I didn’t go to Develop this year so didn’t get to watch any of the sessions live. I did see tweets about what was being talked about though, and I raised my eyebrows just as much as anyone else did when I saw this:
"We can love games but we are not gamers, we are developers, it's ok to admit this" – Indie Keynote @developconf pic.twitter.com/DctsgztwG4
— Jemma Harris (@Jemma_Harris) July 16, 2015
The first question that popped into my brain was, “Who are ‘we’, exactly? ‘We’ as in, ‘we at Vlambeer’? ‘We’ as in, ‘we game developers’?”. I don’t know, I can’t tell from the slide. Nor can I tell exactly how much emphasis is on the word “can” in the accompanying quote. Nor can I tell whether the, “and it’s okay to admit this” implies that this is some basic truth that we (as in all game developers) think, but don’t say. This is the problem with tweeting a picture of a slide on social media bereft of context.
It’s also the problem with producing such slides – which don’t require a Rocket Scientist to realise could maybe look a little bit contentious when taken in isolation. Maybe courting controversy was part of the point, maybe it was never seen as contentious, maybe someone with 90K Twitter followers didn’t think photos from their talk would get tweeted, maybe a million other possibilities including that maybe I’m being a total arse for over-analysing it. But that’s all besides the point. The point is, can you be an effective game developer who isn’t a gamer?
What actually constitutes a “gamer”?
This is the very cause of the problem. We throw this word around but we very rarely actually define what we mean by it. In that sense, it sits nicely alongside “indie” as being a generally useless term. At its simplest a “gamer” is just anyone who plays videogames but, of course, if that were the case then there’d be absolutely no possible counter-argument to saying that “Gamers are Over” is an utterly ridiculous thing to say. But there was a counter-argument offered (albeit somewhat implicitly) and that counter-argument was that, “we don’t mean literally anyone who plays videogames, we mean this specific set of people who play videogames that we don’t like very much”.
To me, the term “gamer” applies to anyone who plays videogames who is sufficiently interested in videogames to read gaming websites, follow developers on Twitter, spend time thinking about videogames, discussing them etc. In other words, someone who’s interest in videogames is such that playing them is pretty much their primary hobby.
By this definition, there is not an indie developer on the planet who doesn’t need to listen and respond to gamers. These gamers – the ones who read gaming news, watch Twitch streams, all that jazz – these are the active people. The people who will spread information about your game, post about it on forums, request Let’s Plays of your game from popular YouTubers. The more passive games players who would not identify with the “gamer” moniker, well they might buy your game, they may even tell one or two friends about it – but that’s pretty much it. They’re important people to reach, but you reach them via the gamers – unless you want to spend a fortune on a PR campaign outside of gaming websites.
So, do you need to be a gamer to write videogames?
No, obviously not. You don’t need to be a film buff to make a film – you don’t need to read a lot of books to be an author. It probably helps though, since you can learn rather a lot about designing videogames by playing them. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that. Of course, playing a lot of videogames for research purposes doesn’t require that you actually like any of them. Your entire motivation to make games could be precisely because of this – and this was part of Rami’s point in his talk. I’m not entirely sure I would particularly want to work in a field where I didn’t like almost all of my peers’ current and past output though, but that’s just me. Orson Welles made Citizen Kane despite not being tremendously fond of cinema. But then Orson Welles was a genius and I am not, and nor are most other people on the planet.
The rest of us mortals learn game design by playing shit loads of games, discovering what we like and replicating it, and discovering what we hate and avoiding it. With any luck, you’ll get to do a little bit of innovation along the way. The more you enjoy games (the more that you are a gamer, in other words), the more games you are likely to play. The more games you play, the larger palette you have to work from. The larger the palette you have to work from, the more likely you are to see trends – things which tend to work well, or things which tend to work badly – and the better your own games will tend to be.
But, of course, this all hinges on what people mean by “gamer”. So let’s decide, eh? Or we’ll be running around in circles forever.
Watch the Develop sessions on Youtube here.