Game Designers are Childish and Immature?
Man, I feel like Leigh Alexander is coming out swinging to help us poor game developers who got bullied at GDC last week.

Pixelvixen reported on Heather Chaplin's rant (which most of us are only now hearing secondhand), where she took game developers to task:

Like Wendy slapping around the lost boys, Chaplin patiently but firmly laid down the line. “It is you guys as game designers who are mired deeply in ‘guy culture,’” Chaplin said. The problem isn’t the medium: “You are a bunch of stunted adolescents.” Games avoid any of the things that separate men from boys: responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery. And “when you’re talking about culture-makers, this is a problem.”

Leigh Alexander has responded eloquently to Chaplin's rant, and David Jaffe has a surprisingly low-key response as well.

In my opinion, Chaplin isn't wrong, but she isn't right either. (How's that for weaseling?) I think that in part, she's confusing cause for effect, and I think she's also suffering from a bad case of tunnel vision. I'll frame my own opinion / response in the form of an analogy:

This is about like Ms. Chaplin ranting at McDonalds for not offering fine French cuisine and a mature, classy dining experience. And then going further, and not just blaming the managers at McDonalds, but calling them a bunch of immature, provincial, ignorant, uneducated, butt-scratching American hicks. Nevermind that one of the local managers she's ranting about is using his McDonald's gig to pay his way through culinary school.

And all the while, three blocks away, there's a small French Restaurant that almost nobody - including Ms. Chaplin - visits or even knows about. But it offers - if not exactly what she is ranting about - then something pretty close. But no, that's unimportant - the important thing is trying to get McDonalds to change.

Sound silly?

Like it or not, an entire industry has evolved out of making the very kinds of games she doesn't like. Optimized to sell the most possible games, it offers the lowest common denominator in gaming - repeatedly - because that generates (as far as they know) the greatest return. Yeah, this usually means adolescent power fantasies.

It saddens me too, because some of my favorite kinds of games are no longer being produced by the industry that once served me much better. Sure, there are occasional successful diversions from the formula, with a few success stories (The Sims being an almost canonical example - though it's now been a decade since it made waves in the business). But usually an attempt to offer something outside the box in a direction that Ms. Chaplin suggests ends in commercial failure and a loss of jobs.

As far as the designers themselves: As varied as this industry is, painting them with such a broad brush is doomed from the start. I know there are several designers who match her description. Many of the companies that hire the designers pay crap wages and offer a work environment that would only appeal to the kinds of kids Ms. Chaplin seems to be describing.

But there are many others in the business who would be the choir for her preaching if she'd quit calling them names. But 99% of them aren't empowered to change anything. They aren't named Will Wright. They are being paid to do a job, and that job isn't to isn't to sit in an ivory tower and conjecture on how to provide a game that deals with issues of intimacy, intellectual discovery, introspection, and responsibility. No, their job is to very specifically to make level 8 as cool as hell, provide the player a shotgun, and introduce the player to the Battleoid Zombies. Unless said designer relishes a trip to the unemployment line with a depressingly specialized resume, he (or she) is going to do exactly what they are paid to do.

Unless the market for these games shifts (and I think, in many ways, it is starting to do just that - but it's a slow process), the industry that was built to support that market is just gonna keep going with small evolutionary changes. Right now, the mainstream games industry is simply incapable of serving the "broader spectrum of masculinity" (or femininity). It just how it rolls.

And the whole "indie thing" is one big end-run around an industry mired in it's own success.

Take a look at casual games, for example. A decade ago, these kinds of games occupied a tiny niche only being addressed by a few shareware developers and - every once in a while - the occasional bone thrown by the mainstream games industry. Nowadays? There's an entire industry that has built up around them, separate from the mainstream games business entirely but for a few points of intersection (mainly where the big mainstream publishers are trying to "cash in."). It's still not as big as its multi-billion-dollar cousin, but it's growing.

I'm kind of astonished that Ms. Chaplin would issue this kind of rant at the same convention that hosted the IGF awards literally hours earlier. The Independent Games Festival seems to have the tendency these days (from my perspective) on rewarding the weird wannabe arthouse games or the bigger-budget indie titles.

The mainstream games business is McDonalds. In time, it may evolve as the tastes of the general public drift. but if you want something it is incapable of providing, don't just rant against it, and please don't call its employees names. Instead, please take your business down the street to the little restaurant that WILL try and give you what you want. Don't get suckered into believing that McDonalds is the only restaurant in town.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:24 AM (Permalink)