Developer's Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators (Inside Technology) by Casey O'Donnell

Author:Casey O'Donnell [O'Donnell, Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-12-14T02:18:00+00:00

World 5-3: The Game Develop(er/ment) Mythology

These cyclical arguments of needing to open up, yet rejecting such an act of subversion in the culture of play, hearken back to the "breaking into the industry" narratives of informants, and the entire sub-genre of game development community writings about how one can gain entry to the restrictive networks of access. While it is true that work/play is imaginative, interesting, and desirable, it seems that the way it wraps itself in secrecy and closes off networks of access further elevates its status and desirability. The levels of secrecy and networks of access pervade numerous aspects of the work/play of the videogame industry. The mythology that surrounds the game industry about what game development is, who it is for, how it takes place, and its broader political economic context all enter into this equation.

The secrets of manufacturers, even when revealed to a licensed engineering team, are protected by restrictions on what may be freely shared outside of an individual studio. Chances are, even if two studios are covered by the same contracts and non-disclosure agreements, they will be reluctant to speak in specificities for fear of transferring some specific piece of "proprietary" information. The threat is not only of revealing secrets that might give a rival studio an advantage, but of angering the publisher or manufacturer who controls future contracts. Artists who move from one company to another will encounter entirely new, though perhaps quite similar, technical systems that enable their work/play. The immense categories of work covered by copyright, non-disclosure agreement, or corporate contract encourages the fallback position that everything is secret. Names of characters, basic game mechanics, story lines, tools, model requirements, engineering standards, processes, pipelines, organizational structure, clients, publishers, and hardware being worked with all begin to fall into the category of "secret." And because ongoing pervasive secrecy within and among each studio compounds the historical legacy of secrecy in a walled off industry, potential answers about how or why systems have been constructed in the way they were remain unknown.

The importance of the secret, combined with an average career lifespan for game developers that hovers somewhere around five years (Staff 2007), results in a situation that resembles a perpetual startup company machine. Experience is crucial to the game developer's work, but it is the very thing that has proved elusive for the game industry. Secrecy and inexperience leads to continual reinvention of the industry in terms of methods and technologies. Those companies that do succeed at creating games are often purchased and incorporated into the increasingly secretive inner circles of the videogame monoliths and the acquired knowledge locked into powerful, legally circumscribed spheres. Game development has no theoretical foundation that can be simply applied; and even if an all-encompassing theory of game design did exist, all theories are "models or tools," and it is the technologist's ability to "apply theory through recognizing situations as similar" (Turnbull 2000, 43) that would allow the universal use of that knowledge. Few developers have access

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