The recent spat between former Blizzard man David Brevik and current Diablo 3 director Jay Wilson shines a spotlight on the issue of professional relationships and expressing personal opinions about other people's games.
More and more these days, we are seeing game developers with the confidence to say what they think not merely about their own work, but about the work of others. Brevik commented on what he saw as poor design decisions in a game in which he had no hand in making, but having made the original Diablo and Diablo 2, he is eminently qualified to state these opinions, and we should welcome his honesty.
Wilson's initial response, an infamous three-word post on Facebook, was regrettable and he later apologized. In doing so, he explained his own emotional response to the criticism and some of the details about the game's genesis, addressing a few of the points Brevik had made. So although the conversation briefly strayed into unpleasantness, it was nonetheless an illuminating insight into one of the year's biggest games, from two people of intelligence and passion.
Open conversation
There have been times in the past when debate between the game industry's best and brightest has been dulled by the forces of corporate publicity machines. Employees of large publishers, even the most senior and respected ones, must toe the line and avoid making statements that might cause PR teams to rush out "clarifications."
But as the business splinters, as power is drawn from these large organizations towards developers, indies, and Kickstarters, we should all be able to enjoy a more open conversation.
Last month, Cory Davis, who worked on Yager's Spec Ops: The Line, criticized publisher 2K Games for its "relentless" insistence on a multiplayer mode that he described as a "cancerous" growth.
For those of us who work in the press, this is really good stuff -- visual imagery and strong opinions are our bread and marmalade. But more than this, it's a signal that bad design decisions -- those that come from a marketing-agenda rather than a gaming one -- can carry negative publicity consequences. We find out that the multiplayer part of the game was indeed rushed to Darkside Game Studios, which did the best job it could under the circumstances.
Is it too much to hope that there are executives at publishers who, reading those stories, will think twice before insisting, against the advice of a game's designers, on squeezing in an inappropriate feature?
The trouble with expressing opinions about other people's decisions is that we are all liable to get prickly and irate when we feel under attack, especially in the area of work and creativity. This is why, while we can all agree that personal attacks are wrong, it is possible to sympathize with Wilson for his initial angry response to Brevik.
There are also developers like David Jaffe, who says what he thinks, and deals with the consequences later. You can Google News Jaffe at almost any point and he'll be in the media expressing a colorful opinion. Agree or not with his commentary, the alternative is a bland and boring world in which game developers merely sit in media interviews parroting feature-lists.
Take also Arkane's Harvey Smith, who's working on Dishonored. Last week he also was expressing opinions on other people's games, addressing a massively important issue in game design. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz to promote his forthcoming game Dishonored, he talked at length about his own discomfort with heavily-scripted cinematic games, how they represented a "less healthy" evolution in game design than more open experiences.
This is not an opinion that everyone will share, and was certainly not the general wisdom in the executive corridors a few years ago. And yet it is essential that leading game designers feel comfortable critiquing others' work in a public forum.
Freedom to express
Obviously, it is generally good practice to avoid outright meanness, but video game creation progresses through the honest appraisal of work by people who really know what they are talking about. It's interesting to hear what actual game makers have to say about each others' work.
Game developers are becoming less and less under the thumb of marketing overlords, dictating what they can and can't say. This freedom to express opinions is yet another consequence of the rise of digital distribution, and the coming of Kickstarter.
Note Brian Fargo's Wasteland 2pitch on Kickstarter, which spent no small amount of time savaging publishers for their limited creative horizons. And then there are guys like Notch, Edmund McMillen and Jenova Chen who are never backward about coming forward when it comes to talking about the creative direction of gaming.
We are lucky to be able to enjoy their work, but also the opinions and emotional perspectives that produce them.
Should developers be able and willing to speak their minds? Yes. However, I find any sort of magnification of the drama on the part of journalists highly distasteful. Developers are creators, not some pitiful soap opera sideshow.
