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.