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[Developers, including id's John Carmack, Media Molecule's Kareem Ettouney, and Frontier Developments' David Braben debate on whether developers should be obsessive gamers -- or remain outside of the influence of other titles.]
"A strong interest in computer or video games", "a passion for playing games from multiple genres and over many years", "be part of a culture dedicated to gaming".
These are just a selection of the qualities sought from applicants to recent game development job adverts on Gamasutra. These aren't desirables, but must-have requirements.
Anyone without these qualities need not apply. It seems that it is not enough to be a great artist, a master programmer, a first-rate manager, or an audio wizard; you need to have the very word gamer etched through you like a living stick of rock.
But is it really necessary for everyone on a development team to eat, sleep, dream, and breathe games as well as devote their working life to them? Certainly there's a romantic idea of the game developer who devotes their life to gaming.
Living in crunch mode, working in a darkened room, and using their lunch breaks to get another fix of gaming. Stereotype that may be, but many in the game industry do hold the view that to be a game maker you must also be an insatiable gamer.
"Developers should play games," says David Braben, founder of Frontier Developments (Kinectimals) and an avid player outside of work. "The reason they become developers should be because they are gamers. Would you expect someone making films to not have any love or appreciation of films? It would be barmy."
Kinectimals
Neil Barnden, co-founder of Stainless Games (Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012), echoes the sentiment: "It is my main pastime outside of work. If I'm not walking the dog or taking photographs, I'm probably back in front of my screen playing something, and I'd say that for the majority of people here it would be the same."
Both Braben and Barnden see that kind of dedication to gaming among developers as having clear benefits for the quality of the work a team produces.
"I've always found the most useful people I have worked with have been the ones who are just fanatical gamers, who play all sorts of stuff, and can instantly look at a game, and say, 'You need to look at so-and-so'," says Barnden. "They may be talking about a game that was made five to 10 years ago, but it did something particularly well -- and thanks to YouTube, you don't even have to play it. You can just go and find various clips that show what they were talking about."
Braben sees having staff with an encyclopedic knowledge of games as a powerful defense against me-too development. "It is vital for developers to have a thorough familiarity with games and to have a love for games; otherwise they will produce games by numbers, and I think there is some of that around," he says.
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All in all, nice to hear the thoughts of some of the leading developers out there. Thanks for the article.
At least we from the scene - who actually know how things work - have to accept the fact that making games is work, and it only becomes fun when you see the results, which, more often than not, take ages to show up. It's a mental hurdle to convince ourselves that making play is not play, it's work, a mental hurdle that most of us aren't willing to accept. Personally I rather face the facts, and find me weird for actually enjoying so much work :)
Is there a right or wrong? Well, when you need a wrench, it's usually a good idea to just find a wrench that fits. Novelty in a game is valuable, but only when it's fun. I wouldn't recommend trying to come up with a console FPS control scheme from scratch when gamers know, love, and want the standard dual analog setup. By the same token, I wouldn't recommend taking Call of Duty, and hoping that making the guns shinier will win critical and commercial success.
Cross-pollination of skills from other skills sets/industries is likely to have another positive effect on games in general. But if you don't have any interest in the "thing" i.e. the games you are making, why would you be working at a game development studio or in games in general?
Look at Valve. They hire from all walks of life - psychologists, archeologists, etc, and I'd say that's working out quite well for them. You see much the same in other creative endeavors, where those that draw their inspiration from elsewhere create distinctly original visual / auditory / play experiences. The key (in games) is just to temper that with enough game experience and gut instinct to create a playable final result.
With a small team, though? I'd say there often isn't room in the team for the purely outside opinion, so there, you have to double-down and go for solid experience. Ideally, your solid gamers are just also creative people that draw their inspirations from elsewhere (film, novels, art, nature, etc).
Even with art games, which generally get a free pass, I get annoyed at awkward UIs which didn't need to be that way. Sometimes the strange control scheme is part of the game experience ('Dinner Date'), but I'm thinking of bad arty menus or mappings that take three buttons when they could take one.
Edit: And how could I have forgotten QWOP when mentioning purposely strange control schemes?
For Engine Programmers, not so much.
The only position I think really needs that intense dedication to games is the game design side. Art has other things to draw from. Same for music, same for writing, same for sound, same for production. Game design (and maybe level design) is the only one where you can't pull from non-game material.
Since I'm pretty much doing everything for my little indie project, I can say that I do the game design tasks because I love games, but I do the coding because I love programming, the story because I love writing, and the music because I love music. I don't think I would be doing nearly as much of the coding if I didn't genuinely enjoy programming for its own sake.
I spend a lot less time playing games now that I develop them. In an average week I'll probably spend about a quarter of my leisure time gaming, and the rest reading, watching films or good television series, or finding something else new and interesting to do. I feel that doing so makes me a well-rounded creator, and gives me more perspectives to use in development.
Which is why it is so tragic that these qualities are not put to use correctly.
The point of playing a lot of games is both to expand your idea vocabulary (so you can create and innovate) and to be able to put yourself in the player's shoes (so you can throw out bad prototypes and polish good ones). What I see more is using existing games as a safety net to add features or make decisions -- it's easier to convince your boss that something should go in a game if you can point to a million-seller that does it, but taken to the extreme this "safety net" approach stagnates the growth of the form and stifles good ideas that can be recognized as good based on factors other than "Call of Duty did it".
I feel as if there's a lot of second-hand inspiration, or third, or likely even further removed, found in gaming. It's nice to take a look outside sometimes.
1) There is a lot of mentions of "developers should know and play games to avoid doing something that has already been done". But what might also happen is that developers that are fans of a certain game/type of game would do their own games too similar to the ones they like so much, which would indeed break the potential for original creation.
2) The mention that, "when you play games, you need to look for specific elements to study". It is very true, but it also breaks the magic. After so long working in the MMO space, now I can't play any MMO without just studying it, noting what the developers/publishers did well, and what is to improve. But that constant thinking also breaks the magic of discovering a new game. It's not "just a game" anymore like it used to be when I wasn't working in the industry, it's now an object of study, which means it's work, even outside of work.