If a Lead Designer can wield that kind of influence, should the same capacity be expected from any other department lead? Or is there something that sets design apart from other departments such as art, programming, or audio?
Perhaps, perhaps not. It would, I suppose, depend on the studio size.
But just like I know more directors than composers in film, I’ll know more lead designers than other department heads in games. With the exception of a few notables, they tend to fade into the background, or have muted influence. The further down from the top you are, the more exceptional you must be to have notable influence. There’s only so many Nobuo Uematsu’s around, after all.
If we’re equating famous directors to famous game designers, can we figure out who the equivalent of Orson Welles is? If so then we’re finally close to figuring out what the Citizen Kane of gaming is*.
* I would suggest Doom, but Doom is still a great game to play whereas no-one can sit through Citizen Kane today unless you’re ‘into’ film.
Minor point but I would hate to see games lower our ambition to that of film. I rather hope we can do better than that.
Obviously the Citizen Kane of gaming is Jonathon Blow.
Ludonarrative dissonance is when the gameplay doesn’t match the narrative. Blow otoh is trying to make the gameplay the narrative. Instead of jumping on the head of the goomba being the action and the goal being the princess, he’s trying to make the jumping on the head of the goomba the goal and completing the action to be the narrative. In the Witness the gameplay teaching you about the game is literally the point.
I found this article and thought you might find it interesting as well. It’s about John Knoll, one of the VFX supervisors on Rogue One and Chief Creative Officer of ILM.
“People are usually good from a technical side or a creative side, but not both,” says Gareth Edwards, the movie’s director. “John Knoll is definitely a filmmaker.” Edwards should know; before he became a director, he spent years doing visual effects. “When it comes to Star Wars, some people get excited about meeting Harrison Ford,” Edwards says. “For me, it was John Knoll.”
And from an article years ago:
“No matter how technologically advanced moviemaking instruments have become, they remain tools. And as tools, they will always need artists to wield them, and their creative visions to lead the way. To us, there is no greater example of such an artist than John Knoll. Whatever the problem we throw at him, he’ll never fail to come up with a solution that not only meets the technical requirements or limitations of the project, but also makes sense within the overall storytelling. Hand the impossible to John, and he’ll crack it.”
He was also the co-creator of Photoshop, interestingly.
[quote=“Enidigm, post:65, topic:128987, full:true”]
Obviously the Citizen Kane of gaming is Jonathon Blow.[/quote]
I disagree with both of these (and I think is equally difficult for somebody not into games to play the original Doom without mods today). Citizen Kane is not about technical excellence, it’s about narrative and visual structure to tell a story in more interesting way than usual for the times. Technical innovations are at the service of the structural needs. Doom is structurally uninteresting, so I think it does not fit. If we are going to limit ourselves to mainstream games, I would say Half Life, with its no cuts, always in character structure, fits the bill somewhat better, but still I think it’s not the right match.
And Jonathan Blow is more like a nouvelle vague filmmaker at best. Maybe some other European auteur like Tarkovski (given that The Witness included a 15 minute Tarkovski quote, I feel this is less of a stretch). The only Orson Welles that can be tracked to a Jonathan Blowish aesthetic is F for Fake, but that’s an outlier in his production.
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.