Tameem Antoniades, Chief Creative Officer at Ninja Theory certainly thinks so. In an extensive five page interview at Gamasutra, he discusses the issues the led to Enslaved’s struggle at retail, and problems with video game storytelling amongst other things. But one topic that keeps re-occurring is gaming’s tendency to support conservative, tried and tested gaming experiences.
“I think we’re always battling against what’s current,” he claimed. “Publishers make the decisions; everyone’s too frightened to put their foot forward and say, “This is what we should do”, because if you get it wrong, you’re fired. So publishers are inherently conservative, and the way that they can arrive at what kind of game they should do is through consensus and focus testing.
“If you put a bunch of kids in a room and ask them, “What kind of game do you want to make?”, “What kind of hero do you want to be?”, they’re going to say “I want to be a space alien” because they just played Gears of War, or “I want to be a gangster” because they’ve played Grand Theft Auto, or “I want to be a cowboy” because they’ve played Red Dead Redemption.
“So if you took them something like The King’s Speech and said “How about a film where you want to be a speech therapist and you’re helping a quaint king in old London?”, they’ll say “No, I don’t want to watch that!” Yet somehow in the movie industry they allow it; there’s a system that allows kind of these projects to go forward, whereas in games we don’t allow them to go forward.”
It’s an interesting point. Independent games tend to provide gamers with a broader variety of gaming experiences – and some have sold extremely well — yet major publishers appear reluctant to invest in fresh ideas.
Most likely the increased gestation period of video games is something to do with it. It takes two to three years to develop a full-scale, AAA video game, and the livelihood of hundreds of people is often at risk. In game development the risks are higher in a lot ways, which may account for the fact that the games industry is inherently more conservative.
Thoughts?
Watch As It All Evolves: Tameem Antoniades Speaks [Gamasutra]
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