Don't lead with inflammatory headlines. Print quotes in context of the larger discussion. Avoid accentuating only the emotional aspects of feedback even if it creates a temporary uptick in page views. I realize that there is intense pressure for improving site metrics, but a little journalistic integrity is surprisingly effective at helping creative people open up.
The best developer conversations about their art are not the ones that happen in either on twitter, Facebook comments or (on the other extreme) in PR junkets. Instead they are the ones that happen between two thoughtful, educated and respectful people with time and space to explore their ideas. Be more like the Economist (or even Rock Paper Shotgun interviews). Be less like TMZ.
Yes, the marketoid suppression of expression is bad, but the gleeful gossip mongering in the other direction is equally horrid. I'd rather shut up and make great games than get sucked in the poisonous mix of poor journalism and the small minority of gamers that need someone to hate.
Unfortunately what you are seeing is the future of "gaming" journalism. Tabloid driven articles and content-driven game reviews. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing reality shows of devs gone wild and advertisements disguised as articles with the biggest offender being Kotaku.
Open discussion, honest dialogue and cross-breeding of ideas contribute to the betterment of the industry and, more importantly, the medium. As I've said before, I think a lack of those factors is partly behind the slowdown of the Japanese VG industry.
Critical analysis is far more effective when it comes from other developers rather than reviewers I think, however the competition of "rival" titles has created an animosity that's not really based on anything.
Maybe it's just trolling, I don't know but I think the industry needs a body like TED where debate and critical analysis can take place. We've got things like GDCs and IGDA but they meet only once a year and don't focus much time on collaboration but rather each company's promotion of themselves and their products.
It's up to each of us to take a bit of time and try and say something critical. I wrote a bit on some tricks that Zynga has adopted, and that I found really disturbing. Here's the HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4511065 - I was the first amazed by the response, but the point is, it's not that hard to get a discussion going.
If you subtract subjective criticism from art, then what you are left with isn't art but a product.
I've always felt like games have been struggling between these two cultural forces. As a society we view art and consumer products as very different animals, and yet games struggle somewhere between these two points of view.
Obviously publishers would like to view games as a consumer product, because it gives them strict control over its presentation. They actively dissuade subjective criticism in order to better monetize their product. This is probably not news to anyone.
I think this has some historical precedent. As a new artform the distribution model of games was not borrowed from traditional art media, but rather borrowed from what was, at the time, cutting edge commercial distribution. It is hard to draw a sharp line when it comes to this sort of thing, but I think it would be fair to say that games came along in a post-Edward Bernays world, and the industry's distribution model was influenced heavily by Edward Bernay's contributions to consumerism.
If you look at other art mediums and their distribution models, they were built on foundations of art and integrity that came well before modern consumerism. Naturally many of these other industries (books, movies) adopted modern consumerism models, but the foundation of an industry is important as it sets the tone with how much respect is given to the art. Is it art, or is it a product? For games, it started as a product being sold as art. As opposed to the traditional art being sold as a product.
I would really like to see the day when games are recognized as art being sold as product, and in the indie game sphere I think we get to see a bit of what the industry would look like if it hadn't been built on modern consumerism.
Game developers (typically) have the heart, passion, and creativity of any artist in any medium. Nobody goes into the business if they aren't passionate about games. Publishers provide the resources for these massive undertakings, but so often that comes with a firm guiding hand that is motivated not by artistic integrity but by the tenants of modern consumerism.
I think that the first step to freeing games is to change the perception. Games need to be art first, and products second - not the other way around. And although I may not be an art history major, I think that opening up the space for developers to critique each others' work openly and honestly gives some of the power and ownership back to the artists. Even if that power comes in post-mortem, it is power.
I disagree.
Movies and TV were just as influenced by market forces at just an early a stage. Recognition of movies as "art" came long after they became a consumer-driven industry. Same goes for comics, which are still fighting for mainstream "art" status.
On the other hand, many early games came about not out of a profit interest, but because someone thought it'd be fun, cool or interesting if they existed. They were created out of love for the medium. "Art" is too loaded a word to be useful nowadays.
