Slashdot Mirror
Do Game Designers Burn Out Like Rock Stars ?
Reader Ant wrote in to mention a Guardian Unlimited Gamesblog article which asks: Do Game Designers burn out like rock stars? From the article: "The games industry is getting on a bit now, and so are many of its key 'superstars'. You may not think it, given the proliferation of sequels and movie tie-ins that clog up the charts like that sickly white glue in the veins of heavy smokers, but this is a creative business. No matter how many people are involved in the process, there must be a spark of inspiration somewhere at its core. So what happens when the spark falters, or goes out?"
"The EA Syndrome" will soon be in our vocab
Is this truely a valid comparison? Most rock stars burn out from too much partying. Most game designers burn out from too much crunch time. Aside from the exhaustion presnet in both, there doesn't seem to be much of a similarity.
So what happens when the spark falters, or goes out?"
Then you make a game like Doom 3. Seriously, great tech, bad gameplay.
Will there or won't there be a Grand Theft Auto 6 from Rockstar?
...got fed up with all the sex and drugs that came with designing Combat Solitaire 4.5!
There's a difference between creativity and marketing. Creativity is what spawned the ideas in the first place and led to many of the games we love today (Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, etc). Marketing is how something sells.
Many designers get stuck in a rut with what they've initially created. When something sells once, it's very difficult to walk away and not try to continue cashing in on it. So, the designers often get put on the same product series again and again. This leads to a lack of creativity, as their primary goal is to redesign a concept within heavy restrictions.
A developer like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, for instance, is constantly being put in the chair of developing his Zelda series. There's only so much he can be innovative with and still push the title as a Zelda game. As a result, the end product will tend to not have the same drastic impact upon the gaming world. It'll be a reworked, more-of-the-same type of game, if you will.
There are still creative products being put out there, it's just that the series effect tends to hinder further innovation.
I hate to break it to you pal, not only are your ideas NOT revolutionary, you also have no freaking clue what a design document looks like. Real design docs go over 200 pages. You've got what...6 paragraphs?
I especially love how you declare yourself "world class", and you have all of *3* ideas posted, all of which are cheap tack ons to already existing games.
Here's some harsh reality for you. Nobody is going to come across your webpage and hire you as a designer. In fact, they are less likely to hire you, after seeing how shallow your ideas are. You wanna get into the design biz, get a job at a small company as QA, put in your time, and work your ass up to design.
World class, my ass. You've haven't got the foggiest idea of what goes into making a game. A designer like you is far more likely to hurt a product than you are to help a product.
It's difficult for most people to top themselves. Game designers are people too.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Then you have folks like Peter Molyneax (also mentioned in the article). He has some really great game designs under his belt. But the last 8 years or so have been filled with one disappointment after another. Honestly, Pete, if you'd just keep your big trap shut until you have a working demo, you could save yourself a lot of heartache.
Then there are the Sid Meyers of game design, who, while they haven't shown a lot of innovation lately, certainly know how to please the masses by re-working their tried and true formulas into fresh masterpieces. Half Life 2 and the new Pirates were both very derivative of their predecessors, but both added enough fresh gameplay and new features to make me fall in love all over again.
So let's go through some of these:
... I think that one was obvious to anybody in the MUD scene LONG before Ultima Online came along.
... AFTER Tribes was already announced (in 1995.) BTW, Halo 2 has a ladder, although you're correct that most FPS games omit it.
You predicted that graphical MUDs would be successful after years of successful text-based MUDs.
You also knew that the next FPS evolution (i.e team play and vehicles) was going to be, basically, Tribes
But what I don't get is this: Of COURSE you can prove yourself as a game designer... just build a game. If you can't afford the time to create a graphics engine, use Torque or make a Unreal or Half-Life MOD. The difference between you and the people who won the Make Something Unreal contest is that the people who won the Make Something Unreal contest actually, at some point, sat down and designed a game.
Comment of the year
Have you played Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance or Mortal Kombat: Deception yet?
Or possibly, Mortal Kombat Adventures, Vol. 1 released on the Playstation?
How about Dynasty Warriors: Empires? Or the Story mode in Soul Calibur, Soul Calibur II, Tobal No. 1, Tobal No. 2 or Ehrgeiz?
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
So get a fucking team. When are you going to stop making excuses for your pathetic self and go out there and change the world?
Those MOD makers in the Unreal contest I talked about? They put together teams to get their games made. What the hell's stopping you?
Comment of the year
You are one of those rare few here on Slashdot I just have to follow. I would say you were a troll, but a part of me wants to believe that people like you exist. It seems to me that you lack the ability to truly assess your own abilities and reality. Just like with your religion, you try to argue some form of logic with people...but your logic is so flawed it is impossible to take you seriously. So you claim to be the best RTS player in the world (or at least with a few games). I'll play along and pretend this isn't just another delusion. Being really good at video games has nothing to do with being a good designer. You see, you are using messed up logic by saying that as if it matter. If you were #1, of course people would look at your strategies and try to learn from them. But just because you say you can predict the future of games, when other people have validly pointed out that stuff have existed before you thought it up, does not make you a world class designer. You have to do something. What separates you from world class designers is that you have yet to design anything, yet to really show any skills (I mean, in something as important as God, you have an awful looking page with spelling errors), and basically just say a lot of bs that everyone can see through.
