The Creative and Corporate Duality of Video Games

The games as art debate is stale and pointless. The question of whether a medium can produce good art is stale and pointless, hashed out eternally over the 00s and 10s. I'd much rather declare victory and discuss the fallout. Games can be art, games can be good art, but their need to serve multiple masters as a corporate product and a collaborative artistic work means that they run into a number of problems.

The obvious one is of course, corporate desire to maximize profits. AAA Games continue because corporations want them to happen. Corporations will do their best to move numbers around to avoid investing in genres they don't see much chance for growth in (the premature deaths of genres like the RTS and point and click adventure game) and are never above just personal pettiness of those in charge, but in general they take the path of least resistance and most obvious "growth". Indie games can't totally afford to be against trend either, if you pour years of your life into something and it's for 3 people, even if it isn't your livelihood it's going to break off a piece of your soul to see it ignored. While more adventurous, capitalism imposes limitations even on the independent. This is a tale as old as they come in this industry and while it's fascinating and tragic in equal measures, I kind of want to go into the opposite direction. The artistic end here, when people want and expect a sequel but no one either independent or within a corporate structure wants to actually make it.

I want to start with an example that does not require speculation on my part. A curious old adventure game by LucasArts called Loom. Loom was a SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) adventure game from LucasArts (the game division of George Lucas's LucasFilm) released in 1990. It wasn't attached to any prior IP but had an interesting fantasy world, unlike most adventure games of that time puzzle solving revolved around spells that were cast by playing short tunes. It's a unique, memorable little game that garnered a cult following as was true of many of the games of its ilk from the era. Its worldbuilding and plot didn't necessitate a sequel per se but they left enough space to make one and it has long been known a couple were at least concepted. While for a while rumors percolated that it had simply sold so poorly the company wasn't interested in revisiting it, this doesn't seem to have been the case. Quoth the designer of Loom, Brian Moriarty "[...]I was busy with other projects, and nobody else felt strongly enough about the games to make a commitment. So Forge and The Fold never got made." cited from Wikipedia in turn citing the book Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts which, while I'd love to read it, is now out of print and extremely expensive. We'll have to trust it here. Citation concerns aside, this is something I think people aren't used to seeing and tend to act very oddly when it occurs. Sequels to Loom didn't happen out of outright failure or disintrest, sequels to Loom failed to happen because no one was quite ready to drop their other projects to make them happen.

That's the other side of the games as art coin. If we consider the game design process to be collaborative art, we also have to consider the concept that the people making them have to pick and choose how to spend their time as artists. The debate that often floated around it was always "and that's why they ought to be allowed to continue making (X game with provocative and/or offensive subject matter)" but the less examined flipside is "and that's why they ought to be allowed to stop when they don't feel the need to keep going". I'll pull out a less beloved example of a similar concept. Infamous 2001 Nintendo 64 platformer Conker's Bad Fur Day. A deeply late 90s work that posited "what if a Rareware character was openly horny and swearing and exploding in blood". A game dredged fully formed from a soup of South Park, the Matrix, and Banjo-Kazooie. For the purposes of Rare Replay, a compilation of many of developer Rareware's classic titles, its lead designer Chris Seavor was asked about a sequel, to which he responded that he couldn't really conceive of how he'd make one at that stage in his life, it would have to be made by someone else, someone younger. Every few years someone sort of pokes at the corpse of that IP but his attitude is honestly probably healthier. It was a relic of a specific time, and sometimes the people who make such things move on.

I want to pull up another example, but for this one you're going to have to take some suppositions on my part. There exists a franchise from Nintendo, beloved by a die hard set who clamor for its return any given Direct. It's a franchise that never really had one single "creator" associated with it and its various major installments are all made by distinct teams. That franchise is F-Zero. This isn't to take away from Kazunobu Shimizu, it isn't to take away from Tadashi Sugiyama, and it isn't to take away from Hiroyuki Sakamato (credited directors of F-Zero, X and, GX respectively) nor their teams. Suffice to say F-Zero has never had a "creator" ready to fight tooth and nail to keep it happening. What available information exists about the GX development cycle implies it was Toshihiro Nagoshi who sought to make the game happen. We often think of opportunity cost as something a company worries about, that corporations don't make things because they'd be less profitable than other things they could be making, and definitely plenty of franchises fall to that (F-Zero fell victim to that when Criterion was offered the franchise in 2012). That said opportunity cost exists as a human concept, a career can only go so long, why if you have the infinite privilege of making choices about major projects would you spend it making something you didn't specifically dream of making. Sometimes sequels don't happen because, as with any art, there simply isn't enough will to make them, to commit to the years of work that will be required for that particular end product.

So what's my point here, what am I really getting at? I feel like I'm trying to find it myself but really it's that sometimes we accept a franchise ends not because there's no interest or profit, but because people have to make it and there isn't a will to keep that going. I think it's a healthy and important piece of discussing continuations of a creative work to accept that sometimes something need not be forced into ending by circumstances external to its creator. It doesn't have to stop because there's just nowhere to go with it. Sometimes it just needs to be accepted that it's done. There's often an attachment and desire to treat video games like objects in motion, in motion until something makes them stop. Sometimes there's just not enough keeping them going and that's okay.