Three years ago, I chose to give up the security of regular employment to become a freelancer because I wanted to take control over my life. What I had experienced prior to 1998, both within and without the game industry (the greed, the power struggles, the ever-increasing demands on employees' time) seemed alien to me. I could no longer focus my efforts on fulfilling someone else's idea of what my goals in life should be, so I dropped out.

I never regretted it. Sure, I make less money than I could if I were still a studio executive, and more than a few of the people I meet think I'm insane, but the feeling of being able to set and achieve objectives that actually mean something to me is worth every penny and sideways glance.

For a while, that feeling of self-control vanished in the ruins of the World Trade Center. As I watched the towers tumble to the ground, I was hit by the thought that someone else - the most despicable and contemptible kind of human being in the world, a religious fanatic - was going to dictate the terms by which I, along with every other sane and peace-loving person on Earth, was to live.

As I write this, it seems that the worst of the crisis is behind us. However, there remains a lingering feeling that, as individuals, there are an endless number of phenomena over which we are powerless, from incredibly unpredictable economic systems, to ecological collapse, to madmen bent on destroying civilization.

How we and our societies deal (or fail to deal) with the ever-increasing complexities of life is the topic of Thomas Homer-Dixon's eerily prescient book, The Ingenuity Gap:

What Homer-Dixon calls the Ingenuity Gap happens when a society's capacity for producing solutions is outpaced by the complexity of the issues to be resolved. At that point, problems spin out of control. If the gap happens in some relatively benign context, like our continuing inability to predict the weather, it is merely an annoyance. But if a nation can't solve more fundamental problems, like the rise of religious extremism, social conventions can break down, as we so traumatically learned this year - and as Homer-Dixon predicted in the last page of his book, published long before September 11th:

Homer-Dixon says that the capacity to generate ideas is the most important driving factor behind sustained growth - but as systems become more managed, they lose the ability to fix themselves without further human care, and the need for new ideas to keep them stable grows exponentially.

For this book, Homer-Dixon conducted a staggering amount of research, and it shows. The Ingenuity Gap mostly discusses environmental issues, but it also covers urban design and architecture, economics, aging, the Biosphere experiment, video games, chaos theory, and the evolution of the human brain. It is not light vacation reading by any means, but it is extremely worthwhile, and this column barely brushes up against a small portion of its surface.

In our small corner of the world, the complexity explosion is easy to notice. Witness:

Signs that the situation has passed the breaking point are everywhere. Only a handful of games make money, and far more drive their developers to bankruptcy. Specialization leaves the individual developer largely helpless, like the animal in an overly narrow ecological niche that is absolutely vulnerable to changing habitat conditions. Ironically, what little power the individual retains is essentially destructive: while a single developer can hardly ship a product that will compete with a multi-million dollar behemoth (Chris Sawyer excepted), he can easily disrupt a schedule until a team project collapses, because the more moving cogs there are in a machine, the more ways it can break.

Homer-Dixon says that, when a society can't generate enough ideas to solve its environmental problems (or when political pressure prevents them from being implemented in time), the result is chaos, mass migrations, insurgency and social breakdown. The game industry has its own "environmental" issues. Retailers stock very few products for very little time; imagine how well the music industry would fare if the typical record store only offered a few dozens of CD's that would go out of print after 90 days. And we do have mass migrations: just look at the legions of experienced developers who leave the industry never to return because they can find better conditions somewhere (anywhere?) else.

How do we solve the ingenuity gap in the game industry? Even if we had the power to fix whatever is broken in our business, would we be able to? The industry has become such an intricate network of competing interests, dependencies and (more importantly) unknown interactions that we'd have no idea what to change and what the consequences of our actions would be. Right?

Maybe, maybe not. Homer-Dixon says that the most difficult step is to recognize the existence of a problem:

As is usually the case, we can't assume that a solution will come from above. In Quebec, elaborate government subsidy programs were put in place in 1997 to attract investment and new jobs in new media. The results of Montreal's "Cité du Multimédia" have been underwhelming, as most of the jobs "created" by the programs would have been created anyway - or, in some cases, were simply taken away from other areas of the city. And, as Homer-Dixon notes in a very different context, when the IMF dropped in to "fix" Mexico's broken economy in 1995, it did so "at a huge cost - a cost borne, for the most part, not by Mexico's corrupt elites or foreign lenders, but by the country's middle class and poor."

The solution, if any, will come from the ranks. Positive signs of change are already evident. Game developers have, implicitly or explicitly, started fixing the broken complexities of their work, at least on the development side. Five to seven years ago, every studio developed every bit of their technology and content in-house. Then, all of a sudden, a market for licensed engines and outsourced art creation popped out of thin air - not to mention the one for game development books, where the accumulated wisdom of the community is being shared in open fashion like never before. Internet distribution is already a viable way for mid-list and independent publishers and developers to earn a living despite being shut out of the retail space. We will see more of this in the future.

Elsewhere, a "simple life" movement is picking up speed. People who feel dispossessed and powerless vs the complexity of contemporary society renounce competition and consumerism to gain a measure of control over their own lives. This type of "spontaneous burst of simplicity" has actually happened many times in history, in many different contexts: Homer-Dixon mentions the case of the first jet engine, which replaced the hundreds of moving parts of the old piston engine with a single one and improved commercial flight in the process. The popularity of retro games and small Flash web games shows that a significant class of players is ready for just such a phenomenon today.

At the very least, simplification is preferable to nature's other mechanism for managing out of control complexity: mass extinctions.

We do live in stressful, complicated times. Recent events have shown that we can rely on the professionalism and generosity of others in times of need, but also that there are limits to how effectively a complicated system can be managed from above - most of Sept. 11^th's terrorists were in the U.S. legally, and they all boarded planes with enough weaponry to cause a disaster.

So let's make things simpler for ourselves and for each other, shall we?

BIO
François Dominic Laramée has plagued the game industry for almost a decade, finagling his way into a variety of short-lived jobs as studio head, producer, designer and programmer, until he ran out of luck and was forced to become a (mostly starving) freelancer three years ago. He is in no way responsible for the success of the more than 20 console, PC, online and board games for which he claims unwarranted credit, and should never have been allowed to edit Charles River Media's upcoming book "Game Design Methods" or to publish his insane ramblings in over 35 articles and book chapters. Visit his mediocre web site, http://pages.infinit.net/idjy, at your own risk.

Editor's Note: The Ingenuity Gap is available on Amazon.com.