On EA Louse

I’m not going to give you a diatribe about the whole EA Louse/IceFrog thing that started a few days ago. Game development is something I don’t know much about.

But that’s the point of today’s post. How many gamers know anything about game development? EA Louse’s blog, for most, is a tiny peephole into the great, wide world developers enter every day when they go to work. In the realm of media representation the ground-working group, who probably make up a majority, are entirely silent. We sometimes feel the residual rumblings in our world when reports of a tremulous round of layoffs come in, but we never get any comment from that shader who got discharged or the five-year veteran of a dev’s art department who got a little pink paper rather than a paycheck.

We always hear from the big folks, though. Hideki Kamiya, Shigeru Miyamoto, David Jaffe, Cliffy B. And it’s almost always all smiles and mysterious tweets, isn’t it? But is that how it is for the average developer? What does the average developer even do? I honestly don’t know, but I’d absolutely love to find out. There’s just so little information out there until those rare moments every fifth full moon when the planets align and someone gets pissed and takes up anonymity to become the next whistle-blower. Then we get the bitter, angry description of development—“layoffs are always looming, management’s a joke, it’s like living in a police-state.” But is that even the full picture? Is that even what we should care about?

I think so, but not just that.

I think the process of game development should be more accessible general knowledge than it is. If you consider games to be an artform, you must agree. After all—no other major artform is such a mystery. I love books—I can write a book. I love music—I can make a song. I love art—I can paint a picture. These are things everyone knows how to do, whether they have the desire or determination or not. But games development is such a nebulous, esoteric concept that I wouldn’t know where to start.

Hell, how many of us know everything necessary to even make a flash game?

Exactly.

But it’s not like people just hate getting information from low-level developers—it just never comes up. Even something as big as EA Louse’s blog isn’t covered on Gamespot or IGN. Instead, GS gives us “uDraw doodling on Wii Nov. 14.” Well fuck them. Because they’ll ignore the small guys when they bitch about work conditions but if Gabe Newell says the PS3 is balls, LORD HAVE MERCEY. It’s allover the fucking place.

I don’t know about any of you, but I’m done being in the dark. I’m going to learn about these people more. Who is EA Spouse? Who’s Sanya? Who’s Abdul Ismail? Why do I know more about Gordon Freeman than the tens of people who created him from the ground up? Or, hell, any game character. If you care more about playing the games than hearing about all the bullshit politics around them, that’s perfectly legitimate. But can you really say you don’t care about who made the game? These faceless developer names you hear—SledgeHammer, Bungie, 5th Cell, Ninja Theory—all have many people that actually do the developing. And I think we need to learn a few of those faces if this industry’s ever going to do some developing itself.