following the money

I was saying to someone a few months ago that there's a huge difference in perception between hobbyist games enthusiasts--people who may know a lot about games from a player's perspective, but who have little to no behind-the-scenes connections or knowledge that wasn't acquired at least second-hand--and people who are, however nominally, in the industry, who have some exposure to the process by which games are made.

One of the odd things I've come to realize lately, as I move further into the production side of the industry, is that modern video games are a bizarre confluence. On the one hand, it attracts some deeply creative people, who are eager to explore and use the medium's potential, but on the other, it's all essentially software development, which is in large part the most boring thing you have ever seen.

Games do a pretty good job of concealing the latter from the end user, since most of the development process that you'll see as a player will involve cool things like concept art, motion-capture, or modeling, but no behind-the-scenes documentary will ever show you the roomful of people who have all been writing lines of code for the last sixty hours, or the dozen bug testers who've each individually beaten the game six times in the last two weeks.

Once you have some idea of the actual process by which games are created, it affects how you're able to regard the conversation about them. I don't have a lot of patience, for example, with forum warriors who label a company as "lazy," because I'm aware of the immense amount of work, manpower, money, and time it took to get a game to the point where they can have an opinion about it. When some dork asks "how hard would it have been" to do something, I have to bite my tongue on that, because odds are pretty good that if it actually had been easy, it would've been done.



Games are art. It's difficult to argue against the point, because a modern game is an attempt to construct an experience for the user. There's not much you can call that except "art." The issue is that building that experience typically consists of a near-constant running battle between the artist(s) and some of the least artistic people you can imagine, the latter of whom often have a larger impact on the final product than they should be allowed.

Anecdotally: I was talking to a guy last year who was a producer on a fairly major title, and he mentioned that the developers had not wanted to include a multiplayer mode in the game at all. The game they were making had been, almost from the moment of conception, a single-player experience, and the developers wanted to put all their energy into that.

They wouldn't be allowed to do that, however, because of market forces. Every game on their level had multiplayer, so theirs would as well. That was the sum total of the argument, and since it came from the people who had the money, the argument was over.

To some extent, I think this is what laymen and end users miss when they criticize games. One is that producing one, even a bad one, is a lot of work; another is that making a mainstream game, like a mainstream movie, requires a lot of compromise at the creative end.

When you go after the creatives for producing a game that has yet another interchangeable white brown-haired rage monster as a protagonist, surrounded by disposable women and dead minorities, you're hitting the wrong target. It's the money guys. It's the people with the purse strings, who have invested enough cash into the project that they don't want to risk even a handful of lost sales due to a protagonist/viewpoint character who isn't the most generic human possible, stuck in the most generic plot possible.

Even those money guys, as short-sighted as they may seem, aren't being conservative for no reason. Pop culture in the 2000s, and so far the 2010s, is dominated by sure things and existing franchises, with only a handful of new works that have managed to barely scrape out a handhold. In a medium meant to replicate an experience, enough end users will apparently drop off if you deviate from that pictured norm--i.e. 80% of Mass Effect players using a male avatar, or Prototype 2 switching to a black protagonist and subsequently underperforming--that it may be the difference between a profit and a loss. Even the most well-meaning, liberal producer is going to find it difficult to argue for inclusion and diversity in the face of being responsible for an eight-figure budget and the future of their company. They're probably going to try to find workarounds (create-a-protagonist, clever writing, threadbare plots that only sort of justify the action, acknowledging the cliche outright even as they embody it), but they're going to fall in line.

When publishers want to take Elizabeth off the cover of BioShock Infinite, or Ellie off the cover of The Last of Us, it's not necessarily because they're out-of-touch sexist bastards; it's because they have focus groups and market data that tell them that these are genuine risk factors in a market that's already volatile.

Thus, it's like this:

"Why are white people so over-represented in media?"
"Because of money."
"Why does the money think that?"
"Because it's a high-risk environment and they're trying to remove risks."

"Why do they think it's a risk?"
"Because the data told them so."

It's a vicious cycle, and the only way out is probably through grassroots support: looking outside the mainstream for your entertainment needs, then building those works up until they have at least as much cultural relevance as the mainstream does. There's no point, if you want to change the representation game, of challenging Hollywood or the games industry, because the creatives probably agree with you but are handcuffed by their own money managers.

To some extent, the same argument probably applies if you aren't concerned about the representation game, but are instead concerned about the predominance of sequels and franchises in pop culture. The mainstream is almost never going to be where you go to get challenged, because they're forced to cast as wide a net as possible. You have to take a chance with your entertainment dollar on things you may never have heard of before, whether that means a $3 comic, a $10 movie, or a $60 game. Otherwise, you're part of the problem.

This doesn't mean that you have to abandon the mainstream entirely, of course, or that the mainstream isn't capable of producing fun, interesting, or challenging work. It's simply that it's McDonald's, and no matter how often you ask, or who you ask, or what you think, or why, McDonald's doesn't sell filet mignon. If you want something else, then you need to go somewhere other than McDonald's.