The consumer model as we know it didn't exist until after the second world war. Look up 'Edward Bernays' as a gateway into just how dramatically things have changed. We're not talking about whether or not people were selling things - movies obviously were being sold to audiences. And there is a lot of argument about whether or not movies were observed as 'art' in its infancy. It's one of the arguments for games as art, in fact. That movies struggled with the same image problem. It's about how creativity(art) and industry(production) interact with one another.
If you look at the way that industries interact with artists today, and compare it to the way industries interacted with artists in the 1910's, for example, you will see a wildly different relationship. Before the middle of the century, marketing was largely very honest and to the point. Industries felt that the best way to sell their product was through traditional supply and demand. Post Edward Bernays, and industries started to generate demand where there had been none before.
For example, Edward Bernays saw a demographic (females) who were not purchasing cigarettes. Society had deemed it unladylike. Smoking was a habit for men. He fashioned a campaign - using what was at the time cutting-edge psychological theory - to manipulate culture into believing that smoking was empowering for females. And it worked. He almost doubled the revenues of the tobacco industry in one fell swoop. Nobody had ever done that before, and it was a bit of a pandora's box moment for culture in the west, and its influence seeped heavily into corporate strategy, politics, and journalism.
And that's obviously just one example. But entire industries are built around this philosophy of creating and maintaining new markets, it's the core of mass consumerism.
Games were born into this environment. Movies were not.
As for 'art' being too loaded a word to be useful, that's just nonsense.
For more insight into the changes Chris OKeefe is describing, watch the Adam Curtis documentary "The Century of Self."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmUzwRCyTSo
It's not gospel obviously but I think there's a lot of truth there particularly in the formalization of the methods and practices to shape and manipulate desire, demand and consumption.
Regarding your post and the two replies that follow (and yes, I'm a simpleton so please bear with me), I agree with the generalities which could be drawn from many of the points made but not necessarily the specific arguments.
I think art and sales have no real relationship other than one sometimes using the other in hope of gaining an additional advantage. For the artists it's the power to continue pursuing their vision (their perfect game) and compensation (money, fame). For merchants it's the politics of money (climbing the ladder) and financial security (biggest bank). All combinations of artist/merchant relationships fall somewhere between one or both getting burned (-1), breaking even (0) or increasing stability (+1).
Many of the greatest classical compositions exist solely because wealthy clients paid the composers to create them. They literally contracted the work. Yet music, at heart, is art and much great music is made with only bread, water and instrument.
Conversely, many banal works have been contracted, perhaps as much a result of poor judgment by merchants as a lack of skill in execution by artists.
My point is that as a consumer of any product (including financially-assisted art) you must measure the sincerity and depth of the artist's -and- their merchant's smiles. By any measure one will be slicker than the other. It's not easy to know the sale to art vectors of a given game.
You make some good points. The patron of the arts argument was actually something I was going to bring up in my first post, but decided it was long enough.
The difference between the patron and the industry is pretty straightforward; a patron generally does not intend to benefit from the work created by the artist they are commissioning. The money that is used in these endeavors traditionally came from other pursuits. Wealthy land-owners would commission grand artwork or statues or whatever as a point of status and pride.
An industry can (and must) profit from their 'commissions' in order to continue existing. A game is not necessarily a commission so much as it is an investment. Suffice to say, although I think that this doesn't necessarily need to be a parasitic relationship, I do think it can certainly poison the well. If they see something as a poor investment then it is in their interest to change it. I think it's *fairly* plain that this has real potential to stifle creativity.
It can also lead to other manipulative behaviors when it comes to interacting with the market. I doubt very much that the current FPS market looks the way it does by accident. I doubt very much that the MMO market looks the way it does by accident. It's not that there is someone or some group out there manipulating people; it's that modern marketing techniques used by all major publishers are focused on one major question; How can we create and grow markets? It's not about how you can find existing markets. It hasn't been for decades. Successful marketing is all about creating a demographic where one didn't exist before. The easier a market is to create and grow, the more that games are encouraged to cater to that market. It is a fairly organic process that is under constant flux.
