Brendon Chung
Derek Smart, Derek Smart, De-
Cameron went way overbudget and over schedule with Titanic, had to scream at studio execs to stop them from making cuts. But in that case, he delivered a final product that was pretty darn good, even if you ignore the hokey romance story and watch it for the CGI (groundbreaking at the time). If Star Citizen turns out great, I’ll go along with your comparison to Chris Roberts. :)
I would say “absolutely”. Famous example would be David Fincher directing Alien 3. The studio handed him an incomplete script, gave him only a few weeks to prep, and a tight schedule… it was a total disaster (by his accounts… maybe he just wasn’t ready to direct a major motion picture at that young age).
I don’t think we need to go back to auteur-driven game hype (ie John Romero making you his bitch, Peter Molydeux etc).
Yeah you got me there. I regretted putting that in because it goes against the argument in the OP.
(It was to provide blanket protection against The Old Republic and Dragon Age: Inquisition, which in my mind were the only possible contenders. I’m still thinking that Andromeda takes the throne though.)
The Old Republic and Dragon Age: Inquisition were primarily developed by Bioware Austin and Bioware Edmonton respectively, so that rules out individual culpability. It is very possible, based on this pattern, that responsibility for these problems lies much further up the corporate ladder.
What happened to the woman working at EA (not even Bioware as the Gaters suspected) was a harassment campaign as far as I can tell. Due to the way our culture has evolved, it seems to have become increasingly difficult to separate criticism and harassment. If someone dislikes a game, they often feel it’s sensible to harass and troll its creators directly. This is likely one of the reasons developers actually shy away from recognition, they want to shield themselves from angry internet mobs.
Perhaps I shouldn’t throw this bomb here, but if auteurs can exist in movies but not video games, does that somehow devalue our medium? Just as some critics considered the works of French New Wave filmmakers to be more valuable than those put out by the Hollywood studio system of that time?
Also, to go back to Professor Bartle’s assertion: do you think that modern video game development is analogous to the old Hollywood studio system? Is there a fundamental difference between these mediums (including duration, as you mention) that necessitates such a system in video games, rather than following influential stars, preventing a viable alternative?
[quote=“Ryan_Kelly, post:45, topic:128987, full:true”]Perhaps I shouldn’t throw this bomb here, but if auteurs can exist in movies but not video games, does that somehow devalue our medium? Just as some critics considered the works of French New Wave filmmakers to be more valuable than those put out by the Hollywood studio system of that time?
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Bah,
Auteurs exit in games exactly as they do in movies. The influence of an individual can really affect a product even if that product remains a group effort.
People really confuse what the auteur theory in film is all about with the marketing gimmick of “directed by”. But I’m sort of tired of explaining it again and again and people not listening. But not tired enough not to try again :P.
The auteur theory was developed precisely to identify talented individuals that were capable to transfer a personal, specific outlook into the movies they worked on under the studio system. That is, the concept of film auteurs comes from an examination of the old studio system (very similar to the current videogame studio system in it’s corporate focus), not from the later shift and focus on directors as creative leads. In a way, this later development hides many of the other auteurs of a film behind the shadow of the director and has cheapened the concept in the eyes of the public. It was developed because the New Wave filmmakers saw a lot of artistic value on the studio system movies and wanted to identify where it came from.
Yes, the original writings focuses inordinately on the directors (hey, it was written by directors, go figure) as the sole auteurs, but the contemporary interpretation the the theory does away with this limitation and uses the same analytical tools to identify the many auteurs that can appear in a film. I find it a very useful way to look at collective works to ascertain the individual influences in them.
Auteur theory is now not preoccupied with who is the main creative force behind a work. It’s focus is in whether an individual creative has been able to express a coherent outlook and perspective along all the movies he or she has worked in. That is, it is a post facto analysis of a complete body of work that assesses whether that body of work exhibits specific characteristics that correlate more strongly with the creative being analyzed than with any other factor. A classical example is a DP that works along many different studios but is able to bring a certain atmosphere and way of looking at stuff to his movies.
Auteur theory also states that some directors and writers might not be auteurs despite their high leadership positions. If they lack a common thread or identifying feature in their work, they can be amazing artisans, but not auteurs, since they have no personal perspective to bring to their works. Whether it is useful or not to identify these amazing artisans or not is another issue.
However, it is obvious it is easier for an individual to be identified as an auteur the higher he or she works up in the production chain (since her decisions have more influence) but it is perfectly possible for a cameraman or costume designer to be an auteur. An interesting corollary is that the most influential individuals (and thus most frequent auteurs) under the studio system where the producers, not the directors or writers.
