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February 15, 2007

Chris Taylor: Love the Art!

I'll wrap up my coverage of last week's DICE summit with some motivational words from Gas Powered Games' Chris Taylor. If you're a hardcore PC gamer, you might not recognize the name, but you're definitely familiar with his work: the visionary behind Total Annihilation, he reshaped our opinion of what a real-time strategy game should be. More recently his self-started company produced the action RPG Dungeon Siege and followed it up with a sequel. And next week he's dropping the big one: Supreme Commander is hitting store shelves, another reinvention of the RTS on a jaw-dropping scale.

Download the Supreme Commander Demo!
You won't regret it!

But Chris Taylor's presentation at the DICE summit hardly focused on Sup-Com at all. I haven't seen a whole lot of coverage of his talk online, probably because 1. He wasn't giving away any juicy game details and 2. His presentation was more of a free-form conversation about his own (very personal) observations about the process of making games. Still, I thought he raised some big issues and cast some light on the mindset of developers... stuff that I think is worth talking about. And a great way to wrap up a week's worth of DICE coverage.

Chris Taylor has a message for game developers...

Four Fingers and a Very Challenging Thumb

Taylor looked at the entertainment industry as a whole and said it was like a giant hand -- four fingers and an oddball thumb. Music, television, movies, and books are the fingers. What makes gaming the oddball? A lot of games -- specifically hardcore games -- make people work. With movies or TV you vedge out on the couch, but games throw obstacles in your way. Taylor agrees it's okay to make games challenging, but why the push to make games so hard?

Taylor argues that if we "really truly want to bring in the rest of the world," that game developers should consider the people who just want to relax and recreate. That's why Solitaire remains so popular as a Windows app. It's easy fun.

My take: I've always considered games to be better categorized as an "activity" than an "entertainment." (That's why I don't think movie reviews and game reviews can ever be written the same way. Movie reviews can focus on story, character, and plot but game reviews first and foremost have to examine the actual experience of play.) Obviously an activity should have puzzles and challenges to keep you interested. But -- in part because of pressure from the hardcore gamers who can blow through a game in six hours -- there's been a tendency for game developers to "up the ante" with increasingly difficult, hard to master games. There's always going to be a market for that (including me!), but it's nice to see companies like Nintendo and people like Chris Taylor consciously trying to bring simple, easygoing fun back to games.

Taylor admits that's he's made a bunch of hardcore titles himself -- Supreme Commander is definitely aimed at people who want to mastermind a complex strategy -- but he made it sound like he turned a corner. He didn't give away any details on his next title, but hinted that it would be very, very different.

Love the Art!

As an art form, making great games requires a lot of creativity. On the other hand, the games industry is a business, and Taylor admits its easy to get lost in the business. He talked about how he would stress over royalties and wrangle over contracts with publishers. He bared his soul and confessed that sometime during the creation of his last game he broke down and cried in his office -- "This business is that hard," he admitted. How do you make a great product in that kind of pressure cooker?

The secret, he reiterated again and again, it to "Love the art! ... If you don't love the thing you're making, nobody else will." He continued: "When I walk into Target and look at all the shit [on the gaming shelf], I don't see a lot of people loving the art."

When Taylor founded Gas Powered Games, he worked under the assumption that success in the games industry meant tons of hours on the job. His team put in between 5000 and 8000 hours of overtime in order to ship the game. It was grueling. But the Chris Taylor of 2007, the one who loves the art, has a very different outlook. Health and family come first. He and his Supreme Commander team stopped the continual crunch time and started working normal hours. They discovered that productivity actually started going up. "Creative people don't stop solving problems once they go home," Taylor observed.

A Very Different Game from a Very Different Company

The industry as a whole is worried about "quality of life" issues, which came to a head in recent years when employees actually sued Electronic Arts over working conditions. So there's something powerful about a triple-a game developer standing up and saying that you can make really big, innovative games without working yourself to death.

What's next for Gas Powered Games? I grilled Taylor after the show but he's keeping his secrets. However, it's pretty clear that his company's next title will represent a major shift. Don't expect hardcore action or strategy: it sounds like his next project is something aimed at a bigger audience that'll focus on simple, playful fun. Give it up for loving the art! -Fargo

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