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Game Developers Burn Down the House

Posted by Zonk on from the the-roof-the-roof-the-roof-is-on-fire dept.

Plenty more excellent writeups to share as the Game Developer's Conference comes to an end. Gamespot has The Dark Spirit of Silent Hill, discussing how to craft the spooky survival horrors. Alice has worked her fingers to nubs writing on the Wonderland blog, and offers up Can MMOs Develop Mass Appeal?, and Burn the House Down, a ranting session between Warren Spector and some other surly curmudgeons. From the post: "But I have to say something so I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We're doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you're gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make. The whole concept of word of mouth, remember that? Holy cow it was nice."

2 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. zerg by Lord+Omlette · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wow, the next time someone says "Don't pirate that game, download the demo and if you like it, buy it!", just point them at that "Burn the House Down" rant. Here are gaming's top people, all saying "Pirate my software!"

    --
    [o]_O
  2. That was beautiful by Torgo's+Pizza · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just read the Burn the House Down article. It brought a tear to my eye. I follow Spector and Rocca closely and I email Costikyan everyonce in a while. We all pretty much think that the development and distribution is broken.

    I've contributed to two books about the subject. The first book I talked about implementing a total quality assurance system to the game industry that's been in use for decades in the auto industry. The second book was built around ways to prevent bug defects which include eliminating the counter-productiveness of 80 hour work weeks.

    The game industry is totally insane. There's no way I'd ever go back unless I could have total control over quality, which means we don't ship until QA has final sign-off. (Yeah, I'm going to get a smartass reply saying "That'll never happen then" but I've got a system and it works.)

    I know work in the health/medical field and deal directly with the Food & Drug Administration. The quality controls I deal with put anything in gaming to shame. Why the gaming industry doesn't use established practices in other industries is a mystery.

    Well, actually it isn't. The problem is that managers have really never truly managed a large scale project outside of the industry and the developers and artists have never worked anything other than games. Gaming is too insulated and is becoming inbred. This practice is slowly making an army of retarded game developers who will shortly implode.