There is an amusing scene in the film Amadeus (1984) where enlightened ruler and patron of the arts, the “musical king” Emperor Joseph II, having just witnessed a performance of Antonio Salieri’s opera Axur, King of Ormus, confidently declares it to be “the best opera yet written,” awarding the composer a medal on the spot to a standing ovation from the audience in attendance. This occurs in full view of our hero, Mozart, whose own recent opera, The Marriage of Figaro, has just closed down after only nine performances. One does not need to be very knowledgeable about classical music to know which of these two operas is still enjoyed today by audiences the world over and which has fallen into obscurity.

Lately, it’s seemed as though not a few weeks go by without some long-time editor leaving an enthusiast publication. Just when I feel like I’ve familiarized myself with someone’s output, they’re up and gone. Occasionally they join competing outlets, but often it seems like they more or less “drop out”: maybe do some freelance work while they set up their moody blogs or work on their artsy pursuits. Or, they simply leave the games behind to cover a more respectable industry. Even the people who haven’t left yet just don’t seem to believe writing about games is any kind of sustainable living. I imagine them quietly plotting their escape into actual game development.

How is one really supposed to write about a game? Most major game reviewers spend at least some of their review stepping into the shoes of an imaginary Everyman, attempting to impartially value a game based on ostensibly universal metrics. But there has always been experimentation with a more “gonzo,” experience-based writing approach, focusing on a writer’s personal exposure to the game world, something that doesn’t pretend to be objective at all.

One thing that struck me about this year’s Game Developers Conference was how so many people seemed to be sitting around nodding their heads at each other about how terrible it is that games do not feature enough meaning. Everyone agrees, or seems to agree, that video games just Don’t Mean Enough right now, and that’s why we aren’t being taken seriously by Roger Ebert and all his irritating friends-in-opinion. Onwards the march towards Great Import by injecting more Seriousness, more Sadness (games must make you cry, apparently) and more moving, tragic Reality.

The rapid advance of game technology and their ballooning budgets has resulted in some new trends that I think may become more familiar over the next few years.

Trilogies seem to be the new way to pitch big games.

The basic idea is that so much investment is required up front to create a new franchise that two more installments down the line (with lower production costs) are all but required to recoup the cost. This is sometimes referred to as a “Lord of the Rings” model, since that is supposedly how most of the profit on those films was made. Sequels tend to do well in games generally, and this development model ties in very nicely with marketing (“the story we wanted to tell was just too epic for one game”) and with Wall Street (“we aren’t just publishing games – we’re creating lasting entertainment franchises”). Additionally, if the first game tanks, the next two can always be cancelled. So, it seems like we can expect to see trilogies, whether the material really calls for one or not. Tying in with this is the next trend:

Imagine there’s a company– let’s call them “Midway”– that owns a number of different restaurants, each with its own specialty. The meals these restaurants serve are getting fancier and more complex as people’s tastes grow towards the elaborate. Unfortunately, even though the preparations are more difficult and expensive to make, the price for customers doesn’t have much room to go up. This company and other restaurant-owners are concerned about this trend. It’s clear to that whole industry that everyone will need to figure out to make these extravagant productions in a way that doesn’t bankrupt them.

Scott Sharkey of 1UP.com wrote a list of “tips” for game developers to help improve review scores for their game. I don’t want to sound like I’m on some kind of vendetta – I’m actually quite happy with the review scores for the last title I worked on – but it occurred to me that this exchange of tips might fruitfully go both ways. Just as the 1UP piece isn’t (I hope) meant to implicate all games or all developers, I don’t mean this little response to be a blanket indictment of anyone who has ever written about games, either. Like its companion piece, it is simply a list of pet peeves… except without any funny pictures.

Anyone who’s worked in the game industry for some time has been on a project that came in under the wire– so much so, in fact, that this is unfortunately many people’s exclusive experience with shipping games. Aside from the obvious negative effect this has on our quality of life, and our desirability as an industry for the world’s best creative talent, the last-minute cuts and the seemingly heroic hacks show through in the shipping product as well. Here are some elements to look for in determining how a game’s production went, from smooth sailing (mythical as that may be) to the worst bare-knuckle stress and drama.

