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Angry at Apathy

The Game Developers Rant

by Matthew Sakey

The inaugural Developers Rant, held a year ago at GDC 2005, was received with howls of support from the live studio audience and vague derision from those who hadn't attended. Reading the transcript it's clear how it might seem – to some – that revered developers Greg Costikyan, Brenda Laurel, Warren Spector and Eric Zimmerman were more whining than ranting. Some events simply need to be attended to be appreciated, because as anyone who sat in the audience (even those of us wedged between two unhygienic Super Size Mes in the back) could tell you, there was an energy and a passion in that room that simply can't be a byproduct of whining. The panelists were angry, not whiny, and that's really the point of a rant.

But 2006's rant was subtly different. There was anger – it's not a rant without anger – but there was also a sense of activism. Along with the desire to complain about what's broken, there was zeal to fix it. Indeed, the optimism and excitement about the future seemed to pervade the entire 2006 GDC, despite what can only be considered a pretty lousy previous year for the games industry.

After some introductory comments by Developer's Rant host/GameLab honcho Eric Zimmerman and IGDA boss Jason Della Rocca, the floor went to Area Code's Frank Lantz who, in keeping with the unpredictable nature of these things, immediately subletted a minute of his five to Robin Hunicke of Maxis. Though not part of the official program, Robin's mini-rant was probably the most important, focusing attention on large issues of intolerance and objectification – and, in turn, on serious shortcomings in game content – that have long plagued the business. “What's Next?” she asked, calling on the conference slogan as a way to tear into this industry's most shameful side. “Hot chicks.”

Everyone who attended GDC this year was forced to walk by a little art gallery in the main hall whenever they changed rooms or went out for a smoke. Sponsored by ATI and theoretically intended to showcase rising stars in the field of game art, it actually cast an unflattering spotlight on the grossly inappropriate and hypersexualized portrayal of women in games. Was the art nice? Sure, some of it was great, insofar as talented artists did it. But the slutapalooza in the hallway was also degrading and offensive. I was embarrassed walking by it, so I can't imagine how women felt as they did the same. A big company like ATI should be more responsible than that. Of course, ATI's mascot Ruby is pretty demonstrative of how the company thinks women should be portrayed – whoreish superheroes whose normal mapped boobs and come-hither attitudes will deliver the world from evil.

Sooner or later developers will realize that Half Life 2's Alyx Vance is probably the sexiest female character in modern games. In her jeans, hoodie, gloves, workboots, toolbelt, headband and fur-lined suede coat, Alyx wears more clothes than an Overwatch soldier and has proportions that a normal human spine could actually bear. She is attractive because she's strong, and smart, and brave, and collected under pressure – and hot, definitely. But she's sexy without being tarted up like a Heavy Metal cover. Despite this, Cro-Mag developers still insist on creating a thousand Jessica Cannons for every Alyx Vance. How one of the more liberal industries on the planet can still insist on treating fifty percent of the population this way is befuddling. And it points to more than just sexism and middle school lust. Issues of tolerance and diversity across gender and race in game content and in the game industry itself have been ignored for too long. It threatens the bottom line and certainly drives away potential creative talent that could bring amazing new ideas to a medium many claim has become kind of stagnant. And the pneumatic pinups in the hall – not to mention the floss-clad, top-heavy female characters in games themselves – don't do much to raise the perception of games or developers in the eyes of their detractors.

After recovering the floor from Robin, Frank Lantz raged against the growing obsession with perfect simulations, with immersion that takes on a reality of its own. The “immersive fallacy,” as he called it, is the mistaken viewpoint that games will get better the closer they come to reality. The truth is once games become reality they'll stop being games and stop being fun. Once the animals on the farm could no longer distinguish between the pigs and the humans, then it no longer mattered which was oppressing them – they were being oppressed regardless. The same, Lantz argued, is true with games.

