“The Bob Dylan of Video Games”
Two months ago, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier published a feature on the troubled development of Mass Effect: Andromeda that put a neat little bow on every problem in AAA game development. The trash fire of that game resulted from a perfect storm of overscoping far beyond what the team was capable of, technical difficulties, corporate mandates, poor management and a toxic workplace environment. All of these are things we’ve heard about before in regards to the game industry, and are significant factors in what some view as a creative lag in western AAA games.
However, there is one huge factor that is given only a paragraph, and is really only tangentially related to Mass Effect. Right here:
Casey Hudson, executive producer on the main trilogy, would start a new team at BioWare Edmonton to work on a brand new intellectual property, which they gave the code-name Dylan. (That new IP’s code-name, a source said, came because Hudson and team wanted to make the Bob Dylan of video games — one that would be referenced for years to come.)
“Dylan” would later be given the title Anthem and a huge reveal at this year’s Microsoft E3 conference. But what I want to talk about here isn’t Anthem — it’s Dylan.
The statement “We want to make the Bob Dylan of video games” is something that only makes sense to someone who has never listened to Bob Dylan. For starters, which specific era of Dylan? The pointed political commentary of his early records? The surreal and abstract allegory of Highway 61 Revisited? The semi-autobiography of Blood on the Tracks? Whatever the hell his 80s material was? Bob Dylan as a figure is so complex and varied that director Todd Haynes, rather than make a straightforward Dylan biopic, made an anthology movie telling the story of six characters who were markedly different people, yet all were distinct portrayals of the man himself at various points in his life. The resulting film, I’m Not There, remains the closest anyone has ever come to capturing Dylan’s essence in a single piece of work, and even that could be called cheating.
If BioWare Edmonton wanted to take cues from Todd Haynes, that’d be one thing, but the pseudo-MMO style gameplay and clearly fake voice chat of the E3 reveal is inspired more by The Division than Blonde on Blonde or Mildred Pierce. In all honesty, BioWare themselves state that they have no interest in actually making the Bob Dylan of video games, even though they were the ones who evoked the comparison in the first place. It’s written, clear as day, in this sentence:
(That new IP’s code-name, a source said, came because Hudson and team wanted to make the Bob Dylan of video games — one that would be referenced for years to come.)
What BioWare knows about Bob Dylan isn’t his lyricism, or his songwriting, or the messages he spent decades imparting onto his listeners. It’s the fact that people reference him. It’s the fact that he’s celebrated and held as an example of “high art”. It’s the fact that he has prestige, and by comparing themselves to him, BioWare might be able to get that prestige too.
The statement “We want to make the Bob Dylan of video games” has nothing to do with Bob Dylan. You could replace Dylan in that sentence with The Godfather, or The Great Gatsby, or This Is Spinal Tap and it wouldn’t matter. Because BioWare, and, by extension, AAA gaming as a whole, isn’t interested in the artistic techniques or the craft of the media it lauds itself as being better than. It’s interested in the validation, the glitzy parties, the section in the New York Times.
Am I making too much fuss over a simple codename? I make too much fuss over a lot of things, yes, but this isn’t one of them. I can’t speak as to where the kernel of the idea for Anthem came from, and I probably won’t be able to until at least the game’s launch in the 2018 holiday season. But if that codename and the reasoning behind it is to be taken at face value, then the game’s creation, it’s driving force, was to make something that would be given prestige. Which, yes, most creative works are made with that purpose, but the ones that actually get it have some idea beyond that base impulse. Take that away, and what you’re left with is the Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close of video games. That would’ve been a better codename, had it not been so long.
Look, I’m not asking for game developers to write a 2000-word essay on Bob Dylan’s metaphors as a prerequisite to evoking his name. But this is an industry where we can’t go a few months without a milquetoast games man standing on a stage saying that video games are the greatest form of media in the world to rapturous applause, be it the vice president of EA at E3 or Geoff Keighley at the Game Awards. For a group of people to fellate themselves in such a grandiose manner yet unwittingly display their ignorance with a minor detail is something straight out of a Daffy Duck cartoon, yet it’s that attitude that defines not just the past few years of western AAA gaming, but perhaps it’s entire history.
So, here’s a suggestion: Instead of making the Bob Dylan of video games, make the Jethro Tull of video games. Don’t make something to get a Nobel prize, make something to reflect on religion, or satirize your contemporaries, or whatever else you feel like doing at the moment. Hell, you can even make the Metallica of video games and jerk off onto some bloody glass if you feel like it. Just don’t try to make the Bob Dylan of video games. If you do, you better damn well listen to Highway 61 Revisited first.
