Warren Spector: On Life After Disney and Gaming’s Role Models
As a sort of lead-in/promotion for Warren Spector’s newly-launched monthly column there, GamesIndustry has posted an “exit interview” with him, in which Spector laments the “soul-crushing” nature of AAA game development:
Q: You worked with a very large team on Epic Mickey 2. Are you looking forward to working with a smaller team in the future? Would you ever tackle something on such an (ahem) epic scale again?
Warren Spector: Oh, man, am I looking to work with a smaller team! I loved the Junction Point team. Position by position, that was one of the best, most talented, teams I’ve ever been privileged to work with. But there were just so darn many of them. I like to interview every candidate for every position at my studio – and I sure like knowing everyone’s name. When you get to nearly 200 people and have another… well… insane number of partners outside the studio itself, knowing everyone’s name is nearly impossible. And interviewing everyone? Forget it.
As far as the scale of future projects goes, you never want to say ‘never,’ but I sure hope I can work on smaller projects, at least for a while. As cool as triple-A games are, the time and money that go into them now is just soul-crushing, at least for me. There are so many voices you have to listen to, so many legitimate stakeholders, it’s just a lot less fun than making games should be. I think there are plenty of smaller-scale, still-high-risk – that ain’t gonna change! – projects to tackle out there.
Spector’s first article at GamesIndustry, meanwhile, looks at the gaming industry and wonders where all its role models are.
I look around and, outside of a very few indie games and, of course, the self-styled and largely unheralded “serious games” movement, I don’t see any mainstream developers or publishers offering this kind of serious fare. Ever. As a medium we remain mired in action and genre conventions. Even what passes for seriousness in mainstream gaming seems to require zombies, serial killers, aliens or demons to attract an audience.
If I were to say I wanted to make a game about rescuing hostages in Iran — without guns! — assuming I could figure out how to make such a game, I’d get laughed out of the pitch meeting.
Similarly, there’s no way any publisher is going to fund development of a game about Abraham Lincoln that doesn’t involve actually fighting alongside the Union army, leading it to victory. The behind the scenes machinations would take a backseat to an elevator pitch along the lines of “You are honest Abe! Once you used your axe to split rails. Now you must use it to split heads!” or, if you’re a gamer of more serious intent, perhaps “Do YOU have the military expertise to Defy History and lead the rebel troops to a victory the real world denied them?!”
Can you imagine a game about a guy on a spiritual quest in a boat with a tiger? How about two old people struggling with the pain of love and aging? Or the story behind a raid to kill the world’s most notorious terrorist? Okay, we could probably do an okay job of that last one, though probably not the events leading up to it – do you water board that guy or not? Seriously? But you get my point.
Spector doesn’t offer any real answers to address the issues he highlights, although he leads into his article by warning us to expect that. The tone of the article is, overall, very much in line with Spector’s other recent criticisms of the gaming industry, and his tendency to bemoan the levels of violence (especially) in games today.
He’s being silly. The reason combat is so prevalent in games is because it’s comparatively simple to create unscripted play with robust, deep mechanics out of combat situations. You could make a piece of software depicting those situations he describes, but would it be much of a game?
Craig Stern touched upon this topic In his excellent article describing the nature of skill-based RPGs: http://sinisterdesign.net/toaster-repairman-the-strange-and-unfinished-evolution-of-rpg-character-creation/
“This last concern becomes especially problematic because skills used in emergent systems are mixed with those that can be used only at specifically scripted points in the game. Consider combat for a moment. Combat is generally an RPG’s most highly emergent system. Combat is built upon a number of actors operating according to simple rules, which then produces unexpected and complex situations. There are dozens of different factors in play at any given time in battle: a single scenario involves dozens of player decisions, and is unlikely to play out exactly the same way twice. This emergent quality makes combat a tempting choice to form the backbone of a cRPG, since it offers a much higher ratio of entertaining possibilities relative to development time spent than a more static system (such as, say, dialog trees) would. Thus, combat ends up accounting for a huge chunk of playtime, which in turn makes combat-related skills the most consistently valuable skills in the game.”