Research session
For our first more in-depth research session we’ve processed three articles regarding innovation in the video game industry. Brief recaps of what’s important for our work will follow.
Digital Consumer Networks and Producer-Consumer Collaboration: Innovation and Product Development in the Video Game Industry
Arakji & Lang highlights producers aiming for maximum profit will benefit from partially opening up game content to their lead users. The point of doing this is to let the users innovate on the existing game platform and sort of recirculate “regular” consumers/gamers to the original product while making more profit.
The writers use the example of Valve and their history with releasing Half-life and the subsequent modifications of that game: Counter-strike, Team fortress and Day of Defeat just to name a few. What is essentially interesting is that Valve kept the game engine to themselves but release almost all game content. This is direct in reverse to the phenomenon we are examining where Epic Games (and now also Amazon) is releasing everything free relying on making profit from smaller products such as aiding tools for developers to create communicative games.
The paper also consists of risk analysis of outsourcing to consumers and a proposed economical model for maximizing profit while outsourcing to consumers.
Intermezzo
This first paper had a firm economical approach and didn’t treat game developer innovation that much but was greatly supported in that sense by the following article.
Entanglements of creative agency and digital technology: A sociomaterial study of computer game development
The game engine is subject for researching the relationship between creativity and technological innovation in this article and is explicitly highlighting a field which is of our concern.
“… even if the game engine can be modified to support a feature, the final result may be too functionally unstable to be useful. Thus, the game might slow down because the rendering of high quality graphics uses too much of the processing capacity or memory of the hardware platform”
This is relevant to the question regarding wether UE4 is a spark or limitation for innovative games produced by indie developers. UE4 might give developers the tools they need to fulfill their creativity in functionality but it might also limit them artistically since there is so many set of rules buildt in to the engine that a designer would have to follow.
The paper brings up a lot of noteworthy points that is important to understand about game engines. They can consist of all from physics, artificial intelligence, rendering, audio, interfaces and so on. I will not elaborate on this here since we will probably be doing further research on game engines in our technical background. However, the game companys used in the study signify complications in development where they had to change a lot of the code in the game engine. This was making it difficult for them because game engines might be dependent on hardware produced explicitly for them which itself is a limitation for the whole studio.
In the discussion they also bring up this issue with the connection between hardware and game engines as a topic for further investigations.
Intermezzo
As this article focused on what creativity is and how it applies on the video game industry we can withdraw some valid points for our research and keep in mind that the game engine-hardware connection is crucial for developing dynamical and innovative games. The two articles have now covered interesting facts about game engines in an economical approach and in the sense of creativity. The last paper for this session was found through a source in the previous article and covered a broader sense of the industry of how to stay creative while business/demands are increasing.
Balancing the Tensions Between Rationalization and Creativity in the Video Games Industry
Tschang points out tensions between rationalization and creativity within the video game industry. He starts off with explaining how when industries evolve the product innovation is peaking when it’s in the emergent or fluid phase of a field. For example he brings up how computer game genres branched out and as well as intertwined into furter more genres until rationalization within the industry came along and put the brakes on. He uses a quote from a early designer:
“1986 is when the diversity of the games indsutry peaked and the slowly started narrowing, then in 1990, the narrowing process accelerated and all through the late 80s and early 90s, I was ranting at the industry saying “That we’ve got to broaden, not narrow,”… by about 1993, I realized that I had lost.”
Can UE4, Lumberyard, Unity3d, etc broaden this again? Is this what we might see in the future?
Another interesing quote:
“…the publishers are reading one another’s hype and telling you that gamers (i.e., consumers) don’t want X,Y, and Z. That’s what interests me about creativity…how it’s completely dominated by people who are not creative. It’s completely dominated by the business people.”
Critiscism against the lack of innovation within “AAA”-games rose and consumers wanted more games than just another NHL 200x or FIFA 200y. And Tschang concludes that studios and publishers must learn to cope with the tensions between rationalization and creativity in order to stay innovative at the same time as they are profitable.
Final thoughts about the session
It feels like all of the papers complement each other in a good way for us to get a better understanding of how the video game industry works, what is important for innovation and creativity and how we might tackle this (as I’m starting to think) quite fundamental change of how the video game industry will develop innovatively the following years.