08.4

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.
 * Dead medium: Computer Games Are Dead (Part 2)**
 * From: ChrisCr@aol.com Chris Crawford**

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.