I won't pretend to be an expert, so maybe someone who works in marketing can correct me. That is just my loose understanding from private reading.
Anyway, the original point I wanted to make (and I think was lost in the tangent) was that this industrial relationship between the artist(developers) and the industry(publishers) is what has kept a lid on subjective criticism, and made that an acceptable environment despite the fact that subjective criticism is pivotal to the growth of every other art medium. And likewise, made it so surprising when one well-known and respected developer came out to publicly criticize (in a totally legitimate way) the work of another team of developers.
I mean, why doesn't this happen more often? The industry has thousands and thousands of passionate people in it.
The first step for a game is for it to be playable. That was the philosophy behind the Diablo games (well, the first two anyway). The focus was always on gameplay first. Condor/Blizzard North was a studio that developed itself from the ground up. We're talking about 8 guys in one room working on 486's with 4 megs of RAM running DOS. The original game design document for Diablo is only about three pages but in those three pages it lays out the basic foundations of the type of gameplay it wanted to achieve. It was all about the "structure" of the game.
There were never any internal debates about art or product but there were plenty of debates about gameplay and that's because Blizzard North saw itself as a studio of gamers who were making games, games that they themselves wanted to play. The games that most influenced Diablo were the games the actual developers where playing at that time but being able to add what they wanted that did not exist in the those games like random levels and cooperative multiplayer.
In the initial development of Diablo the goal was simply to "get it on the shelf" so it could get into the hands of gamers because in the end it is about the gamer, at least it was back in those days. There was never any talk about how many units the game would sell or how much money it would make, it was always about the experience the gamer would have running around in an immersive, dark and gothic, action packed world with tons of replayability. It was the gaming experience they themselves wanted.
All the original developers of Diablo were huge fans of the early 80's game Wizardy for the Apple 2. It was vector graphics and text based but it was a fun, challenging, immersive and addictive game that took 6 months to beat and back in those days that was unheard of for any game. Wizardy itself was derived from Dungeons and Dragons, which we all know is a module based pen/paper/dice game and all the original Diablo developers were D&D vets. When you look at the lineage of these games, games as art was never part of the equation or conversation. It was always about gameplay which is what Dave is talking about when he talks about design desicions. Games as art is a conversation that began after Diablo.
As far as other developers were concerned it didn't really matter what they thought (other developers). Like Dave said, Blizzard North and Blizzard South had very very different ideas about making games and also had a vastly different studio culture and there was a lot of rivalry. Growing your studio organically means you aren't looking outside of yourself or to others for your blueprint. It comes from having a vision and gathering a unique group of people that understand that vision and ultimately become greater than the sum of its parts. Diablo didn't have the best artists or the best anything but what it had was individuals who had a a great passion for making and playing games. The games were developed in a vacuum. The innovations came from having a diverse group of people who all had something different to bring to the table and creating an egalitarian environment that allowed everyone to contribute ideas for the game regardless of title or rank. Dave and the Schaefer Brothers started Condor/Blizzard but when it came to the actual work they put themselves on the same level as the people they hired.
Part of the motivation to create the studio was to avoid working in a corporate environment. It was an escape. Blizzard North was more than a studio for the employees in the days of making Diablo, it was life itself and a grand time it was. The whole studio would go on ski trips packed like sardines in a beat up Vanagon staying in a tiny cheap rented cabin sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags or staying in low end motels at CES and later E3. There were no luxuries but if you talk to the team they will tell you those were the Golden Years.
Ok, I think I have said enough and I have gotten off topic. I just felt a need to respond since I know the mentality of the team that made Diablo and how they view their experience. For the making of Diablo, games as art was never an issue. The team had no idea the game would become a massive hit and change gaming because that wasn't the goal. There was no marketing teams or PR people or product development people, or managers or CEO's at Condor/Blizzard North. That all came after the development of Diablo when Blizzard bought Condor which was being bought by Davidson which was being bought by CUC which ultimately merged with HFS to form the conglomerate known as Cendant which nose dived in 1998 because of corporate fraud and sold its gaming division to Vivendi, a french water utility company. It was just 8 dudes in a room with no capital who were happy to just have the opportunity to make a game and have the kind of freedom and culture in the work place that just did not exist at the time.
