Interview with Tale of Tales (well, mostly Auriea)

[Michaël Samyn]

Even I thought this was a fun read, and I was there!

[Chris W]

Thanks, that was a great read.

I liked the part where Auriea talked about her sudden realization that "Wow! People are doing only this because this is what they actually WANT to do!"  I have had a number of realizations like that in life (not necessarily to do with the industry) and it really is a great moment of clarity.

I think you both undersold the power of the mainstream publishing machine.  It's not even really an issue of developers trying harder to stay true to their hearts and avoiding the lure of the idea that marketers know the people better (that last thought was the interviewer's).  For example, the studio I work for is independent, but we don't have the funding to do whatever we want.  So, we have to do contract work - and when a publisher is looking for developers, the game they want to make has already been decided, often years in advance.  Bringing your pet idea to a publisher is, in the vast majority of cases, a losing proposition.  The marketing/publishing side is calling all the shots, which is a shame, becuase these are not the creative people.

I like what one of the commenters mentioned about Nintendo - where the culture was that the marketers were given a game and told to sell it, rather than the marketers telling the developers what kind of game to make so they can then sell it.

There are some glimmers of hope though.  Sony has been funding experimental indie titles (That Game Company being a shining example of that program), but it's on a very small scale, unfortunately.

[Michaël Samyn]

Bringing your pet idea to a publisher is, in the vast majority of cases, a losing proposition.

Then find another way to get your ideas produced and published.

(Not saying that this is the case in your company, but I think many developers conveniently hide behind commercial demands and publishers simply because their ideas are not good enough, or they don't believe in them hard enough. This is not a bad thing! There's already too much wishy-washy art out there. It's good to have a filter -even though, obviously, this is not the best of all possible filters.)

[Michaël Samyn]

Also, "pet ideas" are not necessarily good ideas. It takes a lot of hard work to create video-games that are not unconventional. And one of the steps on that path is realizing that your pet ideas don't work and that no idea actually works and that you need to make a game and then another one and then another one and then realize that you probably don't have the talent and never will have the skill to even get close to what you really want to do. It is much much easier to make a game in an existing format, with somebody else telling you what the goals of the design should be. People often talk about how they cannot do their own work for this or that reason, but they often forget that doing your own work is much harder.

[KnifeFightBob]

Well, I think it is hard facts then that working in the industry is generally a fairly bad deal (which Michael pointed out - better then to have your own way). A raw deal perhaps - them or you - but I think it is both rational and sincere and in the end, avoids the pain of trying to reverse-engineer a machine that seems too corrupt to change. As a friend of mine said regarding 'brutal capitalism': "It doesn't work? Hell, it works all TOO well."

[Thomas]

Good stuff! Like how fluent the interview felt.

One thing though: I am not so sure that game developers WANT to make games about killing. My take on it is that developers think that games about shooting is the only proper way to go about, or at least the basic ingerdient you put in and build everything around. And then because of this, they make themselves believe that shooting games is what they do want to make.

What we do actually affect our attitudes more than the reverse*, so I honestly think this is a possibility. The upbringing of game developers, both as players and creators forces them into a very specific mindset that they then take as their own choice.


* For more info, lookie here: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/10/05/the-benjamin-franklin-effect/

[ghostwheel]

Wonderful interview.

[QXD-me]

I liked this interview, it was a really good read. It was also good to see positive comments under it (at least when I read it).