I don’t think there’s a lack of creativity in the games industry – in the UK, or anywhere else. Games like Rhythm Tengoku, Shadow of the Colossus, Dead Rising… oh wait, those are all Japanese… okay, let’s say games like Little Big Planet, Viva Piñata and Black & White still manage to bring interesting new experiences to the market and capitalise on them. Even the fact that someone can take a game as colourful and charming as Sonic the Hedgehog and turn it into something as awful as Shadow the Hedgehog suggests a kind of creativity, albeit creativity in the vein of the Marquis de Sade.

The games industry is full of creative people with all kinds of weird and wonderful ideas about how and why games should be made, but all too rarely do these reach the finished games they produce. These aren’t drippy art graduates with half-baked ideas like “Let’s make Call of Duty but with flowers instead of guns!”; these are current industry professionals who prove every day that they have the skills required to make games. But even without factoring in office politics (I have heard matching stories from different sources about one of the UK’s top studios, where designers routinely splice new rules and systems in their AAA games without telling anyone because “it’s easier to persuade the project leads to leave them in rather than put them in”) the overriding fact is that games have to make a profit, particularly when hundreds of people have spent the last three years working on it, and studios simply can’t afford to gamble on experimental new ideas.

That’s fine though! I think it’s a crazy way to run a business – especially if you’re not one of the top dogs actually profiting out of it – but in the long run everything will be okay. All those studios that have closed down in the last few years (such as Midway Newcastle, Black Rock, and Bizarre Creations) have splintered down and reformed as smaller, more agile companies (in these cases Atomhawk Design, CCP Newcastle, Roundcube Entertainment, ShortRound Games, Boss Alien, Lucid Games, Hogrocket, and others).

These startups will produce smaller games at a faster rate, with less capital exposure to put them off new innovation. In fact they have an incentive to innovate, in the sense that it’s one area where they can realistically hope to outperform their larger rivals – good design is cheap! Certainly there’s the unpleasant business of the studio collapsing to go through first, but in the long run? Things turn out okay.

“The Indie Scene Will Save The Day!”


You know who has no money and huge stack of crazy game ideas? Indie developers.

Actually I think that’s a dumb stereotype. Many indie games – perhaps most, if you’re factoring in hobbyist and student projects – aren’t really all that original in my opinion, but the purely derivative ones get ignored completely so they don’t usually register in people’s minds. Similarly the image of a penniless indie developer is common, but of course in the real world indie devs can’t survive without at least some modest degree of success – or else they go out and get a second job!

I digress.

The thing that’s been on my mind since GDC – looking at the success of indie games like Minecraft and Super Meat Boy, both of which have attracted a lot of praise and interest from the mainstream industry – is that there’s no good reason why these games couldn’t have emerged from inside the games industry. Sure, there are reasons, but I think these are mostly to do with the kind of crazy business structure and counterproductive cultural practices that I’ve been ranting about in this article.

To give one simple example, I think games companies should allow their employees to work on personal projects and enter game jams on the side. If I was in charge, I would do everything I could to encourage it! It’s pretty standard practice for contracts to state that anything developed during the period of employment is the property of the company. I would guess it’s to prevent employees claiming ownership of things they’ve made during the course of their normal duties, but having a blanket policy like this can be really stifling – I personally know some talented people who have quit jobs over the fact they weren’t allowed to take part in game jams, and many others who routinely break their contract on the assumption that their employer won’t find out.

It actually infuriates me a little to hear Peter Molyneux talk about how much he likes Minecraft!

If this is the kind of game he likes, why do Lionhead continue to exclusively develop big-budget flagship games like Fable? There’s even a precedent in Lionhead’s case: after some employees got together and made Ragdoll Kung-Fu, they left the company to form Media Molecule and create the rather popular Little Big Planet series. And if you think there’s some kind of lesson in there about Media Molecule slipping through Microsoft’s grip, you should bear in mind that it happened in the months before the Microsoft acquisition – if the same thing happened again, Microsoft would be in a great position to sign the new studio up before anyone else knew what they were working on.

Then again, a few months after Molyneux starting showering Minecraft with public praise, Microsoft came out and announced that they would be publishing an exclusive console port for the Xbox 360. Honest praise for a game he liked, or buttering up a future business partner in his role as Creative Director of MGS Europe? If I wasn’t such a hugely bias fan I might not give him the benefit of the doubt.

Minecraft

Notch

That said, I think using Minecraft as an example of anything is a bit spurious – I like the game, sure, but it seems to have very much benefited from being in the right place at the right time, its popularity driven forward by underground internet powerhouses like the Something Awful forums as they screwed around with its emergent mechanics and had fun sharing the results. (There are lessons here in the value of putting toys in your games, and the marketing power of social networks, but this isn’t the time to discuss that either) It’s not even all that innovative really, being heavily inspired by the relatively-unknown Infiniminer and a game called Dungeon Keeper developed by a certain Peter Molyneux.

Minecraft’s incredible success really seems to have sent shockwaves through the games industry. One guy working in his spare time can turn out a simple Java-based PC game that sells millions of copies without any marketing budget! It’s a solid punch in the gut for conventional industry business models – there must be a lot of third- and fourth-string studio bosses out there wondering why they bother with development kits and employees when they could have been making millions like this. If you ask me, they’re right to! If the lesson here is to create personal games with a tight design instead of just making a Grand Theft Auto clone and trying to capture sales between rival releases, then I hope they all learn from it.