Before I begin, I’d like to note that Mass Effect is a great game that I thoroughly enjoyed. I use it as an example here because it’s fresh in my mind, and because I get the feeling that it was meant to be more– maybe much more– than what ended up on the gold disc. I don’t know anyone personally who works at BioWare Edmonton, so everything you’ll read here is just a guess on my part. I mean them no ill– Mass Effect is all the more a triumph, and the team all the more laudable, for overcoming the adversities I’m certain the project faced.

Sometimes it seems like Western video game businesses love to sink money into Japan. From Microsoft’s well-documented and long-running tale of woe trying to sell its Xbox and Xbox 360 there, to Electronic Arts’ multiple aborted strategies for the region (including recently starting up and closing down a complete internal studio, with nary a product to show for it), one gets the sense of a lost cause that can’t be dropped. Why keep trying? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal summed it up this way: “The Japanese market is less than half of the size of the U.S. market, but Microsoft has been unwilling to give up on it because many of the top software makers are based there, and Japan holds huge symbolic value as one of the big videogame cultures.”

Halo 3 will be released in a few weeks, supported by a marketing campaign so large and unprecedented for the video game industry that the Wall Street Journal saw fit to publish an article focussing solely on the game’s advertising, entitled “Here Comes ‘Halo 3’ – With a Side Order of Fries”. This has, naturally, resulted in a lot of cynical reactions from some corners of the hardcore community, especially those who feel Halo is already too mainstream– a game for jocks and frat boys, for people who don’t know what the really good stuff is. But regardless of one’s personal taste for the series, we should recognize that something very important is going on here.

“Why not just use Unreal?”

I don’t think many people who cover the industry actually understand why not– even if they say they do. Ever since Gears of War came out in late 2006, it’s possible to read in magazines statements like, “the game runs on Unreal Engine 3, so it should look quite sharp when it’s released” or “imagine what a studio like Bungie could do if they were using Unreal technology.” The assumptions are clearly made, and they are wrong. Is the general gaming press really this uneducated and gullible?

This is the sort of thing to which we developers ought to pay more attention – in response to Denis Dyack’s rather frenzied comments on how games ought to be marketed, industry journalist N’Gai Croal runs a piece in which he asks a marketer about how game should be developed. Now, I don’t particularly agree with what Mr. Dyack has been saying (more on that later, perhaps), but to turn the tables on him this way strikes me as pointless and condescending. Allowing this moronic marketing rejoinder to what is actually a real and legitimate concern from a genuine creator in our industry only highlights the disrespect with which the industry treats its own lifeblood. Am I being too harsh? After all, maybe this person has some useful insights. Why don’t we take a look:

I honestly didn’t start this journal intending solely to criticize dopey game industry articles, but here’s another that I can’t resist, entitled “Why Is Game Dialogue So Cheesy?” In order to investigate this issue (which is, to be fair, true and a legitimate concern), our author speaks to just two sources: a publisher-side producer at Vivendi Universal, and a fellow game journalist – incredibly, at no point is anyone who has actually written game dialogue consulted. I suppose it wasn’t deemed important enough for an article that is merely pretending to be about the dialogue and story in video games. Unfortunately, it goes downhill from there:

There is a deal done in the business of video game marketing called the review guarantee, which is what it sounds like: a guaranteed minimum score for the (as yet unfinished) game, usually in exchange for an exclusive preview of the title and an embargo on all other publications for a set period of time. I am no PR man, so I cannot comment on how widespread or common this practice is, but I do know it exists, between well-known publishers and magazines, for games you have probably heard of and may have even purchased.

I cannot help but be irritated when developers– whether they be first, second or third party– wade into the province of fanboys, the gaming press and financial analysts by publicly taking sides in the console battle. Recently a developer at Insomniac Games wrote a piece entitled “10 Reasons Why PS3 Will Win This Console Generation,” and at this year’s Game Developers Conference earlier this month, a well-known and respected programmer at Electronic Arts suggested (in foolhardy language) that the Nintendo Wii was not powerful enough and essentially frivolous. Game industry message boards, no strangers to platform brawls, seem even more turbulent of late as the most current generation of consoles touch off emotions like never before. For lack of a better term, this is just disgraceful.

Gamasutra posted an interview with Warren Spector, which starts out promisingly but quickly gets mired in little rants. To be fair, Spector prefaces the particular comment I am about to deconstruct with, “I’m going to alienate just about everybody in the game business,” which sounds conciliatory; but instead of being alienated, I just want to point out one or two specific things which ring false to me. It may seem picky, but we should hold our industry luminaries to this kind of standard because the level of discourse in our industry will not improve unless we do so.

