PixelVixen707

It’s a truism that nobody cares about the people who make our games - that the name of the franchise or the cup size of the cover girl matter more than any of the talents who coded it up. But 2008 shot that theory dead. Scan your average Top 10 of the year list, and the names behind most of the games leap instantly to mind: CliffyB, Suda51, Peter Molyneux, Hideo Kojima, Jason Rohrer, and Jonathan Blow joined perennial “faces of gaming” Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto. Even RockStar’s Housers started doing interviews. Yes, some of the best teams insist on sharing the spotlight - think Harmonix, Valve - yet the idea of game designers as artists with names and personalities is finally starting to click.

Which brings us to the next question: why do we care? I’ll quickly rattle through the obvious answers. If we treat the people who make games as artists, it “proves” that games are art. To study that art, it is useful - in some schools of crit - to study the artist as well. We are human creatures who want to know other human creatures, and so we’re naturally curious about the quirky and brilliant beings behind the curtain. And the celebrity profile is a reliable go-to for all journos, who can hungrily search for the “Rosebud” behind every Citizen Will Wright.

Me? I’m after something far more specific.

Auteurs wear many hats. If they’re not actually making the game with their own two hands, they might be cadging cash for the budget, or hyping the project to the press, or just barging around the cube farm keeping everyone in line. But more than anything else, what they bring to the table is their vision: the compelling, but not comprehensive, statement that guides everything from the code to the story to the testing. If you see the vision, you know the game.

“Vision” is a mushy, ambiguous term - which is why I use it. I’ve noticed other critics bandy it around as well, because the vision sums up what is essential about a work. It also connotes something more than the raw gameplay mechanics: it wraps up the themes, the story, and the other ideological content that turns a shoot-’em-up into a great shoot-’em-up.

Last year, critics were especially attuned to whether a game had a vision and saw it through. Grand Theft Auto IV and Spore suffered for the vagueness in their content and the seams in their gameplay. Little Big Planet, by contrast, scored high for its clear and well-executed vision - and same for Left 4 Dead, which took the principal of intense co-op gameplay and married it to a familiar survival scenario. Every game we play should meet these standards. When we come across a snoozer shooter like Dark Sector, the problem isn’t that it’s “derivative,” or “clunky,” or just “dull.” It flops because it lacks conviction, and passion, and a raison d’etre that set the dev team on fire.

There’s one caveat in the auteur theory: the more we focus on auteurs, the less we care about any of the flesh-and-blood talent. Including the auteur.

When an artist of any stripe gets in the habit of talking to the fans and the press, they undergo a transformation. The rough edges, the uncertainties, the mundane personal details and the mushy self-doubt all fall away. The artist learns to stay on message, and stop slipping around in the muck and confusion of their actual lives. And that’s how the press and the fans like it. Yes, we want to know why Gears of War 2 has such a melancholy tone - but if CliffyB were really just bummed out by his parking tickets, noone would care.

So let me qualify that opening statement: we care who makes our games - when it matters. The Peter Molyneux and Shigeru Miyamoto we read about are mere avatars for a project vision, and they are only useful or engaging in that capacity. They are not “real people.” (Based on his games, I still think Fake CliffyB is “truer” than the real one.) Game auteurs have a creative vision, and they can explain it, cheerlead it, and even beat it into the world. But at the end of the day, the vision is the thing.

(Kudos to Leigh Alexander’s New Years Resolutions for the Game Industry for getting me on this topic. Alexander argues for giving more credit and more interview oppos not just to the talking heads and the visionairies, but to the actual designers and gamemakers who struggle behind the scenes. It sounds like a niche beat, but still, I’m all for it. Imagine if Duke Ellington made his soloists wear masks, and cut Billy Strayhorn’s credit off the sleeve.)