Culture Clash

(December 2005)

Made to be Played

"Regardless of what age you are, you should play as many computer games as you can afford."
-- Ernest Adams, How to Get Started in the Game Industry, Part 1

Show of hands: how many developers, when asked what they're playing, would respond with a variant of “I don't really play games much any more?”

If we are honest with ourselves, hands are aloft from here to Stroggos. Alarmingly, “I don't play many games these days” is probably the most common utterance at the GDC.

The refrain is fairly predictable. No time. Games aren't as good as they used to be. I sit in front of a computer all day, so I don't feel like doing the same thing when I get home. I'm only not playing games if you don't count the one I'm working on. Of all the excuses, “no time” is the favorite. Lack of time is both vague and sufficiently ubiquitous that everyone sympathizes. Modern gamers, being adults, do have less time. Responsibilities are everywhere, most of them requiring at least a fraction of our day. But saying you don't play much for lack of time implies that you'd play more if you had it. The truth is, for many developers the joy has gone out of play, and that's both unfortunate and potentially problematic.

When something you love becomes something you have to do , it's easy to cease finding delight in it. And love of games is what fueled most people's entry into this business. Very few got into game development for utterly pragmatic reasons. It's rather ironic, then, that most developers' job postings say something like “applicant must love games.” Given the number of times we've heard “I don't play games much” out of the mouths of major developers, a better line might be “applicant must love games but don't worry, that will change.”

There are actual consequences associated with the decline in play among developers. None are apocalyptic, but they're real. The issue of vocabulary is one. Simply put, it's hard to talk about the practicalities of games if you don't play them. Game and movie pitches are similar in that it's easier to paint a verbal picture of a new idea if it is possible to draw on shared experiences with old ones: “ Citizen Kane meets Invasion of the Saucer-Men .” What happens when the studio exec sitting across the desk has never seen Citizen Kane because he “doesn't watch many movies any more?” Everyone in our business has doubtless played, say, The Legend of Zelda or Dig Dug , but time is eating away at their relevance. How many developers would be able to conjure up an accurate mental image if they heard “the control structure of Sacrifice , the combat model of Mount & Blade and the economics of Startopia ?” Simple idea transfer between designers who haven't played the same games may impede development.

There's also the question of whether someone who doesn't play games can continue to make good ones. In not playing games, the industry risks losing the “language,” the invisible grammar by which the medium describes itself and by which gameplay is understood. Since developers rarely listen to gamers, and even more rarely heed what they're saying, they need to know this language themselves lest it become impossible to produce content that consumers find tantalizing. After all, how do you create a game that speaks to players when you don't know what games say? That's like trying to write a symphony when all you know how to play is chopsticks.

Many developers snarkily lambaste and condemn pure theorists – who admittedly are often guilty of getting lost in self-absorbed intellectualism and recursive sentence structure – but at the very least pure theorists play games. The same, by their own admission, can't be said of many developers. Scholars speak the same language, and the scholarship can effectively communicate both with itself and with gamers. Developers, meanwhile, have gotten so used to treating gamers with casual contempt or smirking patronization that they've utterly lost sight of something very important: people who play games know more about what makes a good one than people who don't. Many developers will flat-out say that they don't care what gamers think. Gamers play the games . That alone should grant them a certain degree of expertise.

One of the most important games in recent memory slunk quietly onto shelves a month ago, proving that the development community hasn't exactly mislaid its ability to produce deeply resonant work. Indeed, intellectual and stimulating games are on the rise, and we can hope that tendency will continue in years to come. Concurrent with this encouraging trend, though, many lost-in-the-woods companies are desperately trying to hide the fact that they don't know how to make good games any more. The fact that developers aren't playing much may not be the cause of this, but it's a potential culprit.

I don't mean to just browbeat developers. I don't play as many games as I used to either (no time!). The point isn't that not playing games might diminish product quality – there's no way to be sure about that. The point, from my perspective at least, is that there's something deeply sad about the realization that many developers no longer play games, and some no longer want to. I worry that gameplay-based ennui might be catching. After all, games have always been the source of a great delight for me. The thought of losing interest in something that has been so important is frankly rather horrifying. The wisdom of Ernest Adams shouldn't just apply to those trying to join the industry, but to everyone. For all that development is a business, and a serious one at that, I want to believe that we are still able to look past the tedium of production and remember what it is to just love games.