I just don’t understand how you can construct an argument against games driven by a personal perspective. How could they have offended to bring this upon them?
Are these types of games really taking away from collaboratively developed games? Where’s the evidence this is zero-sum? I mean, ok, you want to encourage creative work environments, sure. How does that actually take away from someone wanting to express themselves via a game? If that person has the right to express themselves that way, I can only equate arguing against games as a form of self-expression as wanting to deny them that self-expression.
If the argument is that we need to make “radically new types of games”, well, games with a personal emotional outlook are fairly new as these things go. Arguing against them at this point would be an easy way to discourage this newer type of game. We need more of all the above, not less of one type vs. another.
At least the author and I do agree that a detailed discussion of auteur theory here is not that useful. Regardless of theory, in practice some people view themselves that way, and some games are moreso a product of that kind of vision than others. Auteur theory may or may not be masculine-focused as Kael would argue, but how can you equate games attempting to inspire a deep emotional experiences as limiting to a particular gender? The more games we have that communicate different perspectives the more varied game creators will be. And a requirement to have more games with different perspectives is that more games communicate emotional perspectives, period.
I don’t see why there’s an assumption that a personal emotional perspective naturally inhibits the creativity of others working on a project. The only limitation is the creative leadership – if the vision-holder is capable of communicating the core emotional experience to teammates, encouraging suggestions fall under that vision and dealing well with suggestions that don’t (by more clearly communicating the vision while at the same time not discouraging teammates’ investment in the project), that creative improvisational harmony is a positive exeprience. That kind of creative leaderhsip may not be common, but it’s no less common than well-managed collaborative environments.
Games are in fact objects, game development is the process. Amazing games have been born from horrible process. The more we can extricate the two the easier it will be to advance game criticism, game development, and the range of the medium as a whole.
At my new job in BsAs the idea is to prototype with individual freedom for the designer. I’m in the “Creations Dept.” which is me, two other designers and two concept artists, the idea is to create a lot of stuff and then vet it through a stage-gate process. So it’s like, design something throughly more or less on your own, and then produce it collaboratively, though the core of it doesn’t have nearly as much room to change as in a fully collaborative process.
That’s cool. At the same time I think most people are more comfortable contributing creatively within that smaller scope, when the project is more focused. Part of this is b/c people don’t like the risk of stepping outside their comfort zone to be creative in areas they are less trained in, so in theory that split can work to everyone’s benefit with the right team.