I'm
really sick of hype.
One way
that a young, bright-eyed game developer turns into a cynical, jaded game
developer is through exposure to the mindless blaring of superlatives
that is the output of the public relations machine. After a while it all
sounds the same, and you realize that you can't trust any of it.
I suppose
to some extent hype is inevitable in our industry, and, for that matter,
any entertainment industry. Since there are few objective standards for
testing games, whether you like a game or not comes down to a matter of
opinion. Hype is our way of trying to influence our customers' opinions.
And some extraordinary-sounding claims really are justified. The
games are a lot faster, a lot smoother, and a lot prettier than they used
to be. With the hardware advancing the way it is, it's difficult to find
language to describe these changes that doesn't sound like hyperbole.
Still, I think hype represents a real danger to the development process.
Some years
ago, I was sitting in a meeting with a bunch of other programmers listening
to an Industry Mogul-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless promote his new piece of
hardware. He put up a slide that showed how the number of colors that
various devices could display had changed over the years. The EGA card
could show 16 colors; the VGA, 256, and so on. His device, of course,
was off the graph — it could display 16 million colors — more, he claimed,
than a color TV set, which could only do 10 million.
Right there,
he lost us. His machine used a color TV set for output! What's the good
of having a device that can display 16 million colors if the color TV
it's using for output can only display 10 million anyway? His box was
handling 6 million more colors than it could ever show to the end user.
(I should also point out that a color TV is an analog device, not a digital
one, so it's theoretically capable of displaying an infinite number of
colors, but he apparently wasn't aware of that.)
This was
a classic example of mindless hype. The Industry Mogul put a bunch of
big numbers on the screen and expected everyone to be impressed. But he
was talking to technical people, whose job it is to work with numbers
and to reason about what they mean. When he put that slide up, he insulted
our intelligences, and that made us hostile and suspicious. We had come
to the meeting prepared to be dazzled. When we left, we were offended
and disappointed. His words had had the exact opposite effect from what
he had hoped.
Later on,
at a trade show, I saw the same machine being demonstrated by a chisel-jawed
professional narrator with a sharp suit and an extraordinary amount of
hair gel. He claimed that he was controlling a flight simulator flying
over Yosemite valley, and every branch on every tree was being displayed
in real time. I happened to know that this was an outright lie, because
I had seen the same demo elsewhere. We were seeing a pre-rendered movie
made with Vistapro. Wisely, the narrator disappeared through a door at
the end of his presentation, so there was no way to question him.
The machine
hit the market, flailed, gasped, and sank. It didn't die because of the
hype; it died because it cost too much, did too little, and was a royal
pain to develop for. But the hype was unable to save it. It was a poor
product, and the hype made no friends in the development community at
a time when the product needed all the friends it could get.
Back in
early March of this year, two very different game companies, but both
with big public relations budgets, announced that they were in serious
trouble on the same day. One was Purple
Moon, publisher of Rockett's New School and other games intended
for girls. The other was Ripcord Games, publisher of Postal (strike
one) and the egregious Space Bunnies Must Die (strike two).
Purple
Moon was founded with the best of intentions. The company wanted to break
the mold that most computer games seemed to be made from. It was going
to build games that addressed girls' interests and were meaningful to
their lives. Purple Moon did a ton of research to find out what concerned
girls. Then it fired up the PR machine to trumpet all this to the world,
making outrageous claims about how it was going to revolutionize the industry
and make technology accessible to girls (just a little patronizing to
the millions of girls who were cheerfully using computers already). But
it worked. Purple Moon got a huge amount of press and attention.
The problem
was that the company’s actual games were lame little adventures made with
MacroMedia Director. They were too short, and offered poor value for the
money. The artwork consisted of cartoony sketches. The voice-overs and
sound effects were no more than adequate. Worst of all, the themes of
the games were insipid: giving advice to friends, getting into the right
crowd at school. In the planned series of soccer games, the entire first
game was devoted to finding out who would get onto the team — you didn't
even get to play soccer. God, who would want to relive that nightmare?
Girls come
in all kinds, from those who like playing Quake and talking trash
to those who seem to have been born with a cosmetic case in hand. But
just like boys, girls have dreams that take them beyond their own worlds.
