Game Developer Rants from the GDC

[Teuthida]

Wonderland: Burn The House Down (http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/burn_the_house_.html)

Greg Costikyan

In the most heated and applauded rant, Greg Costikyan discussed creative stagnation. Costikyan was originally a developer of paper based games and is also the co-founder of Unplugged Games which publishes mobile games. In his talk he stated that he has researched the cycle of popular games since the earliest table top games were developed decades ago. He stated that the Microsoft keynote address "made his flesh crawl" and that the age of innovation in the video game industry is over. Higher developmental costs and larger teams will mean that publishers will be less willing to take risks which in turn will stifle creativity and lead to more homogenous gaming experiences.

Costikyan went on to include Nintendo in his rant saying that the company could have shipped development kits to thousands of eager third parties to work on their next generation of titles but instead chose to rely on the ideas of a single aging game designer. He said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata "has the heart of a true gamer, and I wonder what poor bastard's chest he carved it from". He remarked that if the industry's current idea of innovation is "blowing into a microphone," then future of gaming will most definitely consist of endless Grand Theft Auto clones.


Chris Header

The rant closed on a technical note with comments from Chris Header, who works at Definition Six Inc, a development company that works on high-end physics and graphics technologies. His slant on the industry was that the graphics and physics engines are based on sound code while the actual gameplay code is poorly constructed. This leads to great looking games that play horribly. In the next generation of systems the code will become more difficult to write. Header stated that the processors of the next Xbox and PlayStation are "in-order chips which process in-order core slower than the current machines". What does this mean? It means that the industry is adjusting its hardware to accommodate poorly written code, and this "sucks".

There seems to be a lot of developers sharing the same worries. People really weren't that impressed with the Microsoft speech. There seems to be too much focus on this so-called "HD era". As one developer said...If you make HD into a key selling point for your console, you've potentially alienated a huge majority of consumers. Is Microsoft really willing to do that? "Xbox is so busy trying to look cool to American teenage boys that it looks like they might forget about everyone else - again."

The future looks grim.

[GameMaster]

It's a little disheartening but those are only two opinions. You could also argue that maybe these guys just don't like their jobs? Those who are passionate about it will find ways to work around the disadvanatges.

[Teuthida]

Gotta love angry game developers. Some very good (and bias to a point) views below.

How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are ****ED [laughter]. We are well and truly ****ed. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can’t afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it’s ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of redwood city! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation’s time there are still games to love. You can start today.
[standing ovation]

Wal-Mart drives development decisions now. When publishers minimise risk by kow-towing to the retailers, you have a serious problem. When every game has to either be a blockbuster or a student film, we got a real problem.

We’re the only medium that lacks an alternate distribution system. All we have is boxed games sold at retail. This is changing a little. But think about our competition for your entertainment dollar. First run, broadcast, reruns, DVDs.. you name it. hardback, paperback, e-book. Theatre release, pay-per-view, video, DVD. We put our thing on the shelf at Wal-Mart, it sells or it doesn’t, and OMG you just blew 10m dollars.

I don't know about you but I could have been a lawyer, or a carpenter. or a sous-chef. How many of you are here because you’re after a paycheck? [One bloke raises his hand, audience laughs and crows]. Ahuh. And how many of you are here because you love games? [all hands go up]. Right. So we’re being told that everything’s going to get bigger. Paychecks. Budgets. Consoles. But is it going to get better? I’ve been researching old board games and I’ve spotted a pattern. A new genre: it’s called One Hit Game And Its Imitators. One fishing game appears in mid-19C and dozens follow. Games grow through innovations. Creations of new game styles that spawn imitators and whole new markets. The story of the past few decades is not about graphics and processing power, but startling innovation and industry. That’s why we love games. BUT IT’S OVER NOW!

Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto.

Games keep essential social myths in place. So we have tropes in our business. Criminals are cool. The commercial game business is a non-consensual relationship between middle aged men and young boys. It’s worse than the catholic church. These are guys who have really big tyres on their trucks … and we all know why! [laughter] So the fantasies of these guys position these boys as tiny little clones: so they force you to take your genius to create this .. this .. we can’t have that fellas. Oh by the way there was a crowd in the ladies bathroom today. w00t!

GTA. I talked to 22 little boys in LA, all of them wanted to see that game. With only one exception, the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren’t interested in stealing cars. Or the criminals. Or the back-story. They weren’t interested in that, they wanted the simulation of driving by the house.

We model male ethos in the games we design: soldier, super athlete, criminal. Anyone who was born with internet and computers are prosocial. Skaters are mainstream. We have two models of alpha maleness: skaters and ballers [I have no idea what this is referring to - A]. … we need heroes, but what kind of heroes are we making? Where’s Malcolm X, or Chavez? There hasn’t been a game about geopolitics that was worth a **** since Hidden Agenda! We should be giving people rehearsals for citizenship and change. I have to tell you, Microsoft is the walking dead. DRM is a wet dream. It’s not gonna work! Cat’s out the bag! When this happens, you have to let the cards fly in the air and fall where they may. GIVE IT UP ABOUT DRM. GIVE IT UP ABOUT OWNERSHIP. Cleave to open source! A NEW ECONOMY IS COMING. As we become further connected we will find new economies emerging. We are the wellspring of popular culture. We have a responsibility.

It pains me to say this but I recently just took a job at EA. However, I worked for Will on the game you just saw, so.. [laughter] I’m going to rant about How Sony And Microsoft Are About To Screw Your Game Design. Look, how are we going to get where gameplay, graphics and physics are all evenly well balanced? At the moment we’re the 120lb weakling, except nowadays his right arm here, graphics, is enormous.

