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Deus Ex Creator On How a Video-Game Academy Could Fix the Industry
Nerval's Lobster writes "In the fall of 2014, 20 promising video game developers will begin a yearlong (and free) program at the University of Texas at Austin, where they will study under some of the gaming industry's most successful executives. 'The idea is to get the best of the best of the best, run them through a Navy Seals boot camp of sorts and not force them to worry about "how do I pay the rent and buy groceries,"' said program leader Warren Spector, who is responsible for creating well-known games such as Deus Ex. 'Fingers crossed, when we start delivering graduates who can contribute in major ways to the development of future games, that philanthropy will continue.' In a wide-ranging interview, Spector also talked about how his future students will be graduating into an industry in which 'every business model is broken, which is either terrifying or an opportunity depending on how you look at it.' Focus groups, analysis of historical trends, and aggregated game review scores may be comforting to number crunchers, but the majority of game projects still end up as commercial failures. Spector ultimately believes the people who actually make the games are going to make better decisions than the number crunchers. 'We've got to be looking forward and any time you start bringing data into it, you're not," Spector said. "I pitched a Lego construction game in 1989, and guess what: Minecraft is basically a Lego construction game. But at the time I was told "no, that won't work." I pitched a western game and the response was "westerns don't sell." And then Red Dead Redemption came out. Stuff doesn't sell until someone makes one that sells, and no amount of data can reveal what new thing is going to sell. The metrics and data guys, and the publishing guys will never come up with the next big thing.'""
Spector ultimately believes the people who actually make the games are going to make better decisions than the number crunchers.
The people with the money call the shots. How will a year-long boot camp for programmers make managers and number crunchers listen to programmers when they don't now?
Ideas are easy. Everyone has a great idea for a video game. Developing that idea into a functional product is nothing like simply imagining the final product and maybe bits of gameplay and then starting to program it. And he was likely the one being turned down, not his ideas, although it might have seemed that way.
Great, so they can be scooped up by EA and churn out shit like Madden 2013: You Bought it Again.
-- Ethanol-fueled
That's only half the problem.
The problem of game designers learning from current executives is the other half. Honestly, if game companies are only churning out rehash after rehash and unwilling to take risks on new ideas (sounds a lot like Hollywood, doesn't it?) what could you learn, other than what creates failure?
I spent the weekend analyzing Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2, what made these films fresh and funny where so many with so much to offer (great art, great 3D, etc.) flop like the Lone Ranger - easy, look where Pierre Coffin was schooled - GOBELINS, l'école de l'image, spend some time looking through the galleries at student projects, there's a lot of fresh creativity on display there.
What made a standard (from the 1980s) game format like Angry Birds succeed was in taking a risk, simple graphics and fun game play - a formula which works time and again, but it succeeded wildly where other game developers are focusing on cramming too much of everything into a game and leaving the fun to suffer.
An academy with past designers, who were very successful in their day, before they burned out or were put on a treadmill at EA , would work well.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Established "vets" like the ones mentioned in the article are a real problem. Most only have one real success under their belt, with a whole string of mediocre or outright crappy games to follow. The idea that they are somehow the lone voice of quality in the industry is just crap. The fact is, these entrenched vets with name recognition are the ones sucking up funding so they can spend 2 or 3 years developing their current pet project that has no more or less chance of success than anyone else's. Setting up a school specifically to breed more of these kinds of people will only result in more "rockstar developers" who are convinced that they are the best qualified for create a new game, and publishers will probably throw money at them as a result.
Nobody is going to fix the industry. The industry functions quite well just the way it is, grossing more than Hollywood for years now. If we're talking about the precious industry, that financial success is the only thing that matters.
Now if we're talking about ART... That's a whole different problem. Art is anathema to the industry. But this is also true of Hollywood, so we can assume the same sort of results fairly reasonably. Art will still happen, in spite of the industry, not because of it. It will be accidental. It will be serendipitous. It will be the result of one madman with a vision. It will NOT happen because of some hothouse training program.
Those of us who have been in the industry think of something else entirely when talking about fixing the industry. The radical instability of development houses is what needs fixing. Nowhere else in the world is there so little code reuse, and so little retention of talent. Maybe the customers could get some of the things they want, like more reliable ship dates, and better code quality if that were fixed. That's a whole different problem from endless sequels and poor design though.