Young Males

Young men are the most dangerous and inventive creatures on the planet. A huge portion of the sum of human creation, be it artistic, technological, literary, or scientific, is attributable to young men. They have the drive, the reckless ambition, and the energy to pull off astounding feats. They are also the most dangerous driving group on the roads. They are far and away the largest source of violent crime. They are poorly socialized, testosterone-poisoned, and so driven that they have no sense of the possibility of failure.

It's no surprise that the field of computer gaming was created by young males. Nobody else would have had the balls to pour years of labor into a field that didn't exist, confident of eventual triumph. Nobody else would have plunged into a task about which he knew nothing whatever.

I was one of those early testosterone-poisoned fools. I didn't know anything about game design hell, nobody did. That didn't stop me; I figured I would just make it up as I went along. I proudly, grandiloquently blundered my way forward, refusing to acknowledge my many failures but somehow learning from them. The huge database of idiotic mistakes I compiled now provides me with a sound foundation for game design wisdom.

The game design industry, however, has long since passed out of the early pioneering days. A multi-billion-dollar industry cannot operate on macho conceit and arrogance; it needs guidance by steadier, more prudent hands. Yet the industry remains dominated by young men. Partially it's a matter of turnover; there are so many young male fools willing to "break into the games biz" for a pittance that it's just too easy to dump overpaid oldsters and replace them with fresh young (and cheap) faces. Here's an industry that is twenty years old, in which the average creative worker has fewer than five years of experience.

The costs of this cheapness are evident everywhere we turn. Not least is the weak sense of community culture. With so many people coming and going, there is little opportunity to develop a stable set of community values. There are no calm older guys to rein in the young hotheads with cautions that "we don't do it that way." This in turn leads to an industry weak in moral constraints.

The contrast with the book publishing industry is striking. The book people have all been around for years and years; some of the publishers are more than a century old. Many are based in New York City and they all know each other. Untoward behavior is quickly reported through the community grapevine; jerks and rogues are shut out. Competition is certainly not lacking; these people operate on tight margins and sweat every nickel. But they do so with a sense of decency and honor that is entirely missing from the games industry. As with Hollywood, the book publishing industry has its own special set of warts, but on the matter of industry values, the games industry has much to learn from the book publishing industry.

The games industry has been evolving a mechanism for coping with this problem: It has bifurcated into two groups, the publishers and the developers. The publishers are staffed with older fellows who have stuck around for a while. They have their own internal culture that guides them. The young men are all routed into the development houses, where their barbaric behavior is channeled in productive directions. The development houses come and go with a velocity that would astound conventional corporations. I have given up keeping track of development houses; their lifetimes are too short to make the effort worth the candle.

The games industry is an industry by, for, and of young males. This is great for young males, but if and when the industry decides to grow up and out, it will need a broader talent base.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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