Wow. GDC annual rant. I started reading Chris Hecker report and saw Heather Chaplin’s more important one.
You see it’s really funny. Her under reported rant has many points and yet all I can find on the web (interestingly enough, I found more with twittersearch than with google) is people whining about snippets of what she said.
They totally prove her point. We’re a bunch of fucking adolescents that can’t take some critics especially from a woman without yelling YOU BITCH. Reports and responses on the web demonstrate that.
I often complain about the immaturity of the industry. People want to see that as elitism but it’s not. It’s just a view that I don’t want to have something like sex+violence=fun for all the games we make, as a value we absolutely need to fullfill our fantasies with. I did enjoy this shit since when I first could, I enjoyed it from like 86 to now so yeah I’m kinda fucking fed up with especially with nine years in the industry. When I see Wolfenstein3D on the iphone I don’t care, RE 5 is the same etc I don’t believe I’m the only one. Peer pressure is at it.
Others medium have a large and wide panel of tastes and feelings, we don’t. This is the damn point people.
So the first search result about Heather is at David Jaffe’s blog. He knows her so that’s a cool rant.
“The two children whom I spawned and whom I support and love and nurture every day would beg to differ. Even when dog tired, even as a divorced dad who is trying to figure out his new life, I still am an amazing father who shows up for those kids every day. And I do so with joy and love and a strong sense of gratitude that they are in my life. To me, this is the measure of a man, not an adolescent.
The employees who work for the company I co-own and co-founded, the employees-who after years of working at it have become some of the best programmers and artists in the business and who previously created simulations for the government in order to train the troops that protect our country-are clearly adults, not adolescents.”
Well I don’t want to criticize –just debunking- but spawning kids is not an adult stuff, it’s a mamal thing we all can do even as teenagers. Plus sorry but only a long time will let you know if you are an “amazing” father. Founding a startup after ten years or so in a big company with a multi year deal with that big company is not a hard adult choice, it’s a good and quite safe challenge. Nothing to brag about as a ballsy adult thing.
Heather’s point is still valid with that kind of arguments. They may even prove it.
“Sure, I think our industry CAN do better at making games more impacting by mixing meaning and entertainment.”
This is the POINT!! We CAN et we SHOULD ffs. We should push more on it because that’s what games that count are: Deus Ex, Ico, Fallout Katamary Damacy etc have all that damn sense, it makes games stronger no question about it. So stop dodging this fact all the time saying that only bloody gory fun counts or that YOU as a game maker or a player don’t want to care about this stuff and so that it’s crap. It’s childish.
We should have more and more shades of themes and ideas behind our games than only power fantasy as says PixelVixen707:
“It’s eerie how rarely the qualities she ticked off find a place in games. This is important not just to the girls, but to the boys who don’t dream of being a marine or a quarterback. In music, boys can listen to boys who aren’t macho. If balls-out, cock-out rock ain’t your thing, you can listen to Belle & Sebastian. There’s a spectrum of masculinity and femininity, and endless ways for both boys and girls to respond to it. But in games, aggression is the default, and relationships are usually as clumsy as a third-grade dance.”
We absolutely don’t have that. We don’t search for it because we’re not really trying to for a question of paycheck and market but more seriously because the industry lacks diversity: with a 88,5% male 83.3% white 92% heterosexual population (GDC 09 pics make me sad) how the FUCK could we be able to build shades of fun based on values like responsibility, introspection, intimacy, or intellectual discovery that would appeal to a LARGE and DIVERSE population?
We can’t so we rely on the same old shit that sells well and then we blame Heather and people like her for not being able to understand us? It’s childish.
Of course we can’t really compare with music and movies in the 30 years of our existence because we don’t have the same tools history: microphone technology was up really early and never really changed. Movie camera is the same. Game engine? Oh boy.
Still, Heather is right. In thirty years or more we should have done better.
I think I’ll let Jason Della Rocca who did a great job at IGDA before resigning from it finish this rant about people ranting about Heather’s rant with this post:
“Sorry for not having the leadership skills to beat the barriers of participation inequality. Less than 1% of the IGDA membership are truly active in driving the org forward. Sorry for not doing a better job building up a strong pipeline of community leaders and volunteers. Sorry for not overcoming your general apathy and laziness.
Sorry for not getting you to be more serious about the profession of game development. You are no longer a bunch of hacks. This is a real art and science. We need to be way more deliberate and control the path the profession takes as it evolves into the future.
Most of all, sorry for not doing more to help you realize your power! Both, collectively as a profession to tackle industry issues, and as creators of culture. You are all having a massive impact on society. You are transforming the world day-by-day without even realizing it.
Oh well, fuck you, it’s not my job anymore!”