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December
2000
SANTA'S
SHOPPING LIST FOR THE GAME INDUSTRY
by François Dominic Laramée
As you probably know by now, I live in faraway,
frigid Montreal, which is about as close to the North
Pole as a game developer can get without being required
by law to provide food and shelter to any walruses happening to wander into his office. ("What do you do
in Montreal in the summer?" We all go to the beach
that afternoon.)
You can well imagine that living within
snowball-throwing distance of 90°N latitude is usually
a pain in the frozen butt, but it does come in handy
about once a year, when the holidays loom on the
horizon.
You see, old man Claus is practically a neighbor.
When I was a kid, I delivered a couple of bags of
groceries (and quite a few cases of good, strong
Canadian beer) to the jolly old geezer’s shack every
week. Heck, even today, the elves will call me from time
to time to ask "Wazzup?", and we’ll get
drunk and spend half the night tipping the reindeer. We’re
tight, the decrepit dude and I.
Of course, with connections like these, I can get
whatever I want at Christmas. And since you’ve been
reading my little columns so faithfully all year, I
decided to let you in on the scam.
So, here’s what I asked for on your behalf:
For the programmers: Excellent third-party
toolkits to make their lives easier, enough budget to
acquire them, and a slow, excruciating death for the demon-ridden monsters responsible for the PlayStation 2’s
hardware architecture.
For the artists: An X-Box which fulfills its
early promise and frees them from (most) technical
constraints.
For the designers: Respect from their
co-workers. May they never again have to endure the
scorn of programmers and artists who believe that they
sit around all day, doing nothing, when their thinking
is responsible for so much of their collective future.
For the producers: Developers who don’t
collapse into seizures at the mere mention of formal
software engineering methods. Game development projects
have outgrown the "creative chaos" paradigm by
several orders of magnitude; a little discipline would
go a long way towards eliminating those 20-hour-a-day,
three-month-long crunch periods, which in turn would
encourage seasoned professionals to stay in the business
once they have families. Besides, with better methods,
it might be possible to split a project’s workload
between more people without loss of efficiency, which
would speed up deliveries and keep the work interesting.
For the studio heads: More financial leeway to
hire the staff members they really need for their
projects, and a business environment where college
education and people skills are considered at least as
important as the ability to go 36 hours without sleep
and 14 days without a shower. Managing a business is
difficult enough in the best of circumstances; there is
no excuse for the aggravation we inflict on ourselves in
this weird little sub-culture of ours.
For everyone who works in development: Better
working conditions. Everyday, we lose bright programmers
to internet companies, great artists to Hollywood
special effects studios, and first-rate producers to the
"real world". Why? Because they can make twice
as much money for half the workload anywhere else. This
has to stop. Not to mention that this business is still
a bozo magnet; who among us has never been stuck with a
boss straight from an Emile Zola novel, who cared
nothing for anything except the opportunity for a quick
buck at someone else’s expense?
For the publishers: An effective outlet for
episodic distribution. This will give them a chance to
make low-cost investments in "pilot episodes"
of riskier projects with big payoff potentials,
eventually expanding their businesses tremendously when
a major hit draws revenue from new episodes for years.
And a respite from the merger and acquisition terror
they’ve been living under for the past couple of
years.
For the retailers: Nothing. They get enough
from us already, don’t they?
For the freelancers: More business
opportunities. It’s strange, but in a business that
lives and dies by the internet, most development studios
are still scared to death of hiring an offsite
freelancer for even the most strictly delimited project.
Let’s hear it for companies who are not afraid to
relinquish a small measure of control to be able to deal
with specialists. (And for freelancers who actually
deliver the goods once they get a contract.)
For indie developers: More low-cost platforms
with few barriers to entry. WAP, PalmOS, GameBoy, the
web and interactive TV are viable outlets for games
created on a shoestring today; let’s have more, and
with more money in them.
For development studio owners: A fair
distribution model which lets them recoup their
investments and live adequately. Royalties equivalent to
6-8% of retail don’t even work in the book industry,
and a writer doesn’t have a staff of 20 to support for
years. As a special bonus request, a one-way trip to a
Klingon prison camp for the miscreants who insist that
they are doing them a favor when they offer to buy
their content at 35% of cost.
For writers: At least one game which combines
great gameplay and great story as well as Star Control
II did several years ago. Sure, that game’s dialogues
were silly, but the puzzles were great, the
"melee" shooter sub-game (based on Spacewar,
the very first graphical computer game in history, by
the way) was incredibly addictive, the music was the
best I have ever heard in a game and the story was leaps
and bounds beyond most sci-fi movies and TV shows. It
can be done. And all of it was in 2D.
For finance types: A spectacular end to the
e-commerce venture capital bubble. How can you finance a
two-year game development project when the VCs can
(and do) make profits of 600% or more in less than 6
months by bringing a vaporware e-commerce startup to IPO?
For GDC participants: Lots of useful talks,
good weather, enough shuttle buses for everyone in the
morning, lots of great positions available at the job
fair, and food that would actually pass inspection in a
Sudanese refugee camp.
For GDC volunteer staff members: A
registration system that works without a hitch, so that
they don’t have to take abuse from people who are
stuck in line for six hours on the first day of the show
despite having paid their sixteen trillion dollars on
the conference web site months earlier.
For Gignews: Eternal dominion over the entire
Universe, and a crushing death to the puny rodents who
dare to compete with them. All hail the masters!
There you have it. I hope I haven’t forgotten
anyone. If I have, feel free to write to the old man
yourselves, and tell him that I sent you. We’re tight,
I swear.
And now, I’m off to fry my lazy carcass in the
Caribbean. Because quite frankly, I’ve already had
more Christmas than I can stomach. See you next year!
Bio
François-Dominic
Laramée is a freelance interactive game designer, developer and
producer. He has been involved in one form or another of the game
industry, whether PC, console, online, set-top box or even play-by-mail,
for the past decade, including more than 8 years of experience as Head
of Studio, Game Designer, Software Engineer, Producer and Quality
Assurance Manager in the interactive entertainment and spoken dialogue
interfaces industries. Learn more on his website at: http://pages.infinit.net/idjy/
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