The Unimportance of Hiring Ernest

There are three guaranteed ways to waste studio development time and money.

The first is to try and make all of a game’s components simultaneously.
The second is to build a large team quickly and then have no real work for them to do for 6 months.
The third is to hire Ernest W. Adams.

This may strike you as a mean thing to say. Why not be more general, and say “design consultants” and spread the blame around? Well there aren’t that many of them, and for seconders because Adams is by far their most prolific and public advocate. Those are good reasons. Mostly, however, it’s because he’s rubbish. And everybody in the industry knows he’s rubbish. But nobody says it publicly due to the general industry practise of omerta.

He writes copious articles and wiggy books about how he thinks game design should be done. He hosts lectures and workshops that teach his methods, and does the GDC circuit. He also works for ihobo (who are also, basically, rubbish). Yet the main problem with Ernest is that he’s never actually designed a major game in his life. His CV includes such wondrous achievements as audio producer on Madden and … something to do with Bullfrog when it became a department of EA that never amounted to anything and … audio producer on Madden…

Ernest is actually a documenter. When hired, he – and other design consultants – mainly produce documents. And charts. And occasionally very large Excel spreadsheets. These documents tend to be very large, they tend to be written in highly academic language and they tend to be somewhat oblique. Their method consists of acting to all intents and purposes as a screenwriter does to the film world.

It’s not completely Ernest’s fault that he’s rubbish. It’s the fault of the studios that hire him assuming that since he talks the talk he must walk the walk. It’s basically because most studios don’t know what a good game designer is or does, and so they just muddle along as best they can. The great open secret of game development is that nobody reads design documents, but that doesn’t stop designers and design consultant writing them. Nobody can tell them what it is that they are supposed to be doing, so they might as well do that.

This method has many problems. It doesn’t embed the designer with the team, nor does it get into actively prototyping. It also assumes a level of design language familiarity among other departments which they don’t generally have, and so most of the work is wasted. Everybody knows that this approach to design generally doesn’t work, by the way, but that doesn’t stop studios from doing it.

What design documents actually do in the industry is make publishers feel happy. That is their sole use. This is because publishing executives are usually morons who know even less about the realities of game development than Ernest does. Since the documents are never read and the development team don’t understand them or the value of spending a week teasing out the consultant’s genius, the whole exercise is a dead loss.

Rule Number Four: Do not hire design consultants. They are not worth the money. Get a junior tester to write the documents instead because it’s cheaper and about the same value in real terms.

No Ideas? Merge

Question
What do two companies that have successful existing intellectual properties but no earthly idea of how to grow themselves and their fanbases because of
1. The IP’s inherent inability to grow any further
2. The IP’s original creators having either left, descended into cocaine or just plain turned crap
3. The fanbase’s stable but culturally solidified state
do about it?

Answer
They merge.

Consider.
Bioware, a company which specialises in D+D roleplaying game conversions and has had massive trouble with getting its own independent IPs to be successful (Jade Empire: lukewarm, Mass Effect:likely the same). So what do they do? Merge with Pandemic. Who, by the way, have nothing whatsoever to do with Bioware’s core kind of game, so the merger is basically the same as a cheese company and a soup company merging on the basis that they both make food, and therefore their experience is valuable to each other. It is only if you want to make choup.

And Now
The newest, even more hilarious merge is that of CCP (they of the moderately successful EVE Online who clearly have some money but no second-game strategy) to merge with White Wolf (a company’s whose main successful product line self-detonated about three years ago and has provided the fodder for a couple of unsuccessful cross media efforts, other roleplaying games likewise, and whose forays into markets have essentially been creatively stalled since about 1994).

It’s a match made in heaven. The rpg’s answer to the Sisters of Mercy is teaming up to fight crime with the MMOG Elite guys. Surely the fruition of this creative genius will create…. um… Vampires in Space? World of Dullness MMOG? Superheroes of the Exalted World of Darkness in Space?

Rule number Three since this seems to be a theme: When two developers merge it’s because one of them has no money and both have no ideas (but the money developer’s CEO hasn’t done his homework and doesn’t realise). These mergers ALWAYS fail, resulting in one of the companies getting eaten by the other and a consequent large staff overhead that dwindles resources, brand values and all the rest of it.

What they should actually do is this: CCP should keep working on making a better EVE and their owners should found a new company instead to develop a new idea. EVE is about to have some actual competition for the first time since it launched (Firefly etc) and if they’re not ready then they’re going to lose out Big Time. Meanwhile White Wolf should be left to die a long-overdue death because their properties have close to zero value in the clear light of day.

They won’t. What they will do is work on some half-assed project for three years, spend every penny they own and end up selling the remaining hulk to whomever wants it, having lost EVE’s salient advantage to more focussed companies and spend as long trying to figure out a way to make the Vampire bell ring, which it ceased doing a very long time ago.

