Fire Emblem Path of radiance for the gamecube? For anyones first time through and watching all the cutscenes and story, at least 30 hours. Next, I do not believe there is anything wrong with designing games to be fun. This is what games originally had to aim for in the 8 and 16-bit era's, because they could not rely on graphics to sell their games.

The problem is the cost of games versus the size of the audience, versus what they can charge per copy of the game against how many they can potentially sell.

I think the real problem though is that games and gaming are inherently different beasts from other media, and because of the length and depth of modern hits you see people focusing on a few core games at the top of their respective genre's raking in all the money.

I think the simple problem is that there are lots of great and fun games to be made but the number of people in the audience for them makes it non-profitable or not very profitable simply because game costs have skyrocketed and the graphical expectations have gone up as well.

Metal gear series for the PS2 were great experiences but they are not exactly the kinds of games you can reply for fun.

Games like Mario and Mario kart became so popular for a reason, they were first and foremost fun above all else. I think people really forget how and why the game industry became as big as it did.

The real problem now is that as the hardware has advanced the costs to make a game and expectations have reached critical financial point that makes developing new properties and taking risks severely punishing economically so you have to have a lot of money or you are simply not in the game. Whereas earlier in game development history it took a lot less money to explore new ideas, concepts and idea's so the economic cost of some failure didn't make the game industry as risk averse.

[Argent Stonecutter]

"Statues wouldn’t be better if they could move. Model airplanes would not be better if they were the same size as airplanes!"

Model airplanes that are the same size as airplanes totally rock, and if I could rez up an airplane in First Life like I can in Second Life... let alone do all the other things you can do in there... I don't think I'd ever touch a computer game again.

[Dan]

I would have to say that the majority of the panel blab on and on without making any point of reaching a resolution. Jane seemed to be the only smart one there to bring up that something should be done about it rather than just talk about it.
I think that video games are going into the wrong direction. Putting in more "emotional content" will allow audiences to identify better, but that's just one end of the spectrum. Games first and foremost are supposed to be fun. That's why they're called games, for crying out loud!
Making games closer to reality doesn't add any fun to it. I might as well just do stuff in real life.
Saying that games are still silly looking to most people doesn't cut it. You can't please everyone. Those people simply don't get it. Making a game more real doesn't make it any less silly looking. What makes it serious is the content. Look at Shadow of the Colossus. Look at Ico. Both games succeed on more than just a technical level. It's emotional because it connects with the player, and they're fun games to play. All these factors are really important to make a successful game.

[Frustrated Developer]

Its an interesting read that game developers and stalwarts in the field take a chance to rant at the whole thing about how the industry is and what is wrong etc. I especially liked the comment about the lack of creativity, I dont come from America and I was talking to some american folks the other day and they asked me why do all games look and feel almost the same and why they only improve in graphics quality (barring some exceptions!) my answer surprisingly was the people who make the games and the people for whom the games are made have the same mental makeup, so they know what THAT audience wants and what SELLS in the market and they will give only that. I mean seriously how many developers/Publishers will fund a multi-million dollar where the main protagonist is a gay guy / lesbian women I doubt if any.

Why just stop there lets make a game about a black guy/girl but has absolutely no violence or rap music involved in the game. The process is like a digestive system if you eat shitty food (read junk, greasy cheesy stuff!) then your body is not gonna be in the prim and proper shape. So make sure the input is right to get the output correct, I was surprised that nobody mentioned the total lack of diversity in the game work force I am sure if minds come to the table from different walks, different cultures and different thought processes then the chances of creativity being added to the game are much higher but I doubt thats gonna happen...so its just shut up and bear it time. No body wants to do anything about it they just want to make good suggestions, publish white papers and carry out studies but nothing ever gets implemented. The industry might not be dead but the people inside are hell bent on making Chri' prediction come true and its sad :-(

[Solid]

Dan, a rant isn't about reaching conclusions or making a point. It's just saying what you think is wrong.

[Jonathan Blow]

I have posted the original text of my rant, along with the slides, here:

http://number-none.com/blow/slides/rant_2006.html

The text doesn't exactly match what I said live, but it is pretty close and contains some things missing in these notes.

[Alice]

Thanks Jonathan!

Updates are always good. I slam the notes up for two reasons - one, I can't multitask and write coherent notes while listening at the same time, and two, because heavy notes like this are fun to read for folks who can't make it to expensive shows.

In the spirit of t'internets, publish then filter. All updates very welcome.

x

[Jonathan Blow]

Oh, yeah... my message wasn't a criticism, just informational.

