{"id":795,"date":"2007-11-02T12:19:26","date_gmt":"2007-11-02T16:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/11\/02\/the-limits-of-authorship\/"},"modified":"2008-02-27T19:40:59","modified_gmt":"2008-02-27T23:40:59","slug":"the-limits-of-authorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/11\/02\/the-limits-of-authorship\/","title":{"rendered":"The Limits of Authorship"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know you’ve made it when someone calls you out on shoddy journalism because they know how to write your articles better than you do.<\/a> I’m a hack!<\/p>\n

Mr. Goldberg’s reasonable (but out of place) point makes me question the persistence of authorship in game franchising. For how long should game journalists be expected to go to Will Wright for every Sims<\/em> article or to Sid Meier for every Civ<\/em> article? Meier is still heavily involved in play testing and prototyping but neither has been the lead designer on their signature franchise for over a decade. From where I sit, Wright’s position on the Sims<\/em> community would be dated, but if my article had taken a different standpoint and addressed issues of, say, consumerism, avatar development, etc. should the series founder still be the go to guy for perspectives on the series? Why not talk to Tim LeTourneau? Or Margaret Ng?<\/p>\n

Wright is one of my personal game deities, as I noted last week<\/a>. And, unless Spore satisfies its promise, there’s no doubt that the Sims<\/em> is the culmination of his career. But the franchise has been going on for so long and through so many different hands that there are lots of people who are very knowledgeable about it. EA has given Maxis unparalleled freedom to go crazy and that has let to an explosion of insight and talent in that division.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I was exchanging emails with a friend who has moved into game development and he talked about how collaborative the process is; how the idea of the lead designer we grew up with is increasingly irrelevant. You still need a central repository to bring all these ideas together, but design is messy. Still, there is a tendency for game journalists and gamers to attach a name to the development process. Miyamoto, Jaffe, Carmack…these are our movie stars and there is a lot to be gained in putting them up front. The idea of the Game God persists even as the industry becomes less dependent on original breakthrough designs and more dependent on a consistent collection of talent.<\/p>\n

And the old names of the past keep their hands on the collective impression of their franchises. Sort of like how Tom Clancy doesn’t write Tom Clancy books anymore. There is a need for recognition, I suppose, to have someone who can be a public spokesman for a series. And if the audience already has a persona mapped in your head (Wright=Mad Genius, Carmack=Technogeek, etc.) then PR and the games press can use that recognition as a hook. “Bruce Shelley talks Age of Empires IV” works better as a headline than “Dave Pottinger”, even though Ensemble has assembled one of the strongest RTS design teams in the world.<\/p>\n

Is there an alternative? Maybe lead design credits should be on the cover of every box. The author format does keep some of the design process decoupled from the corporate brand. (I should probably talk about Jason Bender<\/a> more than I do EALA.) And certainly the gaming pantheon is still relevant, especially when they takes a hands-on design role (Wright in Spore<\/em>, Molyneux in everything.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know you’ve made it when someone calls you out on shoddy journalism because they know how to write your articles better than you do. I’m a hack! Mr. Goldberg’s reasonable (but out of place) point makes me question the persistence of authorship in game franchising. For how long should game journalists be expected to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-cP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}