A classically commissioned work of art puts the whole of the artistic endeavor on the shoulders and judgement of the artist to fill the space or the canvas as only the artist can possibly know best. For he/she is the artist and it's scary to think of someone who calls themselves an artists who doesn't believe this to be the case.. someone who believes that their job is to fullfill someone else's vision.
It's quite simple.
This is not the case for industrial game production and I hope that is obvious. There you delve into various depths of color by number.
And in a sense, that type of "art" is basically just ripping off stuff because it fits with some popular concept that fits the marketers ideal.
http://www.flavorwire.com/210885/10-advertisements-that-shamelessl y-rip-off-well -known-songs
i dont mind this for products... but just dont go around proudly claiming it's art....
That is an excellent and enlightening review of the team that put Diablo together, thanks for taking the time to put it together!
I'm by no means saying that the mass marketing mindset is all encompassing; you don't even have to look far afield to see developers that buck the trend. Runic, developer for the Torchlight series, operate in much the same way as you described, from what I can tell. Very likely because, y'know, it was founded by the guys who founded Blizzard North. And that is one reason why I have so much respect for those guys.
Also, the fact that developers were not looking at games as art back in the day is no surprise. It never occurred to me that they would have - in fact, quite the opposite. There was never a push for games to be viewed as art, in part because in its infancy games were rather crude; a pinball machine had more grace and complexity than most video games for years. It was easy to fit games into a niche; games as a product of entertainment.
That niche is a perception thing, not necessarily a conscious choice that people made. If a developer decides that they want to avoid the mass consumerism of big publishing, that doesn't mean they haven't bought into the idea that games are a product of entertainment. It just means they didn't want to have their creativity shackled to big publishing. Whether or not that creativity leads to something they would call art is, again, really just a matter of perception.
It took years before people started to realize that games could be both art and entertainment.
The thing about talking is that even in my short time in the industry I have seen situations where myself or my team as a whole disagreed with a feature or aspect of a game we were making but the publisher demanded. What purpose is talking if we as gamers and game devs know better but essentially the wallets that back our projects don't appreciate our insight? The games I have been apart of I could pick apart myself and I could mention the aspects of those games I hated or that we as a team did not like but at the end of the day it wasn't our game in terms of content it was our game in terms of our time , skill, and effort put into it. unfortunate but true .
I don't think that their is no purpose purpose for talking amongst us as developers but unless a developer is the deciding force in all aspects of development the knowledge such conversations could form is not going to be able to produce the maximum result. unapplied knowledge is useless.
I've been making objectives comments on industry trends since at least 2001 when I was a journalist at www.unknownplayer.com (under the alias Sarcerok). I've had the honor of having major companies sue me to silence me for exposing things that were unethical then, and illegal now. Giving the industry the feedback they need is something that is absolutely necessary if we are to move forward. Further, the increased ratio of non-gamers to gamers leading the major gaming studios means that there are things that the creators of today's games increasingly do not understand. In order to solve the industry's current problems, the first step is to admit you don't know how to. This is something executives seem trained not to do. Only once you admit you don't have the answers are you going to humble yourself enough to go look for the solutions.
One of my favorite, if unfortunate, pastimes is to speak whatever potentially offensive shit is on my mind, and apologize later if I truly offended someone I was speaking about. Unless you name file systems after yourself, it's not like flame wars result in murder or anything. Shit-talking has always been an important part of playing games, so why not in developing them? Let loose the guns and make better games.
Don't lead with inflammatory headlines. Print quotes in context of the larger discussion. Avoid accentuating only the emotional aspects of feedback even if it creates a temporary uptick in page views. I realize that there is intense pressure for improving site metrics, but a little journalistic integrity is surprisingly effective at helping creative people open up.