[Michael Samyn]

Dear Ms. Pinkard en the rest of the Cozy Club, this is to inform you that there are people doing exactly what everybody else is saying that somebody should be doing. But they don't get invited to conferences. That's one thing that Mr. Crawford got right: the future of interactive entertainment lies outside of the games industry.
New ideas, new audiences and alternative business models are being developed probably in many different places. But you don't mention them in your blogs or your magazines because they are not accompanied with the glitz and pseudo-glamour of the games industry. Or because they don't have a PR department...
If you want to find something new: step out of your cozy little club and go and look for it. Who knows, maybe you might even be able to lend a helping hand to "the revolution".

Take me next year Alice? I'll pack my geekiest tshirts? :D

[cris Rose]

oops forgot my details lol. Anonomous baaaad

[madsax]

I didn't attend the rant session but sure heard a lot about it at the show afterward. My beef with rant sessions has always been that they are more like a sports match than anything useful - the ranters are rewarded by the crowd for the speed and craftiness and ferociousness of their rants, not (in general) for making valid points.

There are a lot of problems in the game industry, and a lot of us know what they are. We like to get together and bitch about them over beers. Sometimes it is hard to differentiate between the problems invented by people who are trained to ALWAYS find a problem (engineers), and a problem which is ACTUALLY a problem. But truth is we have enough problems to go around.

I would love to someday see a rant panel in which a rant turns into something that the audience can get enrolled into - a rant that is very powerful and then turns and opens a door, which the audience feels encouraged to step through. I haven't seen that rant yet. But reading Jane's comments, and Seamus's bit about jumping over to CAA, give me faith that we might see that soon. So many problems... let's work on some solutions together, not just bitch about them and have another beer!

[Hm]

Interesting how almost none of those people have ever shipped a real game. Like, what, two of them have? (Seamus and Frank?...Chris like 15 years ago, I guess?)

[Chris Crawford]

Chris has shipped 14 games.

[Patrick]

I'd like to point out that the transcript, while largely accurate, has some ommisions in it. Some are excusable to the effect that different people were talking different threads at the end, but I get the impression from Chris' dialogue with the "audience" that the transcripter filled in blanks to the effect of making Chris look bad. The "go into the mountains for 14 years" was a bit extreme, so assuming the audience responded with "wow" isn't too over the top.

However, when someone asked "What so embittered you?" they then followed up with a question about why the nature of Chris' work trying to do characters interactively, so that when Chris responded "When you can do people, do it, you can't" he was responding to a point about the technical problem, not his being embittered (he's a bit embittered, but not SO embittered). Putting in "Audience: Huh?" only serves to downplay the seriousness of the point and make Chris look bad, made possible by omitting the questioner's full inquiry.

Just wanted to point that out.

[Game Producer]

Ranting is okay, but these people should use soap and clean their mouths.

;)

Thanks for the rants.

[geoff kirk]

It doesn't matter that the games industry doesn't have a Sundance type festival for niche/"edgy"/small/alternative/indie type games since there's no place where you can go to buy such games. And by that I mean, a place where you can go and see a game that you hadn't heard of before and buy it...not finding the publisher of niche-type Brokeback game and then ordering the game on-line.

[Unimpressed]

If there's any group less capable of identifying or reasonably discussing issues in gaming, it is game devs. These 'rants' (more like temper tantrums) are pathetic. They are not and will never be the solution to anything, but they are a symptom of the real problems facing the video game industry -- namely, delusions of granduer and clinical levels of egocentrism among devs, and, most important, a stunning level of near industry-wide fundamental immaturity.

Get over yourselves and grow the hell up, or the boom and bust cycle will continue.

[Joshoc]

I don't know why it's so hard to come up with good games that sell well.

One example of a successful, creative game:

I think the best game I ever played was Baldur's Gate 2. Graphics were horrible, not 'immersive' but I was immersed and hooked. It had social interaction and get this it was all *imagined*. You played alone. However, you interacted with hundreds and it all affected the outcome. Icewind Dale reverted to Hack n Slash, and Neverwinter Nights got rid of the mixed party of scripted and self-created characters that made BG2 so much fun. I don't see why there wasn't a BG2 made in every genre imaginable... I'd have played them all.

[BIG DOG]

Wow, Unimpressed, through this whole discussion, I hadn't been thoroughly struck by anything anyone had said, till I read your post. We need to stop flaming the industry, and start fixing it! Start up a braintrust! Let's get ideas flowing! Nothing can be accomplished or acted upon unless we ACTUALLY start THINKING.

For instance, for all the hubub caused by Jonathan's comment about gameplay, No one actually bothered to *define* it. Gameplay is the one aspect of a game that is not so easily "boxable." Not like graphics and physics are, anyway. Gameplay could be defined as simply as the genre of game it is, or alternatively it could mean the blending of the amount of gameplay(which would then be defined as the period you spend actually playing the game) and cutscenes. I could continue, but I think I've made my point.

