GDC Debate: Costikyan to Spector: "suck me!"

Games
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Warren Spector has started debating Greg Costikyan over at Costikyan’s blog on the subject of the game industry’s obsession with sequels and licensed properties, to the detriment (according to Costikyan) of originality.

Here’s a favorite part of mine.

Spector:

Heck, let’s be wacky for a minute – don’t you believe in your heart of hearts that you could create a cool Scooby Doo game, if you were charged with doing so?

Heck, I KNOW you could.

Costikyan’s rebuttal:

(…while I would not relish doing a game based on The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I’d at least find it amusing. Scooby Doo, Warren? Fuckin Scooby Doo? No, I would not do a good job, because I have no sympathy for the material. Scooby Doo my ass. Animaniacs at least, please.)

Sure, Warren. If your job requires you to do a Scooby Doo game, by all means, buckle down and do the best fucking Scooby Doo game you can do. Get what ever satisfaction you can get you of your degraded circumstances, you poor motherfucker. You have my every sympathy.

But what would Jesus do?

I’m being facetious.

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Oh, here’s the URL:

http://www.costik.com/weblog/

Scroll down to see Costikyan’s original piece, followed by Spector’s response and Costikyan’s rebuttal in reverse chronological order.

3

How does that story go again? Where the upper-class lady made fun of some prostitute, and the prositute says “if a man were to offer you a billion dollars for one night, would you do it?” and the snobby gal says “yes.” So the prostitute says “then we are both whores, the only difference is price.” Or something like that. I think it’s some famous quote maybe, I wish I could remember.

I give the point to Specter. Costikyan can’t argue that an obsession with sequels and licenses stifles creativity and then go say he’d like to do a particular one just because he likes the source material. One man’s “Unbearable Lightness of Being” is another man’s “Scooby Doo.” Niether one is original.

TV and movies are chock full of licenses, sequels, spin-offs, and knock-offs. And we don’t run around complaining about how unoriginal it makes everything (well, the film snobs do…). Hell, most of the world gleefully runs out to see the next Lord of the Rings movie, the next Bond film, the latest Matrix rip-off, etc.

By the way…when is the next Harry Potter book coming out, again? :)

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I think Warren wins:

"For me, making the most of it [working with sequels and licensed properties] means doing everything in our power, as developers, to ensure that our games exploit to the absolute maximum the medium’s unique characteristics (which I see as the power to transport players to fantastic worlds and immerse them as completely as possible in those worlds; the requirement that the experience be driven by player participation and that the game respond actively and appropriately to player choices; the crafting of experiences and stories that are the result of emergence and not simply careful planning on the part of a writer or designer. In other words, I want to see a game industry that strives to share authorship of the gameplay experience with our collaborators – our players.

“You’ll note that NONE of those unique characteristics have a blessed thing to do with the creation of a cool universe or a marketable character. That stuff’s almost irrelevant to the gameplay experience I think players want and deserve.”

That’s it exactly. You might be stuck working on a Bugs Bunny title, but there’s no reason why you still can’t be creative. Just look how creative the Mario games have been.

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I wouldn’t fuck with either of these guys in a game-design argument … their history goes waaaaaaay back into the PnP wargame/RPG arena. (Anyone remember the credits on the first version of Toon?) Toss Jim Dunnigan in there and we’d get critical mass.

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Ok, I see Costikyan’s problem:

“Here we are, at the inception of the interactive revolution, creating the first entertainment media that does not treat its enthusiasts as thumb-sucking passive dweebs, marvelling at the amazing creativity of the Godlike Creators, but instead invites them to collaborate actively with us in the creation of emergent narratives, creative expressions in which their contribution is at least as important as ours. Here we are, tentatively stepping toward a truly democratic artform, one that harnessses the creativity of the participants even while allowing scope for the creative expression by the field’s professionals. Here we are, like Balboa, shocked with wild surmise as we face a fast unknown Pacific of enormous creative possibility–and all we can do is licensed drivel?”

He’s an artiste stuck in a commercial world! Oh the pain!

See, this whole games as art crap leads people astray.

