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Subject: Dead Media Working Note 08.4
Dead medium: Computer Games Are Dead (Part 2)
From: ChrisCr_AT_aol.com (Chris Crawford)
Source: INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT DESIGN Volume 9, Number
4, April 1996
Interactive Entertainment Design
5251 Sierra Road
San Jose, CA 95132
published six times/year, $36 year, $50 outside US
(((We continue Mr Crawford's essay on the decline of computer gaming, "Computer
Games Are Dead")))
FROM CREATOR-DRIVEN TO MARKET-DRIVEN
The first indicator is the decisive shift from a
creator-driven field to a market-driven field. In the
early days of computer gaming, the creative talents made
all the editorial decisions. There were two reasons for
this: first, they had a lockhold on the supply of games.
Competent designer/programmers were rare; if the
executives didn't take it the way the designer created it,
the designer could walk away and leave the executives
stranded without product.
Nowadays, the supply is more closely matched to
demand, so the designers have less creative control over
their work. Second, the marketplace was not well-
understood in those days. It's difficult to overrule a
designer with marketing data that doesn't exist. But over
the years the industry has built up an impressive set of
marketing truisms that have shifted the balance of power
into the hands of the marketing folk.
I'll not decry this power shift as an evil; it just
happened. Marketing people aren't bad or stupid or crass,
and designers don't hold the keys to goodness and light.
But the shift from a creator-driven atmosphere to a
market-driven atmosphere worked a profound change on the
organism, transforming it from a future-looking creature
to a past-looking creature. At its heart, the creator-
driven approach concentrates on the future, on what might
be. The creator's whole point and purpose is to move
beyond the existing limits and explore new areas == to
change. This emphasis on change is at the core of what we
mean by "life."
By contrast, the market-driven approach is past-
looking, for it concentrates on what was successful
yesterday. The marketer's whole point and purpose is to
identify the locus of success and stick close to it.
Stability is the byword of the market-driven approach.
Every industry combines the creator-driven approach
with the market-driven approach in its own proportion. The
creators supply drive and the marketers provide
sustenance. The proportion determines the liveliness or
morbidity of the industry. For example, laundry detergent
is a mature industry, needing nothing in the way of new
worlds to conquer; it is therefore, and quite fittingly, a
market-driven industry.
By contrast, a field such as genetic engineering is
still nascent; its triumphs all lie in the future.
Marketing focus is inappropriate here; whoever finds a
cure for cancer need not concern himself with marketing
issues. This field is utterly creator-driven.
There is nothing inherently disreputable or
dishonorable about the laundry detergent industry, nor is
genetic engineering morally superior to making laundry
detergent. But ask yourself: which field has more life in
it? Which field has the future with the greater promise
of change?
By shifting from a creator-driven organism to a
market-driven organism, we have transformed computer games
from a medium to a commodity. A medium is a channel of
communication, something whose content is constantly in
flux and ever-surprising. This flux, this change, is the
heartbeat of life of the medium. There is always the hope
of a brighter future with any medium, because the content
can always change to address new conditions. But a
commodity is a dead thing, a box that sits on a shelf.
Who can confidently expect the commodities of today to
meet the needs of tomorrow? In our shift from creator-
driven to market-driven, our image of the computer game
has shifted, too: we now see a box where once we saw a
medium. By fixing it in place, we have killed it.
BUYING MARKET SHARE
1990 brought a turning point in the history of computer games: Wing Commander.
The game itself had some strong points; it was a modernized version of Star Raiders,
the classic Atari game of 1979 that catapulted the Atari computers into near-success.
But its greatest strength lay in its development budget. This may be hard to understand,
but in 1990 the typical computer game cost perhaps $150K to create. Wing Commander's
budget was much, much larger than this. Origin's strategy with Wing Commander
was clear: to buy market share. In most cases, a willingness to raise the stakes
by investing more money is of positive benefit to an industry. Everybody else
must either call the bet or fold, and the overall quality of product rises.
However, in a young industry such as computer games,
it doesn't quite work the way it should work, or the way
it does work in mature industries. In a mature industry,
additional investment capital is carefully routed to those
endeavors that will yield the greatest return on
investment. To make this intelligent allocation of funds,
we require an experienced team of executives who know what
they're doing.
