Slashdot Mirror
Writer's Guild Nominates Game Writing
Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog notes that the Writer's Guild of America stepped back from the picket line long enough to nominate a few 2007 games for great writing. Unfortunately, their nominees suck. The list of nominees consists of: "Crash of the Titans, Written by Christopher Mitchell, Sierra Entertainment. Dead Head Fred, Written by Dave Ellis and Adam Cogan, D3 Publisher. The Simpsons Game, Lead Writer Matt Selman, Written by Tim Long and Matt Warburton, Dialogue by Jeff Poliquin, Electronic Arts. The Witcher, Lead Story Designer Artur Ganszyniec, Dialogue Sebastian Stepien, Additional Dialogue Marcin Blacha, Writers Sande Chen and Anne Toole, Atari. World in Conflict, Story Design Christofer Emgard, Story Consultant Larry Bond, Script Consultant Ed Zuckerman, Sierra Entertainment." No Mass Effect? Nothing at all from the Orange Box? No BioShock? For shame, WGA.
Just speculation on my part: perhaps the writers contributing to Mass Effect/Orange Box/Bioshock are not members of the WGA and hence weren't considered for nomination?
I wonder if the producers for Bioshock, Mass Effect, and The Orange Box will be able to dig themselves out from under their respective piles of awards to offer an apology to the Writers Guild for not employing their members.
That's what the WGA claims is the crux of the strike but when studio execs agreed to deal provided about a half-dozen unrelated items were considered off the table for discussion, the WGA refused. The studio execs are willing to negotiate electronic distribution royalties.
The Witcher is an awesome nominee and I would put it easily up against Mass Effect or Orange Box. I haven't played the other games, but judging by that nomination it is obvious they know what they are talking about. Also, it is writing award, not a hype award.
I have been giving the residuals vs. salary issue some thought recently and here are my initial conclusions. There are two categories of product, finite and infinite. "Finite" products are those that require labor to reproduce, including both goods (cars, computers, etc.) and services (customer support, waiting tables at a restaurant, etc.). Then there are products that are "infinite" (essentially intellectual property), such as scripts, movies, computer games, and recorded music. All of these things can now be reproduced infinitely with trivial effort.
Corporations that sell finite goods can only sell them once; if they want more of them to sell, they must rely on new labor efforts, for which the laborers must be compensated. Corporations that sell infinite goods can sell extremely cheap-to-produce reproductions of their products with no practical limits, and do not require more labor to make them (except for DVD pressings or servers hosting the material for example, which typically represent a tiny fraction of production costs).
Now we address fairness in each of these types of product. Finite products produce a predictable revenue, that can be examined to see if the compensation to the laborers who produced it is considered "fair." Infinite products produce a very unpredictable revenue, that can vary substantially. A movie that performs poorly can make a tenth of what a box office success can make. In this case, the "fairness" of compensation, measured by the ratio of the salary paid to the laborer to the revenue from sales, can vary wildly.
It seems to me that laborers in "infinite" production industries have a very good argument for residuals, from the perspective of fairness.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
It seems to me that laborers in "infinite" production industries have a very good argument for residuals, from the perspective of fairness.
Although frankly, if they want residuals in the games industry, they can get the fuck in line. Behind the programmers, artists, animators, fx guys, et al. (Same goes for the actors - fuck you! You want royalties on a performance that took you at most a week? We slaved over that game for over three years, working evenings, weekends, you name it).
Coming soon - pyrogyra
You are looking for the terms "rival" and "nonrival".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalrous
A related concept is "excludability".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability
One can make a matrix of these two categories and place most products into one of the quadrants.
Music recordings used to be rival/excludable. You could only get them on CD (or tape). If you were using that CD then someone else could not (rival). CDs cost money at the store and such are excludable. It is pretty easy to make money on goods that are rival/excludable as long as people want those goods.
Digital technology has turned music recordings into nonrival/nonexcludable. I can rip your CD and we can now both listen to the music (nonrival). One could put that recording on the internet making it available to everyone (nonexcludable). It is extremely difficult to make money on goods that are nonrival/nonexcludable. DRM technology is an attempt to move goods like this back towards rival/excludable.
Some argue that once your product becomes nonrival/nonexcludable then you shouldn't try to change your product to be profitable but should instead change your business model to fit the new marketplace. Treat the nonrival/nonexcludable product as advertising to sell something else that is rival or excludable -- like concerts or t-shirts.
Since it didn't waste any time with depth and went straight for quality. It's all economy, no fat. In terms of writing, it was perfect: it's so slight that many folks can discount it as "just a game," but for those who look, it's at one time an implementation of "games as learning" theory and the playtest-intensive approach of Valve and a criticism of it. How much of the game is simply an exercise, and how much of it is being measured by some remote server and being scored as a victory? Portal has some of the most endearing writing because it takes the stereotypes of "test gone wrong" (which built Half Life, among others) and the "lying computer", and twists them ultimately into "test gone right" ("This was a triumph") and "truthful computer" ("The difference between us is that I can feel pain" - prima facie so wrong, but on further reflection, so right).
But it also poses the greatest threat to the WGA. Just look at how it was developed. Yes, they had professional writers in the various cabals, and those guys are venerated for their work. Yet their development structure gave everyone input.
Create an environment where extremely creative people who specialize in different disciplines inspire each other to great heights, and the result is greater than any could achieve in their own domain, were turf boundaries established. To do so, however, requires an egalitarian environment antithetical to the traditional management/labor divide. Enslaved masses, forward!