The best developer conversations about their art are not the ones that happen in either on twitter, Facebook comments or (on the other extreme) in PR junkets. Instead they are the ones that happen between two thoughtful, educated and respectful people with time and space to explore their ideas. Be more like the Economist (or even Rock Paper Shotgun interviews). Be less like TMZ.
Yes, the marketoid suppression of expression is bad, but the gleeful gossip mongering in the other direction is equally horrid. I'd rather shut up and make great games than get sucked in the poisonous mix of poor journalism and the small minority of gamers that need someone to hate.
take care,
Danc.
Maybe it's just trolling, I don't know but I think the industry needs a body like TED where debate and critical analysis can take place. We've got things like GDCs and IGDA but they meet only once a year and don't focus much time on collaboration but rather each company's promotion of themselves and their products.
I've always felt like games have been struggling between these two cultural forces. As a society we view art and consumer products as very different animals, and yet games struggle somewhere between these two points of view.
Obviously publishers would like to view games as a consumer product, because it gives them strict control over its presentation. They actively dissuade subjective criticism in order to better monetize their product. This is probably not news to anyone.
I think this has some historical precedent. As a new artform the distribution model of games was not borrowed from traditional art media, but rather borrowed from what was, at the time, cutting edge commercial distribution. It is hard to draw a sharp line when it comes to this sort of thing, but I think it would be fair to say that games came along in a post-Edward Bernays world, and the industry's distribution model was influenced heavily by Edward Bernay's contributions to consumerism.
If you look at other art mediums and their distribution models, they were built on foundations of art and integrity that came well before modern consumerism. Naturally many of these other industries (books, movies) adopted modern consumerism models, but the foundation of an industry is important as it sets the tone with how much respect is given to the art. Is it art, or is it a product? For games, it started as a product being sold as art. As opposed to the traditional art being sold as a product.
I would really like to see the day when games are recognized as art being sold as product, and in the indie game sphere I think we get to see a bit of what the industry would look like if it hadn't been built on modern consumerism.
Game developers (typically) have the heart, passion, and creativity of any artist in any medium. Nobody goes into the business if they aren't passionate about games. Publishers provide the resources for these massive undertakings, but so often that comes with a firm guiding hand that is motivated not by artistic integrity but by the tenants of modern consumerism.
I think that the first step to freeing games is to change the perception. Games need to be art first, and products second - not the other way around. And although I may not be an art history major, I think that opening up the space for developers to critique each others' work openly and honestly gives some of the power and ownership back to the artists. Even if that power comes in post-mortem, it is power.
Movies and TV were just as influenced by market forces at just an early a stage. Recognition of movies as "art" came long after they became a consumer-driven industry. Same goes for comics, which are still fighting for mainstream "art" status.
On the other hand, many early games came about not out of a profit interest, but because someone thought it'd be fun, cool or interesting if they existed. They were created out of love for the medium. "Art" is too loaded a word to be useful nowadays.
If you look at the way that industries interact with artists today, and compare it to the way industries interacted with artists in the 1910's, for example, you will see a wildly different relationship. Before the middle of the century, marketing was largely very honest and to the point. Industries felt that the best way to sell their product was through traditional supply and demand. Post Edward Bernays, and industries started to generate demand where there had been none before.
For example, Edward Bernays saw a demographic (females) who were not purchasing cigarettes. Society had deemed it unladylike. Smoking was a habit for men. He fashioned a campaign - using what was at the time cutting-edge psychological theory - to manipulate culture into believing that smoking was empowering for females. And it worked. He almost doubled the revenues of the tobacco industry in one fell swoop. Nobody had ever done that before, and it was a bit of a pandora's box moment for culture in the west, and its influence seeped heavily into corporate strategy, politics, and journalism.
And that's obviously just one example. But entire industries are built around this philosophy of creating and maintaining new markets, it's the core of mass consumerism.
