Industrial creativity bows down to unshakeable profit forecasts.
Luckily, there are always brave voices that raise a red flag, proclaiming the need to break with the past and to open new paths forward. In order for an entertainment industry to survive and thrive further, it is profit forecasting that needs to adapt, bowing to the ever-changing shift in the tastes and needs of our increasingly accelerated, bewildered, stressed, rhizomatic society. Deprived of affection and quality time; craving for relief.
The effectiveness of manifestos, as a rupture device or as encouraging beacon lighting the way towards a new beginning, is perfectly questionable: neither art nor the political apparatus—the natural ground for manifestos—have prevented society from reaching the current status quo. Nevertheless, a retrospective, chronological analysis of manifestos proves useful on two counts: it allows us to evaluate the diagnosis of problems to solve, as well as the efficacy and validity of the solutions provided.
For a manifesto on the videogame industry to propose a valid path, its author has to perform a double intellectual somersault: empathizing both with the content creators—understanding the hardships they face—and consumers. And then, with both perspectives into account, make a proposal that satisfies both sides and ideally anticipates imminent trend changes. It is a tough task, and we should be grateful for the efforts invested by the authors mentioned below.
Let’s begin with this (non-thorough) review of manifestos around the videogame industry:
2000 - Designer X / Greg Costikyan: The Scratchware Manifesto
Seventeen years ago, under the moniker “Designer X”, Greg Costikyan exploded in a heated manifesto against industry practices, in which he spared no one. By then, videogames were distributed in big boxes, so each game competed for shelf space, enormously limiting the available offer in each shop and harming, who else, the humblest studios that were not backed by a strong publisher. Publishers’ attitude, regularly favouring low-risk, safe-bet titles, spread towards the game designer workplace: producers and marketing managers interfered in the creative process with the good intention of preventing the (predictably frustrated) designer from going off-track from the publisher’s expectations.
Physical distribution brought along severe creative consequences. Source: Wikimedia Commons
This chain of influences, contended Costikyan, ended up harming the end users, who saw their closest shops offering scantily improved clones of last season hits at ever higher prices. The solution proposed: Scratchware. Brief, affordable, innovative, professional-quality games, created by self-managed small teams, devoid from any kind of business mediation, and distributed through alternative channels: a win-win for developers and players (or in his own words: “Death to the game industry! Long-live games”). Although five years later he founded Manifesto Games, presumably with the intention of turning the Scratchware concept into reality, results were modest, to say the least. However, the dream of Designer X became true—although thanks to very different motivations—shortly after:
On one hand, the rise of Steam, a digital distribution platform, gave (and keeps giving) ample publishing opportunities to small and passionate studios with hardly any mediation, and allowing affordable prices for any player. Being digital, the library of games on offer can only grow; there’s no longer a competition for shelf space (Or is there? We’ll see later...)
On the other hand, the arrival of smartphones and the democratization of powerful development tools (like Unity or Game Maker) had a similar effect on mobile platforms, almost non-existent by the time Costikyan’s manifesto was written.
2008 David Fox, John Sharp - Making games art: The Designer’s manifesto
Project Horseshoe is a (self-denominated) elitist Think-Tank that gathers yearly to debate the challenges of the videogame industry from the perspective of Game Designers.
In their 2008 gathering, they addressed what they saw as the elephant in the room: the status of videogames as a means for creative expression. How could the videogame industry be recognised by audience and critics at the same level as other creative industries, like cinema or music? Their profuse manifesto, from a perspective that would certainly delight Ayn Rand, is summarized in three frontlines, proposing solutions for each.
The image problem: videogames are perceived as a juvenile pastime, sexist, superficial, and, in general, a blameworthy waste of time for those who enjoy them; a judgement that is not applied so indiscriminately to those who watch movies, play board games, or read best-sellers. Although it is true that a portion of the industry, the press and the players themselves has historically favored that “masculine”, brainless audience niche (defending their territory to profoundly indignant and retrograde extents), luckily there’s an increasing number of voices (and money) rowing towards wider diversity.
The preservation of videogame history proposed in the manifesto was backed, in 2012, by an exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum revising the 40 years of the medium, to be followed by several curatorial initiatives in art centers around the globe, like the addition, that same year, of several classic games to MoMA’s permanent collection. Even acknowledging that just because something is exhibited at a museum does not imply that it is art, or high culture, this was a relevant step. Besides, the appearance of an independent title of high artistic value that also had remarkable commercial success came true in 2009 with Braid, which together with other indie projects at the time, finally opened the—until then—locked gates of mainstream home consoles to independent teams with visions and offerings far from the standard. The ‘indie boom’ of those years can be lived almost in first person through the frenetic, distressing and exhilarating documentary “Indie Game: The Movie”.
The leadership problem: the manifesto highlights that creative directors have a hard time earning enough authority and respect to be allowed to accomplish their creative vision. You can almost count on the fingers of one hand the widely known names of Authors, (psst: there are women too) on Videogame History, because being a game experience designer has been a discipline historically unrecognized by the general public and roughly treated by production and profit requirements. Nowadays, the relevance of Game Design is finally apparent thanks to the presence of specific specializations in the academic syllabi of most universities and schools, in addition to the traditional focus on art and programming in videogame studies.
The money problem: the desire for new funding methods expressed in the manifesto, became partially true with the advent of Kickstarter, barely some months after the Horseshoe gathering, and the subsequent crowdfunding boom which prevails to this day. Another example is the micro-patronage platform Patreon, which debuted in 2013, and allows artists and creators to have a fixed monthly income contributed directly by their fans.
In hindsight, this one is undoubtedly one of the more accurate manifestos, for its spot-on diagnosis and because most of the solutions proposed therein have become a reality in one way or another.
2016 - Richard Garfield: A Game player’s manifesto
Richard Garfield, creator of the wildly popular and profitable trading card game Magic: The Gathering, throws in “A Game Player’s Manifesto” a tough diatribe against what he calls “Skinnerware”, in reference to the Skinner Box used in experiments with animals to attain a given behavior through negative and/or positive reinforcements. Garfield stands in defence of “vulnerable” players who, despite not being able to afford it, may develop an addictive behavior towards the purchases offered in such games, pointing out that this vulnerability is more prone when susceptible players are enduring “difficult times”. It’s a possible reality, though neither Garfield nor anyone else can estimate its magnitude given how difficult it would be to know how many players are in that situation (low income plus vulnerable to addiction).
Example of a Skinner box. Source: Wikimedia Commons
"Free to Play” (F2P) games have led the gross bookings rankings year after year, starting in social networks with hits like Farmville, and then moving to mobile platforms, their genuine habitat, at the same pace as smartphones lowered their price and increased their penetration. The gargantuan profitability of successful F2P games, compared to games sold at a fixed price and offering no micro-payments (“Premium” games), keeps attracting the attention of investors looking for a high Return On Investment. This hypothetical gold rus
