In-Depth: Asking 'Why' Will Keep Games Out Of The Ghetto, Says Hecker
[We've had a couple of folks covering the IGDA Leadership Forum over the past couple of days, and in this comprehensive write-up, Chris Remo tackles an excellent, thought-provoking keynote from former Spore programmer and ever-swift thinker, Chris Hecker.]
Chris Hecker, independent developer and until recently a designer at Maxis, used to give a lot of talks about the "how" of game development -- talks with names like "Game Object Systems" and "Five Physics Simulators for Articulated Bodies."
But now, as he reflected during a keynote address at the IGDA Leadership Forum in San Francisco, he spends a lot more time considering and discussing the "why," as in "Why do you make games?" It's a question he believes is crucial not just to individual developers, but to the cultural impact of the entire medium for decades to come.
Why Ask Why?
Those who work in certain popular forms like music, film, and literature often reflect on how a particular work was born out of a specific event. "I had to write this book when my girlfriend dumped me," a novelist might say.
"That doesn't show up often in game development bios," Hecker pointed out. Developers rarely discuss what they were trying to convey or express with a particular game, outside the confines of the game's own entertainment value.
"Should we care about 'why'? I think the answer is yes. We should care," said Hecker. But why care about 'why'? Hecker sees three main routes popular culture can travel, and games are in grave danger of ending up on the wrong one, the consequences of which could put the medium permanently in the cultural doghouse, rather than in the vaunted halls of cultural relevance.
"If we continue on our current path, we'll end up in the pop cultural ghetto where comics are," he said. "An alternative path is where film, books, and music ended up. There's even a low road, toys -- or, as you hear, 'just toys' -- where you cease to have any meaning beyond what you're playing with."
"I believe games will be the preeminent art and entertainment form of the 21st century -- if we don't screw it up," Hecker professed. He wants to make games, not music or books or films. He doesn't have a case of Hollywood envy -- except, perhaps, for the freedom film has built for itself on the back of its great work.
"Film," broadly speaking, is seen as artistically valid, despite the existence of countless forgettable films. Not every film is great -- most are not -- but as an overall medium, it is relatively bulletproof. "They can shovel out as much crap as they want, and it doesn't affect their ability to be considered an art," Hecker pointed out. "The New York Times isn't going to demote them out of the Arts section because of Saw IV."
By contrast, comics are roughly the same age as film, and both forms were initially culturally derided, seen as diversions for the uneducated. But after more than a century, even comics' most impressive works have been unable to remove its broadly negative stigma. Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, and the works of the cartoonist Chris Ware, for example, are individually respected, but have not dramatically raised their medium's profile.
"I want to be clear -- we can actually screw it up," Hecker warned. "You can screw it up to where you're not rescue-able, or you can succeed to the point where you can't mess up."
The Mass Market Myth
Hecker proposes four metrics on which to judge the success of popular entertainment forms. In approximate order of increasing importance, they are revenue, units sold, cultural impact, and diversity of content.
"We do great on the first one of these, which is the least important," he said, "but we fuck it up on the other three."
The game industry is bizarrely obsessed with revenue at the exclusion of nearly anything else, he argued: "You get the impression that the game industry wouldn't care if some prince in Dubai bought a single copy of a game that costs $24 billion dollars -- Call of Madden Duty Halo -- as long as we're the ones he's buying it from."
This week's release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 saw yet another of the industry's neverending claims about its biggest entertainment launches of all time, but that has much to do with a game's relatively exorbitant individual price tag compared to, say, a book or a movie ticket. On a unit basis, on the other hand, games aren't all that impressive.
Gone With the Wind, the most successful film by revenue after adjusting for inflation, sold 35 million "units" in the United Kingdom alone in 1940, at which point that country had a population of 43 million. Even more astonishingly, it sold 202 million tickets in the United States -- which had a population of only 130 million at the time. "Everyone went twice!" Hecker exclaimed. "This is mass market reach."
That extraordinary example aside, you have to go extremely far down the list of top-selling movies of all time before you find examples on equal footing with the game industry's best-selling non-console-bundled SKU, Wii Play, which across all worldwide territories has sold about 24 million units. (That's true outside film as well, of course: "Celine Dion is beating every game we've ever made.")