Games were born into this environment. Movies were not.
As for 'art' being too loaded a word to be useful, that's just nonsense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmUzwRCyTSo
It's not gospel obviously but I think there's a lot of truth there particularly in the formalization of the methods and practices to shape and manipulate desire, demand and consumption.
I think art and sales have no real relationship other than one sometimes using the other in hope of gaining an additional advantage. For the artists it's the power to continue pursuing their vision (their perfect game) and compensation (money, fame). For merchants it's the politics of money (climbing the ladder) and financial security (biggest bank). All combinations of artist/merchant relationships fall somewhere between one or both getting burned (-1), breaking even (0) or increasing stability (+1).
Many of the greatest classical compositions exist solely because wealthy clients paid the composers to create them. They literally contracted the work. Yet music, at heart, is art and much great music is made with only bread, water and instrument.
Conversely, many banal works have been contracted, perhaps as much a result of poor judgment by merchants as a lack of skill in execution by artists.
My point is that as a consumer of any product (including financially-assisted art) you must measure the sincerity and depth of the artist's -and- their merchant's smiles. By any measure one will be slicker than the other. It's not easy to know the sale to art vectors of a given game.
You make some good points. The patron of the arts argument was actually something I was going to bring up in my first post, but decided it was long enough.
The difference between the patron and the industry is pretty straightforward; a patron generally does not intend to benefit from the work created by the artist they are commissioning. The money that is used in these endeavors traditionally came from other pursuits. Wealthy land-owners would commission grand artwork or statues or whatever as a point of status and pride.
An industry can (and must) profit from their 'commissions' in order to continue existing. A game is not necessarily a commission so much as it is an investment. Suffice to say, although I think that this doesn't necessarily need to be a parasitic relationship, I do think it can certainly poison the well. If they see something as a poor investment then it is in their interest to change it. I think it's *fairly* plain that this has real potential to stifle creativity.
It can also lead to other manipulative behaviors when it comes to interacting with the market. I doubt very much that the current FPS market looks the way it does by accident. I doubt very much that the MMO market looks the way it does by accident. It's not that there is someone or some group out there manipulating people; it's that modern marketing techniques used by all major publishers are focused on one major question; How can we create and grow markets? It's not about how you can find existing markets. It hasn't been for decades. Successful marketing is all about creating a demographic where one didn't exist before. The easier a market is to create and grow, the more that games are encouraged to cater to that market. It is a fairly organic process that is under constant flux.
I won't pretend to be an expert, so maybe someone who works in marketing can correct me. That is just my loose understanding from private reading.
Anyway, the original point I wanted to make (and I think was lost in the tangent) was that this industrial relationship between the artist(developers) and the industry(publishers) is what has kept a lid on subjective criticism, and made that an acceptable environment despite the fact that subjective criticism is pivotal to the growth of every other art medium. And likewise, made it so surprising when one well-known and respected developer came out to publicly criticize (in a totally legitimate way) the work of another team of developers.
I mean, why doesn't this happen more often? The industry has thousands and thousands of passionate people in it.
There were never any internal debates about art or product but there were plenty of debates about gameplay and that's because Blizzard North saw itself as a studio of gamers who were making games, games that they themselves wanted to play. The games that most influenced Diablo were the games the actual developers where playing at that time but being able to add what they wanted that did not exist in the those games like random levels and cooperative multiplayer.
In the initial development of Diablo the goal was simply to "get it on the shelf" so it could get into the hands of gamers because in the end it is about the gamer, at least it was back in those days. There was never any talk about how many units the game would sell or how much money it would make, it was always about the experience the gamer would have running around in an immersive, dark and gothic, action packed world with tons of replayability. It was the gaming experience they themselves wanted.
