To the Editor: As a game developer, I found Warren Spector's despairing diatribe on the woeful lack of innovation in the industry offensive and hypocritical. Two words: Ion Storm. I don't recall hearing about stagnant creativity, rising development costs, or gloom and doom speeches. Yet right up there with the piles of Atari ET cartridges in land fills, we have Ion Storm, a developer of adolescent power fantasy, hard core titles, whowasted an obscene amount of money, and became a huge embarrassment to game developers and the industry as a whole. And who was a partner at Ion Storm? Mr. Spector, of course.
If the industry is as stagnant creatively as Mr. Spector believes, he himself is part of the reason why. The man credited with some of the most beloved, hard core games of all time, like Deus Ex and Ultima Underworld, has the nerve to lecture the rest of the industry that we're not trying hard enough to reach outside the 18-25 male adolescent power fantasy? His last titles were Deux Ex: Invisible War and Thief III - both examples of, as Mr. Spector writes, "licenses, sequels and 'me too' games - vain attempts by publishers to increase the odds of breaking even or...Profiting."
What game has Mr. Spector created that hasn't fit into the mold of the adolescent power fantasy?
I'm a hard core gamer and proud of it. But we're the very audience he insults by implying they cannot to be trusted with the future of the gaming, the ones "willing - even eager - to settlefor the mediocre, the rehashed, the non-interactive experience masquerading as interactivity." You mean the very titles you yourself offered up?
Please, I beg you. Just shut up and work on your game like the rest of us. Let your game speak for itself. Don't lecture us with your grand plans when all you've given us are sequels to glory days FPS franchises.
-Anonymous
To the Editor: First off, great job; I really take my hat off to this sort of thing, we need so much more of it in the industry. For a long time it seems Edge has been the lone voice when it came to intelligent writing on games. I've only just found you at issue #37, but I'll be reading every one from here on in.
Warren Spector's piece really struck a chord with me, as did the subsequent articles. I'm a big believer in narrative driving the player experience and not shoe-horning stories into pre-made levels, having quality writers create our content and leaving the fan-fictionwriters to do it on weekends and in their role-playing groups. After 5 years in the industry as a Designer and Producer, I left it late last year, tired of the general direction we as an industry were heading with the seeming lack of real initiative amongst Publishers to take games to the places people like Spector seemcapable of taking them to. I say Publishers because to lay the blame at Developer's feet is, I think, unfair. Right now it is just too hard to do something truly unique without the backing of someone with deep pockets who believes in what you're doing.
I come from a more traditional creative background, by that I mean theatre, writing and music, yet I've played games since I could crawl. In the medium, as Warren says, we have an unmatched potential for communication, for conveying messages, to inspire the people we reach in ways that movies, literature and music can only dream of.
I'm tired of story-telling that amounts to at best, somebody's Friday night role playing group, and at worst, well, Resident Evil was mentioned, and for good reason. Where are our stories based on Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck? Narratives that are more than adolescent fantasy, ideas that give way to the gaming equivalent of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Lost in Translation, even Brokeback Mountain? There will always be a place for action adventure, what I'm interested in ismore subtle story-telling, better writing, and starting from a story and deciding from there what the best way to tell it is.
The self-imposed exile from the industry won't last I'm sure, gaming gets in your blood like few other things. What I hope is not too long from now, a new surge of creativity will have begun where developers craft experiences out of stories they want to tell and messages they want to convey. Everyone has a story to tell but not nearly every story is worth telling; it's time for the industry to stop taking so much pride in being marginal, male-fantasy driven and clichéd. That's not to say people aren't taking steps toward it yet, but it remains a severely minor group within the greater development community. Warren Spector, Doug Church, the guys at Valve; these are the people leading the way. When a few more people start to follow, I'll come running back. Until then I'm looking for a means of creative expression that doesn't confine itself to stereotypes, technologies used to enhance the player experience rather than limit it, and a few more stories I think somebody wants to hear.
Like a favoured child throwing away an obvious gift, the industry I adore is just too frustrating to watch right now.
-David Gillespie
