A firm fan favourite, the 1993 tactical strategy game Syndicate regularly features on lists of games that should be remade. It seems EA are finally about to grant fans their wish. Well, sort of. While it shares a setting with the original game, the new Syndicate is a first person shooter, sounding like a mix between Deus Ex and Left 4 Dead.
Personally, this makes me dubious as to its prospects. Publishers often fool themselves into thinking that their franchises are applicable to any kind of game but this is rarely true. More commonly the result is disappointing, both for the publishers and for the fans who just wanted to see their favourite game reborn.
In short: the game will insist on using always-online authentication, forbid modding (allowing access to the engine or tools), and include a market for the buying and selling of items. The first means you won’t be able to play the game on a plane. The second means that fans will not be allowed to fully express themselves. And the third means that those with more money may progress faster.
Of the three ideas, only the third is smart. Most players really don’t mind if others have used a shortcut to their success as long as it doesn’t affect them directly. But the other two are terrible. They are indicative of a growing trend in publishing to try and keep players at bay. They may work in the short term, but as long term strategies they are fraught with danger.
A depressing story that occasionally does the rounds of blogs and forums is that of working conditions in the games industry. Whether it’s EA_spouse or the recent revelations about the conditions at Team Bondi (of LA Noire fame), the sorry story of how the pressure cooker environment of game making leads good people to become crazymakers is a long and ignominious one.
It’s sad for three reasons. Firstly that there are studios out there that think nothing of abusing staff. Secondly that, despite the overtime, they still can’t manage to ship games within a reasonable timeframe. And thirdly that developers young and old seem to think that this is the only way that life can be.
Have faith friends. There is more to life than this.
I was at an event hosted by NESTA in which Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope presented a top-line summary for a report talking about the problems of education in the UK. Specifically what they talked about was how to train young people with better sets of skills to equip them for digital industries like games or visual effects.
The thing I noticed more than anything else, however, was that (at 37 years old) I was one of the youngest people there. In a room of luminaries from the digital industries in the UK, all I could see was a mass of bald heads and grey hair. Where were the young companies and the new generation?
Nowhere that I could see. I think that might be a problem.
It’s never pretty, but game projects often fail. However the interpretation of why failure happens is almost always wrong. The easy thing to do is point at a developer and describe failure in personal terms. If only their ego didn’t run away with itself, or if only they didn’t do such a poor job.
Actually most failure has systemic causes. It’s the result of a dysfunctional publishing culture that is set up to be adversarial, and that in turn is what breeds failure. Most game failures are actually caused at the executive level.
It’s common, if you reside in management layers, to lose your connection with the player in the street. Likewise, if you come into games from other industries, it’s typical to feel disconnected from the customer. It’s hard to know whether a Gears of War or a Halo are a good idea if you don’t have that physical connection to games, and this is why execs are often far more comfortable with track records than new ideas.
What management often reaches for, like a comfort blanket, in this scenario is features. The users are there, goes the reasoning. So they can be attracted to a better product with superior features. Games are just products, so the rules of product sales apply. Right?
This is the final part of the series about no-brainer games and the inner moron. In the first part I talked about what moronism is, and in the second part I talked about Four-Elephant ideas, hidden factors and our old friend Techthulhu. This part is about the delusions of spreadsheets, overly strategic thinking, and just plain old boredom.
What it's referring to is a game or business idea that is so obvious that you can't think of any reason why you wouldn't do it. It is the idea that literally requires no thought to explain. Some investors (and other powerful figures) love no-brainers. For many, they are in fact the only kind of idea that they really want to hear about. No-brainers seems to fit into a strategy, to be the perfect cog for the golden machine, and so all their problems are solved without the mysterious and complicated hair-pulling exercise that is most game development.
These people are, not to put too fine a point on it, being morons.
This is the second part in a light-hearted series about no-brainer games and the inner moron. In the first part I talked about what moronism is, and started into a list of questions that you could be asking to vet your ideas, to see if you are in fact being a moron. This article continues that with four more, including a reference to elephants!
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