So, as you know, graphics and physics grind on large homogenous floating point data structures in a very straight-line structured way. Then we have AI and gameplay code. Lots of exceptions, tunable parameters, indirections and often messy. We hate this code, it’s a mess, but this is the code that makes the game DIFFERENT. Here is the terrifying realization about the next generation consoles: I’m about to break a ton of NDAs here, oh well, haha, I never signed them anyway.

Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, which is there to make crappy code run fast. This was really good for the industry when it happened, although it annoyed many assembly language wizards in Sweden. Xenon and Cell are both in-order chips. What does this mean? It’s cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of cores. One out-of-order core is about four times [did I catch that right?Alice] the size of an in-order core. What does this do to our code? It’s great for grinding on floating point, but for anything else it totally sucks. Rumours from people actually working on these chips – straight-line runs 1/3 to 1/10th the performance at the same clock speed. This sucks.

We hope Nintendo doesn’t follow Sony and Microsoft on this, although they totally flailed this generation so anything could happen. Think about batchable designs and simulationy systems. You wanna just write the gameplay. You could just do PC games. Luckily due to the power of Will Wright, our game is a PC game! [laughter]

Q: I am one of the bad guys: I’m working on a big budget next generation console game. I want to ask about totally legalised piracy? Not Russia and grey market – I’m talking Blockbuster. 20 dollars a year you can borrow whatever you like then give it back. People are going to rent my game for 4 dollars. I won’t see any of that. They’re robbing me!

Chris: I’m pro-piracy. I want people to play the games I make. I do it because it’s art. I think DRM is a total ****ing stupid mess. If the game industry collapses and can be reborn, I’m all for it. Pirate on!

Greg: they’re not pirating the game! Someone bought a legal copy! The world is not designed in such a way that money inherently funnels its way into your wallet!?

Warren: I never minded piracy. Anyone who minds about piracy is full of ****. Anyone who pirates your game wasn’t going to buy it anyway!

[Null]

some bring up somewhat interesting and maybe valid points. others sound like they almost have no idea what they're talking about, or have extremely biased views.


but the future looks fine just as it always has. games will continue to develope at thier own pace no matter how many times a company tries to force an innovation. i dont know what some people are expecting, many have very unrealistic expectations.

[Jonbo298]

Good stuff, and interesting stuff

[Perfect Stu]

Sounds like people are wasting a WHOLE lot of energry doing their best to preach what they think "SHOULD BUT WILL NEVER HAPPEN!!!!!"

They make their little point, and the world has not changed the next day.

Thanks for coming out, though.

Honestly now...people will buy what suits their fancy. Whatever interests them. Companies do what they can to provide consumers with these products. Everything else is just mumbo jumbo that takes care of itself. Just because some talking head thinks this is 'oh-so-wrong' isnt going to do squat.

Maybe more people preferred 'Marble Madness' as opposed to 'Baseball Stars' back in 1987. Today, clearly more people prefer 'MVP Baseball 2005' over the latest puzzle game. That's just how it is. Niche games will always have their niche markets. Videogames have become much more mainstream, and the mainstream want games like Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Gran Turismo, Zelda and Madden NFL. That's where the money is...and that's the bottom line.

Games are not doing people an injustice today. If everyone (like one guy says) likes games that are INNOVATIVE and NEW and DIFFERENT, then EVERYONE will pay to buy them. And if that's the case, go make your innovative game, have people buy them, and let that be the end of it. Quit b*tching...the world doesnt owe you a living, you have to go out there and make it happen.

[gekko]

Actually they can make a difference. It's called small business. While EA may be trying for a monopoly, they get their employees from the same pool as everybody else. If the game developers aren't happy with what's going on, they slowly start to go away and do their own thing. Look how many gaming studios have been started after a few lead programmers broke away and created their own?

You don't think this stuff makes a difference, but how involved are you with the game development community? This is the same reason people fled to open source, and look at where that's at. the same thing happened in the web development community, and now there's more people than ever sticking to standards and open-source languages because they grew sick of playing Microsoft's game.

If game developers bitch to other game developers and they all agree on the same things, changes will be made, they have to, or they will lose their best employees.

[Crash]

great read. heh heh heh

oh course game developers are going to bitch... they are all a bunch of college-age or a little older, and that demographic bitches....


but you're right, unless people stop buying crappy games, publishers/developers will keep cranking out crappy games

mario party/madden/tony hawk/exteme whatever sport/

something new would be refreshing....

something like DDR/donkey konga/splintercell all great games with innovation

[MuGen]

Interesting read, but unfortunately I don't care about a few developer's rants. Rants are exactly what they are. Sometimes they are there to blow off steam, or they are there to force on others their own views.

Each brand has their brand games... And one of the rants coming from someone who is a designer of unplugged and table top games? Far be it for me to think this person just doesn't like the digital era?

In any case, my opinion is that the future will be the future. Why try to predict it and be disappointed in the long run. We live each day.... We don't live a week ahead. Live day by day, not worrying about what will come, only what can be if w/ the decisions you make.

[Stray_Bullet]

Hundreds of games will be made. Only a couple need to be good. I'll buy them, have some fun, save some money, and have spare time to boot! Yahoo.

[Solid Snake]

I think there is some truth to what they are ranting about, EA being a good example of a company that is a lot of graphics and poor game play. I also think that now that companies have the ability to cram a lot into a game they will find new ways of writting code, (like the ability to use C++ for example), that will make programming for the new games more streamlined.

I also agree with Stay Bullet, they will make hundreds of games but I will probably only buy around 10 or so of the very best.