The state of game industry journalism is still terrible. Everything seems to cling to the extreme of either gas-bag meaninglessness or rock-stupid fanboyism. Former ESA president Doug Lowenstein thought this was a big enough problem that he chose to mention it in his farewell address to the industry, describing our press as thoughtless, immature and lazy. Unsurprisingly, few video game news sites decided to make much mention of this, but it's impossible to disagree with him– especially when sites like GameDailyBiz concurrently present articles in which a supposed game critic puts forth the laughably absurd notion that “being knowledgable is not necessarily a prerequisite to being a good critic.” Actually, it is.

But instead of staying negative, I want to point towards something that I like, and this brings me to Insert Credit.

Game developers have big egos. We are always so proud of ourselves! Any artist or creator needs some self-belief in order to project himself or herself forward in front of an audience, but game developers seem to have more than enough. Universally, we seem to think what we are doing is rather remarkable. We are quick to criticize everything around us: publishers, press, other game developers, even our own fans. We are opinionated, even about things of which we know little. We ascribe our successes to ourselves, and our failures to marketing, or timing, or the stupidity of the masses.

It’s time to look at another bit of writing that our industry has produced, this time from one of our purported trade publications. Most large industries have such periodicals; some are a little dry, while others are obnoxious. But if every industry gets the trade publication it deserves, the game industry must be guilty of sins I can scarcely imagine. We get articles like “Game Investing 101,” printed, apparently with serious intent, by GameDailyBiz, “The industry source for video game professionals.”

Much of it is condescendingly obvious, but some of it is actually wrong. As usual, I will refute some of the points that the article attempts to make.

Woe is the professional game critic! Nobody takes him seriously. Film critics are lambasted by consumers and studio executives alike for being out of touch with the movie-going public, but this at least lets them stand by artistic merit as the true measure by which they judge a film’s worth. Literary critics work in the medium of their topic, and occasionally earn genuine respect as artists of prose in their own right. But the game critic rattles around in small box and wonders if anyone outside even knows he’s there.

A low percentage of players actually finish the video games they begin. While we’ve known for some time that this is true anecdotally, recent developments like Xbox Live and Valve’s Steam have allowed us to collect some real statistics, and they are disheartening: as the game progresses, more and more players fall away, until a mere fraction of those who start the game experience the ending. People get bored of books, or walk out of movies and plays, but not on anything like the scale that they don’t finish games.

Is this really a problem? I think it is.

Over a year ago, a company called Manifesto Games was founded with the idea that it would aggregate and sell low-budget but innovative games and by doing so help to advance the state of the game industry. While I have yet to see a new genre of games spring from this site, I do generally like and agree with the idea of invention as an essential but under-explored component of interactive entertainment.

Unfortunately, for all the talk of revolution (or even incremental improvement), the level of rhetoric actually displayed on the site is quite disappointing. The hyperbole in the actual Manifesto of Manifesto Games may be explained away as a stylistic choice, but the tract often crosses over into statements that are simply untrue. I believe it’s imprudent to base the foundation for a revolution, or even simply a new company, on such sloppy thinking.

Here are some of the statements of the manifesto that bothered me:

Oftentimes I’ll happen across a discussion about the business side of games and someone will bring up sales figures, saying things like “but the game sold great, so they must be doing fine,” or “why do these big dumb publishers keep making such crappy games that sell so poorly?” Assertions like these are usually backed up by no data at all, or some anecdotal evidence that doesn’t inform how successful the title actually was from a financial standpoint. Unless you’re a higher-ranking employee of the publisher that released the game, it’s safe to assume you don’t know the complete picture of how a particular game is doing– even if you work for the developer that made the game (sometimes especially if you are the developer, since someone might decide that keeping you in the dark about the numbers that lead to your royalty payments is the best strategy).

PR materials of upcoming games find themselves under a lot of scrutiny, and sometimes intense debate. There’s always going to be an element of exaggeration in the old art of selling, but games in particular seem to have bred a culture of mistrust between the marketers and their audience. I’m not laying blame, though, because how to get people excited about a title in development is actually a more difficult question than one would first think. Speaking simply, we have three options: