The Issue of Funding: Medium vs. Amusement

With so many, many proponents to games being considered an art form (whatever that means), why is it still ...not? In one word, Funding. With how expensive it is to actually go from concept to gameplay, games are on the trek up the long, hard road to becoming a medium. Traditional art had to do it, as well as movies, music; games have to find their place in our society before we will widely accept them as a medium rather than an amusement.

Before I continue, we need definitions:

Medium - An agency or means of doing something. (Dictionary.com)

I do appreciate dictionary.com for it's eloquence. Games as a medium are capable of things music, movies, traditional art, etc. are not: they allow the user to interact with the thought/idea. This allows artists to tweak the level of transparency to a much higher degree than they can with other mediums. Games as a medium provoke the simple question: Is it the job of the designer to foster the user to build their own experience or to describe to them, inch by inch, what is taking place inside their own imagination? Should I build a world for you to explore or tear open my skull for you to peer inside and look around?

Amusement - The provision or enjoyment of entertainment. (Dictionary.com)

This is the other much more common view: games as toys or novelties; distractions that lack the capability for depth. How can one draw meaning from playing with Play-doh? How is that any different from drawing meaning from games?

The Issue of Funding
Games are expensive to create. Angry Birds, a relatively "simple" design ('simple' as in low number of mechanics, not 'simple' as in lack of brilliance) and low 2D asset load, still cost $140,000 for the first playable. While no numbers were posted, the iOS super-retro game Monkey Labour cost over 300+ manhours for one very experienced programmer, not to mention the efforts of the other 4, +2 on contract.

Regardless of the huge difference between the financial success of each of those, they both cost a lot of money to make. Yes, GTA IV had a mega budget, including marketing/ads in the hundreds of millions, and SW:TOR was the most expensive MMO to create, ever, but we must look at the issue of funding through the eyes of the individual artist; we must look at development costs the same way a sculptor views her purchase of clay, tools, and the rent for her studio space. Very few sculptures cost $140k to create. Yes, you could argue the giant marble blocks Michelangelo carved cost quite a bit, but  Michelangelowas more like the Electronic Arts of his day, not the Rovio. This brings me to my next point:

Funding fuels the creative process.

Consider the painter. Regardless of WHAT she wants to paint, it all costs the same more or less. She is completely free of the issue of funding in this regard. The game designer, much like the director, is faced with the issue that their creative vision will costs large sums of money based on what it is. Rovio could not have made the next GTA, Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, with their team and setup. I'm not saying they were not capable of doing it, they just did not have the funding.

So, in a way...funding is as important to the design of a game as the mechanics and elements. Game Design Documents should be filtered based on the amount of money that can be pumped into it. You also cannot argue that people can simply get together and build something like Gears of War 3 on their own time. They could, but time costs money. They could, instead, spend that time making money and then use that money to fund a large team.

All of this means that the creative process is in the hands of those with the money. Granting "full creative freedom" doesn't really exist in the publisher-developer model, even if both parties want to. The one with the money will always have the final say.

Let's go back to Michaelangelo. The church funded his art, as they did most (all?) of the old masters. Without the church's interest (and money), they would not have been able to exist as artists. What if the church didn't fund them, but some eccentric gazillionaire from another country? Or what if it had been a different religion? What if Leonardo became wealthy off of one of his inventions, and used that to fund his own art, for his own ends? The result would have been COMPLETELY different artwork. This is a prime example of how the issue of funding affects content. We see it today in every game we play: studios are afraid to take big leaps in design, because funding comes from publishers, who are doing the logical thing and taking lowest-risk-greatest-reward projects. Not just in IPs, either, but in mechanics and elements as well.

I get a little depressed when looking at my black book of ideas. I have hundreds upon hundreds in here, but only a few are actually feasible because of how expensive the others are. As much as I love working on one of my big MMOs, in the back of my head there's always a little voice saying that it's just a waste of time. Their design and my craft is limited only by the issue of funding.

The Good News: Commission Based Funding

Certain business models are immune or work around the issue of funding. Alpha-funding, donations, Kickstarter, etc. all work around it. The project earns funding based on the amount of interest. In a way, it's a completely reverse model of distribution: instead of a product being created, set up to be sold, and then the money is made back, the money is made up front. Developers get to (in theory) feed their families, take care of their bills, expenses, etc. up front, while working on the project. When the project is finished, they move on to the next one. They get to always work and make money, consumers get exactly what they want. This is WAY more similar to how today's traditional artists make a lot of their money: commissions. It also front-loads the marketing aspect of the project.

Games are art, in my mind, but our society does not treat them as such: they are bought and sold as amusements. The entire industry is moving in the right direction: front-loaded distribution, lower development costs, and an expanding audience. And when it does happen, when games earn their beret, nobody will notice or even care. It will be as natural a transition as any other; evolution is fueled by the mutations we've seen in the past decade, but the process will always be slow and steady.