Do we honestly want an RPG that's so realistic it requires the player to eat, and defecate, and brush his teeth or risk losing them? Games seek realism as a way to immerse the player, but they should never seek to create worlds identical to reality. A space must always exist between the real and the simulated, or else they'll be the same thing. No one “plays” their life and no one wants to. The magic of games exists in the chunks of unreality that separate the simulation and the real world.

Gameplay innovateur Jonathan Blow's rant also bemoaned game content – namely, that games aren't exploring any new territory, aren't covering ground that hasn't been covered before. Technology, and even gameplay mechanics, are advancing by leaps and bounds every year, but they're not what make games rich or powerful. That comes from the intangible content, whether it's storyline, or theme, or resonance with the player or whatever else. A game like DOOM 3 can be a technical triumph but still be derivative and bland, offering no lasting contribution to the canon, while a technologically nonchalant game like System Shock 2 can knock your emotional socks off.

Critics usually refer to this as a lack of “innovation” in gaming, which has become the de facto phrase to complain about the sad truth that games aren't really going anywhere thematically. Recalling the moral challenges faced by players in Ultima IV , Jonathan called on developers to create games that are genuinely meaningful: “games that people care about so much, they can't not play them.” It seems a little cheesy, but the fact is that such games can exist, and will once developers really begin to exercise their creativity in ways that affect people rather than simply entertain them.

Every generation of developers learns from the last: technology, art, audio, AI and of course story and gameplay models evolve organically as new developers build on work done before. If a game like Ultima IV , technologically backward by today's standards, can affect a player to such a degree that its challenges of self-achievement resonate with that player even two decades later, one can only imagine what modern games should theoretically be able to do. That few of them have yet exercised that sort of power isn't a limitation of games, but a shortcoming in the developer ideology. Perhaps, Jonathan suggested, this generation must give way to the next before the really miraculous stuff starts to happen – “Maybe we need to become fossil fuel for the next generation to come along and show us how it's done.” A depressing, if plausible, thought. But even that is a dream that will only come true if game studies programs start including more than just technical training.

Seamus Blackley, in addition to enduring copious good-natured teasing about the ill-fated Trespasser and the mysterious nature of his current role at Creative Artists Agency, warned the room of a longstanding problem associated with the business sense, or lack thereof, in the mind of the average developer. He argued, rightly, that this industry isn't well-known for wrapping its creative ideas in the pastry shell of good business that's necessary to get them supported. Developers are quick to bemoan their inability to get publisher support for their more innovative ideas, but why should a publisher take such a risk of the developer can't make a strong business case for it? Citing the theoretically limited appeal of Brokeback Mountain , Seamus pointed out that the film got the green light, received a healthy budget and went on to turn some pretty good numbers at the box office – presumably because it sold itself to the money people before even a single frame was shot. If developers would think about that more, and learn to present without pretension, they might find publishers are supportive of courageous ideas after all. Good business sense, and a single, industry-wide academy and awards show to recognize beautiful and powerful things that no one would otherwise try, would go a long way toward validating and strengthening the drive to innovative games.

Seamus's rant actually preceded Jonathan's, and the two argued for the same thing from different angles. Jonathan said games need to be more innovative – that developers need to challenge gamers in ways that previous games have not. The common developer rebuttal is that publishers are loathe to take risks on out-of-the-box games. And, as Jonathan said, sometimes these innovative ideas aren't really so great. Sometimes they suck. That's why it's important to have a publisher layer, someone who can look at the idea from a business standpoint, to assess its potential realistically. And Seamus's argument that many publishers are scared off not by innovation itself but by the developer's inability to rationally verbalize the benefits of the innovation was a pretty compelling one. The fact is, publishers are not dead-set against innovation. Remember that someone somewhere green-lighted Shadow of the Colossus , a game we're all going to get sick of hearing about from each other long before we get sick of talking about it ourselves.

Chris Crawford's contribution was the one most likely to go down in the annals as petulant and nonconstructive. “The game industry is dead,” he snarled, “…I don't mean totally dead, but brain dead.” Maybe so; at the very least lots of people would agree with the sentiment. So far, his remarks don't seem too different from those complaining about a lack of innovation. But his solution to the industry's vegetative state, concocted after fourteen years of solitary pondering in the wilderness, boiled down to changing the medium's name from “games” to “interactive storytelling.” His implication that there's a difference between the two, that games are rotting away in a hospital bed while interactive storytelling is squalling into life in the maternity ward down the hall (and, doubtless, past the knocker-rific art show) is a little absurd.

Look, Chris would doubtless say there's more to his idea than that, but there isn't. We could call the medium “zucchini” and it wouldn't matter. The name is irrelevant; the content is the significant issue. The only thing that's wrong with the word “game” is that it's perceived negatively by nongamers, something that wasn't really at issue in the rant. “Games are about things,” Chris said later in response to an audience member's request for clarification. “Interactive storytelling is about people.” Okay, then make games about people. Make games about whatever you want to make games about, just make them matter – that's the important thing, not what they're called.

Last-minute addition Jane Pinckard, 1Up writer and founder of Game Girl Advance, stepped in for developer Jessica Mulligan. Intentionally or not, her rant was the perfect capper for the hour. In the wake of the rest, of the objectification and the wrongness of over-immersive games and the need to innovate and the necessity of businesslike thinking and the fact that games are dead, Jane snapped the boys on the panel out of their rant-induced reverie and back to practical reality. “No more ranting! Let's go do stuff.” She even assigned homework: pick your number one complaint about the industry and do something to fix it on Monday.

Rants are great, and they're always lots of fun to attend, but as Jane pointed out, they're just the beginning. Complaining about a problem without taking positive action is whining. And the industry has been complaining about the same things for a long time. Eric Zimmerman summed it up: “…It seems we're angry at apathy more than external conditions?”

And that's the truth of all the rants: the issues each developer discussed are definitely real, and in many cases they've been around for years. Yet the community has hitherto seemed collectively content to wait the problems out, even if said problems are showing no signs of going away on their own. The challenge, then, is to both continue to rant about it so as to maintain interest, and also to take whatever steps are needed to deal with the issues.

With a few minutes left over at the end of the lecture and everyone tired of trying to figure out the difference between games and interactive storytelling, Chris Hecker – until that moment just a lowly audience member – was invited to provide an encore of the acceptance speech he gave after winning a well-deserved award for contributions to the games community. Like Robin, he wasn't on the program, and like Robin, he said some really important stuff, stuff that sums up like this: games are amazing. Like really amazingly amazing. And they're just getting started – thirty years is peanuts for a new medium. Gaming (or, if you prefer, interactive storytelling) isn't even an infant yet. It's an embryo. It's a zygote. And here we all are, developers and press, academics and businesspeople, players and producers, all here at the very beginning, the inception of something really exciting and really important. As Chris said, “How often do you get to be there at the start of an art form? Once every 100 years?”

It's easy to get dewey-eyed at events like the Developers Rant, especially when they end on as high a note as this one did. Everyone shouted and swore, and called out problems that we all agree exist. But at the end of the hour as people were jostling for the exits, the audience felt like something had been accomplished. At the very least, awareness had been raised. Would everyone in the room rush home and do something about their number one complaint, as Jane ordered them to? Who knows. But that energy was there, that sense that everyone in the room, however peripherally involved with the act of making games they may be, was part of something special. Something that hadn't yet seen its best days. Jonathan Blow said, “The future of humanity depends on what we do.”

You know what? It kinda does.

 

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Authors' Bio

Eric Zimmerman Matthew Sakey is a writer and consultant. His work includes games-based learning design, curriculum design for game studies programs and research into the cultural impact of the medium. Matthew has written on gaming for Play Meter and Game Developer magazines, AOL, MSN, and others. He reviews games as “Steerpike” at www.fourfatchicks.com and consults with researchers and corporate clients interested in leveraging game technologies for learning. For more information, visit www.matthewsakey.net or email him at matthewsakey -at- comcast -dot- net.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the IGDA.