Another thing that struck me about Pollack’s The Sketches of Frank Gehry (which is now available on DVD for those interested), was a scene where Gehry recalls, years previously, having asked Pollack how he managed to deal with working in a creative field with such strong commercial constraints. Pollack’s answer (in the perspective of his film career) had been simply that you need to ‘carve out’ the little wedge of the project where you’re ‘allowed’ to be creative despite the demands of all the stakeholders trying to mitigate their risks. Gehry said that this was a piece of advice he had carried with him his entire career.
This is a good bit of rather obvious advice I suppose, and there are clear parallels to the way designers in the game industry need to find those small elements of their work in which we can truly innovate and be expressive. What was interesting to me wasn’t so much what was said, but what it got me thinking about beyond the admittedly banal initial statement.
What I started to realize is the incredible advantage we have as game designers over creators in other media (such as film or architecture). What is that advantage? The advantage is simply that we are not the only ones who haven’t really figured out very well how this new media and the industry that supports it functions.
Film has pretty much been figured out – not only from a creative perspective, but also from a business perspective. The Ishtar’s, Hudson Hawk’s and Waterworld’s of film are surprisingly rare, and this is a pretty good indicator that the business guys in Hollywood can turn X million dollars into 2X million dollars pretty consistently – maybe not on a film-by-film basis, but at least on a year-over-year basis.
Granted, architecture certainly has very different commercial constraints to deal with than either film or games, they’ve also had thousands and thousands of years to figure out how to manage the process of constructing buildings that are both financially viable to build and meaningful to the society that utilizes them.
In games it’s different.
I often lament the fact that we haven’t ‘figured out’ game design, and in large parts that’s true. But at the same time, the financial stakeholders in this industry have also not yet figured out how the business model ought to work to consistently generate profit across a small handful of titles. Within certain niches certain publishers have it mostly nailed (like EA and sports titles for example) but there are still a huge number of shots being fired in the dark, a huge number of great games completely failing to turn a profit, and a huge number of projects simply being cancelled after millions of dollars of investment.
If an architect were to try to convince his stakeholders that he was going to build a castle that floats on a cloud, the project would not get green-lighted. But I’m not so sure that’s true in games. Impossible projects seem to get the go-ahead with surprising frequency (only to crash and burn eventually), and what seem like sure-fire winners, often don’t do the numbers they’re expected to.
This probably arises from the combination of a few different factors:
- A need to innovate – simply because innovation has been a core value proposition offered by games for 30 years now.
- A lack of formalized design – even though I lament it, without formalized processes, ‘good’ game design is hard to do reproducibly, therefore, from the standpoint of a company evaluating a concept proposal, it is very hard to predict whether the game can be ‘safely’ designed.
- A rapidly changing market – referring only to the ever increasing age and the ever decreasing ‘status’ of the ‘typical’ gamer (when I was a kid, consoles were something the rich kids on the block had, now games are significantly less expensive and the age of gamers is increasing).
These three factors – and probably many others – are all contributors to the high risk factor in the game industry, and in some ways make the task of figuring out how to consistently turn a profit a much harder problem for the financial stakeholders in the industry.
What’s interesting though, is that if they can’t figure out how to do it as consistently as they do it in architecture or film, then it’s much harder for them to constrain the creators in the industry. Pollack and Gehry talk about having to carve out some tiny little wedge in which to be creative given the financial weight of a film or architecture project. Their stakeholders likely know exactly how much creative freedom can be afforded the Frank Gehry’s and Sydney Pollack’s of the world… but do the stakeholders in our industry know the same? Certainly they’re not blind, and the successful ones are successful for a reason. But it seems reasonable to me to imagine that they are only as good at figuring out how much room to leave for designers (and developers in general) to be expressive as we are at figuring out how to do what we do.
In other words, in face of all the unknowns in this industry, maybe we developers have a lot more say about how creative we can be than we maybe think we do.
If you in fact do have more freedom than you think… how would you know?
And what would you do with it?
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