Is it worth mentioning that Notch also regularly takes part in game jams? Jus’ sayin’.

Adding to the madness is the recent news that the company Notch founded – Mojang Specification – have rejected a lucrative contract with EA and are instead getting into the publishing business! I have a lot of faith in their design sensibilities, but the idea of them cherry-picking indie games to put on the world stage sounds equally heroic and insane. I suppose my hope is that they’ll make a lot of money from that as well, and perhaps then the industry will pay closer attention to indie developments and maybe even use their initiative to recruit promising indie talent? I can think of a couple of companies that do this already, but I guess most companies just aren’t interested in emulating wacky little artgame startups like Valve or Blizzard.

You’re Doing It Wrong

I should add that there are evidently some mainstream companies keeping an eye on the indie scene for promising new IP! Unfortunately, more often than not they are looking for good ideas to rip off wholesale, as in the case of Gamenauts’ Extreme Fishing vs. Vlambeer’s Radical Fishing.

Of course I think it’s really crass and horrible for Gamenauts to clone Vlambeer’s game like that, but again I pretty much expect that kind of behaviour from faceless, profit-driven corporate entities. Besides, one of the lessons drilled into us during the ‘business’ side of my games degree was that you can’t copyright gameplay – Rockstar can do no more to prevent copycat studios from making their own Grand Theft Auto knock-offs than Vlambeer can prevent Gamenauts from making their own version of Radical Fishing.

To be honest, I like it like that. If games companies could copyright concepts such as ‘power ups’ or ‘experience points’ then I think it would be hugely damaging for game design – these things are like components of grammar in the language of game mechanics, and I think designers need to be able to experiment with them without stressing about lawsuits.

But really, isn’t there a business case for studios like Gamenauts to just hire designers like Vlambeer and get the same design ideas direct from the source? Despite what some people seem to think, a lot of indie designers might not want to work for a big studio. That’s okay too, but to me it  seems like good sense all round for studios to at least make some kind of offer – the studio’s resources would improve the game’s polish and marketing power, while directly involving the designer(s) would at best enable some exciting new ideas they couldn’t explore on their own, and at worst prevent the game from becoming a soulless, empty experience.

I don’t buy into the cult-like belief that indie games are the future, but from somewhere between all these trends – larger studios breaking down into smaller teams, project budgets falling, indie developers enjoying more success – I am confident that a bright future will emerge. As the divisions between the traditional indie development and mainstream studios break down, I think the combination of indie spirit and mainstream resources will lead to a golden age of awesome non-AAA games. You might say this is what’s happening already, in the mobile and social markets; it’s even creeping into the mainstream industry, if you look at the way Double Fine transitioned from Brutal Legend into Stacking, Costume Quest, Trenched and whatever other funky downloadable games they have up their sleeves.

My Favourite Part

The whole issue of graduates not having the required technical skills to work in the industry sounds like a real problem. Here’s the thing: I disagree.

Twenty years ago (!) SNES games were programmed in Assembly. Ten years ago, PS2 games were programmed in C++. Today, most Xbox 360 games have their gameplay defined in scripting languages, while whole mobile phone apps can be developed using the drag-and-drop interface of App Inventor. While hardware has become more complex, the trend in game development has been to move to higher-level programming languages – formats that read more like human speech, that are easier to work with and require less hardcore technical skills.

Okay, okay… obviously that’s not entirely true. Studios still need some serious programmers to create a bridge between these high-level scripting languages and the deep functions of the hardware, and obviously you can’t click together a quest using a drag-and-drop interface unless you have someone around who can program the drag-and-drop software. But in terms of setting rules and defining gameplay, we are always developing bigger and better tools to abstract the technology out and make things easier. If you doubt this at all, you’ve obviously never used Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights toolset… developed 10 years ago! Better yet, just ask Team Meat:

“There weren’t many tools used with Super Meat Boy. The in-game level editor was invaluable because it provided Edmund the ability to make levels with a “what you see is what you get” mindset.” – Tommy Refenes

Democratisation


There is a lineage of easy-to-use game creation software stretching back to when I was a child. I personally have experience of Klik ‘N Play, Multimedia Fusion, Game Maker, Kodu Game Lab, App Inventor and – as of last weekend – Stencyl, and there are many more alternatives out there. What’s really great is that many of these tools are cheap, if not completely free!

This is really one of the best and most exciting things happening in games right now! It’s true that a lot of the games being made with these tools are crappy clones, but the important thing is that people are able to make their own crappy clones now. These tools democratise game development, opening it up to people who don’t have serious technical skills, allowing them to easily experiment with different game rules and learning how they affect the play experience. And even if a particular program goes a bit off the rails, there are an increasing number of alternatives coming up to fill the gap.

This is excellent news for game education because it allows untrained people to get to grips with real game design problems – not ‘how many guns can we fit on the disc?’ but issues like pacing, balance and difficulty. I really think that giving people access to creative tools leads to a huge boost in their understanding how to use them! Just as technology like mobile phone cameras, Flickr and YouTube are changing our relationship with pictures and video, I really think it’s only a matter of time before tools like Stencyl and Kongregate change our perception of video games – not as commercial products promoting adolescent male fantasies, but as systems of interaction that express our experiences of the world.

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