But even units don't paint the more telling picture. The true strength of film -- surely the dominant art form of the 20th century -- is its cultural, not just financial, impact and breadth. Games tend to resolutely and aggressively target the 18- to 34-year male. If you aren't trying to capture as much of that audience as you possibly can (or, increasingly, middle-aged housewives) you aren't in step with the industry.
That isn't the sign of a healthy, diverse medium. "All films are not Titanic and they're not trying to be," Hecker said. "Not all bands are trying to make Thriller. They're not all trying to hit every single person in their entire audience with a single work, which we try to do routinely. We have such incredibly narrow sets of users that we don't actually have a reasonable description of a mass market audience. Film can do both The Dark Knight and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it makes the medium richer for it. You can rent one when you're in one mood, and the other when you're in another mood. We don't provide for that."
How Did We Get Here?
So why is this the case?
"We can't be totally blamed," Hecker acknowledged, introducing a simple set of comparisons illustrating what any game developer knows well: there are certain types of gameplay that are well understood and easily accomplished in games, and others that still largely elude us.
"What's the easiest film to make?" he asked. "I claim the easiest film to make is to put a camera in a room with some people, and they talk. You get a video camera, and you can do it for $500. What's the hardest film to make? It's got explosions and spaceships and lasers flying all over the place."
By contrast, "what's the easiest game to make? It's got explosions, and maybe elves or orcs, and whatever. What's the hardest game to make? Well, it's got some people in a room talking."
Hecker accompanied the last statement with a screenshot of the narrative experimental game Facade. Even with its impressive complexity and ambitious interactive scope within a constrained narrative setting, Facade's conversations still face difficulties.
"Mediums have a grain," argued Hecker, and the formal grain of video games runs in a very different direction to the formal grain of film and literature. "You have to work extra hard to work against the grain, and our grain tends to want to put spaceships with bullets coming out of them on the screen."
Or, paraphrasing Nietzsche, "the way your language works makes you think in certain ways, and you have to try really hard to think another way."
Are We Doomed?
"Are we doomed?" Hecker pondered. "Is the grain guiding everything we do? I don't think that's true, but it does make our job a lot harder, and we have to want to do it."
There are other factors to contend with if one wishes to work against the grain. For one thing, "we got a bit big and successful before we figured out what we're doing -- hence, the industry-wide risk aversion." Games may not have the reach of Gone With the Wind or Celine Dion, but there's undoubtedly money to be made, and that has to a large extent locked in many design ideas in the service of financial safety.
And, as Heather Chaplin put it, we are "a bunch of stunted adolescents. And I include myself in that," Hecker added. He recounted a recent experience playing Valve's Left 4 Dead, a game he greatly enjoys. "But it's vacuous," he said. "It's cool, but there's not really any 'there' there."
In a 2003 critique of the film Seabiscuit for The New Yorker, David Denby wrote, "When a director exploits our hard-wired responses to pathos, he fails, so to speak, a test of honor."
Video game designers are extremely skilled at exploiting a different hard-wired response, the enjoyment of the power fantasy. "It's not hard to put a gun in someone's hand and make them feel great about themselves," Hecker said of those exciting, if often relatively empty, experiences. "But it's having cotton candy every day for dinner."
That isn't to say video games should abandon the power fantasy; instead, they might rely on it less, or couple it with more interesting themes. "You still want your Pirates of the Caribbean. You want to have those summer blockbusters," Hecker said. "But you want something else, too. And even something like Pirates of the Caribbean has more of the human condition in it than most games do."
What Next?
Like literature, music, film, and other forms, games offer their own intrinsic element to add to culture. For games, it's interactivity. That uniqueness is necessary for a form to carve out its own cultural space, and it's what will allow games to occupy such a space if the gaming community doesn't wall it off.
But that means designers must strive to convey some kind of "why," and when they do, it will ideally be conveyed through interactivity, not just cutscenes. Linear "theme park ride" games, as Hecker calls them -- recently, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, et al. -- can be great fun, and we have become quite skilled at making them, but they also represent something of a creative red herring: "The part that speaks to the human condition is in the cutscenes, not in the interactivity."
