The magical connection: Games

So it's been over a month since my last post and I can say it's for good reasons. It seems like the moment I turned my attention to the area of creating video games, some "magical connection" turned on and suddenly lots of interesting things started happening in my life. I've suddenly found myself with the possibility of various job offers, I've learned overwhelming amounts of stuff about games, game design and the game industry and I've had some amazing conversations to boot. In the following days I'll be posting some of the nuggets of information I picked up in this seemingly very long span of time. I'll start off with one of the new strange thoughts that popped out of my head after two days of "state of the games" info picked up at the "German Gamedays" conference two days ago...

The thought:
That the nature of life is for things to grow to their fullest capacity and development, but as this approach tends to create dinosaurs who are doomed to extinction, mutation appears with the random innovation to save the day. Many mutations fail to produce anything new, but every now and then one succeeds in changing the direction of evolution and opening up new possibilities for growth. So it seems to me that the role of the individual artist, the rebel, the one-man army, is that of the mutant gene, the creative gene which creates a new branch of things that no one else can or dares to foresee, but without which the life of ideas would come to a swift end.

The things that led to the thought:
"Top Jobs of the Future: Working in the Games Field"
It was a rather informal presentation, with two top guys from one of the world's largest browser based games company, Klaas Kerstin (CEO) and Ralf Adam from Gameforge. As a footnote, Germany is the world leader in browser-based games. Basically they told their stories of passion, love and success as a game designers and finished off with sugary descriptions of what it is like today to work for a game studio. Think of informal clothes, loose schedules, healthy meals in a top class cafeteria, a basement loaded with arcade machines and consoles, loose hierarchies, good pay and plenty of creative space for all. It bears a striking resemblance to the Hollywood style special effects and animation studios (plus or minus the ping-pong tables, gyms, mini-cinemas, etc). The feeling in the audience seemed to be a mix of skepticism vs internal drooling...

Rewind to the previous day, Ubisoft's Benedict Grindel and Christopher Schmitz talked about "Why big games need to be made by big teams - or do they?(...)". They spoke about the 2 to 4 year production cycle and the team size needed to churn out AAA titles, think 80 to 400 people (Assasin's Creed). Mr. Adam, previously mentioned, seemed to be in favor of smaller teams (under 100 people), argumenting that larger teams and longer cycles burned out the people and made things very impersonal.

Enter the Americans:
A little bit later that day, veteran game designer, writer and presently on the board of directors for the IGDA, Mr. Bob Bates ("Game Design:The Art and Business of Creating Games) was joined by Robert Wallace, (retired manager consultant in the business) and guess who..? Ralf Adams again... This discussion panel got interesting, with Bates arguing for the individuality and creative authorship of the individual game designer; Adam going for the middle size yet still personal co-creation team and Wallace stating that the upcoming business model would resemble the Hollywood production cycle more and more (this is the AAA/Ubisoft approach).

In the midst of all the flurry of conversations (particularly the ones happening right after each talk, in the halls), I suddenly realized a basic fact of "Big Things". I am referring to anything from a biological organism to any human endeavor which grows and develops into a massive living system. Sometime ago I had read the phrase "Much gathers more and loss leads to greater loss", and it suddenly came back to me in a flash, along with a feeling for the history and development of the videogame industry. In Germany, the demand for artists needed for the continued growth of these hungry "company creatures" is exceeding the available pool. Just think that Gamesforge, the browser based game company, has grown 4500% since it's founding days (2003!). Mr. Schmidt from Ubisoft, made it very clear that their only way forward is bigger and better. They are expanding their markets on all platforms and all kinds of games, not just the AAA ones. They are the second largest game publisher in the world and it would seem like they intend to keep it that way or become number one...

So it was in this context which I came to think about the role of the individual artist/inventor/enterpreneur... The world produces both massive creature/systems and independent creators running in parallel. These apparently antagonistic elements are impartially put out in the merciless game of life, death and rebirth, playing itself out, over and over again across time.

Coming up next: Back to the game engines!