Sun 22 Jul 2007
Mike Gallagher, the new ESA president, has mentioned the need for the game industry to produce more celebrities. This is largely driven by the assumption that more celebrities equals higher social status that then equates to more influence within political circles.
Mike mentioned this is his initial NY Times interview, and brings it up again when interviewed by GameDaily BIZ during E3:
Bono walks in and there’s this bow wave and this entourage and orchestra that follow him and he can get a meeting in anyone’s office just like that. (snaps fingers) Our industry has a challenge to meet that we need to create those types of star power capabilities on the Hill and we’ll reap the benefits of it.
Obviously, he’s motivated by the political angle given that’s one of the primary roles of the ESA. This does bring up other questions, such as:
- Who would our celebrities be (star designers, publisher CEOs, game characters)?
- What other benefits (or harms) would a more celebrity-oriented industry have beyond political sway?
- Are celebrities totally antithetical to the team based nature of game development?
While the IGDA, with our focus on advancing careers of game professionals, has made a point of providing credit where credit is due (eg, via mandatory attributions for the Game Developers Choice Awards, and our ongoing efforts to set crediting standards), we are not chasing celebrity status per se.
What’s somewhat surprising is to hear the head of the PUBLISHERS association calling for celebrity. Certainly things have improved in recent years, but publishers are still very much about controlling and pushing the corporate brand. And, having individual celebrities running amok commoditizes the publishers’ role (much like record labels and musicians).
Hmm, unless of course, Mike is expecting his member companies‘ CEOs to be the celebrities…
(A more mundane example is a little boasting in front of retail clerks - via Greg.)
July 22nd, 2007 at 3:14 pm
1) Star designers, period.
2) Refocusing the marketing dynamic toward a purer vision of play/ distraction toward egos rather than indivual experiences with play - see Marilyn Manson.
3) No.
July 22nd, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Wow, very artificial, creating celebrities doesn’t really work. You can have powerful figureheads doing PR work, or brilliant minds doing the developing, but neither one is destined to be a celebrity.
Definitely goes against the team nature, heh.
Unlike music, unlike films, unlike books, games do not need a highly paid figurehead to sell the product. Games are made by lots of people, and neither visuals, music, writing, programming or voice acting can take pure credit (look at the disastrous ways most publishers shove in “celebrity” voice talent which kills characters.)
Anyway, celebrities are made out of publicly viewable people. Games are made all about hiding who did it, and who is voicing the characters on screen. Apart from in the press, or within conferences and public events, you simply do not see developers / musicians / producers when you play the game (unlike music, film and books).
There are a few around though, however, “celebrity” assumes people know you despite what you do. How many people off the street know “Bono” vs. “Miyamoto”? or “Carmack”? or “Insert famous game designer here”?. Big problem if you say, apart from 20+ years ago, that one person did “everything” anyway. I think game studios are perhaps more recognisable, producers probably more so (EA vs. Bioware, EA wins out, but EA vs. Bono might be harder to call).
I find it totally bizarre how star power helps political battles too. What a warped system…
Anyway, since it is always a team effort, with no way of knowing who made it or is in it when you played (a good voice actor should be unrecognisable, which is why celebrity hollywood screen talent falls flat often). Since the publishers always put themselves out to promote a game, never putting the actual makers of it, no one will know who actually made the game (and PR people are not celebrities).
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Questions:
- What makes a celebrity?
- Will we end up seeing Miyamoto on http://www.thesuperficial.com?
- Will a publisher pay a designer a gajillion dollars for three games over the next 8 years?
- Will that designer end up posing nude in a magazine?
- Will that designer be me (answer: for your sake, I hope not)
- Will my adoption of a minority child from another continent be headline news on tabloids all over the world?
- Will the video game celebrity end up on Letterman showing a clip…or playing his new game…or describing how she was inspired to develop a new type of shading language…or some data structure for who knows what…or showing the wicked awesome funny bug she found in the next CS: Source…right before “Stupid Human Tricks”?
- Will the celebrity date Courtney Love?
- Assuming the industry can produce such a celebrity - by either circumstance or corporate machinery - is there an easier way to get political influence?
If you are curious, I am not a celebrity and I have never met or known one. I think I saw Brett Hart in Philadelphia once, but I was not entirely sure it was him.
My big question is “what makes a celebrity”? I have my ideas, but it seems like such a large sociological question that I am too tired to write about now. Hopefully there will be some dialogue after this post…
Ryan
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:44 am
i work in a team of 2.
i do everything but the coding.
that means art and design.
if my game gets popular, i sure hope ill get credit.and in my case, i can take almost ALL the credit, deservingly.
but i work indie.
in a comercial setting, if someone was to emerge from the group as being the face of the project, id sure hope he/she has what it takes.
it would take a LOT of charisma, a LOT of vision, and to be a hell of a leader for me to not be bothered by the fact a single person would represent and get credit for this team effort.
but in the indie field, i think its primordial that the creators be recognised.
ive been reading a lot of press about my friend jon mak’s everyday shooter. and im amazed to see that not every outlett will even mention his name.