The problem with Purple Moon's games, apart from their poor production
values, was that they didn't fulfill any dreams.
Purple Moon
claimed that it couldn’t compete with Barbie, Mattel's
powerhouse license. Now, I'm extremely dubious about Barbie — I think
her body presents an unachievable ideal that girls desperately try to
emulate, to the detriment of their own mental and physical health. But
the Barbie games are about fantasies more interesting than Purple Moon's,
by anyone's measure. I'm sure Mattel does have more marketing money
and a better distribution system than Purple Moon does. But Mattel also
has better games.
The real
irony in all of this is that Mattel seems to be bailing Purple Moon out
by purchasing the company, presumably for the brand and the PR value.
There’s something thoroughly incongruous about the very un-PC Mattel owning
the highly-PC Purple Moon.
The other
outfit that made the news on the same day was Ripcord Games. Parent company
Matsushita announced it was either going to sell off or shut down Ripcord.
Ripcord’s game hype attitude could not have been more different from Purple
Moon's
— Space Bunnies Must Die was sexploitation schlock, with a huge-breasted,
halter-topped heroine who danced, changed clothes, and shot giant rabbits.
But Ripcord also cranked the volume knob on the hype amplifier up to 11.
At the 1998 Electronic Entertainment Expo, the Space Bunnies Must Die
logo — the mudflap girl with a gun — was printed on every available surface.
Matsushita actually built a Space Bunnies Must Die tunnel in one
of the hallways, and it was impossible to go from one part of the expo
to another without passing through the tunnel.
And yet,
Ripcord’s game was no more than a lame Tomb Raider rip-off. Huge
breasts or not, Alison, the main character, wasn't that well rendered
or animated. The story was silly. The backgrounds were unimpressive. The
country-music soundtrack clashed with the space exploration theme. Nobody
cared. If Space Bunnies Must Die was fulfilling a dream, it was
too demented a dream for most people to identify with.
Over and
over we see massively-hyped products that go nowhere. Remember Microsoft
Bob? The Microsoft Bob logo was plastered all over the place
at the Consumer Electronics Show; an airplane even pulled a banner so
you could see it as you walked in from the parking lot. But it was a dumb
product and nobody bought it.
The message
here is simple: All the hype in the world cannot save a lame game. As
a game developer, it's your job to make a good game, and for that you
have to have a certain amount of objectivity and detachment. You need
a sharp, self-critical eye, and to be constantly asking yourself, is this
good enough? What would make it better? What deficiencies am I tolerating
or overlooking? You must become your own toughest reviewer.
This is
where the danger to the development process comes in. Stay the hell away
from the PR and marketing departments, except as needed to teach them
about your game. If you hang around too long, you’ll start to believe
your own press releases, and when that happens, you slack off, thinking
that the work is already done. I'm sure that’s what happened to Purple
Moon and Ripcord Games and to Microsoft Bob. Their developers,
and worse yet, their producers, got caught up in the PR frenzy and lost
their detachment. The marketing department is there to sell your game,
not to provide you with objective feedback. If you want to know what people
really think of your game, ask the testers, who have played it until they're
sick to death of it. You can generally count on them to give you the hard
truth.
Of course
you want to take pride in your own work. But that pride should come from
a clear-eyed assessment of your own achievements, not from the inflated
prose that appears in your ad copy. Clearly you can't have ads that say
yours is "the second-best real-time strategy game on the market," but
if the ads say it's the best and you know it's not, hang on to that knowledge
— otherwise you're deluding yourself. You have to retain the ability to
judge your own work.
The other
thing to remember is that if you really do have a spectacularly good product,
other people will hype it for you. id
Software didn't have a ton of marketing money; they just put out the
first few levels of Doom as shareware and let Usenet do the rest.
Genuine public acclaim is worth far more than any advertising you can
buy.
Keep your
nose to the grindstone and your eye on the ball. Make the best game you
know how. Don't brag or exaggerate in the press — it irritates people
and blows your credibility if you can't deliver. Your job as a designer
is to think and write, not to talk. Shut up and design.