You heard it here first sports fans.

Lucky Bastards

See the monkey talk.

Nobody in the games industry takes Peter Molyneux seriously any more. Worse, nobody in Lionhead takes him seriously either except when he gets into one of his legendary picky moods. Even more hilarious is that Peter the Mouthpiece has turned into one of the blandest corporate whores ever since his failing ailing money-losing studio was bought/rescued from self-destruction for a small amount of chunk change to save Fable 2.

The image around this guy is legendary, with his OBE and his ability to craft a perfect message for journos, but just as legendary is his lack of actually doing any work on any of the games that are “his”. The Movies, Black and White 2, Fable, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper and Syndicate are basically games built by other people. Everybody knows it, even most journalists, but they give Molyneux a blind pass because he occupies that untouchable space reserved for industry mouthpieces. As long as the man is good copy, whatever he says goes.

So Moulinex can come out with these daft “YouTube of games” and “I only code with 23 tracks” lines if he likes, but I challenge him to actually show us any actual coding that he has done in the last ten years, any actual design documents he has written. Since the man is the greatest game designer that Britain has ever produced, it stands to reason that his footprint is somewhere in all this work.

Rule Number 2: Most of the industry luminaries are full of shit and behind every one of them stands an army of silenced developers who know full well that they are nothing but windy bags of air.

Super studios

Rule 1 of game development in the 21st century: Never hire a British studio.

That’s because of the myth of super-studios. A few weeks ago, Develop magazine published an article in which they claimed that the air had cleared in the UK industry and twenty or so “Super-studios” (companies who post staff of over 100 people) were now buoyantly awaiting a new golden age. The horrors of the PS2 generation has passed by and a new tomorrow would begin.

This is nonsense. What the article fails to mention is this: In the last 5 years precisely one of these super-studios have actually posted a consistent profit. One of them, Climax (who graced the front cover of that issue) have actually lost nearly 10 million pounds in the last 2 years. Above that, Kuju and all the rest of them have also lost tonnes upon tonnes of money, and only one or two have actually managed to avoid this down-rush of cash.

This is nothing to do with PS2 generation. That was 5 years ago. This is to do with appallingly bad management who have no idea how to run a company. Because the inside news is this: British developers are the worst developers in the world. Specifically, large-scale British developers are the worst in the world.

They live in a high-currency climate, they spend money away on stupid ideas, they perpetuate a management class that drifts from studio to studio, driving each one to the edge of extinction. British developers have a history of innovation and creativity at the small scale (Introversion, Bullfrog etc) but once they get to a size above fifteen people, this management class come in and fuck it up.

Anyone in American publishing would want to have therapy if they are thinking of hiring a British developer. All they are guaranteed to see out of that is wasted money, missed milestone, a haze of lies and shifting priorities, extreme amounts of double talk and “scope rationalization”. Mile upon mile of bullshit covering over the fact that British coders are mediocre, British artists are wage slaves and British designers are the very worst pretentious gamasutra-eating offal that the world has ever known.

All the good British people leave Britain for the US or Canada for a reason, or leave the industry, or go into a sister industry like mobile or web. All the super-studios bar one or two are completely deceiving the public at large as to the quality of their talents, and their magazine media are complicit in this deceit. They are bad companies, badly run, full of bad people and I would sooner hire a Chinese out-sourcer to make my game whole and complete according to a design spec than touch a British developer ever again.

NEVER HIRE A BRITISH DEVELOPER.

Why?

Why make a blog about the truth behind the games industry? Simply because I’m tired of watching so-called journalists fuck it up so often and so completely. The games industry is painted in the media as being the source of all sorts of new and hip advances in media and storytelling. Luminaries from across the globe gather and speak about great things, talk about interactive storytelling, gameplay advances, HD-TV and so on.

Not a one of these luminaries is what they seem. From the luminary who has ripped off his partners to the luminary who has lived on the work of others to the luminary who has an extraordinarily creepy past, every one of them is just a face.

These people make me very angry. They are the same generation who created the games industry twenty years ago, and, like many founding creators, stayed too long at the fair. They have lived on the fruits of others’ labour, become press darlings (and the complicity of the game press is another source of HUGE anger) and basically walked over the backs and souls of thousands of other developers to get there, with no comeback.

I absolutely hate the foetid stink that these people have caused. I hate the lives of the many people whom they have ruined and I hate the industry that their greed for fame and cash has brought about.

Somebody has to speak the truth, or at least the other side of the story, and it might as well be a blog like this. Even if this blog ends up ranting to absolutely no-one, it’s important that someone say that this industry stinks because of the developers who prop it up rather than the companies who deal with them. Someone has to tell the story.