Maybe Costikyan should be reminded that Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the Sistine Chapel, Shakespeare had to make Macbeth one of his shortest plays (because King James fell asleep at plays), had to include supernatural elements (because King James was interested in the occult), and had to include King James own ancestors to flatter the king – see, even Shakespeare had to deal with a license, and he produced one of his greatest works.

Man, these whiny artists are hard to take sometimes.

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While Costikyan should rightly be credited with the creation of some wonderfully turgid board games and his one true accomplishment: The Creature That Ate Sheboygan, what has this guy really done? He seems like a prolific producer of mediocrity.

But oh does he like to talk about himself and try to reinvent existing movements so he can take credit for them…

He’s not fit to drink Warren Spector’s soiled bathwater IMO…

Side note: I once saw him in operation as he walked trhough the booths of GDC with his squeeze. He’d pick up a game’s controllers for about 40 seconds, try to play, and then drop it, authoritatively informing her that the game was crap.

Side side note: I once pitched Gary Coleman (back when he had money) to fund a video game. He had a much prettier girlfriend than Greg’s, who was about a foot and a half taller than him. She was eating frozen yogurt.

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Going to show some ignorance here. I know what Warren Spector has done, but who is Costikyan?

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I assume Costikyan knows a lot about designing games - because he’s designed a lot of games, none of which I’ve played - but he doesn’t appear to know a lot about games he hasn’t written. A month or so ago on his blog, he wrote a similar lengthy rant about some shareware title that was the most innovative thing he’d ever seen and that the criminally ignorant Hollywood types in publishing wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Only it turned out that this innovative game was actually a more or less bubble for bubble rip off of Bust-a-Move, a game that’s remade about twice a week. In this current round he says:

Even as the rest of ION Storm produced astonishingly apalling garbage, you produced a fine game in Deux Ex.

Neither Anachronox nor Daikatana was either a sequel or a licensed property. You’d think Costikyan would cut their appalling crappiness a little slack. I’m thinking he may just not know about Anachronox, since it wasn’t that appallingly crappy anyway.

But I can’t imagine Miyamoto, Meier, Garfield, Garriot, or Naja think much of licensed drivel

That’s because most of them are too busy thinking about all the sequels they’re working on. Jesus, Richard Garriot not only spent his entire professional life making incremental improvements to the same game, he pretty much changed his name to one of the game’s characters.

Have I adequately expressed how unhappy I was with Heroes IV? I mean, I not only bought every expansion set for III, I bought every one of the quest games they produced… and so eagerly looked forward to IV

So sequels are a massive creative sinkhole, but Costikyan loves to daydream about them when he’s not actively playing them.

Never mind the self-evident fact that the industry’s real hits have always been innovative, always been out of left field–SimCity, Balance of Power, Command & Conquer, Deer Hunter, Roller Coaster Tycoon, The Sims.

Wasn’t Command & Conquer just a Dune 2 / Herzog Zwei clone? Wasn’t Roller Coaster Tycoon a successful reworking of Theme Park?

Do “innovative” (whatever that means, exactly, to Costkyan) games really have a track record of being any more creatively successful than licensed games and sequels? Somebody ought to show him Goldeneye. And I’ll virtually guarantee that the next Army Man game will be better than Majestic.

*edited to change “Majesty” to “Majestic”. No matter what Geryk says, the next Army Man won’t be better than Majesty.
*Edited a second time to explain the first edit.

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"The Creature That Ate Sheboygan, "

I just bought this for a buck at a thrift store!

weird box art. seems complete.

is it fun enough to actually try and play?

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What about this quote from Costikyan:

But I’d also find room to fund development of cool stuff. For two reasons: First, because while most innovative products may fail, every once in a while, one will succeed beyond my wildest expectations, and create IP I can exploit into infinity.

So sequels should be avoided so that original content can be created that creates more sequels?

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You have to have the right players, and the right GM. If you have that, it’s easily the funniest RPG ever made.

EDIT:
He also did Toon, (with Warren Spector, as it happens). Costikyan and Spector collaborated on some Paranoia stuff as well, if I’m not mistaken.

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Well, I think Greg would answer that you’re assuming that the licensor puts few restrictions on use, AND that your boss isn’t demanding a modest design that’s sure to finish on time and budget.

