Erin Hoffman has recently written a number of articles for Escapist Magazine covering some interesting aspects of video games that often become overlooked. She’s certainly no stranger to overlooked concerns, having been the blogger known as EA_Spouse who’s livejournal sparked a firestorm in the game developer community several years previously. Erin Hoffman is a writer, editor, and game designer and has worked on a number of games. Currently she is the lead designer for GoPets: Vacation Island, and her writing credits include awards for poetry and a number of fiction pieces, as well as articles in Strange Horizons, the previously mentioned Escapist Magazine, and an upcoming article in Shameless Magazine. I caught up with her in the midst of a hectic schedule, as the Nintendo DS version of GoPets hits market.
Wes Unruh:
My friends say that games are the new TV, AND In the last few years some game release figures have been as impressive as any movie release. How does this changing financial reward effect the quality of life of the game designers?
Erin Hoffman:
Things have really been that way for quite awhile. It’s hard to chart the Quality of Life effect from that high up, but the overall result is that you see the gaming megacorporations — EA, Vivendi, etc — and they’re working with much greater stakes, which is where we get the pattern of independent game studios putting out something great, then getting bought up by the big guys, so they don’t really stay around very long. But that cycle has been around since the beginning, more or less, too. The main impact is that as reward increases for games, the games themselves keep getting bigger, to the point now where your average console title is going to involve multiple millions of dollars in investment — and that makes things start to get out of control, which is frightening from an individual developer perspective. Managing a team of 200 is fundamentally different from managing a team of 40 or even 100, and I don’t know that we yet even have a good way of going about it.
WU:
I know that you achieved a certain level of infamy by writing a blog piece in 2005 that culminated in Electronic Arts actually changing how they treated their employees, apparently for the better. Since then, you’ve spoken out about Quality of Life issues for game designers, and maintain Gamewatch.org towards this end. What are the digital rights issues that people in high-tech and entertainment industries need to be aware of?
EH:
Digital rights is sort of a subset of QoL and it is something developers need to be aware of. This is something we’re addressing and focusing intently on with the IGDA, and in fact is probably one of the most clear-cut cases of where the IGDA has a responsibility to its members to defend their rights. They’re tricky issues, though, and require a lot of careful consideration.
WU: Could you explain a little about the post, and was the response that you recieved from the most what you expected would happen, and if it was more impactful than you’d expected, could you explain how it exceeded your expectations?
EH:
Hindsight is always 20/20, and honestly I can’t remember at this point what my actual expectations were prior to writing the post. I certainly did not expect it to catch fire so fast or reach so many people, and I also didn’t expect it to have the wide-ranging effect on quality of life, both in perception and action, that it did on the entire industry. To a large extent it was a right place, right time thing — but something specifically about the way it was written caught hold of people’s attention, too. I was certainly careful about writing it, but to my mind the actual facts presented in the Quality of Life white paper from the IGDA in 2004 are more disturbing — mostly dealing with the number of developers that leave the industry and intended to leave within five years of the surveys data gathering — but I think what the post did was put a human face on those numbers. We all knew that these problems were serious, but it’s one thing to read numbers and it’s another to actually see the effects of them on people’s lives. Looking back I can see how I would have written parts of it better, but given how totally distraught I was at the time part of me is surprised it’s as solid as it is. But I get the “did you expect what happened?” question a lot, and the rough answer is that I don’t think it was possible for me to expect it to turn out as it did, and even if it had entered my mind that it could be of such great impact, those wouldn’t have been serious thoughts, but more a kind of wild hope that the world wasn’t as bleak as it seemed. That hope turned out to be true, and an awful lot of people cared about what was going on.
WU:
Regarding the state of gaming today, how has the Wii impacted gaming, and to what extent has the industry shifted in development?
EH:
The Wii had been heavily anticipated in the game development community for as long or longer as it had been in the larger gaming community. I think most developers knew that it was going to radically change the face of innovation in game development; right now it looks poised not only to change the potential for how games are made, but to radically expand audiences and reach beyond entertainment and into genuine lifestyle integration. I’m sure that’s exactly what Nintendo wants to hear, but it’s the truth, and I don’t know anyone who isn’t very excited to see what comes out if Wii development in the next few years. I do think that pixel-pushers like the PS3 and XBox360 aren’t going anywhere, and are their own form of art, but Nintendo is taking gaming in an entirely different and new direction.
WU:
Have the tools and techniques that we have learned from gaming impacted other sectors of daily life?
EH:
Absolutely. There’s a rather off color adage about that — the first thing that drove graphics technology was pornography, and the second thing was the video game. Games operate on the bleeding edge of technology in general, but in a medical technology sense they also harness advanced technology *concepts* and gaming itself is hard-wired into the human brain in major motivational sectors. Games of various types have been used in therapy for as long as computers have been around, but recently we’re starting to see them establishing their own sort of subculture niche within the medical field. Increasing number sof medical professionals are recognizing their potential as the data starts to come in.