I can't get to your pages because you somehow managed to overwhelm the server with your text. But I don't even need to read it, since we are not even close to true artificial intelligence in any form. I have a Master in CS, I took plenty of AI courses. No one is close yet. But the generel concept of having good AI has been around for a long time...like in HL where the troops will shoot at you and then flush you out with grenades if you hide. Saying you want true AI is like a 4 year old saying he wants a giant robot with lasers to shoot people. It sounds great, but let's see you do it. If you were smart enough to actually create something truly AI, you would be a rich, rich man. The only way you will be rich is if some sucker is pulled in by the garbage you spew out.
But good trolls so far...I am having fun...I will keep an eye on you.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
You have a LOT of free time for someone who can't actually make an actual game.
Comment of the year
Do they look like rock stars? No. More like 1980s rap stars. Who looks like rock stars then? Kernel hackers. OS hackers look like church music stars and hacker anthropologists look like movie stars. As you see, all of the hackers look like stars, but only kernel hackers look like rock stars, except those who look like sport stars. If you have any other "Ask Slashdot" questions, you know where to find me.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
All the old greats worked in a different industry - a smaller one, with smaller teams, smaller budgets, and more risk-taking.
It should come as no great surprise they've ended up going back to their roots and doing work as indies or for portables. I know *I* wouldn't want to put up with the crap that goes on at EA or Atari or whatnot.
Thats the thing, I know games so well I'm overlooked.
I'm only telling you this because I hope you'll listen. You're not being overlooked because you're really good at playing video games. You're being overlooked because playing video games has absolutely zero bearing on software development, and because nobody starts in game design.
What you're doing is saying "I have this neat idea for a jet engine that eats peroxide to keep itself clean, put me in the cutting edge lab at SkunkWorks," and all the while, your resume shows no experience in aeronautics, physics, materials engineering, mechanics or math.
If you want to be a game designer, first you have to become a programmer; no successful artist can work in ignorance of their tools. I say this with firmament having read your web page; not to be rude, but some of the things written there seem to be an indication of total ignorance of machine limitations.
You suggest things like that once we get machine vision going, suddenly AI will just jump into our laps, with neither any fortifying argument nor any evidence, and seemingly without realizing that many non-intelligent creatures can see. Belay any discussion of the watershed level of the intelligence level of a deer, please; we're well past the level of the intelligence of cockroaches already, and many far simpler creatures than cockroaches have sight.
Your progress in AI page contains things like logs of the crashes of MS Windows, frustration with image blending algorithms and compilers, photographs of rooms, but nothing actually about artificial intelligence beyond a rant filled with points like "okay, so, we need it to imprint like a duck, that'll be good, that way our computer will trust us and obey us; one way to teach it would be to put stuff on disk, but better would be voice recognition; you can use verbal commands to teach it, as long as they're in terms of objects and actions it's already familiar with." Maybe this'll be a shock to you: we don't have any computers which even have the concept of familiarity yet.
Making a list of loosely-related speculations about what might work well is not research, and it is most certainly not invention. If you want to be taken seriously, get rid of the list that says "my best invention is potential AI, the reason Cyc fails blah blah blah." Nobody's interested in bare speculation; it's useless.
Write functioning code, or stop pretending to be more than you are. This is hardly even up to the level of armchair quarterbacking.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I'll take the liverty to answer that question for him :
"Reality"
Crazy Jim,
Good name, because you are crazy. I went to your website and your games are terrible. If you are world class, I must be galaxy class because I am so much better. My game idea is to make a online RTS FPS MMORPG. its called empires of pac-Craft!1!! It is so good. You control armies of pacmen that battle ACROSS TIME! Pacman is still a top selling game! I'm making it even better. alsoyou get Tetris-based inventory. If you cant make your stuff line up like tetris blocks you lose it. Ha ha ha. Awesome! It's for hardcore gamers, not girls or boys! Seriously, everyone talks about massives,, but no one has this great idea of mine. When you buy the game you are teamed up with some other player. Maybe the President of USA or an angry chinese kid. Whoi knows it doesn't matter. That is the only person you can play against so my game makes high scores and world peace because you get to know each other and differences and stuff. I don't know how to program yet, but I've written codes for big head mode and free lives in m$word so I just need some help. I'm looking for artists because the game will be in 2ds and 3ds and maybe 4ds if we have time. ha ha ha. seriously!!! It will hopefully come out on the PS3 because I should have the money to make it by then. My grandpa is going to die soon and hes rich! So um, yeah, Crazy Jim I'm gonna hire you to fire you when I'm rich. ha ha ha! seriously.
You predicted that graphical MUDs would be successful after years of successful text-based MUDs
Actually, his prediction postdates the first successful graphic MMOs, too. Have a look at the early histories of GEnie, Delphi and Compuserve; they offered massive online games whose game mechanics, if not whose quality of graphics, frequently rivalled or bettered those available today.
StoneCypher is Full of BS