Culture Clash March10

Every month, Matthew Sakey discusses culture-oriented issues of gaming, ranging from the evolution of critical language for understanding the new medium to the culture of gaming and how the nongaming public perceives the industry.

The Beast Within

We hurt ourselves, every day

By Matthew Sakey

"Wait till you get to this level," reads the Myriad Pro-looking copy overlaid on a print ad anyone who subscribes to any gaming magazine has seen about a thousand times in the last few months.

The implication is that it's spoken by this snappy-looking metrosexual dude in the picture, clearly master of his universe, seated at an IKEA-alike table in an IKEA-alike conference room. He's holding a piece of paper in his hand. Five colleagues are arrayed around him: four women and another man, all young, attractive, multiethnic, and (in a subdued professional cooler-than-you sort of way) totally gobsmacked, like seriously dude by what's going to happen when "you" get to "this level."

And anyone who knows anything about the games industry reacts this way:

"BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*snort*HAHAHAHAHAHA*sob*HAHAHAHA(etc.)" The tears follow quickly on the laughter.

"We know you," the ad goes on, "your idea of happiness is working crazy hours on the release of the new sci-fi shooter." Oh, that shooter. I am excited about that one. I bet it's like Halo, but.

It's not the people in the picture, so ridiculously coiffed and dressed to the nines in superlative business-casual form. It's not the 4:2 female-to-male ratio in the room. It's not the slack-jawed hero worship with which the speaker's coworkers eyefuck him (you can be like him, the ad implies, and he created this level, and holy smokes, just wait until you get to it). It's not the "wait till you get to this level," a remark so sublimely, panderingly idiotic that only an advertising copywriter could come up with it, and a nongamer one at that, even with its superclever double-meaning - the game's "level" is a revelation, but you yourself could get to this level in the world of game development - do you see what they did there? Do you? It's not even the Swedish particle board, exposed brick, and corrugated metal haute panache of the room. It's the combination of these things that fuels the nauseous eye roll. The ad is as ridiculous as that one for the U.S. Air Force where black-clad supertroopers coordinate to dodge space junk, and as revoltingly misleading.

Beyond the absurd level of stage management that even a chimpanzee could recognize, The Art Institutes, with this ad, attempts to not just justify but actually glorify poor quality of life and crunch times as some people's idea of happiness. Despite what Dave Perry or Julian Eggebrecht insist, crunch is no one's idea of happiness. This ad emulsifies and smarmily misrepresents nearly every aspect of development, and it's offensive. In one badly lit shot, The Art Institutes managed to capture what every grandparent and aunt believes making videogames entails: sitting around in stylish conference rooms with hot women (or men), blandly commenting about this or that "level." The game will make itself, that ad suggests. You just have to sit here and look good while discussing it. Oh, and since working crazy hours is your idea of happiness, that's even better. Presumably "game development is about to make you its bitch" wouldn't draw as many applications.

I'm a big supporter of games studies programs at the college level - both design/development programs and theory. So it's not that some university is advertising that bugs me. It's the way it's done, like gamers are so stupid, so easily misled, so eager to suffer, as to fall for whatever melodramatic horseshit the local agency happens to stir up. And of course it goes beyond just school ads.

Sony's reality excrement The Tester has raised a hackle or two in the industry. Developer and old friend Ben Hoyt, in a rare fury for the easygoing fellow, emailed me thusly: "Sony should be ashamed of themselves, as should any self-respecting game developer (David Jaffe?!) who would participate in such a gross misrepresentation of the industry and one of its most critical - and already misrepresented - roles. It trivializes what we do and makes it look like any jackass in the world is qualified. If I were a tester I'd be particularly offended... as if running in giant hamster balls has anything to do with qualifying you to be in QA."

I've always equated QA in game development to the Traffic department in advertising. Traffic Coordinators work 120+ hours a week for salaries just a hair above the poverty line: getting sandwiches, checking spreadsheets, buying plane tickets for superiors, taking notes in meetings, enduring torture - and, commonly, sexual harassment - from higher-ups, and generally being miserable. I once worked in advertising. Most of the Traffic people I knew had crushing debt (Traffic in our agency got no-limit American Express cards for the millions of small expenses they were expected to take on. You have to pay an Amex bill in full every month, but our agency was notorious for not reimbursing expenses in less than half a year), drinking problems, insomnia, and stress-related illnesses. They were the lowest of the low, and most agency employees made certain to remind them of this on a regular basis. Similarly, testing is a tough, often thankless job, though not without some positives and opportunities for upward mobility. Matthew Burns outlines the realities of QA in his delicious four-parter In the Dungeon. Sony's show demeans QA and game development as a whole. It makes game development into a game - something it most certainly is not. I think Penny Arcade summed it up nicely.

I often find myself frustrated these days. Gaming and game development is becoming ever more mainstream, with ever greater positive attention being paid to it. And yet there are people within the industry who actively seek to trivialize not only the hobby, but those who make the hobby possible. In a world where some Brobdingnagian number of people play Farmville every day, where an obscure Ukrainian shooter like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat moves two million units, there are still rotten apples right in our own barrel. Jaffe, who's got the clout to refuse to participate in The Tester, should indeed be ashamed. As for the rest - the Perrys and Eggebrechts and Sonys and Art Instituteses and so on - when will they realize that they're only hurting themselves?

Matts Bio

Matthew Sakey is a professional writer, designer, and interactive media analyst. In addition to writing the monthly Culture Clash column for the IGDA website, Matt also maintains the popular gaming and entertainment site www.tap-repeatedly.com. His work has appeared in several other publications, Games for Windows: the Official Magazine, Develop, The Escapist, Game Developer, and Play Meter. Matt serves as an industry consultant and analyst, working with developers on story and gameplay, educators on curricula for game studies, and corporate clients seeking to leverage games-based technology for e-Learning. For more information, visit www.matthewsakey.net or email matthewsakey@comcast.net.

© 2010 Matthew Sakey. All rights reserved.

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