So last weekend I was in Mexico City for the Day of the Dead, which was awesome.
I’ve had a slight fascination with this holiday since, well, you guessed it, Grim Fandango. The game is celebrating its tenth birthday this year.
Here’s games that inspiring learning about other cultures – Happy birthday Grim Fandango! Have another cake from me:
I do still have a job a EALA. Unfortunately a number of incredibly talented friends now do not. If you’ve got work, big or small, I’d be happy to pass along contact info.
Also, a slightly more regular blogging schedule should (hopefully) resume soon.
It’s funny what a few words can mean to somebody.
Especially when those words involve your name at the end of a game you’ve worked on.
Gamasutra has a feature up on that topic, with comments from Mark Jacobs, CEO of Mythic, Jen MacLean, chair of the IGDA board, and Doug Lombardi, dude at Valve.
It is perhaps unsurprising that most studio heads have opinions like some of those presented in the article. They’re simply not directly affected by the problem. The notion that people can avoid working at places that don’t have reasonable crediting policies is a myth, because the large majority of studios do exactly what Mythic used to. If you want to work for somebody else in the game industry it’s pretty hard to avoid it. Kudos to Mythic & Mark Jacobs for making a change and treating the work of all of its employees with the respect it deserves.
I just don’t understand how you can construct an argument against games driven by a personal perspective. How could they have offended to bring this upon them?
Are these types of games really taking away from collaboratively developed games? Where’s the evidence this is zero-sum? I mean, ok, you want to encourage creative work environments, sure. How does that actually take away from someone wanting to express themselves via a game? If that person has the right to express themselves that way, I can only equate arguing against games as a form of self-expression as wanting to deny them that self-expression.
If the argument is that we need to make “radically new types of games”, well, games with a personal emotional outlook are fairly new as these things go. Arguing against them at this point would be an easy way to discourage this newer type of game. We need more of all the above, not less of one type vs. another.
At least the author and I do agree that a detailed discussion of auteur theory here is not that useful. Regardless of theory, in practice some people view themselves that way, and some games are moreso a product of that kind of vision than others. Auteur theory may or may not be masculine-focused as Kael would argue, but how can you equate games attempting to inspire a deep emotional experiences as limiting to a particular gender? The more games we have that communicate different perspectives the more varied game creators will be. And a requirement to have more games with different perspectives is that more games communicate emotional perspectives, period.
I don’t see why there’s an assumption that a personal emotional perspective naturally inhibits the creativity of others working on a project. The only limitation is the creative leadership – if the vision-holder is capable of communicating the core emotional experience to teammates, encouraging suggestions fall under that vision and dealing well with suggestions that don’t (by more clearly communicating the vision while at the same time not discouraging teammates’ investment in the project), that creative improvisational harmony is a positive exeprience. That kind of creative leaderhsip may not be common, but it’s no less common than well-managed collaborative environments.
Games are in fact objects, game development is the process. Amazing games have been born from horrible process. The more we can extricate the two the easier it will be to advance game criticism, game development, and the range of the medium as a whole.
Just a splash of color. Garish by my normally minimalist standards, anyway.