With the advent of the New Hollywood, New Wave and other changes in film production, directors (and somewhat writers) gained a lot of influence in the process, and became more likely auteurs, with body of works and tendencies easier to identify, but that does not mean they are the only auteurs that remain. Auteur theory is equally applicable now as it was then, and I dare people to challenge the notion that people like Vitorio Storaro (DP) or Peter Sellers are not auteurs.
So, after this long winded explanation, what does it means for games?
Auteur theory is equally applicable to big AAA studio games as it is to films made under the old studio system. People that might have a chance of having a bigger than usual and coherent along a body of work influence in games (that is, who have a better chance of being defended as auteurs) are: Directors (obviously, including department directors), Designers (including level designers), Producers (I would say the Housers, for example have shown quite the coherence in their body of work), Writers, Character designers, Animators, AI coders, Core gameplay programmers (they influence game feel more than designers sometimes)… Of course not everybody is going to be an auteur, and there could be auteurs from other positions, but all the above I could see influencing enough works in a consistent manner to be able to track their influence in their products and the point of view they bring to it.
On that note, I have determined that the actual Lead Cinematic Animator on Mass Effect: Andromeda is Tim Golem, who previously served as one of the two Lead Cinematic Animators on Dragon Age: Inquisition.
There does still seem to be an issue spanning all three Bioware studios, though.
Also, I think you win this thread.
Don’t confuse authorship (ability to bring a common perspective along a body of works) with technical competence. Many movies made by great professionals turned out badly for, for example, lack of budget, misdirected production priorities, or simply shit hitting the fan. As @Granath says, this is very likely due to production structure and prioritization of tasks that due to any individual negative influence.
Where do you draw the line between artistic influence and technical competence? My issue with Bioware animations goes beyond bugs, glitches, and missing values. In many cases, I simply find them to lack lifelike or believable qualities, such as their failure to convey relevant emotions.
That’s a good question. I guess you could make the point there’s authorial coherence in regards to lifeless animations…
But again, if you can’t identify an individual responsible for the specific artistic input, it’s probably something or somebody higher up. Either a producer or creative lead who considers animations unimportant in the big scheme of things or the studio’s own production structure (however, I though ME2 -not ME1 nor ME3, those were just ok- cinematic animations were quite good, specially for the times, so at some point the studio was doing good work in that regard).
Maybe you can identify somebody who left around ME2 (DA2, despite other failings also had some interesting cinematics, but not at the ME2 level) and that has brought with him/her the same level of care towards animations -I would say use of body language- to other projects?
Cinematic animator Jonathan Cooper went on to contribute to Uncharted 4, but he was but one out of a dozen non-lead animators on Mass Effect 2, and one out of dozens of non-lead animators on Uncharted 4. I could not with any amount of confidence infer that he was responsible for the praiseworthy level of care in either.
Mass Effect 2’s Lead Cinematic Animator was Parrish Ley, whereas Mass Effect 3 had two Lead Cinematic Animators: Parrish Ley and Joel MacMillan (working from Bioware Montreal). Parrish Ley stayed in Edmonton and was uninvolved with Andromeda, whereas Joel MacMillan went on to become that game’s Art Director.
My own input is not as worthy as Juan’s, but what the hell… :D
We do have auteurs in the gaming industry, just not in the massive, sprawling, too much for one person games. And even then it’s debatable, I liken those games more to TV shows than movies.
An episode can have auteurs. A season too. A whole series also. They might not be the same persons, and just like games, it becomes harder to know who deserves the praise / criticism.
And I think we’re still at a very early stage of game development, technical competency is still an issue for many games, in a sense we’re still learning how to make games and not how to make good games. Michael Bay knows how to make movies. I might dislike them, and scholars in the field might find fault, but the explosions are gonna look good, the camera is going to be pointed in the right direction, sound is gonna work, flags will wave properly, sad music will play at the right time, happy music likewise, etc. I’m gonna have the experience I’m supposed to have. Until that becomes the standard for games, it’s probably premature to make comparisons to the studio system…
The problem with all of this is, in any kind of creative venture that involves more than 1 person, it’s actually very very hard to tell who it is you like. It’s akin to having a band member leave. You may have no idea what that member actually did in the day to day workings of things, but once they are gone, things aren’t the same.