I mean, look at the expectations that licenses bring with them. Who on Earth is going to go to his boss and say, "I’ve got a great idea for the new Scooby Doo game! Instead of an action platformer, I want a director’s perspective game where you’re trying to film a cool murder mystery cartoon! Or… get this! The player is in the role of old Man Smithers, trying to keep the local townspeople away from the abandoned gold mine – then the Scooby gang arrives and really turns up the heat – sort of like Dungeon Keeper, except with a mini game where you tie up Daphne and try to keep Fred from finding her.

Eh. I’m just in a bad mood because the new console Fallout game looks like a generic brawler, dumbed down into being just like a slew of other games.

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bad feelings with interplay over that title :evil:

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"The Creature That Ate Sheboygan, "

I just bought this for a buck at a thrift store!

weird box art. seems complete.

is it fun enough to actually try and play?

Not really. Sheboygan has very crude mechanics. There have been a handful of giant monster board games, and none of them get across the levels of scale that make the movies on that subject fun. Wait for They Came From Hollywood instead.

For me, Costikiyan’s game design cred peaked with Paranoia, which is easily as good as some other posters have mentioned here. Better, even.

But yes, Cotikiyan is pretty apocalyptic by nature, and everything to him is either wonderful or (usually) terrible.

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Well, I think Greg would answer that you’re assuming that the licensor puts few restrictions on use, AND that your boss isn’t demanding a modest design that’s sure to finish on time and budget.

I mean, look at the expectations that licenses bring with them. Who on Earth is going to go to his boss and say, "I’ve got a great idea for the new Scooby Doo game! Instead of an action platformer, I want a director’s perspective game where you’re trying to film a cool murder mystery cartoon! Or… get this! The player is in the role of old Man Smithers, trying to keep the local townspeople away from the abandoned gold mine – then the Scooby gang arrives and really turns up the heat – sort of like Dungeon Keeper, except with a mini game where you tie up Daphne and try to keep Fred from finding her.

Eh. I’m just in a bad mood because the new console Fallout game looks like a generic brawler, dumbed down into being just like a slew of other games.[/quote]

Who’s to say a publisher wouldn’t go for some of those ideas for a Scooby game?

Look, we just got a Treasure Planet game that’s really a game of naval combat in space. Disney ok’d that concept. I would never have expected them to greenlight that kind of game. In fact, if I was a higher-up at Disney I’d probably be the guy who’d raise doubts about making that kind of game. Yeah, I’d be an evil suit because it wouldn’t seem like a game that would market well. As a game fan, I’m really happy they got to make that game, though. I hope it sold ok for them.

Anyway, if people like Greg need to be free of all constraints, they need to go the indie route like Jeff Vogel, Apezone, the Combat Mission guys, Octopus Motors, etc. Publishers will always put some restraints on the developers. That’s just reality and it’s not going to change no matter how much he whines.

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I also forgot his Star Wars RPG for West End Games, which was so good one could forget one was sitting around a table pretending to shoot Jawas.

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Here is Costikyan’s ludography:

http://www.costik.com/ludograf.html

I think it’s hilarious that a bunch of guys on here that usually piss and moan about lazy, poorly thought out, lousy licenced property computer games designed to cash in (Jurassic Park: Tresspasser, Kiss: Psycho Circus, Superman 64, Spider-Man: The Movie Game, Cryo’s latest Dune game, Freedom: First Resistance, The Shadow of Zorro, Hitchcock: The Final Cut, VIP: The Game, Britney’s Dance Beat, Heavy Metal FAKK2, the South Park console games, Farscape: The Game, the endless parade of lousy Star Trek games, the adaptation of the Fellowship of the Rings book, Michael Chriton’s Timeline, etc., etc.) and who dread the upcoming Enter the Matrix game are up in arms with accusations of “snobbishness” about Costikyan’s distaste for that exact same phenomenon.

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I don’t think anybody hates those games because of the licenses. People hate them because they’re bad games. The role of “people” in this case is being played by me. In fact, the worst thing about KISS was how little KISS it had. And other parts of it, too. I guess there was actually a tie for worst on that one.

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Umm, are they the same guys?