Should individual game developers receive greater recognition (be it good or bad)?

I sometimes think even the few game directors get too much credit, not that many of them are actually known by name. I mean, it takes a lot more than one talented person to make a whole game, doesn’t it?

Well, I’ve been thinking about Hidetaka Miyazaki, in particular. He’s supposed to be the genius behind the Demon’s Souls/Dark Souls and souls fans revere him as a God. But how much of it is genius and how much is being at the right place at the right time? The Souls series clearly has a lot of common DNA with King’s Field and Armored Core series, just tweaked so that it’s finally really good. It helps that the PS3 was at last a console powerful enough for such a game (King’s Field - The Ancient City was probably the best they could pull off on PS2). Demon’s Souls was already in development when he started directing the project. While it was supposed to be a “failure”, I’d be curious to know how good it really was before his involvement: did they not realize they had a gem on their hands or did Miyazaki turn it around to greatness?

Plus, I don’t get it: according to his wikipedia page, Miyazaki went from first job in the VG industry at 29 years old to game director in less than two years. What the?

Directing is the skillset that better translates between industries and disciplines, in my experience. It’s easier for a project director to switch between fields (still hard, mind you, but easier) than for any other more specialized professional.

Maybe Miyazaki’s previous experience can shed some light on why the quick upwards trajectory?

I find people like John Shafer, going from first hire to Lead Designer in a major franchise, and in a specialized role, much more impressive in that regard.

It says Miyazaki had a degree in social sciences and worked for years as account manager for Oracle. But then het got hired as a coder at From, so I guess he went back to school for programming classes?

So yeah, education related to analysis and management, and project management experience in a tech based company (and one would say product ownership experience to a degree, depending exactly on what the job entailed).

Plus he could code.

That’s definitely a lot of skills directly applicable to directing a game project (of course many other are needed, so we have to assume he had them).

I’m sure you’re right and it was not a great fit, but it’s hard to think of non-indie developers of a similar … position. David Lynch looms over artsy/indie gaming right now and lots of indie games that might qualify just seem to be taking their style from him. Maybe whoever was in charge of Tell Tale Games? Everyone seems to love the Walking Dead game and it seemed to be their breakthrough adventure game which defined a new genre of adventure gaming. OTOH, maybe in that vein Roberta Williams from Sierra is more an Orson Wells type…

Ah, I think the Papers Please guy fits the bill better (except that he would need more of a career). Both Papers Please and his next game are about structure with a narrative framework and technical or design elegance.

However, I’m not sure an indie fits Orson Welles at all.

Who designed Specs Ops The Line??? That’s a very Orwellian game (well, more Polanski, but still).

Sean Vanaman was the co-project lead/designer/lead writer/director for The Walking Dead Season One and then left Telltale to found his own studio and direct its first game, Firewatch.

There is something to think about no one has quite mentioned. Talented coders and AI developers are precious pieces of the gaming puzzle. I’m not sure there’s a a remotely close analogue to the movie making process. If you think about a job that is more critical yet so often ignored and out of sight, this is it.

Jonathan Cooper @GameAnim
Just as we credit a team, not an individual, for a game’s success, we should never single out one person for a team’s failures.


“I thought it was funny that people are piling on animators for these glitches, when in reality the animators are probably blameless,” said Gwen Frey, who animated The Flame in the Flood and worked on BioShock Infinite. “On a AAA project of this scope most of the smaller cut scenes are never seen by the animators. Instead you create a system for designers to use and trust the designers to script everything properly.”

narrative narrative narrative. There’s too much narrative in gaming these days. Whatever happened to the playative?

I think Doom is the Citizen Kane of Games ™ because it had some scroll text and was about shooting monsters in the face.

(ps I have no actual idea what made Citizen Kane the Citizen Kane of Movies so no idea how that applies to gaming)

Yeah, what does make Citizen Kane the Citizen Kane of movies?

Hey, Jonathan Cooper!

“On a AAA project of this scope most of the smaller cut scenes are never seen by the animators. Instead you create a system for designers to use and trust the designers to script everything properly.”

https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/844962209075642368

So my understanding is that these are examples of scenes sequenced by Cinematic Designers using pre-created animations:

Whereas these scenes would have been hand-crafted by the Cinematic Animators themselves.

https://i.imgur.com/lGrQTdF.gif

https://giant.gfycat.com/UniformLavishDodobird.gif

I thought that Cooper’s theory was interesting:

https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/844963759835656192
https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/844963849459527681

Which would mean that responsibility laid with bad project management rather than the animators or cinematic designers themselves when it came to the low-tier player dialogue segments.

Jonathan Cooper @GameAnim
Just as we credit a team, not an individual, for a game’s success, we should never single out one person for a team’s failures.

There is a corollary to this practice, however:

Until players learn that game design is important, they’ll follow the studio; this means that if a game flops, the reputation of the whole studio suffers, rather than that of the designer.

Although once again, if his theory is correct, I wouldn’t blame the animators for the algorithmic portions. I’m not sure who they would pass blame to for those scenes above that did get completed by hand, though.

It’s all project management in Andromeda as far as I’m concerned. Even in your example gifs, let’s not forget that someone wrote that drivel, someone laid out the scenes, someone directed the VO, etc. The “My face is tired” scene isn’t an object of ridicule just for the bad lip-sync. There’s a whole lot of bad there that came together.

Ya, lots of stuff clearly wasn’t tested enough. Little things that shouldn’t be in a big budget title like this.

It’s not a bad game, it’s just less than it really should be.

The problem with blaming project management is sometimes it’s not the project managers that are the reason deadlines don’t shift. I am not sure about gaming but in my industry, a lot of those deadlines are set before the PMs are even assigned. Getting the large deadlines, aka the release date, moved goes all the way up. I’ve never seen it happen. I have seen some dates the PMs did set that were really messed up and that cascaded problems throughout the entire project, for everyone.

The point is… people in the industry don’t seem that eager to tar and feather or pin stars on people either. Why should we? Hollywood might have some standouts, but even then the crowds over estimate the power of a single name.

Sure. I have no argument in general on timelines being moved up beyond the control of the PM. That said, I think there are still problems with “My face is tired” that are outside the scope of a rushed schedule. I mean, come on. My face is tired? No amount of time is going to fix that line.

I guess my answer would be that authorship is an important concept when analyzing any form of art. If it has no relevance to video games, what does that imply?

I don’t typically run out to see movies because of the people who made them. The long list you guys have up there, half of those names mean nothing to me. The other part of art… not everyone approaches it in the same way you do. (well way more than half on the gaming side).

My thinking is that exceptional aspects of a work have a lot to do with the respective departments responsible, whereas substandard work can be blamed just as much on the project lead, who is also accountable for how well those aspects tie together to form a cohesive whole.

It was also intended to solely be a first person perspective game, like the earlier games in the series. It was only because of console gamer expectations that the ability to see your character was added, and gradually improved over subsequent Bethesda games, but they are still intended to be first person perspective games.