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Nice Game! No Credit For You, Though
In an interview with GameDaily earlier this week, IGDA's Jason Della Rocca expressed his extreme frustration over Rockstar's handling of the credits on Manhunt 2. You may recall that the core group that initially made the game at Rockstar Vienna were completely left off of the final credits . One of the producers has taken the step of speaking out about the poor treatment he received from the company. Producer Jurie Horneman initially expressed his displeasure on his blog, but followed that up with comments made to the site Next Generation. "I get the impression that Rockstar New York tried to close the Vienna branch as quickly and quietly as possible. The offices were closed down during E3 2006, making it likely that the news would be buried ... As I recall there was never an official press release stating we were closed - it even took some time before it was officially acknowledged we'd been closed down."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision
Sounds a bit similar to Atari in the late 70's early 80's. They didn't credit their developers, so several of them left and formed Activision, which credited their devs quite a bit (commercials, print ads, etc).
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
True, but that doesn't make it any more classy a move.
There's been a real shift away from giving credit where credit is due because things are bought and paid for. TV for a while now has been fast-forwarding and shrinking-towards-illegible credits since they just can't be bothered with it and are using the space instead to promote something else. Movies haven't had credits in the beginning of the movie for maybe 40 years and instead lump them at the end where nobody sticks around for it in the theaters.
It's really unfortunate that our ownership and consumer society commoditizes EVERYTHING to the point where an individual's pride and accomplishment is just trivia instead of a display of credit.
More Twoson than Cupertino
A lot of movies also put little things in the end credits now to make it more interesting for people to stay, so its not all bad.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
What's the point in a list of names I care nothing about? Yes, the list of 100 names flowing before me created the game I enjoyed, big whoop! You know something? I really don't care. Just give me the full ending for the game already. If something impressed me enough, (which would usually be the music), I'll go and look for the composer myself, which is always a simple google/imdb search away.
Nope. The copyright laws have nothing to say on the matter. Credits aren't required at all, they're basically coerced into existence by the people who need them to prove the point for their resumes. I did work on 4 games for which I'm uncredited, and 2 for which I'm credited. The difference was all in my negotiating position for the 6 releases.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Just give me the full ending for the game already. If something impressed me enough, (which would usually be the music), I'll go and look for the composer myself, which is always a simple google/imdb search away.
I guess you're missing the obvious fault in this logic.
If the composer is not officially credited, he's not going to appear in either IMDB or Google.
It's not about displaying names. It's about assigning credit.
You are not the audience for those credits. It's for the industry. When I hire, I care to know what games you've been credited on. Think of it as a resume issue.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
The International Game Developers Association has been working on this sort of problem and is trying to come up with guidelines for giving fair credit to game developers http://www.igda.org/credit/. Perhaps this will give them a bit more attention.
Most of the bigger development places will make at least a cursory check to see if you are actually listed in the credits for something you claimed to work on. If mobygames won't turn you up, for example, it may mean you get a question at the interview about what your contributions were and why you weren't credited.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Give me star wars style of "BAM ACTION!" any day over that credit crap.I disagree, I think it's just another blunder by the worse cut throat industry on the planet.
Now taking people's names out of the credits is a no no. To me that feels borderline illegal. In a movie everyone gets a damn credit, even the coffee maker guy and the cleaner. I don't see why the games industry can't follow, especially when it costs them nothing to do it whereas in a movie more credits == more movie time.
Shame on the games industry but then this is what they're like. They don't give a shit. They'd soon as fire you and replace you with someone less experienced just to save a buck. That's the industry right now. Unprofessional, greedy and heartless.
Read any first hand experience of an experienced game developer and you'll see the horror stories pour out. I still remember one an ex-developer told me first hand. Their manager/producer (?) would throw an employees case out the window and scream "GTFO! You're done". Apparently a big muscled ex-military guy.
Welcome to the games industry!
If you list the designers, then you should list the developers. If you list the developers, then you should list the QA team. If the QA team gets credit, then you should also include Operations...
Eventually, to be "fair", you'd have to list the whole company. If you draw the line somewhere else other than all or none, then you'll be leaving someone off arbitrarily.
This was one of the arguments put forward at Apple to justify removing individual credits from Mac OS X.
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I have been left off several of the credits for games I worked on*.
It sucks at the time. After all credit is just that... being given credit for the work you did. Not being given the credit you earned is kind of a blow.
The thing you really quickly realize is that there's almost never actual malice behind it. A marketing drone or some exec's PA is given the task of gathering the names of everyone involved. When they don't know the dev process well enough to cover a chunk of one department, get the names of the people who're out that day, get the names of people who did the original build but are now on a different project, etc... those people get missed. There's no malice, just a complete lack of awareness from someone who has no notion of what the credit means to the people who sweated over the game.
So, you can get bitter about it and spend energy blaming and hating people... Or you can accept laziness and lack of consideration are unfortunate but they happen.
*Ironically, the MobyGames list misses me from all of the Planetside games - the one place where my ideas actually got directly included in gameplay whereas I'm credited for plenty of games where I only did behind the scenes work.
The "credits at the beginning of movies" BS was foisted upon studios (and more importantly, the audiences) by the film actors' guild. It's stupid and annoying and caused a number of films to take twenty minutes of really boring opening sequence before getting around to actually starting.
If you go to a play, you don't get someone shouting all the mains' names during the opening act. You're lucky if everyone gets an individual bow during the curtain call. But you will get a program with bios of the important people and a list of everyone else. Which is just how it should be.
The credits should never have been part of the performance. With video games it's even easier. You don't have to worry about space, a PDF with thousands of names and a few bios won't take more than a few hundred kB. As long as the list is on the disk or in the manual, that should be sufficient. Anyone can look up the names if they want to, but no one is forced to watch page after page of "Key Grip's Page" scroll by if they don't want to.
Digital TV offers us additional options as well. Imagine stuffing an exhaustive list onto a data segment like closed captioning. Players could be made that record the list for perusal at any point during the show, and the list could be searchable. Heck, you could conceivably have a button that identifies all of the characters on the screen and their actors with a label just under their head. Such a list could be made far more complete than what you could send in a few minutes of scrolling with a font large enough to be read on a standard definition television.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Can I do Help -> About in Windows Vista and see credits for the thousands who helped write that program? What about Mac OSX? Hell what about Firefox?
Why do video game developers for some reason get put on this pedestal compared to other developers - it is all coding. In the end, they did their job, they got paid for it, end of story. This isn't another EA scandal here, this is just a bunch of whiny babies.