OK, this might be better as “You Can’t Keep A Good Writer Down”, but since I love zombies so much around here, any excuse to write about them is good, right? Besides, ghost writers are so boring.
Saylah of Mystic Worlds has poked her head up over at Tipa’s West Karana with some posts about Aion.
Aion: Living the Dream in the Ghetto
I can totally understand not wanting to maintain a blog, and writer’s burnout. I wished Saylah well with her self-imposed “fade to black“. Still, it’s good to see her writing again and having fun with a game. Or at least, writing about it. (And of course, I still wish her well.)
It also appears that even Hobbits like to look for adventure now and then, too. Jedioftheshire has fired his blog up again with a few walls of text, and it’s good to see what he’s coming up with lately, too. My favorite of the three is the most Unique one.
And then there is Erin Hoffman, the lady who kicked the doors off of frustration with the game industry as ea_spouse and who currently maintains Gamewatch.org. Maybe I’ve just not been paying attention, but I haven’t seen her write as much as I used to. So when I saw her new article over at The Escapist, I had to pop in. It’s a doozie, and well worth a read:
I want move blog posts zombies!
If you want to read a “fun” zombie book, check out Patient Zero by Joe Ledger. It’s about a martial artist cop who takes on zombie terrorists. Yes, it’s exactly as good as it sounds
LOL – Thanks Tesh. Sometimes I can’t help myself in wanting to write about the game I’m playing. It’s odd but doing it on MW I often felt compelled to write there because I’m a completest and having the blog silent for more than a couple of days really bothered me. This way I focus on the other writing I’m doing and only do a blog post occasionally.
Erin Hoffman is an idiot. I don’t care how much attention she got from the EA spouse crap, what she says in that article, while MAYBE trying to be helpful, comes off as snobbish, holier than thou and just rude.
I’m sure a large amount of people who are just starting up are looking for more insight than YOUR IDEA SUCKS, LULZ! Which is exactly what she sounds like.
Thanks be to you Tesh, thanks for helping get the word out that I’m back. I, too, was a little put off by Erin Hoffman’s article. She might be right about the industry being saturated with ideas, and about studios always having too many ideas on their plate at once, but I can think of more than a few better ways to send the message besides four pages of “all of your ideas are trash” and then just tagging a “or maybe it doesn’t, but we don’t care” right at the end.
That’s what the headline sounds like, certainly, but look a little deeper. She’s *correctly* saying that ideas in and of themselves are nearly worthless. It’s *execution* that matters when it comes to creating publishable, marketable games.
Ed Catmull (of CG rendering fame, “Catmull-Rom” splines, among other things) said much the same thing in a presentation at my alma mater. (He’s the head of Disney’s CG animation, both over the internal studio and Pixar.) Professionals in the industry have ideas. Lots of ideas. They don’t need unsolicited ones. (And they legally can’t even look at them anyway.)
Beyond that, the actual production of a movie or a game comprises *thousands* of ideas, and more often than not, many of those are changed during production due to project constraints. (Money, technology, personnel, egos, whatever.) The scriptwriter who has a great idea is just at the very beginning of a very involved process in crafting a complete product.
Look at Ixobelle’s efforts to storm the gates at Blizzard. He’s got a lot more than just a Raid idea, but even as much as he had wasn’t enough for Blizzard to throw the Holy Grail at him. They very specifically told him to go show that he can do the work, via some modding and scripting. They could have easily said “your raid design sucks” and kicked him off the lot. That doesn’t mean that Ixo’s ideas suck (they look good from here, for what it’s worth), but it does mean that from the devs’ standpoint, they don’t have time to spend on it, and that Ixo would be well served to show how awesome his ideas are with a bit of “proof in the pudding”, as it were. Ixo in particular has a portfolio of art and other experience, so he’s not even a real rookie. They still want him to show more.
Ideas are cheap and easy. Making those ideas reality takes more than just a design document. Far too many people don’t really understand all of what goes into game development.
That’s the core message of Hoffman’s article, and it’s one that she’s not alone in expressing. Ernest Adams has several articles up blasting bad game design (the “no twinkie” series), and many of those rookie design failures are very evident in unsolicited submissions.
Hoffman’s article was a slap to the face, yes, and could have been worded a bit more kindly and gently, but look deeper and you’ll note that she says that if your idea really is special, you’ll do more to make it reality than just leave it as an idea. (And note how many people take kindness as encouragement to run with their half-baked ideas… sometimes a kick in the head is what it takes to get through to people.) Wiqd, you’ve even noted that at your place, writing down your TV show ideas. If that’s really what you want to do, you’ll take the next logical steps and learn everything you can about what goes into making a TV show, and *then* go about selling it (and yourself).
Even the “World of Goo” example of “two guys in a garage” making a great game underlines her comments. They didn’t just have a great idea and sit on it, trying to sell it to a big publisher somewhere. They rolled up their sleeves and made the thing into a game. They didn’t even get a publisher to bite once the game was complete. They took matters into their own hands, and only then did they find success.
Again, ideas alone are cheap. They might actually be brilliant ideas, but without the work and production to back them up, they aren’t actually worth much at all. That’s what aspirant game designers have to understand, that the process of making a game is more than:
1. Cool Idea
2. Design Document
3. ???
4. Profit
It’s that ??? where a lot of hard work comes in, and that’s *after* having a perfect idea and design document. (And often, the ideas mutate as production runs into the realities of life.)
