Does auteur theory apply to game designers?

[J T]

In film, there is the concept of the director as "auteur". As the director, he or she guides the central creative vision of the film project. This means that the director's vision will rise up as the primary noticeable influence out of the collective of people that all work to create the total project. This also means that a director with a distinctive voice can create movies across different stories and settings that share a recognizeable series of traits that make it clear that it is one of that director's films. They leave their mark on everything they touch.

It may not always be true that the director is the central guiding voice, but there are certainly directors that do maintain a pretty consistent flavor across movies. Woody Allen, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick... if you see any of their films, you know a bit of what to expect based on their previous work.

It seems like the same auteur theory should be able to apply to game designers. There is a certain "je ne sais quoi" that cuts across games developed by certain distinctive game designers such as Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, or Tim Schafer. I bring this up because I think the average gamer doesn't know their designers as well as the average film buff knows their directors, and I think gaming would be better off if we learned to associate our games with their designers. Under a general acceptance of auteur theory, films are marketed by highlighting that they are directed by specific people known for their creative vision. This allows well known directors to explore films of various topics and genres because their imagination is a marketable trait. I think the same could be done for games.

In the world of gaming, however, it seems to more often be the case that games are marketed by their similarity to previous games, and this leads to many spinoffs, sequels, and clones. It doesn't lead to taking chances. What I like about auteur theory, is that it values individuals who can create and innovate rather than simply valuing the product and wanting to recreate the product. Instead, the fans of a director want to see that director use their unique voice across different stories and settings. We want to see them create, not replicate.

I propose that the gaming world would be better off if we placed a greater emphasis on the importance of our game designers. Gaming spits out too many clones and carbon copied sequels. We need to learn to identify our imaginative visionaries in the field and market the fact that they are creative rather than pigeonholing them into making sequels.

Hideo Kojima is a great example. He has made a ton of Metal Gear games now. While I think Metal Gear games are great, I feel like Kojima is a caged tiger because of the expectations that he make more of the same game. Kojima is a crazy imaginative person, and his side projects have been more interesting than his sequels to me. Snatcher, Policenauts, Zone of the Enders, and Boktai are all examples of the kinds of fascinating games he's capable of making when he's not being pressured to make another Metal Gear sequel. And Hideo Kojima is one of the most respected and auteur-like designers in the industry, who has made a point of marketing his name, which is how he has managed to do anything other than Metal Gear.

I would like to see our industry do more to educate consumers about the creative people behind the games, so that we as gamers can come to know them by name and demand their creative vision rather than their sequels. I think we would have a richer array of innovative games if we adopted an auteur approach to discussing and marketing videogames.

[Erik_Twice]

I have always thought that the auteur theory is a silly attempt to give all the praise of a collaborative work to a single person because it's easier to discuss and sell. Making it as if only one person were an artist while the rest are downgraded to tools is simply beyond me.

Of course, this doesn't mean everyone has equal hand in the work or that they deserve equal credit.


Let's take Yu Suzuki as an example. He is a very personal designer and all his games are undeniably a part of him, something he finds interesting and wants to share. Out Run is about his idea of driving, Shenmue is about a time he thinks it's particularly interesting and so on. You can easily tell when a game is his.

But alas, we can't say that Out Run is his and only his game. The colorful palette and the classic tunes are key in creating the game's world and those were not made by him.

Similarly, I don't know who designed the latest Call of Duty but his artistic choices were not exactly important compared to Activision telling him to make everything more brown.



It's also very hard to know much about designers when it comes to videogames because it's the only industry that doesn't properly credit them and in Japan they may not even credit them at all. This is completely backwards and when having a well-known name attached to your product makes it sell more, such thinking goes against their own self-interest.

People talk about Portal but god be dammed if anyone, including me, knows who created it.

Just go to boardgamegeek and see what happens when Martin Wallace releases a new game. The industry is moronic not to see that.

[neilencio]

I don't think it's exclusive to designers, but a lot of games were sold based on their association with a single person. Like the King's Quest with Roberta Williams, or Sid Miers' Civ games, Molyneux's Black and White, Carmack has a lot of clout if he's associated with a project, and remember when John Romero made all of us his bitch? Good times.

I think nowadays, the association is being shifted more towards publishers and developers. Probably because there's way too many people involved in making a game that it would be unfair to give credit to a single person. Nowadays games are bought (or not bought) because it was made/developed/published by Blizzard, Rockstar Games, Bethesda, EA. Even games that were made by small indie teams usually try to promote it under the banner of their company name (can we say that it's a lot less personal nowadays?)

[J T]

I have always thought that the auteur theory is a silly attempt to give all the praise of a collaborative work to a single person because it's easier to discuss and sell. Making it as if only one person were an artist while the rest are downgraded to tools is simply beyond me.

And this is the heavy downside to auteur theory. In modern day gaming, teams are huge for AAA titles and made up of hundreds of people. It's hard to give credit to individual people, though in cases like Call of Duty, we can at least look to the studios (the developers Infinity Ward and Treyarch are the main groups). Of course, the trouble with identifying different studios is that their personnel change, but the name stays the same.

I guess the indie scene is probably the best place to apply auteur theory because you can find people that actually work alone or with small teams. Cave Story was all created by one guy: Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya. World of Goo was made entirely by Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel. And then there is Cactus... and nobody knows what the hell to make of him.

