“familiar material from presentations by Juul”

Come on, I haven’t written anything about games without goals before, and I took great care to remove all slides that I had previously presented!

Yes, unfortunately the GDC game/story panel last year didn’t lead to productive answers.

Dirk, those ballpark numbers on movie development are informative, thanks.

Patrick wrote, Hollywood … will never return to the brillaince of the 70’s autuer-driven studio pics or the radical energy of the mid-90s indie scene

Once self-published digital distribution of indie films becomes viable, maybe we’ll see a new wave? Just as we’re anticipating for games? Both waves could happen at the same time, in fact, once your average joe can effortlessly download a multi-gigabyte media file.

Anyhow…

My take is, when it’s all said and done, what’s really going to make or break a game is quality. If we’re looking for solutions, the questions we should be asking are, how are we going to pull off making high quality innovative games? We can make indie games until the cows come home, but if they suck, there’ll be no progress.

I suppose we can break that down into several subquestions, including:
- under what conditions does innovation happen?
- how do we create environments for such innovation?
- how do we educate game developers to be better equipped for innovation?

See, while I appreciate Jon and Jane’s suggestions about what we need to be doing on a high level — “We need to make games that people care about so much that people can’t not play them,” “No more ranting! Let’s go do stuff. … Do something positive, make something produce something, create something, otherwise we’re sitting around talking about this forever. It’s about pushing things out to everyone else.” — there’s no talk about how to do that. (Other than “go off to the mountains for 14 years”, which I agree is sometimes necessary.)

I was trying to get at the how to questions with my GDC panel last year, but apparently it wasn’t a situation conducive for productive answers.

In a future post I’m going to propose a particular model for fostering innovation, a post I’ve been meaning to write for some time.

With games, however, there is an even deeper difference: the hit potential of a game can be gauged by the experience of its interactivity rather than the experience of its images. You can’t really tell if a film is good or not until its been made and you watch it and have that visceral, visual, cinematic experience, producing those images at all requires lost of money. Games, on the other hand, can be prototyped at varying degress of cost, and such prototyping enables a refinement and gauging of the potential quality of the title before the full team comes on to burn millions in production. Its different from revising a film script, sure, both frameworks involve being filled out with images in production, but a film’s images is, in a basic sense, the film itself, while a game’s images are extraneous to the eye of a designer on a play-test quest for the right confluence of mechanics.

Chris Bateman and Richard Boon make a great point very early in their book, 21st Century Game Design, when they state that the first rule of game design is that games are designed to meet audience needs. Its the player that plays these games, after all is said and shipped.

Marketing starts before pre-production, it starts in the design. You have to be able to dream up an context and the verbs that fill out that context and then take a step back and think, “who primarily is going to want to play in these ways in this context?” When you can answer that with “probably just a niche hardcore” then its best to go that route, build the thing as scratchware and sell it on Moondance or Manifesto. If your answer is “predominatly females ages 8-15″ then you go make Nintendogs. Thats what Seamus was getting at.

However, for Chris’ purposes, the industry model is more prudent than the project model, since you’ve designed Storytron, which could be called a meta-game upon which many storyworlds can be authored. You’ve got to think of the needs of an audience of storybuilders (which is tough, since its a first generation drama engine) and more to your immediate concerns, you’ve got to think about encouraging a varied portfolio of storyworld content, so that a wider audience will not only be drawn to subscribe to the service, but be compelled to stay a subscribed, entreated by a rotation of divergent dramas to interact with.

In addition to Storytron prototyping, I’m currently considering doing an indie game for the DS. When the concept came to me on tuesday, the first thing I thought of was the nature of the challenge (social) the primary verb (gestural symbology) the setting (a magic school) and THEN I thought of the target audience (predomiantly females ages 8-15). We know from Animal Crossing and Nintendogs that thats an audience that the DS can sell to, so theres a reasonable chance my game might get made. The innovative aspects of it are not merely co-incidental.

Obviously, nobody sets out to lose money, and lots of people try to guarantee success. But in the final analysis, NO entertainment product is a sure thing; every project has risk. My point here is that Hollywood understands this and engages in rational risk-taking, while the games business does not understand this is and refuses to take any risks, ensuring the continuing blandness of its products.

