Eviltainment -
March 6, 2001 - Chris Jones
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed
within this column are those of the participants and the
moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the
GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive
material afoot.
I now have a laptop with g++ installed. Fear my wrath, puny humans!
Don't say we didn't warn you.
Ok, I'm back, and quite pleased with what my system's capable of doing. Speaking of which, this provides me a great segue (kinda, if you squint a bit) to talk about one of the questions we get all the time here at the column: resuming downloads, and why we don't have it.
To make a long story short, the GIA runs Roxen, not Apache, as you may have noticed if you've ever mistyped a link to a page on the site. We do this because Roxen's much more efficient than Apache, so Roxen on one machine is about as effective as Apache on several machines. This saves us a good bit of money, and it's probably less of an administrative hassle to boot. The problem is that Roxen does not support file resuming, and at the moment there's not a lot that can be done about it. However, a future version of Roxen or an expansion module may support resuming, and if and when it does, we'll see what can be done. We do listen to you folks, even if we're not always capable of doing what's requested.
On the other hand, these complaints only seem to be a major issue when we've just put up a new FF trailer, so draw your own conclusions.
Onward.
| Corrupting truth and beauty to get ahead in life |
| Chris,
Well, initially, I thought I'd do pretty much anything I could think of.
Creating games is what I really want to do. It's a way to tell a story, just
like writing a book or making a movie, only I think I could actually do
something worthwhile with it. Of course, then, I realize that I honestly
think games are art, and have the potential to be recognized as such. So,
there's simply no way I'd assist edutainment or any other such ridiculous
project, I'd be betraying myself. There we go, a pointless letter wherein I
make myself appear foolish. Yay.
-The Neocount of Merentha, didn't complete his project on the RPG Maker
because he couldn't stomach the battle system they forced you to use. Not
because he's lazy. Honest. |
The question is, why does everything you do as a game developer have to be great? Any number of great artists have put out what the market wanted to put food on the table, and as long as they didn't confuse that with their really good stuff, it was fine. And, as the next letter points, out, even edutainment doesn't have to be complete crap...
| Entercation, not edutainment |
| Hey officer, watch the dog, I don't want him eating my stash!
Technically isn't almost all great entertainment 'edutainment'? Wouldn't
you rather watch a movie like "Do the Right Thing" than "Scary Movie"?
Of course you don't want it crammed down your throat, if you could work a
message about the fragility of life into a hockey game it would probably be
commended (also because a game not built around plot is hard to work
messages into), but if you just come out and blatantly say that brain
injuries might lead to CAT scanning, you're just being really righteous and
kind of a dick in ruining a kids idea of a fun time. Hey this letter was too
long, I should've just mentioned that the drug abuse scenes in "Xenogears"
are more elegant than after school specials where a teenager dies a
literally impossible death by over
dosing on marijuana(?).
But then if it doesn't sacrifice all the 'tainment' to fit in more 'edu'
as well as feeding you the message through an IV needle jammed into your
frontal lobe, then it's not really 'edutainment'
is it?
That said, I'd gladly make sacrifices to enter the game industry as long
as the job itself was decent, I'd design characters for 989 studios if it
meant I got to design characters and get paid for it. And you have to
remember that crappy jobs will quite often lead to better ones, even
Sakaguchi was producing "Rad Racer" before he got to take total control over
his own projects, and Amano Yoshitaka was designing for anime about bees
before he finally got to the point where he could work on his current "Hero"
multimedia project.
Gilbert
P.S. I wanted to suggest a topic on drugs and their relationship to game design here, but it's not like when the product of said relationship is a "New Age Retro Hippie" who uses a ruler in battle so he can "Figure out the length of things more easily" that the topic would be taken seriously by... anyone at all. |
It's true that a lot of good art does teach something - I learned a lot about history and science just by reading science fiction as a kid. But good art also disguises what it teaches, whereas edutainment nearly always hammers the lessons home to a point where they're not even remotely interesting anymore. And of course, there's the question of what's actually gonna get taught: you'll probably absorb a fair amount from the movie Traffic, but including some stuff they wouldn't have wanted in an after school special.
| Horror story |
| My personal shame: doing Q&A on an edutainment title.
When I was in college, I did exactly what -CS- discusses. I wanted to get into
the game industry bad enough that I ended up working on an edutainment title -
not even programming, just play testing. Everyone despises edutainment games
because they almost always suck, but this was worse than normal. I won't
describe the title or name names (for the sake of my own pride more than
anything else) but it suffices to say that this was one of those programs that
comes free with packaged computers aimed at the average American family. You
know, the programs that suck?