Directors getting credit instead of studios, is a move in the right direction, but once again, you are assigning creative success to one person, where there are dozens of people involved. There are numerous examples of great directors that always worked with more or less the same crew. Bergman and his cinematographer for example…would Bergman films have been nearly as good without that person? Arguable not, but you probably know Bergmans name, you probably don’t know Sven Vilhem Nykvist.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the basic premise of defining who the actual talent is, but it’s very hard to do in a project where 100 people have their hands on things.
I spent a lot of time in France at one point in my life, and recently. I learned something very funny, that’s sort of pertinent to this discussion. The French have long been credited with loving Jerry Lewis…turns out, who they really loved, was the guy who did the French voiceovers for all the Jerry Lewis movies. If you go and check some of those out, you’ll see how radically different it is from Jerry Lewis’s actual voice and inflection.
Having spent a lifetime in creative pursuits, most of them collaborative, I can tell you, the person who is actually responsible for “magic” is a very very slippery thing to get a hold of, even among the people involved.
Let me begin by saying that I know basically zero about the movie industry, so I’d love to be corrected if I’m wrong here.
That said, doesn’t a director bring on the staff/contractors/firms s/he wants in order to complete the picture within the constraints imposed by the producer(s)? If that premise is correct, then already we’re at a divergence because of the studio system that we’re talking about with mainstream games largely has that staff already in place.
I know from my limited time working with larger game studios that teams could request personnel from other groups but outside hiring was far more difficult if there were individuals or teams on the bench within the company. These guys may not be who you want, but they’re who is available and thus you’d be stuck with them.
[quote=“meeper, post:54, topic:128987, full:true”]That said, doesn’t a director bring on the staff/contractors/firms s/he wants in order to complete the picture within the constraints imposed by the producer(s)? If that premise is correct, then already we’re at a divergence because of the studio system that we’re talking about with mainstream games largely has that staff already in place.
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It’s more complicated than that, and nowadays depends of the specific production (it’s usually a negotiation between the director and the studio).
But in the old studio days (when the auteur theory was coined) it was very similar to how game studios are set up today, with studios comprised 100% of full-time hires, including directors and actors. They did shuffle people from one project to another within the same studio (again, like most game studios nowadays).
you bring up good points, ones which are particularly relevant to positions where there are many people working in a single subsystem. Take special effects on a modern CGI heavy film. There may be one or two directors of special effects, but so many dozens, or hundreds, of hands are responsible that individuals can’t be singled out for credit. This is true more now than in the 70’s and 80’s. Compare Empire Strikes Back to Rogue One, for example. It is much easier to divine the work and influence of Phil Tippet in the tauntauns and AT-ATs, or even the T-rex in Jurassic Park, than it is to see how Steve Ellis (whom I’m guessing is largely responsible) influence the space battles of Rogue One.
This is no slight on the craft and capabilities of people now, but merely that the credits for Rogue One list 134 names from ILM alone just with peoples last names of A-C. That is impossible to have one person have the level of influence at that point.
However it is distinctly easier to see the influence of writers (usually), directors or producers, or even lead composers. These people, even in films with crews in the hundreds or thousands, have responsibilities that coalesce into one or two individuals.
And this is where we are now in games. Whatever you think of the writing of Tomb Raider, there is a certain authorship to the new games that you can identify to Rhianna Pratchett. But at the same time the flaws and weaknesses may be her own, or may be due to constraints of the production. Was the bonheaded capture scene her poor writing? Or was it that the designer had already created the setpiece and assets, and she had to write around that? Given the rumors of the stage of development where she came on, I’d wager more than a little the second option. But it also does work against my thesis, somewhat. In that even in areas with clear authorial voice, there can be complications due to other factors.
Still I stand by the baseline premise, that areas where work falls into a small, or singular, set of hands it will be easier to see the individual’s influence, be it film or games.
This, however, I strongly take issue with. Bands are still small groups, and have discrete responsibilities. And it is still damned easy to identify who has what influence. Read the song credits and you can see who wrote the lyrics, and who wrote the music. And it is easy to see when someone has influence across multiple bands.
Take the name Bob Rock. Now you may not know him, but I assure you that you have heard him. He was never a formal member of a band, so much as he was one of the most influential and important songwriters of the 80’s and 90’s. And if you know your music history, you can clearly see his influence in Metallica’s Black album (the first he produced for them).
But when you go to bands who write their own music (music elitist warning!) then it becomes even clearer. For example it is very easy to see how Steven Wilson, or Arjen Anthony Lucassen, or Devin Townsend, or Mike Portnoy, or Neal Morse, or Rick Wakeman can influence an album. Their presence is unmistakable. Or take Yngwie Malmsteen. Over the years he’s had many singers. Yet his musical style is very distinct. Each new singer, however, brings different things to an album. Jeff Scott Soto and Goram Edman bring something different, and identifiable, to the distinct sound of Yngwie. Yngwie perfectly fits into the auteur category, if you transpose the record companies with studios.