WHAT exactly needs to change??? And more specifically, what does it need to change TO???

I could make a game that plays differently than any other game, but more than likely it would bomb because it would be too unusual or the learning curve might be too steep. I know "WE" want more innovative and fresh games, but have you ever stopped to consider what the Customer wants?? Have you ever wondered why publishers crank out thousands of sequels, and only fund big-name producers?? Because they know it will make them MONEY!! The customer doesn't want 'Fresh and New', they want what their friend down the street has, but with a different name so he can feel 'special'! Customers will buy 1) what they see on TV, 2) what their teenage kid whines incessantly about, and 3) a sequel to something they've already played! The 20% of the market share that WE represent doesn't mean squat to publishers! So until we actually have a base of regulars that have been playing games for over 5 years that constitutes a majority demographic, publishers will continue to dole out voluminous quantities of pungent excrement! Until then, Steam is the answer(or a Steam-like service)! Of course, not in its current form. Steam must be GIVEN to people like me and, for the most part, all of you! Game developers with NO way of reaching a large audience, and with no fundage. But the important thing is, it must be given to us FREE. We must be given the power to post our games on Steam for all to see and download. We MUST create our own game proliferation community!! And I strongly believe freeware is the answer. We must seek out those individuals, as Mr. Samyn so eloquently pointed out, who are bold enough to do something about it! There are thousands of game developers out there who could single-handedly revolutionize the game industry, but for one reason or another, their opportunity is quashed like so many others', and their brilliant ideas never see the light of day.

So I call you out! Put up or shut up! Come up with a great idea, or invest the time in finding someone who will!

My idea?
KEEP THE PERSONAL COMPUTER ALIVE.
What do I mean by that? Simply this: The direction the game industry is currently headed is mobile. While I don't think that's a bad direction by any means, the PC has always been the lifeblood of this industry. When the PC gets phased out, so much will change in this industry, every single fear mentioned above will come to full and horiffic fruition. The games industry will be irreparably plunged back into the dark ages, until cell phones become as powerful as computers. And even then, it won't be the all-encompassing experience that it is now: 7.1 surround, 21in. monitor, quad-GPU video cards--the point about graphics overpowering this industry is a valid point. But, it's also the driving force behind technological advancements. Allow me to explain.

The Game is the ONLY piece of software that fully takes advantage of ALL available system resources that is available to the general public. Those who do not play games use their 3.4GHz AMD FX 2GB RAM w/7800 GTX video cards, for email. Games are the reason Moore's law continues to exist today. Sure, without games advancements would continue. But, we'd see new technology Twenty years after it had been developed, instead of just 10 years.

My point is, EVERYONE on this rant is right. But what are we going to DO about it???

[Marc Cassidy]

I want to become a games developer what do i need to do were do i need to go

[Annerose]

These comments have been invaluable to me as is this whole site. I thank you for your comment.

[Luggage]

Well, rants are like that. A bunch of talking, a bunch of ranting, but not much action to be honest.

Although, I did enjoy some of the statements made. Two of them, specifically, is I'd hate the computer gaming market to lose it's 'artistic' side and just sell sex and hawt chix like hollywood does. Of course it'll sell. It's just totally lame, that's all.

Secondly, the fact that some people are just trying to get 'more and more realistic' with their games takes away what makes a game a game – it's not like our world, not at all like our world, and that's what's cool about it. You can do things there that you can't do here, and you can do things here that there you can't do because there it makes no sense to be able to do them.

I really do miss the old 2d adventure game and am happy to see Himalaya studio's trying to bring it back. It takes the 'interactive storytelling' element in, and presents an unreal world that is nothing like ours. Myst is still one of the most best games out there... I know others would disagree. But I'd exchange action for atmosphere and imagination any day.

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A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game console, such as Sony's PlayStation 3, PSP, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, Nintendo DS, or may develop for a variety of systems, including personal computers.

Some developers also specialize in certain types of games, such as computer role-playing games or first-person shooters. Some focus on porting games from one system to another. Some focus on translating games from one language to another. An unusual few do other kinds of software development work in addition to games.

Most video game publishers maintain development studios, such as Electronic Arts's EA Canada, Activision's Radical Entertainment, Nintendo EAD and Sony Polyphony Digital . However, as publishing is still their primary activity, they are generally described as "publishers" rather than "developers".

[paper bag]

Yes,I want to become a games developer what do i need to do were do i need to go.

[game development]

I remember the game dev conference of 2K6! What a year. I hope that 2K11 brings the same kind of excitement!