Heres the bigger picture, the powers-of-ten-rule of movie financing:

10 movie ideas => 1 treatment
10 treatments => 1 first draft script
10 first draft scripts => 1 final draft script
10 final draft scripts => 1 greenlighted movie
10 greenlighted movies => 1 movie that gets made
10 movies that get made => 1 hit
1,000,000 movie ideas => 1 hit

The reason why I’m working on interactive characters is that I couldn’t find the money to produce my scripts, and figured that I wouldn’t have to talk to bank managers if all I needed for production was a computer. And I’d be the last one who’d try to say that there are lots of similarities between the film industry and the videogame industry. From what I could see so far, they seem to be fairly different, which is why I’m surprised about the frequency and intensity with which game developers try to compare them. I don’t know any film people who compare their products with games in such a way, so, to me, that’s one of the differences.

So I didn’t want to suggest anything; I just wanted to ask a question. The rule-of-thumb for the movie industry is: For every one movie that gets made which does not loose money, one gets made that does. What would that ration be for videogames?

You suggest that there’s little difference between the games industry and the movie industry in their results. I think that your comparison is incomplete. There are two gigantic differences between the two industries.

The first difference is difficult to pin down; it’s the degree of risk-taking on the part of the two industries. The best way to figure it is to look for the frequency of magnificent flops. Is there anything in the games industry comparable to “Heavens Gate” or “Waterworld”? Hollywood is willing to roll the dice with risky films; the games industry is not.

Here’s another way to look at it: how many huge ROI games get made? A huge ROI indicates a long shot that paid off. A good example is “Pulp Fiction”, with an ROI way over 1000%. These kinds of things happen all the time in Hollywood. How many games can you think of that had this kind of ROI? In other words, how many long shots does the games industry take?

Here’s a third way to look at it: support for the creative base. Hollywood spends millions of dollars on creative pump-priming. They pour money into schools — the games industry is astoundingly chintzy in this regard. The sole such expenditure that I am aware of is EA’s purchase of a vanity chair for Bing Gordon for $5 million at USC — in return for all rights to student work there. That’s not investing in the future, that’s just another sharp deal. And EA made it very clear that this was a one-time deal.

Hollywood spends oodles of money supporting all sorts of young talent. They have a strong creative base of talent that is able to work its way up the pyramid to the very top. A Quentin Tarantino can start at the very bottom and work his way up to the top. Can you honestly say that the games biz is as consistent a meritocracy as the film biz?

Here’s another difference: talent really means something in Hollywood, but it is secondary in the games biz. Yes, we have talented people, but we don’t run on talent. Look at the game credits: they include an army of faceless people. You can put one or more names behind any given Hollywood hit, but that’s not true of games. We have the publishers to blame for this. They honestly think that people will buy an EA game or a Microsoft game. Whoever went to see a Universal picture? Whoever walked into the bookstore looking for a Simon & Schuster book? The games publishers are idiots for trying to hide their creative talent.

There are huge differences between these two industries. Hollywood has been running on creative energy from the beginning. Games have been running on marketing and technology.

Hollywood understands this difference clearly: you fund ten risky projects, nine bomb, and one pays off for the other nine.

That wouldn’t work, Chris; nobvody could be making movies using this formula. An estimate I got from a bank manager who specializes in movie financing is: out of ten movies that get made

- one is a hit

- two break even at the box office, generating profits through subsequent sales channels (DVD, TV, &c.)

- two break even over time (using the whole exploitation chain to get there)

- five don’t recoup their cost.

So half of the movies that get made loose money. Is this very different from how things work out in the videogame industry?

For the last week I’ve been at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Jose. I spent the first two days at the Serious Games Summit, giving two talks on Monday. Then I gave two more talks on Friday during traditional…

My greatest objection was to Seamus Blackley, whose argument I totally reject. What he fails to address is the difference between industry profitability and project profitability. Hollywood understands this difference clearly: you fund ten risky projects, nine bomb, and one pays off for the other nine. What Seamus argued was the very thing that has the games biz in such a deep rut: the insistence that there be a solid business case for each and every game. As soon as you start thinking this way, you lock yourself down to “sure things” — which of course are nothing more than yesterday’s hits warmed over. This is small-time, cowardly thinking by middle-managers. Executives should be able to think on a larger time scale, but most games decision-makers are mousy wimps unwilling to gamble. Unless you gamble, you’ll never fail big and you’ll never win big.

I was also dismayed by the comments rejecting innovation as a limited resource. The games industry is creatively constipated, and here’s this guy rationalizing the absence of creativity on the grounds that creativity must somehow be a limited resource. Well, yes, it’s limited when you have blinders on. But an entertainment industry that tells itself that innovation is ancient history is already in an advanced stage of decay.

Thanks for the report, Andrew!