Furthermore, while gamers are highly resistant to decreases in graphical fidelity, they seem on the whole unbothered by regressions in interactivity, hence the flourishing of the theme park ride approach. And since, for technical reasons, it's safer and cheaper to decrease interactivity as you increase realism, the latter may well continue to suffer.
The booming market of casual and social games, Hecker points out, has a different problem. "It's great to have a game to play while you're waiting for a bus," he said, "but they're not trying to say anything at all."
That leaves the broad category of "systems games," which are more intrinsically predicated on interactivity and player-driven choice. They contain the best candidates for creating unique, meaningful works in games, Hecker believes, but at the present moment, "these games aren't really saying anything either, because we don't know how to say things through interactivity, how an authorial voice works through a system."
There's no easy way out of this arguably slippery slope except for the dedication and intent of the people making the games. "I believe this is the big question for the next ten years of game design," Hecker said. "We have so many opportunities."
Mechanics and systems can be continually evolved, but designers would do well to keep the following questions in mind, he said: "What are you trying to say, and why?" and "And are you trying to say it with interactivity?"
"If you can answer those," Hecker concluded, "you're on the right track."
Comments
Great write-up. Hecker's succinctly articulating what's been eating at me for a while now.
I'm pretty young, and I'm making games, and will continue to make games, mostly in anticipation for the future. Mostly so I can at least try and help the medium not fuck up.
Hecker's comparison to comics is not lost on me: my older brother's a comic artist/writer. He's a good one, too - Eisner-nominated - but even still he's constantly struggling with his medium; with an ephemeral audience; sometimes with finding a job. I've seen what comics have to offer and they don't deserve less than the positions film and music and literature have earned.
And, being from the generation that I am in which more videogame experiences have stayed with me and shaped my personality than films have (okay, not quite books), it kills me to imagine games culturally stagnating into something like that. Acknowledged but not respected.
I'll cut myself short because I can see myself going on like this, but: I do, actually, believe that this concept of cultural relevance and artistic self-respect among games is something more easily realized on the younger and younger; the idealistic indies sooner than the working pragmatics. Not that it should be left to the young, but I mean I'm optimistic that the talented youth come into the industry kind of understanding this stuff as the torch is passed down the ladder. I definitely get what Hecker wants to accomplish because videogames are a big part of my life, and not just in a hobby kind of way. They're my pop culture.
So if this whole comment sounds really dumb and cheesy, I figured out it's because this is my accidental pep-talk... I don't know if I'll ever be great enough of a designer or an artist to make a cultural impact on behalf of videogames. But after spouting all this junk, I damn well better do it!
Posted by: Scypher | November 15, 2009 12:09 PM
"And since, for technical reasons, it's safer and cheaper to decrease interactivity as you increase realism, the latter may well continue to suffer."
Sorry if I'm wrong, but shouldn't it be the former (interactivity) that may well continue to suffer?
Posted by: Miker | November 15, 2009 2:06 PM
Great article, and a number of sentiments many gamers long to hear spoken aloud by people with credentials.
In particular it's great to have yet another voice point out that action-blockbusters are indeed vapid. Which isn't a terrible thing in-and-of-itself.
But when the "In Crowd" of gaming rails on Bejeweled for being simplistic or casual and then bows down at the altar of Modern Warfare 2 or Halo 3, proclaiming them the pinnacle of our medium. Well, then you know something's going terribly awry.
Posted by: P.F. | November 15, 2009 3:02 PM
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/massage_my_ass/
Posted by: yeah | November 15, 2009 5:11 PM
is it just me or are comics in much better shape than movies these days? i don't even remember the last decent movie i saw (ok, it was a serious man, but there was a long drought before that), which fantastic comics seem to come out of nowhere constantly (asterious polyp for one).
all this bloated hollywood worship is going to be what kills the "industry"... and good riddance!
Posted by: PASTRIES | November 16, 2009 8:01 AM
Chris Crawford has been saying this for almost two decades now. It's good to see that others realise that the industry's lack of breadth and shallowness is a problem.
I don't go so far to say that the game industry is dead, but it's in a steep dive. Unfortunately, everyone's too set on their ways to change. We might see an interactive creation that embraces the complexities of the human condition, but I'm adraid that it might not be called a game.