WU:
Given the speed at which computing changes, It seems it would be easier to build products for consoles, than to anticipate where computers are at by the time something is brought to launch. This is one dynamic that seems completely different from any other part of the entertainment industry, except perhaps special effects. How much of this is a legitamate issue? How much time is spent in actual game play design, as opposed to getting a game to conform to a specific set of specifications?
EH:
Consoles have their own challenges, because they must be persistently altered and the console developers are in a position of having to constantly one-up each other. There’s also the matter of software. Development for a console is often not solid until it’s been on the market quite awhile, whereas PC development remains more or less standardized — and by the time development is solid on a console, we’re usually preparing for the introduction of the next one. So that differentiating dynamic is a very big one.
But at the same time we are also in an ideal world always looking for more ways to innovate in gameplay; this tends to go in baby steps just because we have deadlines and publishers and commercial goals to meet (and tight timeframes are never going to be completely conducive to innovation), so the majority of games are made according to a sort of established gameplay template (“we’re making an RTS/RPG/FPS”) and modified in less risky steps from there. Exceptions to this are cases like Nintendo’s internal development, which in large part doesn’t have to worry as much about budget or time, though I understand they kill themselves quite a bit too.
WU:
It seems that most game designers are focused now on MMO’s, and I wonder how much of this might be due to the impact of piracy on the industry, and, just in general what the primary factors in this shift might be?
EH:
I wouldn’t say that many developers are actually focused on MMOs. MMO dev is a subset of game development that personnel wise is still quiet small compared to the rest of the industry. It’s just that because of WoW’s success a variety of venture capital groups and speculators rae out to chase that star, so it seems bigger (and in a money sense, it is).
Piracy is actually nearly as much of an issue with MMOs as it is with “regular” games, and because it’s on the PC it has fewer ways of fighting it than console games do, to a large extent. But the MMMO is effectively just a rising format within games at the moment, and because of the subscription model when it gains traction it can make obscene amounts of money.
WU:
So Whatever happened to VR? Are we doomed to inferior interfaces like Second Life, or do you see hope for truly immersive experiences patterned on the net?
EH:
VR is still waiting on the hardware technology, but that technology continues to be developed and it is inevitable that we will see more comprehensive and immersive things from it in the future. I would predict that at some point there will be a major hardware breakthrough that brings it back to the forefront of public consciousness, and then, like PCs coming into the home, you’ll see a boom in game development for those formats following. Internet technologies like widespread availability of fiber optics will be the internet bridge for them.
WU:
I’m curious about projects you’ve worked on both in the past and about GoPets. First, what was Black9, and not that I think the Illuminati prevented it’s release, but why did it never make it to launch?
EH:
There was a dispute with the publisher — they effectively stopped paying us and tried to bring the game in-house. There was a lawsuit, but being a small company the developer ran out of money before the publisher, so justice was never really done. That publisher has since moved away from creating large console titles.
Wu:
And currently you’re working on GoPets, coming out of 1st Playable. Could you describe this game, and talk about the design challenges in bringing this to a new platform?
EH:
GoPets is a global community pet game for the PC that I worked on when it was just starting out in 2004-2005.
When I signed on with 1st Playable, an opportunity came up to form a licensing partnership between GoPets and 1st Playable to bring the game to the DS. The DS platform is perfectly suited to GoPets’ game play style, with its touchscreen and wifi features, so that was actually what started my first dialogues with Tobi, since I knew that she would be focusing on hand held game development.
It’s a very exciting project, since it will be the first DS game to connect with an actual PC online network, among other “firsts”, but the challenges have been tremendous. There is no standard template for the game play style, which is basically social networking driven, and that leads to a lot of passionate opinions about the direction the game should be taking. Wifi in general on the DS is notoriously tricky still, as well. And since we’re working with teams from all over the world — the parent licensing company in Korea, the publisher in northern California, a GoPets networking team in southern California, a partner engine team in the Netherlands — just maintaining communication through the development process has been a huge undertaking. We joke around that “the sun never sets” on the project, and it’s absolutely true. But having such a diverse team structure, beyond its challenges, means we’re working on something totally unique, too.
WU:
Awesome, thank you for taking the time to talk with me.
For more, follow the links:
Erin Hoffman online
Gryphonflight.com
Escapist Magazine
Escapistmagazine.com
GameWatch
Gamewatch.org
1st Playable
1stPlayable.com
GoPets
GoPetslive.com
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Most comprehensive and well designed list I’ve come across. Hopefully a few more people will come across this and understand the lies that The Regime feeds us.
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