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Carmack Addresses FPS Creativity Concerns

Posted by Soulskill on from the if-you-build-it dept.

donniebaseball23 writes "id Software co-founder John Carmack defended the creativity of first-person shooter games in a recent interview. The legendary programmer, who was a pioneer in the shooter genre with Doom and Quake, said he doesn't like hearing from developers that shooters aren't good because they're not reinventing the wheel. 'I am pretty down on people who take the sort of creative auteurs' perspective. It's like "Oh, we're not being creative." But we're creating value for people — that's our job! It's not to do something that nobody's ever seen before. It's to do something that people love so much they're willing to give us money for... you see some of the indie developers that really take a snooty attitude about this,' he lamented."

13 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Still doesnt excuse by spire3661 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Doom III. I'm sorry but Doom III wasnt a game, it was a tech demo. While I understand what you are getting at, you have some big skeletons in your closet regarding this particular complaint.

    --
    Good-bye
    1. Re:Still doesnt excuse by black3d · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't understand what you're getting at. He only made two real statements, neither of which yours seems to counter.

      He said that developers need to create value that people are willing to pay for. Doom 3 sold well, despite it not living up to some's expectations, it certainly fulfilled this statement.

      Then he said that indie developers take a snooty attitude about this approach (implying in context that, rather, indie developers believe every game DOES have to be something that's never been done before). This has no relation to Doom 3 at all.

      It sounds like you're just taking the opportunity to bash Doom 3. Understand, Carmack is arguing here FOR on-rails shooters. He's saying that games don't need to be incredibly creative and new every time they get released, they just have to do their job - provide entertainment that people are willing to pay for. And you're arguing against that by marching out a game which... provides entertatinment that people were willing to pay for. ..

      --
      "The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
    2. Re:Still doesnt excuse by bonch · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It sounds like you're just taking the opportunity to bash Doom 3. Understand, Carmack is arguing here FOR on-rails shooters. He's saying that games don't need to be incredibly creative and new every time they get released, they just have to do their job - provide entertainment that people are willing to pay for. And you're arguing against that by marching out a game which... provides entertatinment that people were willing to pay for. ..

      You're missing the point that Doom 3 was widely panned for not straying from a formula. Doom 3 is the most recent game from id Software, so naturally, it's going to be brought up. The damn thing had monster closets. It wasn't retro in an ironic way, either.

      Incidentally, someone else made the point that the arguments Carmack is using to justify formula shooters are the same that Uwe Bowell and other directors use to justify their generic movies. Carmack is one of those guys who will tell you that big, dumb movies like Transformers 3 are just "doing their job" and that filmmakers making movies nobody has seen before are "snooty."

    3. Re:Still doesnt excuse by Miseph · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And those guys are right, even if you don't like it. Transformers 3 made more money in a day than most movies will ever make. Nobody on that project was being paid to do anything particularly original or interesting... they were being paid to crank out a movie where robots blow shit up. They did their jobs, they got paid, the execs got precisely what they wanted from their employees... and hopefully a chunk of the money that the genuinely creative people who worked on it were paid for churning out the money-making-sequel de jour will go toward creating new and exciting works of art which will genuinely contribute to our culture.

      What he's saying is that anyone who criticizes those games or movies simply on the basis that they have failed to do anything particularly new or groundbreaking or edgy are just being pretentious. Who really thought Doom III should have been chock full of "original" FPS gameplay, anyway? If it had been a stealth-based puzzle game designed to comment Kantian philosophy, that just happened to be an FPS, nobody would have praised it for being "groundbreaking" or thought it was great that id put a new spin on the franchise: they would have called Carmack a goddamn moron for shitting all over what everyone expected with some random bullshit. They would have been right, too.

      Maybe you think it was shit, but it was still what you thought it would be, and you still bought the game based on that. If you see Transformers 3, you aren't expecting to have your mind blown by complex writing (it does feature some enjoyable snark, but every time Optimus speaks it makes you long for the depth and wit of a GI Joe PSA) or an intriguing plot (unless your definition of "intriguing" is XBox huge plot holes and characters behaving without any sort of consistency or logic), you're expecting to see giant robots that turn into cars and blow shit up. If, instead, you got Crime And Punishment, you'd probably be more than a little bit pissed off, regardless of how "original" it would be for Transformers to go in that direction.