If you want a great game made from your ideas, you can’t stop at 2 and hope someone else foots the bill and does the work. (More than once, I’ve heard it likened to a guy who comes to Steven King with a few pages of notes and a book cover sketch and asks him to write his novel since it’s just such a great idea, after which they will split the profits 50/50. The idea alone just isn’t worth that much. Writing is work, just like game design and development is work. That work is expensive and/or time consuming.)
It doesn’t mean that newbies can’t make games. It just means that there is a lot to learn in the process, and you can’t stop at the idea phase. It’s as true in game design as in any project, really. Novel writing, movie production, software development, politics, whatever. Ideas are cheap and mean nothing if they just stay in idea form. Even in the grand sum of a final production, the idea itself is a tiny fraction of what made the project complete.
…and that’s without getting too much into all of the ideas that really *do* suck, and all of the “me too” design out there that even the professionals indulge in.
If anything, that underscores the problem. It’s not the idea that matters so much as the money and work that makes the games complete. EA can pass off the suckiest game ideas because they have the money and manpower to do so. For every Sims expansion pack, they could have funded a half dozen or more great indie games from guys with brilliant ideas. That they didn’t shows the harsh realities of game production. It’s those harsh realities that Hoffman is trying to illustrate… albeit in a somewhat grumpy way.
Yea, I guess I wasn’t discounting the meat of her article as untrue, she just came of the wrong way to me. I don’t mind someone saying “You know what, you may have an idea, but it’s what you DO with that idea that counts. You can’t JUST have an idea,” but the way she said it sounded a lot like “You SHOULDN’T have an idea because we got it covered. We’re pros, we’re in the industry and have jobs that deal with ideas. We got this.”
Yea I know there’s stuff in there where she says “Go ahead, have ideas” but the overall tone of the article makes it sound like she only says that so she’s not seen as completely snide about it.
You’re right, I’ve said before that sometimes it takes a kick in the head, but her article seems a bit more on the nuclear annihilation side of that spectrum.
Don’t misunderstand me, I KNOW what her point is, but they way she conveyed it could have been better. The whole “I’m not going to sugarcoat it” along with the topic of “your ideas suck” just don’t convey what she’s trying to say. Your ideas may be awesome and may require a lot of work to get going, but you’re not just magically going to get money to do it. That’s ok. Someone telling me that is ok.
Someone saying “You’re ideas suck, are piss poor and will never fly” is a slap in the face, really. That sounds like she’s telling everyone that their ideas are bad and to stop doing it and leave it to the pros. At least, that’s how she came off to me.
I’m having a zombie Groom’s Cake at our wedding this month. It’s going to be a mini, color-inverted version of her Wedding Cake, with zombie arms poking out the sides and top.
Jealous yet?
Only if it’s chocolate, Beej.
Wiqd, aye, she definitely could have framed it less… acrimoniously. Thing is, *that’s* sugarcoated compared to some dissertations on this that I’ve heard.
Scary.
Tesh: Yea, not sugarcoating something doesn’t mean you intentionally try to hurt someone’s feelings. You just speak the truth and if it does, it’s an unfortunate side effect.
She didn’t hurt my feelings, she just disgusted me because of her attitude. I can take someone telling me my idea probably will never even be seen unless I do something about it myself (which I’m trying to do now as you know
), but someone taking the paper from my hand, throwing it down on the ground, peeing on it and saying “Your idea sucks!” isn’t very appropriate, IMO.
Anyway, seems we’re on the same page as always.
Incidentally, I found this today while searching for ways to pitch TV show pilot scripts:
“This situation reminds me of Ian Gurvitz’ words in his book, Hello, Lied the Agent.
“Execution is everything—how a TV show or movie is written, cast, directed, edited, scored, even marketed. It’s not the idea; it’s how you do it.”
Ideas are worthless. Execution is the key, and it all starts with the written word.”
See? You can say the same thing without being a jerk about it.
*chuckle*
Indeed.
A thought, though: It’s already been said that way. Some people didn’t get the message. It’s *those* folk that Hoffman is taking a beatstick to.
That quote is a great one, and very fitting. Thanks for bringing it over!
I think there’ll always be people who think they’re better than the norm. I’ll admit I felt invincible awhile back in that I thought my idea was sound and I could sell it based solely on the idea. I quickly woke up after doing even just a little bit of research.
I’ve taken a different approach this time with my scriptwriting and I’m actively pursuing contests, signing up for sites that get writers and producers together, even making plans to shoot it myself if I have to.
It takes different amounts of realization for different people, but I think the people Mrs. Hoffman is aiming at are in for a rude awakening when it finally sinks in. I’m beginning to understand her point a little bit more with each day that passes.
Good to see you persisting with it.
That certainly seems to be the key.
The instructors in both the writing workshops I’ve taken recently have said the same thing. Ideas are cheap, it’s the execution that matters.
I was agreeing with Wiqd. I understood what she was saying, and I DID read the entire thing, but presentation is often more than half the battle.
I agree with Jedi and Wiqd, I found her attitude to be off-putting and pompous. Erin who? Sure she’s the EA spouse but other then that why the hell should anyone be taking her seriously? Her attitude reminds me of Sanya Weathers another non-designer who writes in the same “know-it-all” fashion.
Great ideas are worth developing. And yes they will be stolen. Don’t post them on blogs or forums if you value them.