Such has not been the case with computer games.
Despite all we have learned in the last fifteen years,
most computer game company executives are still groping
about. The best evidence of this is the torrent of money
that has been poured down the sinkhole over the last five
years. Origin's action triggered an inverted gold rush;
everybody stampeded to spend money on products.
In the process, we succeeded in 1) glutting the
shelves with overpriced junk; 2) convincing our customers
that our output was overpriced junk; and 3) attracting a
horde of shysters and opportunists into our industry.
The most invidious result of the inverse gold rush
has been the steep rise in entry costs. Back in the
1980s, two clowns in a garage could put together a hit
computer game. This attracted a great many clowns, to be
sure, but some of those clowns turned out to be quite
creative. The low entry costs of making computer games
kept up the creative ferment. But when the entry cost rose
beyond the reach of individuals in the 1990s, computer
game design became an activity requiring financial muscle
== and a lot of talented people were shut out of the
market.
A CLOSED DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM
A third factor contributing to the sclerosis of
computer games is the self-assured closure of the
distribution system for games. Everybody in the
distribution chain, from retailers to distributors to
publishers, knows what sells and what doesn't sell. They
can all tell you with great precision what makes for a hit
game and what doesn't. It has almost been reduced to a
science.
The entire process has become so tightly managed, so
carefully balanced on the edge of profitability, that
there is no longer any room for experimentation.
There's nothing wrong with applying our knowledge. We
need to consider the feedback of the marketplace and apply
that feedback to our creations. But we also need to retain
some intellectual humility, a recognition that our best
marketing data represents only a fraction of the truth, to
wit, the knowledge of what has worked in response to what
has been attempted.
The marketplace is a vast unknown creature, a blob of
confusion that we can only know by poking it with a
variety of experiments. If we try to sell one game and it
fails, then we know that games similar to it will fail; if
we try to sell another game and it succeeds, then we know
that games similar to this game will sell. But we must be
careful about generalizing too much from these lessons. A
failure can be attributed to many factors, and we cannot
know with certainty why any given game succeeded.
For example, why was Balance of Power such a huge commercial success? I
don't know. Was it because it was one of the first games to fully exploit the
spirit of the Macintosh GUI? Was it because it appeared at a tense time when the
public was particularly sensitive to international relations? Was it because its
intelligence and maturity provided a welcome relief from the juvenile pap that
dominated the industry at the time? We will never know. Anybody who claims to
have put their finger on the answer is deceiving himself.
Let's look at the other side of the coin: why did my game Trust & Betrayal
fail so miserably? Was it because the graphics were below average? Perhaps; but
the graphics were still superior to those of some games that were more successful,
such as the Infocom adventure games, which continued to sell well at the same
time that Trust & Betrayal was bombing. Was it because the game had no action
or violence? Perhaps. Was it because the game emphasized interpersonal relationships?
Perhaps. Was it that the game had no clear market identification? Was the price
too high? Who knows? The danger here is that we can use Trust & Betrayal or Balance
of Power to support any pet theory we favor.
It is entirely plausible that someday, interpersonal
games may be a hugely successful genre. In this case,
people will point to Trust & Betrayal as the precursor
game of the genre, attributing its failure to other
factors. It was on the right track, we will say, but was
crippled by the fatal flaw of (fill in the blank). The
important thing for us to recognize today is that it is
impossible for us to know what that fatal flaw is, at
least not until we try other experiments. To dismiss
interpersonal games as a dead end because Trust & Betrayal
failed would be idiocy == and yet the games industry has
jumped to exactly that conclusion by placing all of its
money on other factors.
This problem has been addressed successfully by other
industries. For example, by the mid-1970's, Hollywood had
established a solid marketing rule of thumb that science-
fiction movies just didn't attract large audiences. Thus,
George Lucas was taking an almost contrarian stance when
he made Star Wars. Had Hollywood's distribution system
been as closed as the computer games distribution system,
Star Wars would never have seen the light of day. But
Hollywood has learned that a certain amount of
experimentation is essential to its survival.
Entertainment is first and foremost a field in flux, and
an industry that cannot support experimentation in an
organized fashion is a dead industry. Such is the case
with computer games.
(((Part Three continues soon with "The Death of Creativity")))
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