Okay, so I delivered a rant at GDC at a session moderated by Eric the Z (with Warren Spector, Brenda Laurel, Jason Della Rocca, and Chris Hecker also ranting)... And I may never work in the game industry again, but hey... It was fun. Packed room, and I got a standing ovation. At dinner afterwards, Will Wright gave me a thumbs-up, which felt good. It's been boingboinged, and Alice posted a summary, but here's the text I was working from... I probably ad libbed a bit from it, but anyway.

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<disclaimer>
My opinions are emphatically not those of my employer.
</disclaimer>

I don’t know about you, but I could have been a lawyer. Or a carpenter. Or a sous-chef. Before I get rolling here, I want to ask all of you a question. Who here is here because, you now, developing games is, like, just a job, doesn’t really matter, whatever, it pays the bills. Put up your hands.

And who’s here because you love games?

Yeah.

I don’t know about you, but the things I’ve heard here at GDC have made the future of this industry clear to me. With the arrival of the next gen consoles, the whole cycle is about to be ratcheted up another notch. We’re going to go from $5m budgets to eight figure ones. We’re going to go from dev teams in the dozens to dev teams in the hundreds. It’s all going to be BIGGER, as Iwata-san says.

Is it going to be better?

I’ve been doing some research recently into the history of British and American boardgames in the 18th and 19th centuries, and I’m seeing an interesting pattern—one that persists into the 20th centuries, into the digital era, and through the modern day. It’s a pattern that Dan Scherlis describes rather cynically this way: “Genre is what we call one hit game and its imitators.” Jeffreys publishes “A Journey Through Europe,” and suddenly we have a whole genre of track-based travel games. One fishing game appears, and we have dozens. Mansions of Happiness begets dozens of games of moral improvement, George Parker creates the business game, Little Wars spawns miniatures. Charles Roberts creates the board wargame, D&D produces the RPG, Magic: The Gathering produces the CCG. Donkey Kong appears, and we instantly have dozens of platformers, Akalabeth and Wizardry produce the digital RPG, Dune II and we have RTS, Doom and the FPS, The Sims, and the autonomous agent game.

Games GROW through innovation. Innovation creates new game styles. Innovation grows the audience. Innovation extends the palette of the possible in games. The story of the last twenty years hasn’t been, as you’ve been sold, the story of increasing processing power and increasing graphics; it’s been the story of a startling burst of creativity and innovation. That’s what created this industry. And that’s why we love games.

But it’s over now.

As recently as 1992, the average budget for a PC game was $200,000. Today, a typical budget for an A-level title is $5m. And with the next generation, it will be more like $20m. As the cost ratchets upward, publishers becoming increasingly conservative, and decreasingly willing to take a chance on anything other than the tired and true. So we get Driver 69. Grand Theft Auto San Infinitum. And licensed drivel after licensed drivel. Today, you CANNOT get an innovative title published, unless your last name is Wright, or Miyamoto.

How many of you were at the Microsoft keynote?

I don’t know about you, but it made MY FLESH CRAWL. The HD Era. Bigger. Louder. More photorealistic 3D. Teams of hundreds. And big bux to be made.

Not by you and me, of course. Not by the developers; developers never see a dime beyond dev funding. By the publishers.

Those budgets, those teams, ensure the death of innovation.

This is not why =I= got into games.

Was YOUR allegiance bought at the price of a television?

Then there’s the Nintendo keynote. Nintendo is the company that brought us to this precipice. Nintendo established the business model under which we are crucified today. Nintendo said “Pay us a royalty not on sale, but manufacture.” Nintendo said “We will decide what games we allow you to publish”—ostensibly to prevent another crash like that of 83, but in reality to quash any innovation but their own. Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer—and my question is, what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from, and how often do they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo HQ?

My friends, we are fucked. We are well and truly fucked. The bar, in terms of graphics and glitz, has been raised and raised and raised until no one can any longer afford to risk anything at all. The sheer labor involved in creating a game has increased exponentially, until our only choice is permanent crunch and mandatory 80 hour weeks—at least until all our jobs are out-sourced to Asia.

With these stakes, risk must be avoided. But without risk, there is no innovation; and innovation is what drives growth in games.

But it’s okay, because The HD Era is here, and big bux are to be made. It doesn’t matter if all we do from here to eternity is more photorealistic drivers and shooters with more polygons on the screen; it doesn’t matter if our idea of innovation becomes blowing into a microphone—because after all, look on the bright side. Bing Gordon’s wallet will be thicker.

I say—enough.

The time has come for revolution.

It may seem to you that what I’ve described are inevitable forces of history, and there’s some truth to that. But not fundamentally. We have free will. And our current plight is the consequence of individual choices.

EA could have chosen to concentrate on innovation, rather than continually raising the graphic bar to squeeze out less well capitalized competitors, but they did not. Sony could have chosen to create a Miramax of the game industry, funding dozens of sub-million titles in a process of planned innovation to establish new world-beating game styles, but they declined. Nintendo could make dev kits cheaply available to small firms, with the promise of funding and publication to to the most interesting titles, but they prefer to rely on the creativity of one aging designer.

You have choices, too. You can take the blue pill, or the red pill. You can go work for the machine, work mandatory eighty hour weeks in a massive sweatshop publisher-owned studio with hundreds of other drones, laboring to build the new, compelling photorealistic driving game-- with the same basic gameplay as Pole Position.

Or you can defy the machine.

You can choose to starve for your art, to beg, borrow, or steal the money you need to create a game that will set the world on fire.

You can choose to riot in the streets of Redwood City, to down your tools and demand an honest wage for an honest eight-hour day.

You can choose to find an alternate distribution channel, a different business model, a path out of the trap the game industry has set itself.

You can choose to remember WHY we love games—and to ensure that, a generation from now, there are still games worthy of our love.

You can start today.

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Some explanatory notes: I'm playing off the Microsoft and Nintendo keynotes. Microsoft gave away 1000 Samsung HDTVs to roughly one in three of their audience (you got a tag when you entered that was black, blue, or yellow, and yellow wound up winning). Nintendo's keynote was actually pretty good--Iwata-san, now Nintendo's president, explained his past as an actual game developer, with the claim that "I have the heart of a gamer." I was inordinately cruel to him, really; Microsoft came across as greedheads, while Nintendo came across as a company that, when you get down to it, does care about gameplay and innovation. But--they did set up the basic console model for games, they have acted like greedheads in the past, and, well, it was too good a line to pass up.

More coherent thoughts on the conference later, perhaps tomorrow, after I've had a few hours to delete accumulated spam.
posted by Greg at 12:11 AM 8 comments