I´ve been working in a growing game company and reading The Black Swan by Nabel Taleb, and its got me thinking that the root of the problem with the game industry isn´t so much risk aversion, hierarchical inequity and creative myopia, as a radically high amount of "expertise" relative to actual performance. We as an industry suffer from an "expert problem" in the sense that we have too many decision makers with too much confidence in their ability to predict what sells and what makes a "good game". At the most intimate level this involves designers flabberghasted by playtesting where other people have difficulty learning the game, find ways to exploit the rules, or find something compelling utterly unrelated to the intended focus. At the highest level this invovles publishers taking a "safe bet" on franchise sequels that... (drumroll) often have dimishing ROIs as the particular market niche gets saturated.
Good game designers don´t write stuff down on paper and assume it will all go to plan, they play with prototypes until something good emerges surrepitously. Good producers don´t dream up a schedule and assume the chaos of dozens of individuals´lives will magically conform to it, they work with those individuals to try and marginalize risks of delay, and the milestone deliverables might still be way off the schedule even with those risks marginalized - thats how probability works. Good investment in games involves permitting the above two principal agents to act without the pressure of pretending to know things. What blows my mind is that the game investment entity most enlighted in this regard seems to be Sony 1st Party, a division of a multi-national corporation that was sure Blu-Ray would dominate media in spite of a format war and the emergence of digital distribution, and staked the majority of their business around that assumption. Even if you gave a couple million bucks to a studio, odds are that the management of the studio would be so egotistically married to their subjective notions that they would fuck it all up. The CEO of Flashbang is a notable exception, if you have any other honorable mentions please note them in the comments.
The only sure thing in this business is a new game dynamic that synchs with people willing to pay for the experience. If you knew what those game dynamics were, you would have already designed them. If you have, congratulations, and good luck getting funding.
Serendipity
Second paragraph, first sentence. I think you meant: "serendipitously"
I would ask you to excuse my pedantry, if this weren't Greg Costikyan's site.
Interestingly pointless ;P
Interesting post, although difficult to catch the concrete message... I'll tell you what -I think- it is the underlying disease: too much Big Egos in this ambit.
Usually the companies are crowded by:
* 22 year old lead programmers that think of themselves like Gods incarnation.
* Then there are the game designers... the stereotype of it has participated a decade ago in the making of a mediocre game, and from that moment, they keep beeing interviewed in the media like some sort of guru.
* And finally there is the money man (pick the title of choice among: producer, publisher, company owner, capitalist partner, etc) who somewhy thinks he perfectly understand what the customers will like, and also want all done in one third of the time, because he *knows* how much time something can possibly take.
Indie or not, any studio with more than 10 people start looking like La cage aux folles.
One side comment on Sony: they really dont know whats going to happen, they just have the more consistent behaviour I've ever seen on supporting the company's stands. Sometimes it goes all wrong, but they regret nothing, and just keep pushing their own branches of otherwise standard technologies (MiniDisc, MemoryStick, etc..)
What about the iPhone?
Is not the iPhone the first viable platform in such a long time that a micro-size company can put out most-any game of their choosing? And without the need for serious funding.
It's that or develop "browser" games - this whole category is in need of some real game designers; I've checked out many of them, and well, it's sad what people are willing to play just 'cause it's free-ish. (Hmmmm...I have a much longer rant on this category for another day.)
Short version:
People thinking they know more than they do is a serious impediment to making good decisions. In soft industries like finance, PR, politics, entertainment and especially games where the product itself is a complex dynamical system, it pays to know what you don´t know and respect those limitations in your work, because otherwise you close off probabilities of discovering something valuable while reinforcing bullshit.
Drake: Of course, the serendipity comes about surrepitously.
Novack: yes, but the ego part of it just comes from tasting the high of "being right" a few thousand times, there are people with far smaller egos who buy into narrative and ludic fallacies. Size is the issue, it would be better to have funding pools for game development cells of a limited size rather than one hieararchy shuffling resources between teams. The difference being that support for teams in the prior case is conditional on lack of assumptions about particualr cells, while in the latter case support is based on management attempting to know how each team is performing and in the processing introducing observer disturbances.
Jack: iPhone is mas o menos, browser yes, freeware downloadable is a big yes. Basically the majority of what we cover is produced by people who to some extent are either not guilty of this overpredictive paralysis or who are guilty of it an interesting way.
I obviously can't vouch for
I obviously can't vouch for every profession out there, but you could just as easily be describing the legal profession. People will be people.
"the root of the problem
"the root of the problem with the game industry isn´t so much risk aversion, hierarchical inequity and creative myopia, as a radically high amount of "expertise" relative to actual performance. We as an industry suffer from an "expert problem" in the sense that we have too many decision makers with too much confidence in their ability to predict what sells and what makes a "good game"."
What you're really saying is that there are too many clueless "experts" at the game companies and therefore just about every game is mucked up as a result.
I remain amazed at how similar the big MMORPGs are too each other. Grind, grind, grind so that someday you can participate in 50-player bottles. Static worlds, endlessly repetitive play.
Yes
"What you're really saying is that there are too many clueless "experts" at the game companies and therefore just about every game is mucked up as a result."
Yes.
This is a problem of "human nature", whatever that is, and of every industry where information is the product. But its particularly a problem in games where the product itself, not just the context of production, is a complex dynamical system.