      --
      Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
  2. Ugh by bonch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's not your job to do something nobody's ever seen before, sure. But raising the bar should be your goal nonetheless. Visuals are a solved problem, and the days of the tech demo are over. Even the hardware race is over--id's new game Rage is targeting six-year-old console hardware. So what else is there but to push creative expressiveness in a genre that's crying out for some artistic legitimacy on the level that movies and novels enjoy? It's clear that a game like Portal 2 would never come out of id Software.

    1. Re:Ugh by bigpet · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >Visuals are a solved problem

      Psssh, don't tell that to the SIGGRAPH attendees or engine developers because they'll smack you square in the face.

    2. Re:Ugh by bonch · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I wouldn't need to say a thing. I'd just hold up the sales figure chart for Minecraft and watch them blink in astonishment.

    3. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I wouldn't need to say a thing. I'd just hold up the sales figure chart for Minecraft and watch them blink in astonishment.

      1) SIGGRAPH has more than just game designers. I'm sure the medical and data visualisation people will be impressed!

      2) Would it surprise you to learn that "looks like ass" is one of the reasons I don't like Minecraft personally? I don't think I'm a unique and precious snow flake so there must be other people like me. Visuals will only be "solved" (as if the concept even applies to something so abstract) when it is possible to express anything you can imagine in real-time, it doesn't need to be realistic, impressionism works well, cell shading too, but it does need more vertices, textures and better lighting algorithms.

      It's really quite amazing how people insist "graphics don't need to get better" even when you can't even render 1000 NPCs fighting each other in real-time at decent visual quality, there are plenty of flaws that are easy to see yet they are readily ignored. This crap has been happening since the PS1's "photorealism", "we don't need better graphics" and yet the PS2 ate the PS1 and on and on, so much for that delusion. This really just feels like another "get off my lawn" type statement from people who grew up with 8-bit NES or even Atari proclaiming that "in my day graphics were blocky and pixelatted AND WE LIKED IT". Well, guess what? I grew up with that stuff too and it just makes me appreciate how far we've come more than anything else.

  3. Doom and Quake? 1993 & 1996... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > pioneer in the shooter genre with Doom and Quake

    When you're still known best for things done 15 and 18 years ago can you really claim "creativity" as one of your strong points?

  4. Re:Indie anything = whiner by hedwards · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not really, indie developers claim that they can do better and actually try to do better. It's pretty clear from your tone that you know precisely zip about what you're talking about. Otherwise you'd realize that indie developers do put their money where their mouths are. Often it doesn't work out well and sometimes you get something that nobody has seen before.

    But to dismiss it as whining when folks point out that the quality of games could and should be higher is just as ignorant as your suggestion of a game involving that vespa and coffee houses.

  5. Re:"if the movie stinks, just don't go." by bonch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To be fair, COD has a multiplayer component driving it, so when people pick up the latest COD, you want to pick it up too so you can play with everyone else online and take advantage of the latest multiplayer additions. That said, even a multiplayer game can be creatively unique--Team Fortress 2 is fantastic.

  6. Oh Carmack by atomicbutterfly · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Carmack, I like you. I respect you and appreciate what you've done for 3D gaming. But it's clear your strength is in engine design and not game design. Stay in your niche please, and don't pretend to believe that indie developers are somehow being 'snooty' so much as in offering an alternative gaming experience compared to the big-budget studios who are afraid to risk trying anything different.

  7. Carmack's creativity by br00tus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Obviously Carmack is not the sole fount of creativity in the world. But his output is amazing. I still know people who talk about Commander Keen. As far as Doom, Quake and the like, the market has spoken. I have spent many hours playing Doom and Quake deathmatch. There was a time the Internet component of Doom's deathmatch was seen as innovative. As far as I'm concerned, Doom and Quake set the bar for FPS, the way Age of Empires set the bar for RTS (I'm biased against Starcraft...)

    Carmack released id Tech 3's code as GPL. Go look at that code. I spend so much time looking over other people's crappy code. That code looks real nice. I couldn't believe how good the code looked. Clear as a bell what everything does. It's also amazing so little code can do so much in games like OpenArena.

    Reading the book Masters of Doom made me admire Carmack all the more as a coder. I don't know who was wrong or right in the office politics with him and Romero at I.D., most people I know who have met Romero say he's a nice guy. But there's no taking away Carmack's technical prowess.