The Realities of Game Development

Several months ago, High Voltage Software designer David A. Rodriguez published the first in a series of editorials on the games industry and game design. He's now published the fourth in the series. While the first article dealt with the design merits of cinematic presentation in game, this offering could not be more different; rather than discussing something that is a design choice, it paints a bleak picture of the utter lack of control most developers have over the games they make.

I'm not an artist.

Sure I work in a creative field. Sure many of the things I do are creative and I get to imagine things and attempt to put them into reality. But an artist gets to do what they want, how they want, when they want. That's not what I do. Someone comes to my company with a contract. They give us money to make something. I make it. They take it and sell it. I don't work in art.

I work...in customer service.

And fortunately or unfortunately, the customer is always right. That means that no matter how bad I think an idea is. That means no matter how unreasonable the request or how STUPID the last thing they said was, in the end they write the check, so they get to decide. I can voice my opinion. I can tell them what I think because that's what they are paying me for, but ultimately, if they decide that something must be in the game...then you can bet your sweet ass it's gonna be in the game.

Rodriguez' depiction of life as a working game designer in today's game industry is reminiscent of the screenwriter's life depicted in the Coen brothers' 1991 period piece Barton Fink, in which the title character comes to Hollywood with big artistic dreams only to find that screenplays are made to order and rushed to production with a set of parameters defined by studio producers. Rodriguez describes living a much happier professional life now that he has accepted his role in the process; currently, he is working on the PSP version of 50 Cent: Bulletproof. As the article points out, this situation is not unique to the game industry. It exists in any entertainment medium that reaches a certain level of success, though the team-oriented and technology-driven nature of game development probably makes it even more conducive to such engineering than other fields. In the short term, it is likely to just get worse, as steadily increasing team sizes and development budgets make it even more difficult for independent studios to remain profitable, and publishers worry more and more about minimizing risk with the huge amounts of money being thrown around. Still, perhaps partially as a result of these trends, alternative methods are springing up making it possible for some developers to maintain independence. Before it released SiN Episodes: Emergence, Ritual Entertainment had done contract work for several years, but low-cost distribution through Steam allowed the company to focus on its own internal property rather than a publisher's license. Many other developers have had similar successes through digital distribution. Ultimately, like any other entertainment form, games can be creative, or derivative; they can be a product of a designer or team's passion, or they can be a column on the balance sheet of a publisher licensing a movie licensed from a remake of a licensed TV show nobody remembers. We'll see how it shakes out in the coming years and decades.