Fair Use, Chris Hecker’s hilarious Game
Developer’s Conference (GDC) 2013 rant, is essential viewing for anyone sick of
video game developers making unsubstantiated claims. Hecker’s rant skewered the
worst tendencies of spokespeople in the gaming business, just by giving a few
of them enough rope to hang themselves with. If you haven’t seen it already, you can check it out at Chris Hecker's personal website.
Let’s
have a closer look at the clips in Fair
Use.
First
we have Yoshinori Ono, producer at Capcom, at the February 2013 reveal event
for the PS4 (0:00). Unveiling the company’s new ‘Panta Rhei’ engine, Ono
explained that:
This new engine […] will allow us to take game design in entirely new directions.
Ono illustrated
this with footage from a new game, Deep
Down, in which men in suits of armour battle a dragon. The footage was beautiful, but hardly looked like an “entirely new”
direction for a medium that gave us Dragon's Lair 30 years ago. Perhaps it was
a translation error, and what Ono actually said was ‘entirely old’. Subtle
nuances are often lost when translating from one language to
another.
Next
(0:40), we have Glen Schofield of Sledgehammer games, delivering a keynote address
entitled “The Art of Inspiration” at the 2013 Design, Innovate, Communicate,
Entertain (D.I.C.E.) Summit. Schofield is a good speaker who seems genuinely
passionate about his craft. When he talks about his realisation that doors on military
Humvees weigh “100, 150 pounds”, you can tell it had an impact on him. Too bad,
then, that when he shows us the scene in Modern Warfare 3 that this realisation influenced, we see a Humvee door
being pushed open with ease. Schofield then says
the following without a hint of irony:
[…]it let us frame the whole scene and make it better. If you just flipped the door open, you don’t have a scene.
Well, Glen, I guess you don’t have a scene.
The
third section of Hecker’s rant is lifted from Guerrilla Game’s Managing
Director, Hermen Hulst, appearing on Late
Night with Jimmy Fallon to demo Killzone:
Shadow Fall (1:53). In the clip, Hulst claims that the PS4 allows
developers to create, “characters that you truly care about”, while onscreen
the player slaughters at least three opponents in under 40 seconds. Watch the
entire spot that the clip is drawn from if you can bear it. Seconds after the
clip in Hecker’s rant cuts out, Hulst begins trying to seriously suggest that
climbing onto ledges is an exciting new feature. Talk about scraping the
bottom of the barrel.
Sucker
Punch’s Nate Fox introducing Infamous:
Second Son at the PS4 reveal event is probably the most amusing section of Fair Use (2:32). Fox, coming across as someone
who might be found late at night fervently reading 1984 while wearing a tinfoil hat, waffles about surveillance
culture, before addressing the elephant in the room:
Now, picture how things would change, how the world would react, if a handful of people suddenly developed superhuman abilities.
How
Fox managed to deliver this breathtakingly nonsensical line with a straight
face, I do not know.
Finally,
we come to Bungie’s Destiny (4:03). Again, it’s worth watching the video
that Hecker sourced the clip from in its entirety. If you’ve ever wondered what
it looks like when a company buckles under the weight of its own hubris, this
overproduced reel of twaddle should give you a good idea. The disembodied voice
in Hecker’s video (apparently that of Martin O'Donnell, composer at Bungie)
repeating “completely new” over and over sounds progressively sillier as we
focus on the Halo-esque scene
unfolding endlessly on the screen.
 |
| "We're creating something completely new. We're creating something completely new. We're creating something completely new." (Picture: Destiny) |
Fair Use works so well because it illustrates in an extremely economic fashion just
how lacking in self-awareness some people in the video game industry can be. Either companies
don’t realise how ridiculous their promises of reinvention sound when they
don’t back them up with evidence, or they just don’t care. Either way, it
reflects poorly on those making the promises. Let me be clear and say that I
think all the upcoming games mentioned in Fair
Use will be good, but I won't be convinced by the lofty claims being made
about them until I see some proof. It’s entirely possible that the Panta Rhei engine
will take gaming in new directions. Maybe you will end up caring for characters
in Killzone Shadow Fall. Perhaps Destiny really is something completely
new. The point is, for us to believe such grandiose talk, developers and
publishers need to provide us with evidence that what they’re saying is true.
In the clips Chris Hecker chose for Fair
Use, they have failed spectacularly to do so.
‘Performative
utterances’ (or just ‘performatives’) are most commonly associated with the British philosopher, J.L.
Austin. Performatives are words or phrases
that, as well as communicating information, also lead to a perceptible change in
reality. “We find the defendant not guilty”, for example, communicates the
opinion of a group of jurors, and also officially exonerates a defendant in the
eyes of the law. When I learned about performatives in my first year at
university, my lecturer explained them using a counter example that has always
stuck with me. He dryly pointed out that you cannot simply show up to the exam
hall and say, “I pass my exam”, only to receive top marks on results day. Of
course, it would be nice if it were the case, but “I pass my exam” is not a
performative.
This seem to be the trick that companies such as Bungie and Guerrilla are trying to pull off. Rather than showing off new
features in their games, they simply say they have them and hope that nobody
will notice. “We’re creating something completely new” is not a performative, so saying
that about your online sci-fi shooter with fantasy elements doesn’t make it so.
We want to believe you when you say it, but you have to give us compelling evidence before we will.
As
for Nate Fox’s bizarre spiel about surveillance and superheroes, well, I don’t know
what to tell you.
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