Industry vs. Inspiration

What's better: Money or Profound Cultural Impact? This is a debate found in every creative field, but only recently has it become an issue for video games. Sure, the core demographic has always been concerned, and so has every red-blooded game designer out there, about creating something brilliant versus something profitable. Everyone loves to hate Halo's story, anything with a movie license, and Dynasty Warriors 9. But with the rise of indie games, quality, innovation, and fun is what stands up above the crowd, and boast the most impressive margins.

Before I end my little intro., I wanted to paste the mission statement of a little developer called SRRN. It pretty much encapsulates the debate behind this article.

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether games are art. You can probably tell how we feel about that argument from our logo up there. To understand our position, it might help to know what we mean by art. For us, art is not about having the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions.

Video games allow us to look at some of our oldest questions in new ways. Bioshock used the conventions of a first-person shooter to ask questions about free will that simply couldn’t have been asked in prose or film. Shadow of the Colossus relied on third person perspective and the structure of action-adventure games to frame questions of moral consequence and introspection in ways that sculpture or photography cannot.

SRRN Games takes as axiomatic that games can be art. The question for us becomes: If games are art, then what? What does that mean for gameplay? What does it mean for narrative? Too often developers and publishers focus myopically on individual features – from frame-rates to play-time – and in doing so miss the forest for the trees. Artistic elements like narrative and character development aren’t things you can add onto a game like bolt-on upgrades.
Bricks are important for construction, but if architects never stepped back to see the bigger picture they couldn’t make art out of buildings. At SRRN, we step back from the individual components that go into game development to view the artistic whole.
It’s not just about the game. It’s about the conversations afterwards.

The Cost of Inspiration

Let's face it. Strapping a license on to the same old tired mechanics is cheap, easy, and makes lot's of money. It's sort of a no brainer for publishers. And, unfortunately, innovative games based on a new IP don't usually sell dick. I work with a man who was a sales rep / zen-master for Sony for a good while, and he told me that Shadow of the Colossus was one of the hardest games he had to sell.

So why are people like myself so obsessed with creating something that will truly impact a person's life? Video games exist solely to entertain, so if it accomplishes that then why go through all the extra effort? Does the guy who designs paper shredders want to create one that is way more expensive to manufacture, require the consumer to dick around with it for months before they can actually use it, or design it to maybe not even shred paper?

Picasso figured this debate out, eventually. He is arguably the most prolific artist of all time, having created over 147,800 pieces. Many critics say he "sold out", as we has simply able to sign his name on a sketch of cat poop and it would sell for a bazillion dollars. Do game designers work in the same way? Is there a point in time before they too sell out? I think it happens in reverse, opposite of all other creative fields. Most (all?) game designers do not start their career as a game designer. Many start in the wonderful land of tedium called Quality Assurance, others opt to see how games actually make money by traveling the Publishing road, some were already coding other types of software, and others were professional magicians. Then, when your title and salary changes to "game designer" you get to work on awesome stuff like, Barbie's Big Adventure in Hairspray Land, Horshoe Toss Mania, or World of Fight. You have to prove to the world that you can take a $40,000 budget with a 2 month dev. cycle and create something people will actually spend money on. You have to sell out first, then once you're famous like Itagaki you can afford the cost of inspiration.

But what is the cost of inspiration? To figure this out, we need definitions. Let's examine our two main variables.

Money

Money, in the context of a salary, is how a society deems an individual's worth that exist within. A society could be your company, or your country, every society is different. If you have a team of 3 game designers and you get paid more than the other two, the society of your company deems you more important than the other two. We all know it doesn't usually work out like this due to politics and general shenanigannery, but that's the idea anyway. By this definition, the money your employer gives you to do work directly translates into how much your work and you are valued.

Profound Cultural Impact

A PCI is a game changer. Usually found in academia, and usually only valued in highly magnified retrospect, PCIs completely change the way an individual, and as a result a society, thinks. It could be anything. Metal Gear Solid 1 made me want to become a game designer after I played the demo I got in my U.S. Playstation Magazine over and over and over for months until the game itself came out when I was in middle school. That video game changed the course of my life forever, hopefully for the better. It showed me a whole new world of expression of ideas. PCIs are responsible for the tingle you get in your lower spine when something awesome happens in a good book. PCIs are what leave you feeling invincible when you walk out of a great action movie. They change how you see the world, if only for a little while. PCIs can also be people like Martin Luther King Jr., inventions like the car, but in here we only speak in the context of video games.

In short the cost of inspiration is money, which by it's definition means it costs value to society. Inspiration is what breeds the creation of a PCI, which means the onus lies solely on the inspired. Sure, you can be like Notch and make something wonderful on the side, but that cost him time, and time = money. Time spent on Minecraft could have been spent on developing something else for someone else to make more money. So why did he do it? He was already creating games, but they were not fulfilling his need to create a PCI. It's almost as if, over time, a hole is created that slowly fills with inspiration. When it fills up it overflows and spills everywhere, leading not only to the creation of a PCI, but also to a life changing event for the creator. The act of creating a PCI is a PCI to the creator of it. It's inevitable, really. Creative people can't avoid it which might be the only reason we have inspired games that challenge convention.

If a designer is placed in an environment where they have total freedom all of the time, will they ever become inspired again? Or will they fall victim to the successes of their first titles, thus generating a creative "template" that their brain falls back on whenever a withdrawl is needed from their giant hole of inspiration. This can lead to designers pretty much making the same game every time, even though they have free reign.

Not all is lost, however. I recently represented Southpeak Interactive at the VPD Summit in Folsom, CA at the end of July. It was my first show, and I had a lot of fun meeting some real salt of the earth alcoholics sales reps. For real though, these people know how to drink. I didn't meet a single asshole, just a bunch of wonderful people. One man I met there was Joe Gonzales, and we had a hell of a conversation which is what actually motivated me to log in here and write up a rough draft of this post. His view is that game design should be about making games that change people's lives. The money will follow as long as you do all the marketing well, and don't have your head up your ass. It was very refreshing to meet someone who has been in every facet of this industry to have this point of view. I was under the impression that such dreams of creating art through games were crushed under the hammer of experience, under the layers of glaze that lead to jaded hopes. I was worried that one only has enough time in this industry to have big dreams before it becomes all about the benjamins. It's nice to see this isn't always true.

Games can truly be about the bigger picture in life, capable of delivering profound messages that change people's lives. We are getting closer to this as the creation of games becomes more accessible, distribution/marketing becomes easier, and games become services versus products. It will just get better.

Just don't give up like Japan.