All the original developers of Diablo were huge fans of the early 80's game Wizardy for the Apple 2. It was vector graphics and text based but it was a fun, challenging, immersive and addictive game that took 6 months to beat and back in those days that was unheard of for any game. Wizardy itself was derived from Dungeons and Dragons, which we all know is a module based pen/paper/dice game and all the original Diablo developers were D&D vets. When you look at the lineage of these games, games as art was never part of the equation or conversation. It was always about gameplay which is what Dave is talking about when he talks about design desicions. Games as art is a conversation that began after Diablo.
As far as other developers were concerned it didn't really matter what they thought (other developers). Like Dave said, Blizzard North and Blizzard South had very very different ideas about making games and also had a vastly different studio culture and there was a lot of rivalry. Growing your studio organically means you aren't looking outside of yourself or to others for your blueprint. It comes from having a vision and gathering a unique group of people that understand that vision and ultimately become greater than the sum of its parts. Diablo didn't have the best artists or the best anything but what it had was individuals who had a a great passion for making and playing games. The games were developed in a vacuum. The innovations came from having a diverse group of people who all had something different to bring to the table and creating an egalitarian environment that allowed everyone to contribute ideas for the game regardless of title or rank. Dave and the Schaefer Brothers started Condor/Blizzard but when it came to the actual work they put themselves on the same level as the people they hired.
Part of the motivation to create the studio was to avoid working in a corporate environment. It was an escape. Blizzard North was more than a studio for the employees in the days of making Diablo, it was life itself and a grand time it was. The whole studio would go on ski trips packed like sardines in a beat up Vanagon staying in a tiny cheap rented cabin sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags or staying in low end motels at CES and later E3. There were no luxuries but if you talk to the team they will tell you those were the Golden Years.
Ok, I think I have said enough and I have gotten off topic. I just felt a need to respond since I know the mentality of the team that made Diablo and how they view their experience. For the making of Diablo, games as art was never an issue. The team had no idea the game would become a massive hit and change gaming because that wasn't the goal. There was no marketing teams or PR people or product development people, or managers or CEO's at Condor/Blizzard North. That all came after the development of Diablo when Blizzard bought Condor which was being bought by Davidson which was being bought by CUC which ultimately merged with HFS to form the conglomerate known as Cendant which nose dived in 1998 because of corporate fraud and sold its gaming division to Vivendi, a french water utility company. It was just 8 dudes in a room with no capital who were happy to just have the opportunity to make a game and have the kind of freedom and culture in the work place that just did not exist at the time.
It's quite simple.
This is not the case for industrial game production and I hope that is obvious. There you delve into various depths of color by number.
And in a sense, that type of "art" is basically just ripping off stuff because it fits with some popular concept that fits the marketers ideal.
http://www.flavorwire.com/210885/10-advertisements-that-shamelessl y-rip-off-well
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i dont mind this for products... but just dont go around proudly claiming it's art....
That is an excellent and enlightening review of the team that put Diablo together, thanks for taking the time to put it together!
I'm by no means saying that the mass marketing mindset is all encompassing; you don't even have to look far afield to see developers that buck the trend. Runic, developer for the Torchlight series, operate in much the same way as you described, from what I can tell. Very likely because, y'know, it was founded by the guys who founded Blizzard North. And that is one reason why I have so much respect for those guys.
Also, the fact that developers were not looking at games as art back in the day is no surprise. It never occurred to me that they would have - in fact, quite the opposite. There was never a push for games to be viewed as art, in part because in its infancy games were rather crude; a pinball machine had more grace and complexity than most video games for years. It was easy to fit games into a niche; games as a product of entertainment.
That niche is a perception thing, not necessarily a conscious choice that people made. If a developer decides that they want to avoid the mass consumerism of big publishing, that doesn't mean they haven't bought into the idea that games are a product of entertainment. It just means they didn't want to have their creativity shackled to big publishing. Whether or not that creativity leads to something they would call art is, again, really just a matter of perception.
It took years before people started to realize that games could be both art and entertainment.
I don't think that their is no purpose purpose for talking amongst us as developers but unless a developer is the deciding force in all aspects of development the knowledge such conversations could form is not going to be able to produce the maximum result. unapplied knowledge is useless.