Anyway, to make a long story shorter, I left the company after a short period
of time. That job and my own personal projects in my spare time (little action
games, 3D engines, etc) made me realize that just because I loved playing games
doesn't mean I'd love making them. I think a lot of people would come to this
same conclusion even if they worked at Nintendo or Konami or any other famous
game house. Making games is work, and there's a reason why it's called "work"
and not "fun".
Chris Wright
- now making cell phones, which is also work |
I dunno - I think it might focus some people a little bit better on what games are actually about if they had to sweat over code for a couple of weeks, and make them more appreciative consumers in the long run. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to be a game designer, because I've seen what goes in to debugging even the simplest of games, and as a result I tend to respect well-crafted but unspectacular titles like Secret of Evermore that much more.
| There may be some hyperbole in this letter |
| Good god. I'd rather die forever yearning, doomed to haunt the moonlit
hours as a wandering spectre, than work on a project like THAT. What
next, adding "Snake Says" to the end of Metal Gear games?
-AJ
|
Hmm...
*wavy lines cover the screen, rising harp chords sound*
"Snake Says: 'Remember kids, always go for the head or groin shot when using tranquilizers. The effect is near-instant, and you don't want a guard on alert for the few seconds it takes to knock him out.'"
(A chorus of kids echoses Snake): "Snake says, stay stealthy, stay in school!"
*wavy lines cover the screen, rising harp chords sound*
A mixed blessing, I'd say.
| High horses |
| There are definite limits I wouldn't cross to get into the industry.
Murdering my way to the top, that's okay, but editing some game to tell kids
to stay in school? That's just wrong. That's manipulation of people's minds,
and it's not my bag.
.....Of course I say that now, but someone waves a roll of hundreds under my
nose and it's hello Thought Police. And I think it'd be the same with lots
of people. It's all good and well to talk about moral integrity and such,
but everyone's got a price. Yes, even you Chris, I'd wager.
Negative Creep |
Sure, but for all practical purposes, nobody's gonna do that to make you develop games - there are plenty of deluded fools who'll gladly do it for free, and some even do good work. I've found that more often than not, once most people get to a certain comfort level - food, shelter, clothes, and enough tv, books, or video games to keep them entertained, they don't really react to more money as an incentive.
Still, if anyone wants to try bribing me, I'm open to suggestions.
| If you gotta shill, shill with style |
| Hell yes I'd make edutainment. And I'd make it the best damn edutainment out
there, so that people would notice my excellence and invite me to
participate in more interesting projects.
You may not want to make your name based on Elmo's Letter Adventure, or turn
a perfectly violent hockey game into a message brought to us by the
AdCouncil, but these jobs may get you your foot in the door, or at least pay
the rent while you work on your magnum opus.
After all, we're not talking about slaughtering babies, we're talking about
edutainment. And no, we are not morally obligated to keep stupid people from
being stupid. That would make us slaves to their stupidity. If we are
morally obligated to anything, it is to taking their money and putting it
toward better ends (better not because they are less stupid, but because
they are ours).
--DarkLao |
Deep, man. It's like, cutthroat and enlightened, all at once! And for what we're talking about, it strikes me as good a governing philosophy as any.
| And you thought they just made Pac Man |
| Chris,
Maybe it's just me, but I've come to a revelation:
Namco is SUCH a cool company.
What's strange is they must have stealth-capabilities,
because I played three Namco products yesterday and
only noticed at the end.
Why are they so cool? They make a great mindless
arcade shooter (Time Crisis 2, oh man, that was fun)
with something I really like actually - the lightguns
have a slide, which bucks back every time you pull the
trigger. It's so sweet. Just a little touch, but one
that counts. It makes other arcade shooters seem a
little bland, which is very impressive. And the co-op
mode of TC2 makes it even better, a friend of mine and
I beat it mostly by tag-teaming boss enemies,
communicating and everything, it was fun.
They make fun strategy games - hard ones, too - Metal
Marines is fiendishly difficult at times but
incredibly fun.
And RPGs, the Tales series, particularly Tales of
Phantasia, is fun. The random encounter rate is NOT,
but the game as a whole is.
So, are there other companies like this that are, at
least in the eyes of the public, incredibly
under-rated? They always put out top-notch (or, at
least, most of the time) products and just never seem
to get the recognition the Squaresofts and Rares of
the world do?
=====
Peter
|
Good question... in fact, it's so good, I'm turning it over to Drew for a topic tomorrow.
Closing Comments:
Yep, email Drew tomorrow about under-appreciated developers, and he'll either give you ice cream or punch you in the stomach - I'm not sure which is on the schedule. See you tomorrow
-Chris Jones, Aquafied
|