All that because music, more than any other medium than books, is intensely personal and individual. The number of hands responsible for an individual song is much smaller. Even in churned out studio songs where the band is merely the pretty faces slapped onto a studio production there are still unmistakeable fingerprints, if you know how to see them. Granted I don’t have much kind to say about the pop music studio systems, but still. There are individuals working in the background who have distinct influences, even when working with different musicians.
So you’re saying that big-budget VFX basically has no analogue to the cinematographer in terms of their auteur potential? If responsibility is diluted with scale, is the presence of an artistic vision also diluted?
Do you have any thoughts on which positions in the video game industry fit that criteria? Creative Director, writers, and composers seem to be pretty much analogous. Producers seem to, by and large, play a different role in the gaming industry than they do in film (not meant as a comment on their importance). Art Director would be more akin to VFX supervisor than cinematographer.
Rob Pardo was the Lead Designer on a project with dozens of designers, and yet he was singled out by Partle as the man who should be foremost associated with World of Warcraft. John Riccitiello too said of Pardo:
There’s always a lot of hands on success. I’ve been in the industry long enough to know that just about everybody credits him with the product
I would say that, to a large extent, this is probably true. Not to say there couldn’t be some singular person who wields outsize influence, but that it becomes increasingly unlikely that person would rest within the VFX team.
Persons are compartmentalized into smaller units, for example our very own Spiffy has worked on Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and some of his work is in the trailer. But it would stretch credulity to assign some fingerprint of his genius on the film at large. He worked on a very small portion, and it seems that increasingly separate teams handle separate aspects. That the creation of the monster is compartmentalized separate from the team working on Rocket Raccoon or the Milano. That anyone who would be able to wield such direct influence would be increasingly separated from the technical creation, likely someone in the production staff. i.e. one of those small number of persons at the top.
I would say this is probably fair. Certainly Christopher Tin, Drew Karpyshyn, or Ken Levine have identifiable traits that you can see in the games. In the case of Mass Effect I do sincerely think that the absence of Drew from ME3 did notably hurt the game, and his diminished role for 2 shows in the uneven nature.
As for listing out which roles fit that bill? It’d be hard for me to specifically call out. Like I said it probably has more to do with the number of persons working on a team. Once the team size required to do a task exceeds some value of X persons, then the role of the individual gets subsumed.
Like, for example, I’m fairly familiar with the staff at Paradox. Wiz, for example, is kind of their big AI guy, and as such it is more fair to attribute the performance of said AI to him individually than it would be for the enemy AI programmers in a Call of Duty game. At Paradox that individual is part of a small, potentially one person, team. Likewise there will be a more coherent artistic vision and style at Supergiant then there is at Ubisoft. Sure there may be style guides, storyboards, concept art, and all that for an AC game, but there is still going to be more variability, less room for individual flourish to inspire.
And a lead designer like Pardo could certainly wield that kind of influence. He is able to direct the grand sweep of the game. However you wouldn’t be able to assign, for example, NPC dialogue to any individual. It’s some large collection of many individuals.
That is fricking brilliant. The M. Knight Shamalan entry made me burst out laughing LOLOL. Nice work. There’s got to be someone out there that emulates Richard Garriott. Maybe Kevin Costner or George R.R. Martin? Actually I think Peter Jackson would fit Richard Garriott really well too, maybe better than the aforementioned individual. I would argue Quentin Tarantino would match up perfectly with Dan Houser and Leslie Benzies of Rockstar North. Then I would align Hideo with Ron Howard.
Man, I thought about that too. Ultimately I felt they weren’t enough of a ‘household’ name, as I don’t really recognize the names myself. Perhaps that’s my general apathy towards Rockstar though.
And I’m glad you brought some new names in. I’m really curious why you would put Hideo with Ron Howard? Not that I think it’s a wrong answer, but that I think you and I were judging on very different critera here!
For the record I see Hideo like Abrams. Technically brilliant, over reliant on certain techniques, and batshit crazy convoluted stories in long running series that rely on nested mysteries I’m not sure hold together at all. Basically MGS narrative as Lost.
Jackson to Garriot I could see. I see Carmack to Jackson because the technical brilliance revolutionizing the medium in some way (LotR and Weta and Doom arguably equally important to technical growth of their medium). But Garriot is an interesting fellow as well.