Posted by: Alex Vostrov | November 16, 2009 8:44 AM
Alex, hasn't the "industry" changed a great deal in the past 4 or 5 years? Personally I think spending much time worrying about the economics and demographics of the industry is an utter waste of one's mental resources, but you have to admit that we're hardly in the same climate as we were when the PS2 was king and Halo was a big deal.
Just because the world isn't moving towards a place in which games ape the narrative techniques of films and books doesn't mean that things aren't changing... they're just not changing in a much less trite and obvious manner.
Posted by: PASTRIES | November 16, 2009 9:32 AM
The majority of the movers and shakers in the industry are very set in their ways. Inordinate amounts of time, money, and media attention are placed on games that do essentially go nowhere (or not very far) and do ape AAA action-movies.
The industry has changed since the PS2 era, when relatively lots of mid-level interesting titles were still being created and finding their niche. Now those games are being crushed under the heel of expensive technology so AAA's like MW2 can be made. Things have changed in some ways, sure, but I don't know that I'd call it progress.
We do have a burgeoning small-level games market and lots of new and returning gamers from them, though, and I look forward to see how that develops and influences the industry.
Posted by: P.F. | November 16, 2009 11:04 AM
but it isn't realistic to expect "AAA" publishers to spend millions of dollars on experimental games that are about "the human condition".
this isn't because they are greedy or cowards. it is because games that attempt what hecker wanst to see are extremely niche.
there has yet to be a single example of a narrative-based game that has succeeded in the mass market (at the scale of scrabble, mario kart, nintendogs and monopoly, for example).
this is like demanding to see john cage perform 4'33 at madison square garden.
Posted by: PASTRIES | November 16, 2009 11:32 AM
I don't expect publishers to risk their skin to advance the medium or any of that artsy stuff. That's like asking a lion to stop being a carnivore. What we have on our hands is a systematic problem and no one particular party is responsible. I have sympathy for those who make AAA games, in fact, because working on "people" game is HARD, as Chris Hecker rightfully points out. Also, the current audience for games is largely hostile to change. The people who would be interested in this sort of game are reading books and watching movies. They are probably not playing games, or if they are, they view them as idle amusements to pass the time.
What gets me is comparing a mature medium like the book industry to games. We don't have a fraction of the dynamism that they have. Writers have an amazing breadth as well as depth of expression over their medium compared to us. The stuff that we consider "art", like Jason Rohrer's games is trivial to anyone who's tried to make a story with decent characters. We're not talking about snobby literature here. Open up the Wheel of Time books and you'll find more character depth and contemplation than our games.
The point that I'm trying to make is that we haven't even started on the path to exploiting the potential of the medium. With the computer, we can do stuff that will blow away every creative medium that has ever existed. This doesn't mean aping books of movies - we need to find our own voice, but it does mean talking about things that matter. Ditch the oversized shoulder pads and chainsaws and embrace the complexity of life. Right now, games are like a TV that's permanently tuned to one channel. Are we so shallow as game designers that we can't talk about other things?
So what can we do to change this? I have a simple answer: make a game about something that matters to you personally. Not something "cool", but something that touched you in your life. It's hard and it's scary, because it means departing familiar shores. I have a decent handle on making a strategy game or an action game - I can think about game space and hit points and resources. For making a game about trust and sacrifice, I have no tools - only vague markings left by previous explorers. Discovering new continents is never easy. I can't demand that every person make a game like this, because that would make me a hypocrite. But I know that unless someone crosses that ocean, we will never realise our potential and we will never be a respected medium.
Posted by: Alex Vostrov | November 16, 2009 12:32 PM
there are two major issues with this line of thought.
the first is the legitimization fallacy. in other words, the expectation that there is a huge audience of sophisticated future-gamers that will, someday, start playing games and usher in a golden future where EVERYONE is a gamer.
the problem with this idea is that those people already play games. see my list above: scrabble, sudoku, nintendogs, poker, apples to apples... these are hugely popular games that reach vastly more people than 'junk food' like, say, kane and lynch or god of war ii. but wait! those games don't tell interesting stories, they don't communicate meaningful ideas about the human condition... well, that brings us to the second major issue with this argument.
it may be misguided to demand that games deliver the same author -> audience experience that films and books can deliver. this is not because the medium isn't 'mature' enough (it isn't - games are far older than film and may be older than books as well), but instead because the thing that makes games interesting is interaction, especially two way interaction between players. it is a DIFFERENT kind of examination of the 'human condition', but not necessarily an inferior one.
i don't mean to discourage people from experimenting and striving for new and interesting ways to make games. however, don't get so caught up in futuristic utopian fantasies that you miss out on the many beautiful examples of meaningful play that already exist.