[Erik_Twice]

And this is the heavy downside to auteur theory. In modern day gaming, teams are huge for AAA titles and made up of hundreds of people. It's hard to give credit to individual people, though in cases like Call of Duty, we can at least look to the studios (the developers Infinity Ward and Treyarch are the main groups). Of course, the trouble with identifying different studios is that their personnel change, but the name stays the same.

But I don't think number of people working on it is the cause, films also have similar numbers of people working on them. The industry is just reticent to give any kidn of credit to anyone for no real reason.

We still have the same number of, dare I say, decision-making people but we need more programmers and animators whose effect in the finished product is small albeit no less necesary.

Sorry if it looks like I'm contradicting myself.

[GigaPepsiMan]

The thing with video games is they have only been around for a good 30/40 years now and in those 30/40 years we have gone from video games made by one person to games made by a dozen people to games made by 50 people, 100, 250, 500 etc.
With film it was always a large number of people working on it from the start, in that sense film hasn't changed much in 100 years (you do get films where 1000+ people wrok on it but for the most part we still have a few hundred people doing most films) but gaming when compared to film has exploded like some rabbit overpopulation.

I'm not sure if the auteur theory can truely work with games, at the moment the only games where the director gets the credits are the games directed by people who have been in the industry in the long time and were around back when the idea of a game was pushed by a one or a few people.
For example Kojima was pretty much the driving force for the original metal gear and he remained the draiving force for pretty much every metal gear that followed, the reason he gets all that credit is because he worked in a time where big games could be made by one person. Same could be said about Peter Molyneux, his early games were more or less his and they because such big successes that he because the main focal point of any game he worked on, this is reason why we blame Peter when a fable sequel ends up being crap.

It is possible to apply the auteur theory to games but I don't think it works anymore because most games now are designed by a committee.

[isiolia]

For example Kojima was pretty much the driving force for the original metal gear and he remained the draiving force for pretty much every metal gear that followed, the reason he gets all that credit is because he worked in a time where big games could be made by one person. Same could be said about Peter Molyneux, his early games were more or less his and they because such big successes that he because the main focal point of any game he worked on, this is reason why we blame Peter when a fable sequel ends up being crap.

This is kind of what I was thinking with it. While there are exceptions, I think that a lot of the well-known names in gaming are folks who got their start when things were smaller. It was fairly common in the 90s for a name to be attached to a project - Chris Roberts bringing a new Wing Commander, Jane Jensen a new Gabriel Knight, Derek Smart still talking about how great Battlecruiser 3000AD will be, and so on.

Most of the names I can think of that didn't (or at least weren't as recognizable then) are folks who aren't just project directors, but also extend into public relations a bit - Ken Levine or Cliffy B for example. Maybe it's not just a matter of whose in charge, but who speaks for the team.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Instead of focusing on individuals, I think that we are better off focusing on development studios. They are usually credited before the game starts, and they tend to produce consistent bodies of work. When I see a WayForward logo during the opening of a game, I know what to expect just as much as if I see "A Christopher Nolan Film" at the begin of a movie. Certainly, you can trace a development studios body of work much like a film director's. (Compare "John Carpenter was great in the '70s and '80s; but by the '90s the quality of his work had decreased substantially." with "Rare was great in the '80s and early '90s, but by the late '90s, the quality of their work dropped sharply compared to other studios.")

[J T]

So this thread topic was turned into a Racketboy podcast:
http://www.racketboy.com/podcast/racket ... ent-244331

I wanted to say that dsheinem made some good additional points that I hadn't thought about, one of which is that film directors often have the creative freedom to bounce around different studios for their projects whereas game designers are more likely to have their careers tied to the company they work for.

Since this post was made, we've seen a wave of successful Kickstarter projects by recognizable names in gaming like Tim Schafer and Brian Fargo. Also, Peter Molyneux (as was mentioned in the podcast) has left Lionhead to form a new independent studio. I think we are starting to see more game designers strike out on their own, and they are particularly successful when they are a known auteur-like name. I hadn't really thought about how a more global use of auteur theory in gaming would translate to career flexibility for game designers, so interesting additional point Dave.

[Menegrothx]

I think that now that the mainstream/AAA side of video game industry is becoming more Hollywood-like in its production methods and development teams are huge, video games will become more like movies in this regard. The difference between video game and movie making is that it is a lot harder for the non-specialist to understand programming and all the tech-related stuff video game programmers do, while even the person who has no training in that particular field can understand what certain specialist is doing in movie production, ie director can guide make up artists, camera men etc in a movie even though he himself isnt a qualified cameraman.
Back when video game development teams were smaller, systems a lot more limited and games in general were less cinematic, most if not all of the members working on game development had programming and tech skills. A good example of that is musicians on the Commodore 64. They had to have knowledge of different programming languages and know the technical limitation of the C64 and it's SID chip, so they could exploit the system with different kinds of programming tricks. It was very mathemathical and really complicated work. Now a person who isnt tech-savy at all who maybe doesnt even play video games can compose music to an AAA video game. There are animators, voice actors, writers and all kinds of staff who do their part. So the team is a lot bigger and more disconnected and most people focus on one particular area of expertise, so some kind of master mind who gets all the credit for their collective efforts is needed to guide all the different parts of the development team.