“sony’s everyday shooter”.
that shit kills me.
the game, the whole ENTIRE game was made by this ONE guy. this one guy, working alone for about 2 years, made this awesome game. and at the last possible moment sony swoops down and publishes it and now its “sony’s everyday shooter”?
i perfectly understand why its rockstar’s GTA or harmonix’s rock band, but in the case of a game made by ONE GUY, shoul;dnt it be natural that this one guy be given credit for his work? and thus be made more famous for it?
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:39 pm
whether you like celebrity culture or not, i think anything that helps raise the visibility of the people who create games is a good thing.
i disagree with Andrew above that games a so different form film; films involve hundreds of people and bigger production budgets, on the whole, than games do. and yet we do have attribution. we know that Wong Kar Wai is an acclaimed director, we know who Kurosawa is, and if we are film buffs, we may even have favorite cinematographers and art directors.
it’s sad that gamers don’t even know, sometimes, who directed their games.
and publishers have a VESTED INTEREST in replacing the name of the developer with their own names - that way, they can farm out the franchise to anyone. on that point i totally agree with Fish that no one is tols the names of the folks who made Everyday Shooter.
and from a practical perspective, i think that personalities help drive interest and respect; if people feel like they can get to know the creators, they feel more invested in the products. that’s just psychology.
celebrity has its ugly side; but i really believe it’s the next step for the games industry.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:54 am
There are not so different, but they are different. In films though, the director has so much more personal control and direction, and a much shorter round time for work thus more constant output.
Some high level designer-managers even work on multiple projects at once, its hard to categorise the same people down to the level that they had their personal hand in every decision.
Lots of varied cases however, its mainly a problem to say what a celebrity is! There may be literally thousands of them in games depending on the description, or there might be really, zero!
Anyway, I didn’t mention the publisher / developer thing. Yeah, big problem, especially with some publishers who mandate the developer doesn’t get a say on the packaging. This is perhaps where the industry totally fails to make a ecology which would promote certain developers (nevermind the people, who in that state cannot get credit for games if the publisher doesn’t let them!).
Someone needs to nail down what the definition is. Why it has to be like the film industry I don’t know - bands are a coherant whole producing the music, even if there are writers in the band you don’t single them out as “the person who did everything”. It could be developers become celebrity-like, whether big or small.
I’m not really in the know of how it all works, but there was some interesting discussion on it at the Develop conference. Certainly there are lots of sides, which do overlap in what they think is right and wrong, its not black and white.
July 29th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
[…] (Tangential aside: In an odd way, on a meta level this plays into my previous post on “celebrity”. Not knowing anything about the book, I bought it solely on the strength of the author and positive past experiences with his work. In the end, I enjoyed the book immensely. Would the same have happened if books simply had the name of publishers plastered on the front?) […]
August 1st, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Attaching celebrity to a project is an excellent way to mitigate risk in new intellectual property development. Look at Hollywood: Steven Spielberg is not stuck doing sequels to Jaws for the rest of his life. Steven Spielberg, instead, has been able to leverage his celebrity in the launch of new IPs — E.T. and Saving Private Ryan, to name a few. As soon as game publishers figure out that celebrity can be capitalized on to bolster IP stables, game publishers might actually lend a hand in (gasp) promoting individuals.
August 2nd, 2007 at 6:14 am
Good point Scott, but don’t they already try that? Sid Meier springs to mind, he’s not the designer of the more recent civs, more like Spielberg doing executive overarching stuff.
I think the name craze kinda died out after some spectacular failures and people leaving the industry, but some names are still around and attached to games even with little to do with them.
A good point though, in favour of name recognition for mitigating risk - as Jason said in his post on that book.
It just might get to the point, like with Civilisation, that name means nothing (like Executive Producer can sometimes mean for films, where they did nothing then perhaps provide some cash and their name).
September 23rd, 2007 at 3:20 pm
[…] Jason Della Rocca added the following aside to one of his recent posts: (Tangential aside: In an odd way, on a meta level this plays into my previous post on “celebrity”. Not knowing anything about [Steven Johnson’s ‘Ghost Map’], I bought it solely on the strength of the author and positive past experiences with his work. In the end, I enjoyed the book immensely. Would the same have happened if books simply had the name of publishers plastered on the front?) […]
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:19 am
[…] Feed 23 Nov 2007The Video Game Celebrity[Essays][ Gaming]Back in July, some dude posted excerpts from a GameDaily BIZ interview with someguy, on the topic of game industry celebrities. Mike Gallagher, the new ESA president, has mentioned the need for the game industry to produce more celebrities. […]