...
finally, on a somewhat unrelated tangent, i have to say that i think people like hecker give far too much credit to movies as a 'legitimate art form' (whatever that means). do you guys see the same movies that i do? you really think we should be using shrek 3, crank or even wall-e as role models?
Posted by: PASTRIES | November 16, 2009 1:05 PM
You may be right PASTRIES, - maybe games can't press the same buttons as, say, romance novels. Maybe Scrabble is our holy grail.
My hunch says that this is not true. The way I see it, interactivity is a fundamental paradigm shift in the way the artist and the audience communicate. I view interactive media as a potential superset of all other media that have come before. Following this line of thinking, it would be shocking if games were not able to express deeper meaning than books or movies.
Who knows, though? This could be a fool's quest caused by excessive contrarianism. Then again, writing was first used for accounting and pity the fool who suggested that it could be an art.
Posted by: Alex Vostrov | November 16, 2009 1:36 PM
not sure if it makes sense to assume that there are deeper or less deep types of 'meaning'. i listen to a great deal of instrumental music that carries NONE of the language-based meaning that i think you want to see more of in games. i don't believe that makes it any less significant than music with lyrics, or a film, which - by your logic - one could consider a superset containing instrumental music.
it's funny because i feel like i'm the one who is being excessively contrarian!
Posted by: PASTRIES | November 16, 2009 2:21 PM
I guess that depends on the context. Out here, grumpy old men like me may be the majority, but in general gamers and game makers are very conservative. The usual response is "There is no problem; shut up", maybe with something about pretense thrown in for good measure. The response is understandable - people identify with their choice of entertainment and feel threatened.
With regard to meaning, I don't want to get into a relativist quagmire of discussing who defines "deeper". Obviously, it's personal opinion.
What I have is an intuition. I see other media being able to talk about all kinds of things that games don't touch. And as I get older, I care about spaceships and explosions less and less. Now my favourite works explore more subtle things like why anarchism is attactive or what it feels to care for someone who is losing their mental capacity. In time, what games have to offer will become irrelevant to me and I'll leave them behind if they don't change with me.
What I have is a dream. It could be just a delusion, but I see games that can talk about the things that I find interesting now. I imagine protagonists solving obstacles with political wit and negotiation instead of a BFG 9000. Games can be so much more than what they are now. Why limit them to only one thing?
It's not that I object that FPSs exist, not any more than I object to the existence of candy bars. What I object to is walking into a store and seeing the walls lined with candy bars.
Posted by: Alex Vostrov | November 16, 2009 4:56 PM
well, i don't know if i agree that gamers or game developers are especially conservative, although my impression is that people with money (ie, publishers) are.
as i get older i find that the fact that a game is about spaceships or penises or hello kitty matters less and less. i'm certainly curious to see how tracy fullerton's game adaptation of walden will be, but if i end up enjoying it will probably have very little to do with the fact that i like thoreau and i like the idea of adapting his work. it will be because of the
i guess what i'm trying to say is that i value the ability to to see through a game's presentation and representation. sure, those things are important, but to be truly literate you need to be able to be able to look beyond them. that's why the movement for 'meaningful' games feels so hollow to me - it feels like it engages with game playing on an extremely vague and superficial level.
maybe i'm just pessimistic, but i don't expect to ever see a retail store that isn't lined with candy bars. you'll have to re-engineer human nature after you're finished re-inventing games :)
Posted by: PASTRIES | November 17, 2009 12:15 PM
oops, "it will be because of the" should have read "it will be because of the decisions and mechanics of the game, and to a lesser extend the atmosphere and execution"
Posted by: PASTRIES | November 17, 2009 12:17 PM